Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90

by Seth Dickinson

  How come you haven’t had enough to eat, Chris? she wanted to ask him sadly, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “Kelly,” he whispered. “What happened? I thought you made it to Centauri station with Mom and Dad. I thought I was the only one that got caught before the ship even took off. Did you get captured by those aliens? What did they do to you?”

  She shook her head. Tried to put her hand to her mouth, to tell him that she couldn’t speak, but her hands trembled and there was blood under her fingernails.

  “Never mind. You can tell Unity. There’s a port in the cab of the flier. You know?”

  Kelly shook her head again.

  “Kelly, it’s so good. We don’t have to talk to Unity now, we can just think things and Unity understands. And if we want to see something, or learn something, Unity puts it straight in our heads for us. For a price. I’ve got a bit of money saved from salvage work. I’ll buy you everything that’s happened in the last ten years. Then you’ll understand. Then you’ll see that you don’t have to be scared. Things are better now.”

  This time, he slung her over his shoulder before he resumed his unsteady stumble towards a helicopter-looking thing with stubby wings and four rotors. The place where it had landed wasn’t burned. Green grass and yellow buttercups were crushed beneath its skids.

  Kelly wanted to touch them, badly. But Chris was putting her in a seat and lowering a blue goldfish-bowl over her head.

  “Just relax,” he said. “Everything will go white for a second. Then you’ll go into transfer mode. It’ll seem like days or weeks go by, but it’ll only be a few seconds. I’ll port up, too, from the pilot’s seat.”

  She didn’t want everything to go white. She didn’t want time to speed up or slow down. Kelly’s nails scrabbled frantically, at the goldfish-bowl this time, but she couldn’t get it off.

  Then she was back on the white planet.

  ERROR, said the Unity console, beside her in the crashed ship. Snowflakes fell through the mesh onto her face.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  The release of an off-world animal back into its habitat must always be in the interests of the animal and the world. The animal must have re-attained its former faculty to compete, survive and reproduce.

  Kelly paced while the Unity Therapist looked on, hands clasped patiently.

  “Why do we have to go in and out? It’s the whiteness I can’t stand, the plugging in or unplugging. Why can’t I live fully in the flesh world or fully in Unity’s virtual world?”

  The wallpaper was bright yellow and green. Bright colors reassured her.

  “We carry out the motions of life in the flesh world,” the Unity Therapist said. It did not get bored with repeating the same things to her. Kelly could pick up the chair she was supposed to be sitting in and smash it over the thing’s head, and all it would do was ask her how she felt. “We work in the virtual world. Everybody must work, if they want their flesh body maintained.”

  “My brother doesn’t work in the virtual world. I want a job like his job.”

  “Jamie works off-grid. There are no jobs for women out there. It is too dangerous. Too physically demanding.”

  “I used to dance,” Kelly said petulantly.

  The Unity Therapist spread its hands silently; eloquently. The office was gone, replaced by a gleaming ebony floor, high ceilings painted cherry red, mirrors and a virtual woman in a black leotard that smiled at Kelly with a tenderness her mother had rarely shown.

  “So dance. You can begin where you left off, as a six-year-old child, or you can own the great grace and skill of your grandmother at the height of her career.”

  Kelly’s grandmother was dead. Her surviving family had refused permission for an assemblage—an approximation of the dead person based on digital records—to be generated. Kelly’s mother was officially a Missing Person. Miscreants who had fled the Unity could not legally be recreated as assemblages.

  “It’s not real grace and skill,” Kelly said, wringing her hands. “None of this is real. You’re not real. My own body doesn’t even feel real to me. I want to see Jamie.”

  She had to brace herself for the disconnect. Every time she broke away from Unity, she thought she’d woken from a dream and was back on the white planet. Every time, she cried, curled up in her port chair, for a full five minutes, until the darkness of her maintenance cell soothed her.

