Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

  Coryn had chosen to leave home nearly naked; no AR and no wearables except her wristlet.

  She stared at the lights for so long her eyes watered.

  The city didn’t care what she thought or if she wanted to leave it. Or even if she stayed. It demanded to be full, but it didn’t care who it was full of. It kept on shining and moving and being. It was easy to think of it as a living thing from here, as if it breathed.

  She was small. It would not miss her.

  “Goodbye,” she whispered, before turning her back on the lights and continuing up the thin, winding road.

  The sun painted their shadows tall and terribly thin on the road before them, so similar at these odd angles she and Paula might have been twins instead of flesh and not. Only their heights showed as different. The six inches between them became a foot or more, as if Coryn would have to tilt her head all the way back to look up into Paula’s yellow-green eyes.

  It grew completely dark before Coryn stopped again at the top of the ridge, her breath searing her chest and her legs soft and tingly. Why did she feel this way? Didn’t she run marathons? The road had wound up and up and up for the last hour, not particularly steep but unrelenting. She stood still and panted for a moment, and then turned to Paula. “This isn’t even hard for you, is it?”

  “It takes more energy to walk uphill.”

  Just like a fucking robot. “I hate you.”

  Paula’s voice was silk and laughter, almost as nuanced as a human’s. “Of course you do.”

  “Why did we teach robots to have a sense of irony?”

  Paula answered with no irony in her voice at all. “You decided it makes us better companions.”

  “I didn’t decide.” Still, Coryn laughed. After all, it was true. She smiled at Paula to take any sting from her words.

  Trees crowded the road. The soft city wind made the branches rustle and golden-hued streetlights began to shine, leaving pools of light that illuminated the dusky color. The straps of her pack cut into her shoulders as she leaned into the job, working too hard to talk.

  They’d spent the better part of the day walking down before toiling up Cherry Valley from Redmond Ridge. They reached the top of the Duvall Ridge. Coryn turned for another glance at the silhouettes of buildings and the gauzy skyways of bridges and transport structures that rose above and beyond Redmond Ridge. The landscape was wilder here than she’d even seen, but still gardened. The trees around her had wild, uneven shapes rather than the neater street and park trees near the city center. A sign hung on gnarled trunk. STAY OUT. REHAB AREA. NO HUMANS. Coryn walked up to it and peered past it into a meadow full of spindly seedlings growing up around blackened stumps. A fire had been through here. In school, she’d learned there had been years of fire. The forests of Washington state had simply burned, one after another. The infernos had been a sort of exclamation point on the great taking, making the land the feds had chased people off useless anyway, at least in the short term. The trees were coming back, but slowly and with a lot of help.

  It felt like life struggling through death. Maybe she could do that, too. Find life out here. They weren’t Outside yet, but she felt how close to the edge of the city they were, how close she was to beginning the biggest adventure of her life.

  They stood above the city of Duvall, or really, neighborhood. It was all Seacouver, after all. Even though it had grown dark, the lights of buildings outlined the waves of civilization that spread below them. First, Duvall’s multistory farms and simple housing for farmers and wine stewards. Behind the indoor farms, a few flat river-flood fields. Then the wide Snoqualmie River, full of aquaculture farms. Most of the rest was invisible, but she could see it in her imagination: the busy Bellevue downtown that started just over the ridge and rose high up and fancy for miles, ending on the low hills just above Lake Washington. Beyond the negative space of the lake, the tallest of the buildings in Seattle proper sprouted beneath the Bridge of Stars.

  Tonight she would sleep just inside the dome, and tomorrow she would leave the city. She swallowed, suddenly cold.

  Paula looped an arm across Coryn’s shoulders. “Are you worried?”

  There was no pretending with personal robots. Paula had known her for most of her life. She knew how Coryn smelled when she was afraid, and when she was nervous, and when she was just fine.

  “A little.” She shook Paula’s hand from her shoulder. “How far is the camp?”

