by Sue Burke
“So, um, Nike, with everything I have to do for the trip,” he murmured, as if it were an important secret, “I can’t pick up this lunch.”
She nodded and smiled thinly, expectations confirmed, and held up her hand to the scanner to pay. The prices weren’t too bad, at least. Some corporations got price-controlled supplies, and besides, only the crust was what it seemed to be, wheat flour and yeast. The rest was artificially flavored … stuff. She chose tap water as her beverage to trim the bill further. He chose coffee with his meal—synthetic but still not cheap.
She knew she’d be eating bags of chips for dinner for the next two days, and she’d never lose weight unless she could afford good food. She collected her tray and ignored the lone human staffer tidying up after the robots. If she made eye contact, they’d have to smile at her per company policy, and she knew how that felt. Would the feeling propel them to mutiny, too?
As they ate, Papa recited a monologue for his show: “What if politics was like football? One team always has the home advantage because all the games are played at that team’s home field. One team gets two balls and an anointed quarterback. Only one team has cleats. The referees wear the home-team colors. If the wrong team somehow wins, the game gets replayed. And one side always loses, even though it has lots more fans in the stands. Why can’t football be played the old-fashioned way?”
That word, old-fashioned, might cross the line. Or maybe he knew, too, what was about to happen. He might know that its color would be purple, and that could explain the violet-colored ties. But she couldn’t say that and breach the secret of the mutiny, although it probably wasn’t a very well-kept secret. She found herself fidgeting, aware of what he wasn’t saying, not that she wanted to hear it, wondering if he was in more danger than she’d thought.
“It’s going to take some work, maybe 3D graphics,” he admitted, briefly dropping his on-screen persona, who was unwary and slightly bewildered. “And I wanna find out if it’s sedition to make fun of the losing side because then it shows that there are winners and losers and what the winners are like. The losers are only angry because they can’t afford rising prices, right? So I could ask, how poor are they, in actual fact, compared to the winners?”
He thought out loud for a while about that, especially about the scarcity of actual facts, then about how even getting the real score for the game might cross the line, and why anyone bothered to play the game anyway. “We try and even if we win, we wind up losing bigger.”
Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. If we fail at the mutiny, it’s like a death sentence. How much will we have to do to at least earn a capital M from history, the Mutiny? We could be dead but not forgotten.
She was eating the pizza crust, not wasting a precious crumb, when he finally said:
“I need you to know something, Berenike.”
He was about to get serious. He’d used her full first name, all four syllables, bear-eh-NEE-kay, the ancient Greek form of Berenice, instead of the two-syllable nickname NIGH-key.
“I really loved your mother, I did. I love you, too. I love being with you. Her, it was just—we were two peas in a pod. You know that old saying? We were just like each other, like peas. We got on each other’s nerves. And then we fought. But hey, you know that.”
She nodded, although her parents had never seemed very much alike to her. “It’s okay, Papa.”
“I know you blame me.”
“No, I don’t.” She blamed him for a lot, but not that. “I was glad when you said you wanted a divorce.” Predictably, that announcement had triggered a vicious drama that ended with Momma’s death. An accidental overdose? Momma did use drugs. But was it a bid for attention or a deliberate suicide? Berenike and Papa would never know, and uncertainty would weigh heavier than the truth. Momma would have liked that.
And besides all the drama, if Momma had been insured—if she’d had really good insurance—she would have gotten better care and might have survived.
“Look,” he said, “I know this was hard on you, and she dragged you into this. She probably told you it was all my fault, that she gave birth to you and so you owed her. Stuff like that.”
Berenike had been subjected to a lot of stuff, so much that she had recently splurged on an online counseling AI to learn some coping techniques. It told her to question and verify everything her parents had ever said or would say. Papa was wrong about one thing, though. “She didn’t forget I was adopted.” She had never let Berenike forget that for a minute, another thing, like being overweight or having a job “any cretin could do,” that Momma thought she should feel guilty about.
