Theory of Bastards

by Audrey Schulman

  Frankie repeated, What’s going on?

  He waved his arms for the occupancy sensor and shouted, The lights are acting crazy.

  I know. Why you yelling?

  He bellowed as though he hadn’t heard her, The toilet keeps flushing, the oven turning on.

  The avatar on the wall nodded at his wisdom and added, 10:48 A.M. Observing the continuum permits another exercise.

  At the avatar’s gestures, Stotts looked over—trained to face the person talking, to listen and consider.

  Frankie waved her hands to get Stotts’ attention, over-emphasizing her mouth movements so he could read her lips, WHY . . . YOU . . . YELLING?

  He jerked his thumb at his ears and shouted, My system’s playing how-to videos really loud.

  The avatar commented, Retail accidents listen to the Pope.

  He froze, his eyes flicking back and forth, watching something only he could see flash across his Lenses. Jesus, that’s my bank account.

  The lights above clicked on and off.

  Must be the static, he yelled, Frying the controls.

  She said, Turn off your BodyWare.

  He shouted, What?

  She grabbed the back of his neck to hold him still, while she pressed his Bindi for three seconds.

  Understanding he shouted, Ok Bindi, power off.

  Then he blinked and focused on her again, his face no longer tight from the audio assault.

  Frankie asked, This happen before? During one of the earlier storms?

  No, he answered.

  The avatar added, Is surprise what generates the silk?

  She jerked her thumb, Can you shut her up?

  He pushed open a small panel in the wall near them, looked inside and turned a dial. The avatar continued to talk, but silently.

  In the new quiet, both of them heard some noise from the enclosure, a faint repetitive sound.

  Stotts said, What is . . .

  She looked through the window and said, Marge is coughing.

  What?

  She forgot about her BodyWare being off and reached for the door, starting to say, Ok D . . . . However she didn’t even have to finish the statement; the knob turned easily. She paused long enough to twist the knob back and forth, the bolt sliding in and out.

  She whispered to him, The door’s unlocked.

  Crap, he said and stopped by the door to play with the knob.

  In the enclosure, Marge was sitting on the ground, hacking, her shoulders working with the violence of her cough.

  In here, the avatar’s volume was still on. She said, Humans hold the stick.

  Frankie moved toward Marge, You alright?

  Crouching down beside Marge, she touched her fingers to the ground, felt grit on the cement.

  The avatar said, Bonobos stick the hand.

  A fine dust lay across the ground, Marge in the center of it. Frankie looked around for where it was coming from, examining the walls, searching for some hole or gap. Gradually she looked up. She saw what seemed to be steam coming from the vents at the top of the wall, the steam floating gently downward.

  The vents to outside had opened, dust drifting in.

  Behind her, Stotts saw it also. Shit, he said and bolted back into the building.

  She took Marge’s hand and led her, coughing, away from the vent to the center of the enclosure.

  The avatar’s vocabulary seemed to be de-evolving. It asked, Why do sticks stick?

  Next to Marge, Frankie patted her back until she stopped coughing. Meanwhile she watched the dust drift down, examining the bonobos for any effect.

  A few minutes later, Stotts opened the door again and asked, Vents closed?

  No.

  He disappeared again.

  The avatar said, Hand the hand.

  The next time he came back, he was huffing. He asked, That work?

  No.

  Damn, he said and closed the door.

  Meanwhile the avatar latched onto these last two words as though onto a life raft. Damn, she said, No no no no.

  Frankie waited, the dust drifting in. The lights above were flashing on and off, fast as the lights on an ambulance.

  No, said the avatar, Damn damn damn damn.

  Sweetie was the next to start coughing, then Mr. Mister, then Houdina. Frankie called them one by one out of the climbing structure and away from the plexiglass, promising them gummy bears, moving them further and further from the walls, until they were all clustered next to the door to the research room. By this point, most of them were coughing on and off. They were much more sensitive to the dust than she was. She could only smell a certain mustiness in the air. When even Id began to hack, her tiny shoulders working, Frankie opened the door and called them all into the research room. Mr. Mister was coughing so hard, she had to lead him by the hand.

