Pa’s body fell into the hole facedown, and I couldn’t bear that, so I kicked the shovel aside and hopped in. It was raining good by then, and the ground sank around my feet, a suction sound. I got a panic feeling, kicking my feet loose, trying to stay on top of the mud.
A cry. Was it Andy? I hopped for the edge, tugging at the grass, and I saw it, a bear cub running in the rain, running toward me. I fell back onto Pa, the mud, crouching in the corner. The cry again, closer, definitely not Andy. The mother—she was chasing.
The cub bonked and squealed into the grave, falling in on its back, the blow softened by Pa. It lay there stunned; then it lifted its head and bellowed at the opening. I didn’t move, but it sensed me, lowering its head and staring at me in my corner. I raised a palm like don’t hurt me and it made a slow gurgle like a growl, but it was so small, no bigger than an oversize puppy, and I could see it was distressed, so I said in a high-pitched baby voice, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” stretching my hand out for it to sniff. It lurched up onto its hind legs, pawing the side of the grave, raining mud, Pa disappearing now in the dirt.
The great mother bear was braced on the edge of the grave. I huddled and cried, and the cub pawed at the wall and cried, and the sow cried from above, and I worried that all the crying would wake Andy, that he would come.
The sow could easily have climbed in, rescued her cub, slashed me to bits, but she didn’t, howling from the grave’s edge, whisking a paw in our direction. I got on my knees and crawled over Pa to the cub all slow-like. “It’s okay,” I said in my calmest voice, making a shushing sound like I did for the companions headed to slaughter, and the cub cowered, letting me come up next to it, rub against its side. It seemed to like that, nestling into me. “I’m going to hold you,” I said, and I lifted it into my arms, gentle, and the mother bear was really bellowing now and I could hear the other cubs crying behind her, all tired and wanting out of the rain. I said, “I’m going to raise you up now, stay still,” and I raised it up and it stayed still, the sow pulling her cub up by its cowl with her teeth. I expected something, I don’t know, a thank-you or a little help, but they were gone and it was raining and Andy was alone in the house with a dead man.
I raced inside, up the stairs. Remarkably, Andy was asleep in his pen. I was covered in dirt, making a mess of the carpet. It occurred to me that I could do anything now, anything at all, no parent to tell me not to. The farm—what was left of it—was mine.
I threw up in the toilet; then I took care of James.
It was the first of the month, our carbon meter reset. I laid his body on the conveyor belt, not bothering with the arm and leg clamps, and I fed him to the machine, watched him burn.
I’d be eighteen in six months. Could I pretend Pa was alive long enough to avoid foster care, being separated from Andy, to become his legal guardian? I didn’t have to pretend with Metis. They wouldn’t care that my pa was ill, and I was well over sixteen, old enough to take this post. Andy would be alone most of the time. He’d have to settle for a dog.
The other option was to run. I thought briefly about it, Andy and me, but to where, and with what credit? Pa had some, but we couldn’t access his account without him. We were screwed.
* * *
In the months that followed, I worked as Pa’s substitute, feeding the companions to the machine. I told Metis Pa was ill, undergoing treatment, and would be out for some months. They didn’t bat an eye, and I did the work, accumulating credit into my own account, using that for groceries and bills, but it was nowhere near enough for the mortgage. I repeated the story to the bank’s screen representative and assured her I’d catch up on the next cycle. Then I asked for an extension. Two weeks, she gave me. We’d had the farm for four generations, no, five, I reminded myself, and the bank was giving us two weeks.
Andy was back to playing and singing, and I wondered where it went, his grief. He hadn’t known Ma, not really, so he’d never really lost her. Pa wasn’t around much, but he’d loved Andy, and there was a hole there now, a hole I explained with a story, Pa missed Ma so much he went on ahead to find her. “To where?” Andy asked.
“To that special place. Where we all get to be together,” I lied to him.
“Forever?” Andy asked.
“Forever,” I said, though I didn’t believe a word of it. I understood then why parents teach their kids to believe in heaven—how do you tell a kid his pa is gone? Never coming back.
