Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  Though maybe Philip could pick him up? She dialed him.

  “Why are you calling me, Rebecca,” he said, not even bothering to disguise his exasperation.

  “I…I’m picking Sean up from school,” she said.

  “Isn’t the bus running?”

  “He got in trouble,” she said, feeling as if she was admitting her own failure. “He’s in detention.”

  “So one of us has to collect the boy when he’s badly behaved? Is that how it works?”

  “Yeah.” Ask me if I’m good to drive. I fucking dare you. Please please ask. I’m begging you.

  “Well, you’ll have to do it, then. I’m deep in work here.”

  “That’s what I said I was going to do! Why do you always—”

  “You don’t need to yell, Rebecca. I need to get back to work. Goodbye.”

  Click.

  Philip wasn’t one of the first people to buy self-driving cars once they were widely available—he’d reined in his early adopter’s impulse until the prices dropped a couple of times—but the vehicles with their swooping, bullet-like shapes and bright green license plates still drew occasional stares from drivers who had to keep their hands on their steering wheels. The first models hadn’t been all that different from conventional cars, but as their designs evolved, they began to incorporate a philosophy of relaxation and inattention. The interiors of third-generation self-driving cars were more womblike: they were dark and comforting, letting your mind go somewhere else while the computer at the wheel piloted your body to the place you wanted it to be. The driver and passenger seats in Rebecca’s car reclined fully, and would have made suitable beds if one were to take an overnight trip down an interstate highway; the front windshield had an emissive film applied to its surface, so that a video projector mounted above the backseat could display a transparent image on the inside of the windshield, through which you could still see the road.

  Rebecca lay back in the driver’s seat and lazily swirled the ice in her fourth G&T. She’d brought up the afternoon news on the windshield. It looked as if the federal government was finally admitting that the United States no longer fully held the Dakota Territories, that they’d been, in part, taken over by a ragtag, nameless assemblage of survivalists, hardcore libertarians, Luddites, sovereign citizens, black militants, and white supremacists, who seemed to have formed an uneasy, chaotic alliance that presumably would hold for only as long as it would take for them to win the right to lawfully secede.

  On the windshield screen was their leader, or one of their leaders. His appearance was apparently meant to befuddle facial recognition technology, with one side of his face bearded and the other clean-shaven, and his forehead dotted with flecks of reflective foil. “We only want to escape from American surveillance,” he was saying, his voice heavily distorted by electronic manipulation. “We are fighting against the reduction of flesh to data. We are fighting for the privacy that is our natural right: we want to not be observed and tracked, by drones and phone cameras and RFID chips. We are not a violent people. We merely wish to pursue the secession that is our God-given right. But if we have to fight, we will fight.”

  The official word from the government was that this was a “conflict,” and a few truckloads of National Guardsmen were being sent in for show. But the whole war was likely to be conducted electronically, with military drones piloted by acne-prone kids who’d been racking up kills in first-person shooters since the age of five. Poor bastards didn’t stand a chance.

  Rebecca drained her glass and chased the dregs of her drink with a breath mint. Things could be worse: at least she didn’t have tinfoil glued all over her face, huddled in some damp, cold bunker along with members of splinter groups from the Klan and the Black Internationale, waiting for the gas or the bomb. All she had to do was retrieve her son from Mrs. Baldridge.

  It wasn’t until Rebecca got Sean in the car and talked to him alone that she was able to piece together the whole story. There was this kid named Brian who’d been held back from third grade and therefore towered over all the other boys in his class, a Cro-Magnon holy terror. And Sean, with his short stature and reedy frame, with his open face and perpetually wide-eyed stare, became the target of Brian’s ire. Brian tormented Sean like it was his job: at least once a week the boy came home from school with telltale salt tracks on his cheeks, claiming that nothing was wrong.