  “A mile.”

  “We should hurry.”

  Paula kept them going straight ahead, and then turned right and right again. She kept her head up and her back stiff, showing the robotic version of disapproval of the whole concept. In this moment, she existed to keep Coryn safe, and this wasn’t safe, so she disapproved. But when Coryn turned eighteen, Paula lost her ability to dictate anything. Although she couldn’t disobey, she had been coded to influence the behavior of humans, and she was quite capable of using a combination of posture and robotic microexpressions to make sure Coryn remembered her advice.

  An automated entry-bot dressed in a City Parks uniform checked them off as they arrived, pointing them toward the path to their site. The small nonmotorized campsite had ten tent spaces. Nine of them were full; they were last in. People sat in small groups, talking and laughing. Many, like Coryn, sat side-by-side with their robots. A few other robots stood a little off the path, conferring among themselves.

  Paula found the trail to their site, which was right in the middle, on the side with the best view of the city. Coryn had saved up for this for a month, but now she wished she’d picked a more private site. She felt watched. But then, no one else was alone. Or almost alone.

  Paula spoke softly to her. “Will you help me set up the tent?”

  Paula needed no help at all, but she always knew what Coryn needed. Right now, that was to be kept busy.

  Their site consisted of a square raised platform with two benches that looked toward the city. A small cooking stove and a sink with running water lined the back. The site came with a huge canvas tent that dwarfed Coryn.

  Coryn fluffed out the sleeping bag she’d found in the free pile, rolled up a coat for a pillow, and then looked for more work, but there really wasn’t anything else to do. She sat, listening to the trees and the low talk around the other campsites and worrying about the next day. After a while she stood back up. “I’m hungry.”

  “So make food,” Paula suggested mildly.

  Coryn chose chicken soup from Paula’s pack and added hot water to constitute it. While she ate, she sat beside the tent watching the night-dark city. Dull yellow lights glowed inside of windows, a multitude of similar shades. Here and there bluer lights or bright white shone. People would be heading to parties and nightclubs and fancy dinners and plays, or settling in to watch their favorite shows. At the orphanage, most of the younger children she’d spent these last five years with would be laying out games or starting homework or trying to sneak out past the house-bot.

  Most of them wouldn’t even notice she was gone.

  A young man and two girls walked by. One of the two girls looked up at her. “Want to come with us? We’re having a fire in the big fire pit.” She was dark skinned and dark-haired, with Asian eyes; a real beauty.

  It surprised her to be included in anything, especially by strangers. “Sure. I’ll be right along.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  She rinsed her dinner bowl and dropped it in the recycler. “Coming?” she asked Paula.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “You can choose.”

  Paula hesitated, but then said, “I’ll be along in a minute. There’s some research I want to do.”

  “How robotic of you.”

  Paula gave her a soft smile and made a shooing motion.

  The dark-haired girl who’d invited her held her hand out. “I’m Ryu.”

  Coryn took it. “Coryn.”

  Her tall, thin companion said, “I’m Luci,” and pointed to the stocky, smiling
man with them. “And this is Lawrence.”

  Lawrence’s wide smile filled his face, brightening the evening. “Pleased to meet you.”

  He made it sound a lot less formal than most people would. Returning his smile was easy, too. “Likewise,” she said.

  An older couple’s robot had already started the communal fire pit, which used real wooden logs. Flames flicked and licked and twisted up at the sky, and the wood popped and shivered as it surrendered to the heat.

  Coryn stared at it, entranced. She’d never seen a real fire so big.

  Ryu sat beside her on a stone bench. “Where are you from?” she asked.

  Coryn gestured toward the southwest. “In the middle there. From Kent. It’s between Seattle and Tacoma. Kind of the middle of everything, but not in any of the big downtowns.”

  “What’s it like there?”

  Coryn shrugged. “It’s not the best of Seattle. We have tent camps and temp housing and boarding schools and a lot of farming.”