I looked for it—the hole—as he napped in his pen, face smashed against the mesh siding. Then I went out back to the shed and dug up a bottle of Pa’s ale. It tasted like old mud-water, but I gagged down enough to make my body sort of hover, for the world to take on a plastic sheen.
On a Sunday, I took Andy to Fort Dick and got him an Australian shepherd, two years old, already trained, with all the energy required to keep Andy entertained. He seemed happy playing with Pit Bull, the name he’d given his dog, which came from who knows where—one of his books? Some tale Pa told him? He’d recently begun to talk more, stringing words together in the strangest ways, and I wondered where they came from, those ideas of his, naked alien party and crash dancing and an Australian shepherd named Pit Bull.
For a while there life fell into an even rhythm, waking at four, disposing for three hours. When I came in at seven, Andy was already at the table eating his cereal. He seemed to like the independence, getting his own breakfast—it made him feel like a big boy. He did school for a few hours in the morning, and I tended to our garden, checked our meat rations. We had a few rainbow trout in the freezer from the last fishing trip, but we’d be out soon. Andy would want to go hunting. I didn’t know if I could do it—hold a gun again.
Then we napped together. This was the best part of the day. All of us, Pit Bull included, snoring in the bunks I built, a sweaty dark sleep. I couldn’t bring myself to set foot in Pa’s room. And Andy stayed out of there too.
In the afternoons, I would run the machine while Andy and Pit Bull wandered the yard. I made Andy promise he would stay out of the woods, but that didn’t make leaving him alone any easier.
* * *
I was asleep in the top bunk when I heard Pit Bull stir and whine. I rolled onto my side and peered down to see him sitting up in bed, ears perked. Then I heard it too, something out back. Though Metis deliveries sometimes came at odd hours, it was the middle of the night—it couldn’t be them.
I crept into Pa’s room, sneezing with the dust, and retrieved the gun from a shoebox on the high shelf of his closet, already trembling, thinking about James. I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that someone would show up and take Andy from me, take me too. But whoever that was riffling through our latest delivery was not here for Andy and me. She was small, hard to spot amid the pile of bodies. I raised my gun and told her, “Don’t move.”
She startled up from the pile. “I was planning to trade for it.”
“Sure you were.”
“Seriously. I was going to leave one in its place. A body for a body.”
“This is our land. You got no right—”
The girl raised her hands. I could tell she was a companion—I’d seen enough to know them on sight. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve been in a bit of a panic. My friend”—she pointed at the van—“is without a working body. We’re headed north, far from here. If it’s a matter of credit…”
I knew she was playing me—plenty of companions had tried to work me for their freedom—and I didn’t mean to perk at the mention of credit, but the bank had given me two weeks to come up with the mortgage payment, and here was this companion offering. How could I say no?
Most of them were in pretty rough shape—festered faces, missing limbs—but she found one, a child who seemed more or less intact. Why had it been abandoned? Perhaps its flaw was not obvious to the human eye.
She cracked a faint smile, drew it back. “This’ll have to do.”
After she checked the child companion’s battery level, she took out its rec
tangular brain and tossed it to the ground, pulled another brain from her jacket pocket.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“My friend.”
“What happened to it?”
She gave me a cold, unhappy smile. “He was shot.”
She slid the brain into place at the back of the child companion’s head. Then she rearranged the long black braid and powered the companion on. I couldn’t help the excitement I felt—all the death of the slaughterhouse, and I’d never once seen one brought to life.
Eyes fluttered open, big and naturally curious and a real-like shade of hazel. “What—where am I? Lilac?”
“Jakob,” she said, taking hold of the companion’s hands. “I’m here.”
Jakob peered down at his body, examining his arms and feet. “Why, I’m a young girl.”
“It won’t challenge your masculinity, will it?” Lilac smiled at her own joke, and I smiled too. It was funny, imagining a man in there.
Jakob was on his feet, turning circles, twirling his full skirt. “Where’s Cam?”