He leaned back and stared at the menu on the restaurant wall. “You’re … honey, that’s … I know we always said that, but no, not exactly.”
“Not exactly?” She set down the remaining bite of crust.
“No, and I never liked that she made me lie about it.”
What kind of lie? She looked at him and waited as she tried to ratchet up her new coping techniques. This wasn’t going to be good news.
He drummed his fingers on the tabletop’s fake red wood. “Here’s what happened. We couldn’t have kids, so your mother’s parents, because they really, really wanted to be grandparents, they decided to give us a child as a gift. They bought a fertilized egg from a clinic and paid for everything, and then they wanted to claim you as their child instead of ours, and there was this big fight. You’ve heard about the fight, just not the real reason why.”
She’d assumed the fight was over her parents’ drug use and poverty and their neglect of her. She tried to relax her shoulders.
After a long gulp of expensive fake coffee, he continued. “That’s when we cut off all communications, and your momma was so mad that she didn’t want to remember what they did, not one thing. So she began to say you were adopted, and I didn’t want to argue because she was right about what shits her parents were. You gotta admit, adoption was a pretty believable story. You don’t look like us at all.”
No, she didn’t, blond next to their dark hair, for starters. She took a slow breath. The air smelled of pizza, but the scent wasn’t real, not at this putzy chain. It was just food-scented air freshener. Fake, the smell. Fake, her birth story. She’d never been able to trust her parents. This was a big—betrayal? Yes, yet another one. How surprised should she be, really?
Stay calm. Drink some water. That was what the AI counselor would have said.
“You can check your birth certificate,” he said. “I know, it sounds stupid now.”
“So … it was one of those donor eggs?”
“I don’t know,” Papa said. “Her parents set up everything.”
“So maybe it was like, when a couple has leftover eggs after a fertility treatment, they donate them.” I might be a leftover.
“Yeah, maybe. Hey, then there’d be someone exactly like you. You’d be like sisters, secret sisters.” His tone of voice shifted: free-associating for a monologue. “You gotta find her. We can make a video. Two sisters meet for the first time. And you get into a fight, not really, it would be in the script, but it would be right up to the line. People would love it.”
Berenike didn’t think she’d love it. She wasn’t loving much about this lunch, either.
As he chattered on about squabbling families, she tried to breathe slow and deep and to examine her feelings like the AI had taught her. This news wouldn’t change things much. In fact, her parents had told her a lot that hadn’t turned out to be true. And she had never known exactly why they were estranged from Momma’s parents, only how viciously. Now she did. Maybe.
Perhaps Momma hadn’t picked her up at an adoption agency, she’d given birth to her. But Momma hadn’t provided the genetic material. Neither had Papa.
Maybe she did have an in vitro sister, and that girl had parents who were very different from her own. Momma and Papa’s girl? No. When she’d believed she’d been adopted, she had long ago surrendered her heart to the mysterious man and woman who,
she’d imagined, had given her up as a newborn to what they hoped was a better home and more loving arms. They hadn’t known those arms would spend a lot of time waving around in senseless anger and ugly arguments.
But if Papa was telling the truth, those loving birth parents were a total fantasy. Instead, perhaps, they’d given away a bit of themselves to anyone who wanted it, carelessly, keeping one beloved girl for themselves. Maybe she had no wonderful parents, real or imaginary.
The pizza wasn’t sitting well.
“Life is full of surprises, you know?” Papa was saying—the man known as Papa. “Families grow and change, right? It’s just you and me now, Nike. Better for me, better for you.”
She was going to need some time to process this. “Yes, it is.”
She needed to find those wannabe grandparents and hear their story as soon as she could. Maybe they’d be what she’d hoped for. Maybe. Question and verify.
* * *
Irene stood and watched the woolly mammoth shuffle aimlessly. His yard-long shaggy hair gleamed rust brown in the afternoon light. For all his huge magnificence, Nimkii looked desolate, pitiful, even out of place, although ten thousand years ago his kind had dominated North America’s grasslands. He stopped dead in his bare pen and rocked back and forth, a sign of forlorn boredom if not an aching mental health crisis.