  “What’s your favorite park?” Luci asked.

  It was an odd question, but an easy one. “I like the parks in Seattle the best. I think I like Volunteer Park the most. It has trees with trunks that are almost bent in circles.”

  Lawrence reached for a log and tossed it on the fire, sending sparks into the sky. “Me too. About Seattle and Volunteer Park. Although I like Discovery Park, too, because of the lighthouse.”

  “I haven’t been there yet,” Coryn replied. “But I’ve seen vids. It looks beautiful. I’m glad they saved it.”

  “They might have to move it again,” he said.

  “Will they have to build up the seawall, too?” she asked.

  “Probably.” He said it with a little sadness, as if the walls would close them in. They would of course. But she was leaving. Another thing not to miss.

  Ryu frowned. “Are you eighteen yet?”

  Coryn bristled at the tone in Ryu’s voice. “Yesterday. How about you?”

  “Almost twenty-three. We graduated from Western last week and we start as park designers for Seattle in the fall, so we’ve seen all the Seattle parks. We studied them. We’re doing an inner transit, writing an entrance paper on how the rest of the city manages public spaces.” Firelight flickered in Ryu’s eyes. “Are you doing a transit, too?”

  Coryn hesitated, staring at the flames, but then decided not to lie. “I’m going Outside.”

  Ryu’s eyes widened. “Just you and your bot? Who are you working for?”

  “No one.” Coryn wished she hadn’t spoken up.

  “You’re going feral?”

  Coryn had heard the word, but it still startled her. “I don’t think of it that way.”

  Ryu turned toward her, one side of her face lit by the fire and the other in shadow. “What would you call it?”

  “I’m looking for someone.” Coryn tried for a change of subject. “What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen on your transit?”

  For a moment she thought Ryu wasn’t going to let go, but she turned back to the fire and whispered. “Deer. We saw three deer this morning, a doe and two tiny fawns.” She hesitated, rolling her eyes up in her head for a moment as if deep in thought. “I want to see more animals. Mostly, I want to see a whale. A whole pod of whales. They’re back now, you know. There’s two families of whales.”

  Coryn nodded in pleased agreement. “I saw one not long ago. From the top of a bridge.”

  “I’d love to see one.”

  Coryn smiled. “Try a bridge. I heard that L pod had another baby yesterday.” Strange to realize she’d said this same thing the last day she had parents, when she’d stood beside Paula on the high bridge. There had been five babies since then.

  Ryu stood and brushed bark from her pant legs. “Mostly we’ve seen farms and forests.”

  “You’ve gone a long way for three days,” Coryn observed.

  “We’ve got bicycles.”

  “I ride bikes,” Coryn said. “But aren’t there a lot of hills on a full transit?”

  Ryu laughed. “We spent a year planning our route.”

  A spike of jealousy skewered Coryn, and she shut it down with a clenched breath. “I’d like to see deer.”

  “Look when you wake up. They come out early in the morning and just before dusk.”

  The same robot who had built the fire threw three more logs on. Sparks flew into the dark sky.

  Ryu called her friends over. “Coryn’s going Outside.”

  Lawrence’s eyes widened. “This way? It’s a trucking gate.”

  Luci brushed her blond hair away from her eyebrows. “Do they let people leave just because they want to? I thought they only let a few out a year.”

  “I think you need to talk to someone,” Lawrence repeated, his voice and face full of concern. “You just do.”

  Like who? But she didn’t say that. She regretted telling Ryu in the first place. “I did my research. They won’t stop me from going.”

  Ryu twisted her fingers together, looking seriously worried. “What if they don’t let you come back?”

  Coryn shrugged, doing her best to look like she didn’t care. It didn’t matter. She had to find Lou and she had to leave and she’d made up her mind and that was, well, that. She stood up, stretching, relieved when the conversation moved on.