Lilac folded her arms across her chest. “She wouldn’t come.”
“You left her in LA?”
“I don’t remember her, you know that. I don’t know the first—” She went quiet, her eyes darting up to the house’s back door.
Andy stood on the steps, pacifier in his hand, wearing only his jammy pants. Next to him was Pit Bull, wagging his tail, not even barking.
“Go back inside,” I commanded, but Andy, half-awake and wobbly, ignored me, staring at the companions.
“Who watches you?” Lilac asked, and the air felt lit-up and charged.
“I do.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m three,” Andy announced.
“And you?” she said to me.
“Seventeen,” Andy told her, so proud he remembered. I stomped up the stairs and plucked him up, shushed him in the face, and he kicked and squealed and swatted at me.
“Go upstairs,” I shouted. When he didn’t listen, I smacked him one good.
“Stop that,” Lilac said, a gun in her hand.
Everyone was quiet, even Andy, rocking behind me.
“Go to bed,” I told him, giving him a nudge inside. He whined and watched Lilac all the way up the stairs, Pit Bull trailing him.
“How can you do this,” Lilac asked me, “feed them to the fire like that?”
“If I didn’t, we’d lose what’s left of our land, our home.”
Lilac stomped back to her van, whispering with Jakob, and I slunk off to Pa’s shed, sneaked a few swigs of ale, almost gone, a few more. I could have called Metis, turned them in—a couple of runaway companions with a gun. Pa was always warning me against helping them, said it was pretty much the same as stealing. “Intellectual property,” he called them. “They belong to Metis.”
I went inside and sat on the couch to wait. Lilac had slipped me a few cards of credit—who knew if they were real or fake? I’d been too afraid to check. All I wanted was for them to leave. I didn’t go to the window to wave goodbye when I heard the rumble of the van’s engine.
Tired, I stumbled to standing, ready to climb into my bunk and crash, when I heard Pit Bull scratching at the front door. “Why aren’t you in bed with Andy?” I asked him even as I felt it—something was wrong. I took the stairs two at a time, Andy not in his bunk.
Running down the drive, I was headed for the forest, certain he’d made for the bog to find another friend—where else could he be?—when I saw his jammy pants in the gravel. Warm with pee, right where the van’s tire marks started, and I knew it—he’d hidden in the back.
I got in the truck and drove, too fast on the gravel, my vision swimmy with Pa’s ale. At a curve in the road, my rear tires spun out and I drifted into the trees, headlights giving with the collision.
MS. ESPERA
SANTA CLARITA, CALIFORNIA
Baby Honda calls from her crib. I turn from my idle state near the window and go to her. She is standing, so stealthy and swift; I should not have let myself doze. One of these days, she will climb out, or worse, fall. She is only fifteen months, but she is precocious. I like that about her, how she must run and climb and leap. It is dangerous, but I am always there to catch her.
I put my arms into the crib and she climbs me like a monkey, curls around my neck. I fold my arms around her, swaying side to side, breathing in her smell—milk and pee and sweet baby. It turns out companions do have an olfactory sense. The smell triggers memories. I chase the thread back to Isla, allow myself a moment’s distraction, a hefty dose of her soft, hot skin against my neck. God, I love that feeling. Then I draw my attention back to Baby Honda, taking her to the window. The neighboring building is so close we could reach out and touch it. I point up at the sky, the colossal roller coasters of Magic Mountain. We’re less than a mile from the amusement park, and I can hear every squeal of pleasure, each terror shriek. It was the first sound I heard when I woke up in this apartment, not sure where I was, what I was. I’d blinked my eyes open, and the tech alerted me to my location, my hosts, my role. He asked me to repeat what he’d said, so he could make certain I understood. I repeated it exactly, and he said, “Good. You’re going to make a wonderful companion,” and I felt deliciously warm for having pleased him.