  The cells were underground. They were ventilated. Water and food were delivered via a chute. A narrow bed and a port chair were the only furniture. The shower cubicle had a pull-out toilet seat built into its wall. Nothing encouraged excursions into the flesh world.

  Law enforcement could not promise to protect anyone who left the safety of their assigned cell.

  Kelly didn’t care. She’d never seen another human soul in this part of the complex. The corridors were narrow and dimly lit. She had painted the walls for three hundred meters between her cell and her brother’s, and nobody had stopped her. Possibly nobody had even noticed the twirling pink ribbons, rainbows or splotched poppies running in garish acrylic over their doors.

  She put her hand on the wall as she walked. It was rough. It was real. She had the keys to Jamie’s cell. All she had to do was push the door-needle into her shoulder to confirm her identity by blood analysis, and the door, emblazoned with a bright purple flier, slid open.

  Jamie’s daughter, Minnie, was in her chair, her eyes closed, lost in Unity. Kelly didn’t try to wake her. She walked over to her and stroked her hair, as Jamie had stroked her hair when he’d first found her.

  Minnie was six, the same age that Kelly had been when she was separated from her family. Jamie had gotten his older girlfriend pregnant while he was still a teenager, while it was still legal to have flesh babies.

  The girlfriend had not wanted to care for a newborn in the flesh world. Jamie, who was accustomed to the horrors of piss and shit, vomit and mess that could not be cleared away with a thought, had agreed to take Minnie to live with him.

  “I could teach you to dance,” Kelly said, knowing that Minnie couldn’t hear her. “We could dance, out here in the real world.”

  But Minnie’s limbs were thin. Jamie bought her enough quality calories for her to grow optimally and he made her do the mandatory exercises, but there was no joy of movement evident in the girl. She would stay in Unity, always, if she could.

  Jamie arrived home from work smelling of crushed clover and machine oil. He held up his hand, forestalling her, as her mouth opened. He always wanted to have a shower, first. The walls of the cubicle were transparent, but he was careless about what she or Minnie saw.

  When he was clean, and his filthy orange suit had been squashed into the laundry chute, he sat down, cross-legged, on the concrete floor, since she was in his port-chair, looked up at her and nodded for her to go on.

  “I don’t ever want to go into Unity again.”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “There’s no point in being there. Nobody that I talk to, there, wants to meet in real life. They think it’s disgusting. I’m so lonely. I wish I had a daughter like Minnie.”

  Jamie shrugged.

  “Those Body-Only people, that’s what they say, too, but it’s not all they make it out to be. Since she turned five and ported in, she hasn’t asked me a single question. She doesn’t want to know what I think about anything. Her friends show her how to hack the learning programs so she can get information she shouldn’t have, yet. She’s not like a kid. She’s a miniature big person.”

  “People have kids and don’t let them port, ever,” Kelly said in a rush. “People have kids off-grid.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow.

  “Women get raped off-grid, is what you mean. I’ve seen skeletons of off-grid mothers with the skeletons of their unborn babies mixed in, like. You want to end up like that? You would have, if I hadn’t been the one to find you. Why do you think Mom and Dad went to the station instead of the wild?”

 
; “That’s if they ever made it there,” Kelly whispered, the blood draining from her face. “If they did, do you think they had more children, when we never arrived?”

  “I dunno.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Look, Kelly, I’m sorry I’m not in Unity often enough for us to hang out. I’m sorry Minnie doesn’t drag her sorry miniature self out of that chair any more than she absolutely has to. If you want a daughter, you should have a virtual one, you know?”

  She shook her head immediately, but he held up his hand again.

  “I don’t mean a virtual kid, a copy of someone. I mean like what the Scandinavians do. Unity mixes your genome with the father’s genome, and you get the randomized result, same as if sperm was mixing with eggs. You don’t get to argue and you don’t get to change anything. You just raise what you get.”

  “But it’s not real, Jamie.”