  A few people had brought drums. Coryn want to their campsite and brought back both Paula and a small wooden flute she’d had for about a year, and for a while they sat with a good-sized crowd and played music together. One of the men from a group of mountain bikers brought an outside speaker that created a bright, moving light show in reds and golds that changed with the music. It shone so brightly it seemed just like they were in the city instead of out of it, the light and sound beating at Coryn’s eardrums.

  When she’d had enough, Coryn excused herself, and she and Paula went back to the tent and sat alone together. Paula pointed out the Big Dipper, which Coryn had already spotted, and then went on to name more stars. The party noise and the bonfire grew larger and louder behind them. Paula turned and pointed toward the smoke. “See how it curls way up there? You can see it when the light from that speaker shines . . . it flattens out as the dome bends. The dome will eventually expel it.”

  Coryn squinted at the sky above the flames and the noisy throng of people. She had to watch the obnoxious light cross the sky three times before she spotted the effect, like a cloud of smoke. “Is that the edge of the weather dome?”

  “It must be.”

  Of course the top of the dome would be closer to them here on the edges. In the city, clouds could be in the dome. She leaned back and stared up at the sky, wondering what a foggy morning would look like. Tonight was clear, but the dome fuzzed out stars and space stations alike, so they were all points of pale and diffuse light.

  “I’m coming, Lou,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coryn jerked awake, and her eyes flew open. She rolled over and peered outside. Fuzzy stars still decorated the night sky.

  Paula spoke from the bench just outside of the tent door. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We can still turn around.”

  A brief, sharp anger made her snap, “Don’t you think I know that?” She turned on her wrist light and stalked to the communal bathrooms, filled her water flask, sucked it dry, refilled it, drank again, and filled it again. She took three deep breaths, struggling with unexpected anger and fear. When she came back, she said, “I’m sorry, silly robot. It will be okay.”

  Paula shook her head slowly. “I hope so.”

  Daylight refused to touch the Olympic Mountains.

  She’d been counting down to this moment for months. She’d seen herself crossing with the dawn, stepping into a new world and finally being free of all the things she’d once loved so much.

  She waited, breathed, and waited. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Let’s take the tent down,” she said.

  In five minutes they w
ere ready.

  “Is it about fifteen minutes to the border?”

  “Maybe twenty.”

  The edge of the sky glowed gray. She watched until she saw a star fade. “Okay, now.”

  Paula shouldered her pack, heavier by a factor of five than Coryn’s. Coryn pulled hers on and settled the weight across her shoulders before following Paula out of the campground. As they left, Ryu opened a tent flap and whispered, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Coryn responded. “You too.”

  She’d chosen this exit on purpose; it was still partly unchanged, maybe the last simple border. Roads on this side of the dome connected to roads on the other side. The rewilding preserves didn’t run right up to the city’s edge here. Small communities hung on, spreading away from the safety and surveillance of Seacouver.

  She had stared at this spot through city cameras so often that it felt familiar, so familiar she had a sense of déjà vu as she approached the border between city and not, between Inside and the wild whatever of the Outside, between a place with no family and a place with one family member.

  The small hut that marked the border glowed with cheery light as she approached. A uniformed guard sat inside, drinking coffee.

  She walked right up and knocked on the window. The occupant startled, looking at her with surprised dark eyes. He might be all of twenty years old; not at all what she expected.

  She smiled as widely as she could, in spite of the blood hammering through her veins so loudly she wondered if he could hear it. “Good morning.”

  His face settled into no expression. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “I’m heading Outside. I won’t be any trouble.”

  He glanced at a small handheld screen. “Coryn Williams. What brings you here?”

  She swallowed. “Family matters. I need to find my sister. She’s on RiversEnd Ranch. Working for the Lucken Foundation.”

  He stared at his screen and sipped his coffee. At least he didn’t seem to be able to hear how fast her heart beat. Certainly, his wasn’t beating as fast. He seemed to do everything in slow motion. “And your companion robot is all that you have with you. I see you have title to her.”