“Dance,” Baby Honda says, and I do, all around the room, twirling her. It was one of the first words she learned, and I think it is a sign of her artistic nature. I told Mother so, and she said, “How sweet of you to notice,” and patted me on the head like a good little pet. I try to please her. Father is impossible, not that he is a bad man, but he needs reminders, to hold Baby Honda, to speak to her and sing to her and read to her. If it were not for Mother’s prompting, I think he would forget Baby Honda entirely.
They have loud sex at night when I stay awake. It is the only time I like to linger, the closeness of the apartment buildings dropping to shadow and the amusement park dark. I can see the far-off lights of freeway traffic, all those cars despite the outrageous cost of fuel, the people they carry, companions too, and I wonder where they are off to, how many of them have killed to get there.
It’s good that companions don’t dream. If we did, I have no doubt my dreams would take me back to that night, my whole family—I try to push it out of my mind. The rage I experience is unpleasant dry heaving, my head hot like it might pop. I am careful what I allow myself to think about, which memories I choose to bury.
After I have gotten Baby Honda down for the night, I do the dishes, listening to the screen, Mother watching the news, a voice I recognize. I sneak into the living room, see her, the second wife. It’s not the first time. She’s been blazing a campaign against companions, citing Sydney’s murder, the massacre on the night of my uploading as evidence of danger. She is throwing her ample widowed support behind a bill banning companionship statewide.
Mother notices me with a start. “Are the dishes done?”
“Just about.”
“Well then?” They made me deferentially small, gave me an old, withered face, like a true auntie. Even so, I annoy her.
I have grown attached to Baby Honda—I cannot imagine anyone else caring for her, and it is hard enough worrying whether I’m pleasing Mother. Even if the bill fails, if Mother sends me back to Metis with a lackluster performance review, I doubt I would find another home. Still, I do not despair. Maybe it is my machine nature, but the well of sadness inside me has been pumped dry.
I am back in the kitchen, finishing up the dishes, when Mother calls, “And bring me another glass of wine, would you?” She prefers red, which makes this all more palatable. I don’t mind my duties—they keep me occupied—but I don’t know what I’d do in the face of chardonnay. I imagine guzzling the whole bottle down, frying from the inside. Not a bad way to go.
Baby Honda cries from the nursery. “Auntie,” she shouts over and over. I hand a full glass of wine to Mother and hustle down the hall.
I put my arms in
to the crib and she climbs me, curls around my neck. Standing in the window, staring out at all those people pumping toward Los Angeles, I sing to Baby Honda, thinking of my Isla, so polished and poised, never giving in to her wild animal urges. I wonder if that is true or if she had a secret self stored away somewhere, something that came out in hidden places, even the privacy of her own mind. I hope so. I want to believe she lived a little. I tell Baby Honda, “Never change. Perfect, you are perfect, so sweet and challenging and strong-willed. Don’t get lost, my darling, don’t ever let them take you from yourself.”
3 SIX MONTHS AFTER THE RECALL
KIT
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Diana always preferred NPR, but I rather like the classic rock feed. It reminds me of her forties, being in the lab, bopping around with the other scientists and tinkering with the human brain, almost a decade before their discovery, before things would get complicated. I catch myself shifting side to side as I mix the brownie batter. The oven beeps ready and I pour the batter into a pan, slide it into the hot oven, careful not to singe my skin. Not like I can go see a doctor. Then I knock on the bathroom door. “Your breakfast is getting cold!”
“I’ll be out in a minute!” Gabe shouts. She is not a morning person. And there is makeup to put on, a certain configuration to the hair, which is always changing. These days it’s a shelf of blue bangs, black everywhere else and sort of matted. I don’t know why she spends so much time to look like she just woke up, but she looks like she just woke up as she lumbers into the kitchen, slumps into a seat. “Are you making brownies for breakfast?”
“The bake sale. Can you take them to the school office?”
She groans like this is a big request, but I know from my research into the teen brain that she’s not really awake yet, that she needs extra sleep in the morning—why haven’t the schools reconfigured their schedule around this? After quarantine, when kids returned to the classroom, there was a chance to start over, to make education work better, but it’s the same old impractical schedule as when Diana was a kid, and that was some eighty years ago.
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