  “Of course it’s real. It’s a real artificial intelligence that never existed before. Unity models the interaction between genes and environment. It’s exactly the same as if you had a kid in the flesh world, except it doesn’t need air, or water, or food, or any of those things that we’re so short of.”

  Kelly looked at his starved, hollow face. She thought of how fat she had been on her return from the white world. The aliens had not been short of resources.

  “Who would the father be?”

  He looked embarrassed. “Me, I guess.”

  She recoiled. “You?”

  “It’s not taboo any more, brothers and sisters. How could it be? No real children are being born. No real children are getting inbred. What does a Unity kid care about being infertile or getting cancer? You can patch that shit. At least, you could, if you ever went to work.”

  Wildlife may be damaged in ways we cannot detect. The xenobiologist may screen for pathogens and other physical defects, but accurate assessment of human mental capacity is currently unavailable.

  –Did you assimilate this morning?

  –Jid, it’s not my fault.

  –Did you?

  –How was I supposed to know they would send a colony ship?

  –They interrogated our module with that crude AI of theirs. Instead of staying away from us, instead of improving their shuttles and avoiding our planet, they are coming to live here. Feed a human and it loses its fear. Then it becomes aggressive. You know this.

  –I suppose there’s only one thing I can do to make amends. I’ll go personally to the human planet and remove knowledge of us from that crude AI of theirs, after the module with the girl in it lands on the planet but before the colony ship is launched.

  –How can you do that, Sil? You have nothing.

  –Exactly. So why stay here? I could send you back reports. Observe them in the wild. You could buy me another module. You’re old and you don’t even want offspring. If that colony ship gets here, the others will find out exactly what we did.

  –Maybe it’s time to confess.

  –Please, Jid. Let me go. I can fix this.

  Decisions to rescue and treat humans in an emergency setting must be based on sound biodiversity and system health principles yet take into account animal welfare and the emotions of local onlookers.

  Kelly stared hollowly at the child she had thought she wanted, through the mirror that was actually one-way glass, in the ballet school that Unity had virtually built for her.

  As the other children had departed, hand in virtual hand with their parents, none of those parents had called their costumed children beautiful or their mastery well-earned.

  Beauty was cheap, here. Anybody could be beautiful. Anyone could buy mastery.

  Thank you, the parents had said instead. My child had fun.

  Fun. They did not bother to judge her choreography on its originality. The forms of the dancers were irrelevant to onlookers who had not paid for the right information downloads to appreciate the art form, who had other sights to see more individually tailored to their tastes. The new dances she had created were fun, or they were not fun. If a child could not perform the dances, they waited for their free upgrade and made something that once only looked effortless, truly effortless.

  Hey beautiful, the handsome man in the office at the spaceport had said.

  The great grace, the Unity Therapist had said reverently, and skill of your grandmother at the height of her career.

  Now you’re empty, her mother had said. Now you can breathe in again.

  The second man had whistled. That’s no animal. That’s the most perfect woman I’ve ever seen.

  Kelly was beautiful, for real. Nobody knew that, here. She couldn’t stay. She had to go somewhere where the things that she had, her beauty and her ability to endure the unendurable—two lonely, pitiful things of value—were readily observable. She had to go where her grande allegros would shake the core of a solid structure, where her pirouettes would shift the station, ever so slightly, in space. She had to go where she could be broken, in order to prove that they could not break her.

  Take those shoes off at once, Mama had ordered, her nostrils flaring, or I’ll whip your backside.

  She had been whipped, but she had worn the shoes anyway, and hidden her bruises under her pale pink tights.

  Kelly Junior ran up to the glass. He breathed on it, a great hot huff that made it fog up, right before drawing a love-heart shape in it.

  “Hi, Mum!” he shouted. He was six years old. “I know you’re watching me. I’m having so much fun!”