He looked at Irene and rumbled. He recognized her—as a source of food but perhaps not as the person who cherished him more than anyone else did. She got back to work and shoved a bale of grassy hay into the chains that hung from the sling of the crane alongside the pen. The bale weighed half of what she did. Every day, he’d eat seven bales along with fruit, fresh-cut long grass and alfalfa, a pail of elephant chow pellets, vegetables, and more.
A quarter ton of fodder in all, every day. Irene’s armpits dripped with sweat. Summer heat and humidity wouldn’t end until late October.
She switched on the motorized winch to lift up the bale, and directed the crane’s arm to swing over the outer fence, marshy moat, and interior fence, then drop the hay. She reversed the motor immediately to reel up the chains as Nimkii rushed for them, jerking his trunk in the air, grabbing at them. He could move gracefully when he wanted, but now he was unhappy. He had reason to be unhappy. So did Irene.
Alan, head of the family that owned the farm, was leaving the house. Is he coming to help me? Not likely. Nimkii gave up on the chains, roared, and ripped apart the hay bale. A crow cawed on a fence post next to the pen, oblivious to the grassy funk of mammoth droppings. The pen desperately needed to be cleaned.
Alan approached, grinning in a way she didn’t like. He stood tall, a middle-aged man, his weather-creased face always flushed. Next to him, Irene felt small and fragile and pale, her hair bleached blonder in the sunshine and held in place by a University of Wisconsin baseball cap.
“We’re getting sort of a tour group today,” Alan announced. “A shelter home for dupes is coming to visit.” He laughed.
Irene had long ago learned to hide her cringe at the word dupe and at laughter more mocking than joyous. He seemed to expect her to say something. “That’ll be nice,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Dupes like him.” He pointed to Nimkii, still grinning. That grin added to Irene’s deepening certainty that Alan and his family had no love for Nimkii. And to her certainty that she had come to a very wrong place.
“I’ll take any visitors we can get,” Alan added defensively, perhaps because she hadn’t laughed. “The tourism board doesn’t do crap for us anyway. We thought this was going to be a great idea, our own little zoo with a big star animal to show off. It’s just not working out.”
Maybe no one wants to visit a sad, stinky animal. Irene began to load some apples into a box for him, rejects from a nearby orchard that were small, misshapen, or blotched—and fragrant in the heat. Her mouth watered.
“I was thinking,” Alan said, “about getting some passenger pigeons. Maybe that would bring more people. They could visit central Wisconsin the way it used to be.”
They’d never guess by the way it is now. Visitors saw endless industrial farms covering sweltering land that only a half century earlier had held cool, beautiful forests. Worse, the farm corporations were pushing for travel restrictions like the ones in Iowa, which would mean no visitors at all.
“You know,” Alan said, “I thought I’d feel connected to him. I’m a little Ojibwe. My ancestors knew mammoths firsthand. That’s why we called him Nimkii.”
The name meant Thunderbird in Ojibwe. A Missouri exotic-animal breeding farm had raised him with an elephant surrogate mother and had called him Big Babar. Irene knew a little about the breeding operation and liked none of it, including the thoughtless names. Nimkii had suffered a cheerless childhood in a pen even smaller than the one where he lived now.
“There’s always so much to do,” Alan said. “And the cost just for alfalfa keeps rising. He eats too much.” He waited for her to answer.
Fruit was expensive, even bad fruit. “Yeah,” she said, faking a little enthusiasm. “We’d better get ready for visitors.”
Alan shrugged and returned to the farmhouse. She picked out a good apple and slipped it into her pocket before she fitted the box into the chains. A twittering flock of sparrows was scavenging inside the pen for bugs in the mammoth scat. Nimkii rumbled, glaring at them, as if they were stealing his dinner.