  By this point the avatar in the research room was palsied, unable to speak or sign at all. Her shoulders and hands twitched and twitched, as though she were struggling to wake from a bad dream.

  Inside, with the door closed, the air was clear. Frankie moved anxiously from bonobo to bonobo, touching their backs and waiting for them to stop, their coughing gradually easing. The lights strobed on and off.

  Stotts opened the door at a half run, expecting the room to be empty. He almost tripped over Houdina and came to a hard stop, staring at all the bonobos sitting inside.

  She asked, You fix it?

  No. I tried everything. Why are they here?

  They were coughing.

  Why not the sleeping chamber?

  That room just has a gate. It wouldn’t protect them from the dust.

  But we can’t have them . . .

  He started to pick his way through them toward the door to the enclosure—probably wanting to see how dusty it was in there. Behind him, Houdina reached up, turned the unlocked doorknob and stepped out into the hall.

  Frankie called, Stotts.

  He turned and said, Christ.

  He moved fast out the door, calling, Houdina, come back here.

  Meanwhile Id scooted out just behind him. When he lunged forward to make a grab for her, Adele slipped out, followed by Sweetie. They made happy peeping noises at this new area to explore.

  No no no, said Frankie, weaving her way through the bonobos to the door to stop them. The rest of the bonobos, figuring everyone was heading that way, trailed along.

  In the hall, Houdina was knuckling straight for the door that led out of the interaction area and into the offices. Stotts ran ahead of her to shove a table in front of the door.

  Frankie asked, You have keys? We could lock it by hand.

  Keys, he said, as though she’d asked for a slide rule.

  Meanwhile the bonobos spread out in every direction, exploring the interaction area. Id disappeared into the kitchen. The lights flickering overhead gave a stop-action quality to everything, as though this was a silent movie showing action taken long ago, no possible way to stop it.

  Grab Id, said Stotts, Don’t let her find the knives.

  Got it, said Frankie.

  Something crashed in the bathroom and Stotts headed that way.

  In the kitchen, Frankie grabbed Id, but by then Goliath arrived and Marge, so she put Id down and, uncertain of what to do, held her palms up in a let’s-not-be-too-hasty gesture. None of them even looked at her. Goliath grabbed the bottle of Dawn dish soap and began to suckle from its nozzle as though from a baby bottle. Id jumped onto the counter and opened the first cabinet—filled with glasses—while Marge slid open the cutlery drawer. Frankie hip-checked the drawer, pinching Marge’s fingers hard enough that she squealed and dropped the forks, offended. On the counter, the blender danced around, its motor whirring out of control.

  Frankie yelled, Out out out. All of you, out of here.
r />   She could have been the avatar for all the attention they paid her.

  Id dropped the first glass into the sink where it shattered with a satisfying ker-ash. Marge tried to open the cutlery drawer again. Frankie jerked the whole drawer out of the cabinet—the sound of wood cracking—and holding it up above their heads, kicked open the walk-in freezer to shove the drawer inside on a shelf. The bonobos peered with interest into the freezer, so she slammed the door shut. Behind her, two more glasses shattered in the sink and Id hooted with excitement. Keeping a foot on the freezer door, Frankie tugged the next two glasses from Id’s hands, threw them in the trash and picking the trash up, swept all the glasses off the shelf into it. Beside her, Goliath made glugging noises, swallowing the dish soap.

  Meanwhile more bonobos pressed into the room, cooing as they opened cabinets and drawers and pressed buttons, while Frankie unplugged the toaster and tugged steak knives out of their hands and yanked away the glass coffee pot. Marge touched one of the now-lit burners and screamed, clutched her hand to her chest and bolted off down the hall.