  That fact was never in dispute. He had never been hungry, except when he’d been hungry for her embrace; he had never been tired or bored. It would have been impossible for Kelly to whip him, when he could so easily mute pain. His fat little hands felt their way along the barre with silent awe, knowing that it was a replica in Unity of the one Kelly’s grandmother had left to her descendants. But no matter how often he touched it; banged it; swung from it, howling, pretending to be a monkey, it could not change.

  Kelly traced her full cheeks, her padded arms and thighs. In the maintenance cell, in the flesh world, she was as thin, now, as Minnie had ever been. She had hoarded enough food to pay bribes to the next generation of men who waited in offices at understaffed spaceports.

  She would take the next ship to Centauri station. She would leave her happy child behind. Jamie wouldn’t need to take care of him. The Unity would do that. And if he was unhappy, if he missed her, what of it? He looked beautiful, he looked like hers and Jamie’s child, but he wasn’t.

  He could never understand her, or the ghosts of women who stood behind her.

  Human mass-strandings are rare, but they do occur. When human colony ship (see ref p. 107) of unknown manufacture (mass measured at 0.93 x 10^9 moles of iron) crashed during the Great Seasonal Solidification at Center-Facing, several hundred animals might have frozen before they were found, if not for the fortuitous coincidence of Professor E. Jid (see ref p.55) being present in the field taking star-images with assistant X. Sil.

  Professor and assistant, between them, were able to place all surviving animals in zoological parks. The ship’s computer was never found and the circumstances that led to this stranding remain a puzzle to eminent xenobiologists in the field today.

  About the Author

  Thoraiya Dyer is a three-time Aurealis Award-winning, three-time Ditmar Award-winning Australian writer based in the Hunter Valley, NSW. Her short fiction has appeared in Apex, Nature, Cosmos and Analog. It is forthcoming in anthologies Long Hidden and War Stories. Her award-shortlisted collection of four original stories, Asymmetry, is available from Twelfth Planet Press.

  Suteta Mono de wa Nai

  捨てたものではない

  (Not Easily Thrown Away)

  Juliette Wade

  ‘Cram-school psycho’ was just a bully’s insult until I started hearing the voices.

  One of them sounds like a whistle, and the other like a rusty trumpet, and when I sit at my desk at midnight, slowly hitting my head against my schoolbooks, they discuss
my future.

  “She’ll probably pass the exams on her own.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “She might. She studies hard.”

  “But she doesn’t sleep enough. Look how she’s fallen apart since her father’s work reassignment.”

  “Her grandmother isn’t taking good care of her. She needs someone to take care of her.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She’d lose her spirit.”

  “She would not.”

  I’d scream at them to shut up, but I wouldn’t want to wake Obaa-chan. Instead, when the pressure in my head wants to break me, and I hear the metallic ticking and the rustling get closer, I slip my feet into my zori sandals on the back step and hop out into the narrow space behind our apartment. Beyond the wall with its leafless ivy, the late train rushes by with a shudder and a shriek and I can scream as loud as I like and nobody will hear.

  I won’t pass the exams.

  I have to pass the exams.

  “She’s mine,” says rusty trumpet. And whistle argues, “No, she’s mine.”

  Sometimes I just want to leave the world.

  Obaa-chan made me name tags so I could sew them into my high school uniform: Kitano Naoko. I didn’t want to throw away the extras, so I stitched them into my Gothic-girl cosplay. One in the spiderweb stockings, another in the white crinoline, another for the black minidress with the lace-up bodice. Small links back to the ordinary me.

  My costume’s still missing something.

  In the bathroom of Harajuku station, I stand at the mirror beside a college girl in platform shoes. Her hair is dyed cherry-red, and she paints her lips into a big pink kiss. I can’t afford platform shoes, and if I dyed my hair they wouldn’t let me back in school. I draw black tears down my cheeks, and walk out into the icy January rain.

  I’m the only one standing on the bridge. My other world is empty: no crowd of cosplayers to talk to, no music to lose myself in. Even Cherry Girl crosses and heads down Takeshita street, probably to meet friends.