“Joe! You son of a bitch!” Joe is standing at the entrance to Jodie’s building, unsuccessfully trying to get buzzed in when Carlin comes up with a crowd of five people. “I never thought I would be able to get you to come out to one of these things.”

Joe just shrugs just like a little Joe on about adventure shows on TV.

Carlin looks around his group and then to Joe, “You know Fletcher—” Joe nods, “—and then this is Candice, Amber and Mark.” Joe acknowledges each of them alongside his desire to not meet new people to run in to at the station or around the neighborhood. Between this and the maniac he’d just met, he is beginning to feel that this goose hunt for some woman named Beatrice is a total mistake. Carlin explains that likely no one can hear the buzzer over the party, so he calls Jodie directly and soon the crew is up on the top floor of the building, milling out of the freight elevator into Jodie’s apartment.

Joe stands in a corner with an un-drunk drink in his hand for about a half-hour hen Jodie walks up to him a friend in tow. She’s a petite blonde woman with her hair in a pony tail and thin rounded-rectangle glasses. She’s wearing a flowing and swooping silk dress with an intricate floral pattern. Jodie smiles at Joe like the are sharing some kind of secret, though Joe is lost on the matter, “Joe…” Jodie starts, “This! is Beatrice.”

Beatrice smiles warmly and actually steps to Joe to embrace him, “Hey Joe!”

Joe stiffly holds his drink and allows himself to be embraced, still confused.

Beatrice sense this and says, “Don’t you remember me?”

Joe stares blankly, and then looks to Jodie for help.

“Don’t worry,” Jodie says to Beatrice, “Joe’s always been a little… shy.”

Beatrice: “Joe, don’t you remember?—that little park on the Bowery? We used to play together there.”

“Y-yeah. Yeah. I… well, I remember the park, I guess.”

“Well, it was a while back. I just remember you used to have all those little wind-up toys.”

That, Joe remembers. He’d had all kinds of wind-up bugs and robots and things that weren’t anything at all really. They would jostle and bounce and do flips and all manner of movement and acrobatics. He would spend hours in the playground pitting one against another; seeing which toy would win a straight on fight or which one would win a race. He knew the fast ones and the slow ones. He knew the strong ones and the ones which would do best on rough terrain. It drove him to study gear ratios and how a wound coil could unwind slowly and pull a small gear to make for a wind-up toy that would be fast but strong. In many ways, Beatrice—the real Beatrice—was just that to him: an amazing assortment of levels of power, interacting parts. And he wondered if he really was crazy and that the real Beatrice was just the cumulative knowledge of power ratios and parts and his careful and precise utilization of the controls of those ratios. The real beatrice was no more alive than his old wind-up toys. And yet. And yet, the woman in the visions seems so clearly to be her; the machine, sitting alone, even now, in some lot with other equipment and missing him, bored for having nothing to dig or tear apart.

Joe just says, “Well, Beatrice, it’s really nice to see you again,” even though it’s not. He has no idea who this woman is and he also knows it is not Beatrice the Machine and not Beatrice of the visions. And now he was stuck at a party.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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