  Today things had finally come to a head. Last week all the kids in second grade had taken a test—these days the students had to take tests of one kind or another every few weeks, and report cards had grown from simple two-column records of scholarship and conduct to multiple-page spreadsheets adorned with the presidential seal. These multiple-choice exams were in Sean’s wheelhouse—if he could ever find a job that consisted solely of finding the next number in a series, Rebecca was certain his future would be secure.

  Naturally, he killed it on the test, and since it was one of those federal things, everyone in the top quintile got a voucher for a free ice cream sandwich at lunch. Which, in the fishbowl world of a second grader, was a huge deal. To hear Sean tell it, the school lunches were just as bad as they were in Rebecca’s day, except that instead of limp French fries and rectangular slices of pizza, they were made up of things intended to be healthy: mealy apples, and clumps of undercooked brown rice, and string beans that had been boiled until their color was nearer to gray than green. Most of the food went in the garbage, day after day: kids who didn’t pack their own lunch came home starving. In such an environment an ice cream sandwich in the middle of the day would taste like ambrosia.

  The problem was that the teacher had handed out the coupons in front of everyone at the beginning of the school day (“I want the smartest children in the class to get their recognition,” she had said, once again demonstrating her utter failure to understand the dog-eat-dog nature of second-grade society), and Sean had had to hold on to the coupon from then until lunchtime (with its drawing of a chocolate ice cream sandwich emerging from a golden explosion on the front, and a portrait of the President on the back, beaming a benevolent attaboy smile). Three hours was an eternity, one that would afford his nemesis Brian plenty of opportunities for ambush and assault.

  From there the narrative got a little murky: Rebecca had to piece things together from what Sean told her, from what his face told her he was unwilling to admit, and from Mrs. Baldridge’s version of events, which was in turn gathered from the testimonies of other excitable second-grade witnesses, and thus was undoubtedly embroidered.

  Apparently Sean got jumped when he was coming back from recess. Brian threw him to the floor on his back, straddled him, and popped him in the face with a quick, stinging backhand. “Give it.”

  “I’m not,” Sean said.

  Brian slapped him again. “Give it, I said.”

  “No!” Sean shouted.

  “But I’m hungry,” said Brian, roughly squeezing Sean’s cheeks with one hand while he rummaged in the pockets of his jeans with the other. Sean’s bucking and writhing did no good: Brian had fifteen pounds on him, and the boy was pinned. “Where is it. Where is it.”

  “Help,” Sean squealed.

  “There it is,” Brian said, extracting the slip of paper from Sean’s pocket. Some bespectacled do-gooder had run to get help—he’d be next on Brian’s list, but that meant Brian only had fifteen seconds tops to do some serious damage. He’d never get away with actually redeeming the coupon; slapping the kid around wasn’t that much fun. What was called for here was something that’d cause nightmares, something that’d grant Sean an unforgettable reminder of his powerlessness. Yes.

  “I’m so hungry,” Brian said, and then he crumpled the coupon into a tiny ball, popped it into his mouth, and swallowed it.

  “Geez,” said an awed bystander.

  Still straddling Sean, Brian lifted his head and rolled his eyes back in his head in mock ecstasy. “Oh, it tastes just like the best ice cream I’ve ever had—aw crap!”

  S
ean had turned his head and buried his teeth into Brian’s hand, biting as hard as he could. If the world wanted him to act like an animal, fine. He’d forget the facts and the colors and be an animal.

  Brian leapt off of Sean and started crying, just as Mrs. Baldridge showed up, on cue. “That kid bit me,” he said, displaying the dotted line of red that ran in an arc along his palm. “See? He bit me! He’s crazy! I bet he’s got rabies! He’s crazy!”

  “My word. My word! It’s okay,” Mrs. Baldridge said, taking Brian’s tender hand in hers and looking at it closely, as if she was looking for signs of viral infection that could be seen with the naked eye. “It’s okay. We’ll take you to the nurse’s office; we’ll get that bandaged up.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Davis who taught fourth grade had hoisted Sean up and, rather unnecessarily, locked him in a half nelson. “I’m going to put you in jail!” Sean screamed, his legs kicking fruitlessly in the air, his eyes squeezed shut. “I’m going to put all of you in jail!”