  Goliath stepped into the center of the room, still cradling the dish soap to his chest, to take a big breath. With a concentrated expression, he let go an enormous burp. A stream of bubbles floated out of his mouth. The females squealed and began bouncing high in the air with joy at the beauty of this day.

  Through the wall, she could hear crashes and thuds and the hand-dryer whirring insanely and Stotts calling, No, no. Hey! No.

  Her back against the freezer, she yelled, What do we do?

  Stotts bellowed back through the wall, No idea.

  Goliath burped again. The females shrieked like teenage girls. One large bubble floated in Frankie’s direction.

  She shouted louder, I need a plan.

  He yelled, Stella, put that down.

  There was the thud of something hitting the bathroom floor hard. Whatever it was, it shattered.

  The bubble burst on the cabinet next to her and she got a distinct waft of Goliath’s fruity bonobo breath.

  Goliath knuckled out into the hall to show off his burps. The others followed.

  Stotts called, We make the rooms safe enough that we have time to figure out how to get the vents shut.

  She called back, Then we get them back in the enclosure.

  Agreed, he called.

  Eyeing the room for danger, she started by blocking off the walk-in freezer. She leaned her shoulder into the free-standing fridge and grunted. It didn’t move. So she wedged herself between the wall and the fridge and shoved with her legs until the fridge juddered backward into place, blocking the freezer’s door. Next, she stuffed everything dangerous she could find into the fridge, going systematically through the drawers and cabinets, stopping occasionally to jerk an object away from one of the bonobos who’d wandered in. When she was done, she taped the fridge closed with yards of duct tape.

  Overhead the lights flashed, frantic.

  Of course if the bonobos wanted to open the fridge or freezer, they still could; it would just take some work. She could only hope, with so much else to explore and play with, they wouldn’t bother.

  Once she finished, she stepped out into the hall. Four bonobos were in the janitor’s closet, the crash and thud of things dropping. Shattered jars on the ground. Mothballs scattered everywhere. Ralph had cut one of his hands and was sitting on his butt, sucking on the wound. Two others, next to him, chirped sympathetically and tugged on his wrist, trying to pull his hand out of his mouth so they could see all the blood. Sweetie was drumming on a tin of turpentine—luckily still shut—making a sloshing ker-plash ker-plish sound. He began to hit it harder. She tugged it away from him and pushed all of them out of the closet. They knuckled toward Goliath who lay on his back, burping long strings of shiny bubbles up toward the ceiling. Five bonobos near him were laughing hard, leaning against the wall for balance, Mama gasping the hardest. When Goliath let go a particularly resonant ribbon of bubbles, Mama’s laughing got worse. She clutched at her crotch and began to tinkle all over the carpet.

  Frankie swept all dangerous items out of the closet and into a garbage bag. On the third shelf down, she came upon a small toolbox and paused, looking in at the tools.

  She glanced at the closet’s doorknob; two small screws at its base held the knob in place on its metal neck.

  With a screwdriver and a bit of concentration, she loosened these screws and then wiggled the knob off so only the bare neck was left. Grabbing the remaining doorknob on the far side, she yanked it and the bolt entirely out of the door. Now there was just a face-plate with an empty hole.

  She stared at the faceplate for a moment, then slid the bolt and its attached knob into the hole like a key. She turned the knob easily, opening and closing the door a few times with this bolt-key, pleased.

  She stuffed everything dangerous nearby into the closet—including the turpentine tin—and slammed the door shut, removing the bolt-key and tucking it into her pocket.

  Sweetie, she called, Could you open this door for me?

  Sweetie knuckled over and looked at the door and then at her. He tried to jam his finger into the empty faceplate hole but it wouldn’t fit. He scraped at that area with his nails for a second, trying to get purchase, then attempted to wedge his fingers under the bottom of the door. After a moment, he lost interest and headed off in the direction of the bathroom instead.