In July, when she’d arrived as an unpaid intern, Irene’s heart had broken the moment she’d seen the woolly mammoth. Or rather, it had broken when she saw his pen. Six acres had looked bigger in the photos. They showed him standing in a lush tallgrass prairie under wide oak trees, wildflowers brushing his belly.
But in real life, the pen resembled an inadequate prison exercise yard. The grass and flowers had been eaten or trampled to bare sandy soil, and the savanna oaks ripped apart. Six acres, just over four football fields, was nowhere near enough for a creature who in the wild might range more than thirty miles in a single day.
Irene had not expected love at first sight, and now she dreamed of somehow petting him as he towered over her. But if he behaved like a wild fourteen-year-old adult male elephant, and it seemed he did, no one could come close. He would assert dominance, and with a casual swipe he could kill.
She hadn’t expected love, but she had arrived with a secret kinship with Nimkii. Like him, she’d been genetically engineered. No one seemed to remember that artificially engineered, cloned humans used to be sort of legal.
On graduation day, when she received her bachelor’s degree in environmental ecology, graffiti had been scribbled on her dorm room door. Dupe. Duplicate, clone. Then she got threatening messages, one showing her at a restaurant with friends the evening before. It was time to get out of town fast and cover her electronic tracks. A mammoth farm in Wausau might be far enough from Madison, only one hundred fifty miles due north, since she’d told no one besides her mother where she was going—and Mamá hadn’t wanted her to go but had no better ideas, either. Now she was cut off from almost everything that mattered.
Second-class now, too, if anyone finds out. Well, things might change soon, from what her mother had told her. Irene found it hard to hope for changes that big.
She hadn’t faced much competition for the internship. Nimkii was legal, but was his existence ethical? With only twelve other mammoths alive in North America, he might be alone his whole life, condemned to solitary confinement. Male elephants seemed like loners but actually led social lives at least as complex as a human’s. Humans in solitary confinement went mad.
He lived in a little pen at a failing farm where the house had fading siding, the barn had a leaking roof, the shed sat on a cracked foundation, and the driveway needed a fresh layer of gravel.
On some days, no visitors came to help pay for his fodder. So when the little bus arrived carrying three residents from the sheltered home, Alan and his gruff wife, Ruby, came out to meet them. Irene busied herself on the far side of the pen, wat
ching surreptitiously. One of the residents wore leg braces, but the other two seemed normal—like Irene. She knew for a fact she was normal. Some clones had been badly designed, physically or mentally, and needed special care. Others could live just fine on their own like anyone else, but they were often pressured into surrendering to protective custody.
Irene didn’t want to think about it. She took the tractor to cut some alfalfa for Nimkii, hoping to distract herself, but she thought of nothing else the whole time. That could be me.
When she came back, the visitors were gone, and Alan and Ruby were in high spirits.
“Hey, Irene, they were nice!” Alan said.
“No one snapped,” Ruby said. They both laughed. Dupes were supposedly mentally unstable.
“That’s good,” Irene said, lifting a bundle of grass from the tractor, her hands trembling with mental rather than physical exertion. How long before I snap? If she hadn’t fallen in love with Nimkii, if things didn’t change soon for the better—much better—she’d pack her suitcase and go. Anywhere would be an improvement.
* * *
I, Peng, designer of life and master of its language, began my day tasked with the unsealing of a package of dead chickens. Three chickens, to be precise, sent express from a farm in Iowa to the lab in Chicago where I labored. My life had come to that, and I hoped it would not grow worse. I still had much to lose. Every day I looked death in the eye and quaked.
To stave off impending disaster, I activated the armatures inside a biosafety cabinet to slit open the seals of the package. I sat on the safe side of the glass window. A coworker stood next to me, as was protocol, and offered encouragement; we took turns doing the physical donkey work, a small act of mutual kindness to share the burden. We were about to perform a crucial task. Together we would discover exactly what had ravaged a distant flock of chickens to determine whether it would also ravage the Earth and all of its biota.