  Rebecca and Sean ended up getting stuck in Route 1’s notorious traffic on the way back, the car speeding up as it came within six inches of the bumper in front of it and then suddenly decelerating, then speeding up again, merging into the next lane with less than a foot to spare. The damn thing drove like a daredevil: it was beautiful.

  In the passenger seat, Sean was curled up in silence. Rebecca had brought up what used to be one of his favorite cartoons and projected it on the windshield, an episode from a long-running series about two armies of giant robots that were forever at war, good fighting with evil over the possession of one glowing MacGuffin or another. But the boy wasn’t paying attention.

  The nerve of that woman. “In addition to talking to several of the students who saw this regrettable contretemps—and who were quite troubled by witnessing such violence, I should add—I spoke to Sean’s teacher, just to get a different perspective on the situation,” Mrs. Baldridge had said. “And after collating our notes I want to present you with some constructive feedback on your son’s behavioral issues.” Then she’d handed Rebecca a pamphlet entitled “The Cycle of Violence: Warning Signs.” It featured a table divided into three columns: yellow (caution), orange (beware), and red (danger!). “As you can see here,” Mrs. Baldridge had said, “today Sean exhibited two of the behaviors in the yellow column—rebellion against authority, and verbal threats—and one in the orange column, physical violence requiring minor medical attention. The orange column, Mrs. Steiner! We don’t see ten orange-column incidents in a year in this school. This is a well-behaved school, Mrs. Steiner. This is a peaceful school. You should take that pamphlet home and share it with your family: it’s something you really need to think about before things get worse.” The red column was full of things like “brings a gun to school” and “pleasures oneself in public”: real psycho stuff. Whereas to Rebecca, half of the behaviors in the yellow column seemed less like signs of potential violence than excess common sense.

  “Thank you for telling me the whole story, Sean,” Rebecca said, looking through transparent images of robot warfare at the highway ahead of them.

  Sean turned to face her, his eyes bloodshot. “I tried to tell her the story too! I tried to tell her but when I started telling her she said be quiet.”

  “I’m really sorry this happened today, Sean.”

  “I’m sorry, too!” Sean said.

  One of the lights on the dashboard in front of Rebecca changed color from green to yellow and began to blink.

  “Life is unfair,” Rebecca said. “Mostly, that’s the fault of the people whose job is to make it fair for you. I wish you could have waited a little while longer to learn that, but here we are. Don’t tell Mrs. Baldridge I told you that.”

  “I won’t,” Sean said.

  “You didn’t want that ice cream anyway,” Rebecca said. “The ice cream in school cafeterias tastes terrible. Do you know what it’s made out of?”

  “No, what?”

  “Packing material! It’s made out of little Styrofoam peanuts, and wood shavings. And also: mealworms. They grind all that stuff up in a blender and freeze it, and it looks just like ice cream, but it isn’t.”

  “No way!”

  “Way! You may not have realized it at the time, but you avoided a terrible fate today, Sean.”

  It felt good to hear him laugh.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Rebecca said. “I’m really proud of you, because you were smart and you stood up for yourself”—this was probably bad parenting, but the thought of that other kid sitting in class with a halo floating over his head made her think Fuck it—“and I’m going to get you an ice cream sandwich, right now. Not a cafeteria one, but a real one, with ice cream made from milk and sugar instead of chemicals and bugs. Would you like that?”

  “That’d be cool,” Sean said.

  “Alert,” the dashboard announced in a brusquely masculine voice, and Rebecca turned to look at the road.

  Later, Rebecca would only remember what happened as a series of snapshots or fragments of sounds, as if her memory of the event had chosen to tear itself to shreds out of tender mercy.

  First:

  Projected on the windshield, a humanoid robot that was half the size of a skyscraper stared at Rebecca with red pinpoint eyes that glimmered beneath the darkness of a metal cowl.