  So she unscrewed and removed all the doorknobs and bolts in the interaction area. Until the bonobos started battering doors in or found some tool that could work the latch mechanism, they were now restrained to the kitchen, bathroom, office and research room.

  When Stotts saw what she’d done, he grabbed her by the ears and planted a kiss hard on her forehead.

  Brilliant, he said.

  She was pressed for a moment against his sternum, a sense of warm muscle and ribs. She inhaled once, then stepped back, blinking.

  She handed him one of the doorknob bolts and said, You go find what’s wrong and fix it. I’ll stay here to make sure they’re alright. Hurry.

  Using his bolt as a key, he opened the door and left.

  Frankie bustled about removing whatever struck her as dangerous. Each time she filled a garbage bag, she opened the door to the office part of the building and tossed the bag unceremoniously down the hall, slamming the door so she only heard the crash.

  Meanwhile every motorized Quark-enabled device whirred louder and louder—the blender, the coffee grinder and the hand dryer in the bathroom—until it burned out, going silent, its LEDs continuing to blink a silent SOS. The smell of burning plastic in the air.

  Perhaps 20 minutes after that, the lights clicked off, not even flickering anymore. Everything went dark. She stood in the unlit hall, her eyes struggling to adjust. After that she had to stumble up and down the hall toward any thumps or crashes, trying to protect the bonobos.

  Soon she was using garbage bags to get rid of the occasional poop she discovered in the dark—her sneaker landing in it and skidding slightly, her body struggling for balance.

  Without a working clock and with little light from the storm outside, it was hard to judge how much time went by. All she knew was by the point Stotts finally returned, she’d begun to worry about him.

  She didn’t hear him open the door, but saw the bright beam of light striding down the hall toward her, the light about six feet up. He stopped in front of her and angled the headlamp up toward the ceiling so she could see him.

  She asked hopefully, The vents closed?

  He shook his head no, the beam of light tracing an arc back and forth across the ceiling.

  You fix the problem?

  The beam of light traced its arc back and forth again.

  Any idea what’s causing it?

  He said, Static? Dust inside some server somewhere? This is not my field of expertise.


  Anything like this happened before during a dust storm?

  Not that I’ve heard of. I’ve only been here for two storms.

  He handed her a second headlamp. She turned it over. It must be at least five years old, from before the night-vision app came installed on all Lenses.

  With all the devices burned out, the only sound left was the toilet, evidently on a different power source because it continued to flush endlessly.

  She added, The system will figure out the problem soon and fix it, right?

  He grunted in a somewhat positive but inconclusive way and said, Meanwhile we keep the bonobos in here.

  She pulled the headlamp’s elastic band over her head, positioning the light in the front, and turned it on.

  Goliath squealed with pain from the bathroom and they both moved that way. He’d cut his hand on a piece of glass from a shattered light fixture. She plucked the piece of glass out, while Stotts began to sweep up the shards.

  Thirty One

  Sometime late that afternoon Stotts and Frankie remembered the bonobos’ lunch. Stepping into the kitchen, they saw the 3-D printer head had secreted a shiny ball of goo around itself, like an insect preparing to pupate. Frankie touched the glob with her fingertips. It was hard and she couldn’t feel any vibration inside. The motor had burned itself out.

  She and Stotts turned to look at the bin next to the printer. It was only half-filled with printed fruit.

  They stared into the bin, waiting for the facts to change. There was a slow silence.

  We still have the pumpkins, said Frankie.

  Stotts asked, How many?

  They moved fast down the hall into the office area to check, slamming the door behind them to stop the bonobos from following.

  In the light from the headlamps, the 12 medium-sized pumpkins lay scattered across the floor. They’d been intended primarily as a garnish for the few days of the storm, a tasty tidbit mixed in with the printed fruit to encourage the bonobos to eat. Yesterday in the wheelbarrow, this had seemed like a large number of pumpkins. Now it looked paltry.

  That’s what, asked Frankie, Three meals?

  It’s alright. There’s emergency fruit in the walk-in freezer.