  Through the image of the robot she could see a car. It was a cute little forest-green convertible with its top down, and instead of having all four of its wheels on the ground it was somehow standing on its front bumper, its rear pointed in the air. Its driver was a woman dressed in business attire—simple white blouse and binding pencil skirt—whose head was obscured by a cloud of wayward strawberry-blond hair.

  Then:

  “Alert,” the car said calmly. “Trouble ahead.”

  Then:

  The woman’s body somehow freed itself from the seatbelt of the convertible and began to fly over the lanes of the highway, arms windmilling, legs asprawl, a single black high-heeled shoe chasing behind. From somewhere ahead there was a wrong kind of light: something was on fire.

  Then:

  “This is an emergency,” the car said. “I will pull off of the road as soon as is safely possible.” On the windshield, the cartoon suddenly disappeared.

  Then:

  “Uh-oh,” said Sean.

  “If you wish to assume control of your vehicle, please touch the steering wheel with both hands,” the car said.

  Then:

  I ought to do something, Rebecca thought, looking at her son. I have to do something. She wanted to wrap her arms around Sean and take flight; she wanted to rewind time. But her head felt full of sludge, and her nerves were screaming, and her arms, as they lifted themselves toward the wheel, were made of lead.

  “Don’t,” Sean said, looking at his mother.

  Then:

  Behind her—was it behind her?—she heard the muted bang of one car colliding with another as, in front of her, the falling woman collided with the roof of an SUV two lanes over, one of her legs bending unnaturally. The cars ahead of her began to drift, pointing in unorthodox directions.

  Then:

  “You are now assuming control of your vehicle,” the car said.

  Then:

  Rebecca felt a blast of heat against the side of her face from somewhere. Acting purely on instinct now, she whipped the wheel to her right, turning it hand over hand. (And when the time came to mete out blame in her mind, she would think: Left. If she was going to take the wheel in the first place, she should have steered left.)

  Then:

  “Alert,” the car said, its voice still placid.

  Then:

  Noises. Horns and screams and curses.

  Then:

  Rebecca’s neck jolted with a sharp snap as another car rammed into hers from the other side, from the passenger side, oh no, oh God. As she felt her own vehicle lift from the road she looked over at Sean and oh no, oh God.

  Then:

  “Catas
trophic collision,” the car said, raising its voice slightly. “Safety foam is coming: close your eyes and mouth. Breathe normally.”

  Then:

  She shut her eyes as the car’s interior suddenly filled with sticky, creamy lather, muting the sounds from outside. Her face somehow felt both numb and stinging: later, she would find that it had sustained first-degree burns from the safety foam’s impact. But she was secure, swaddled in the quickly solidified glop as her center of gravity bounced in her gut: she could feel the foam between each of her fingers, and down her shirt, and in her ears.

  Then:

  Another jolt, surprisingly slight, as her overturned car struck the asphalt and skidded until it came to a stop.

  Then:

  Nothing is as it should be; everything is upside down. That is what Rebecca Wright thought. She hung there in darkness, her seatbelt chafing her shoulder and pinching her breast, her field of view entirely filled by the dimly lit yellow foam that was just in front of her eyes, pressing against her face, reducing each of her breaths to a rasp.

  Then:

  “Sean?” she shouted. “I want you to yell as loud as you can. Tell me you’re okay.”

  No answer.

  Oh God. Oh no.

  Then:

  Grating, scraping sounds as the Jaws of Life tore the door on her side open, and hands began to claw away chunks of the foam. More sound; more light.

  Then:

  Hands removed her from the totaled car: it felt like a dozen of them, all over her, clutching and pulling.

  Then:

  The blanket draped around her, more valuable for its signal of anonymous care than for its warmth. Someone handed her black coffee in a Styrofoam cup and disappeared. In a daze she plucked bits of foam from her ears and the sounds of the world returned, the noises of machines and human wails.