After much research, many hours of survivor interviews, and that inevitable lucky break, Franq found the link. Someone had given the families free tickets to each site. That all three children did not end up at the same tourist attraction is another matter of luck, although what kind of luck no one can say.
Would it have been better to lose more of the Louvre? Or the Eiffel Tower? Or Notre Dame?
Would it have been better to lose one monument instead of damage three? Would more lives have been saved? Lost? Would more people have noticed? Or would less?
I speak to all the parents in this part of the enclave. All of them survivors—some male, some female—of a once-intact family. All of them claiming to be nonpolitical, claiming they did not know—nor did their spouse—that their child was programmed to die.
I ask for proof. They give me similar documents. They give me bank accounts. But, tellingly—at least to me—the names of the hospitals vary, the names of the doctors vary.
“It is the nursing staff,” one man says to me.
“It is an out-patient procedure,” says another woman.
“Anyone could do it,” says a second man. “Even you.”
The rules of journalism have tightened in the past forty years. The scandals of fifty years ago, the tales of made-up sources, or badly researched material or political bias—true or not—nearly destroyed the profession.
When you were hired, you were reminded of those past scandals, told that any story with less than three verifiable sources (sources that have proof of their claims, sources that can be reinterviewed by the fact checker—no listening to vids, which can be manipulated, no scanning of notes), any story with less than three will not be run. Any such stories appearing in blogs or personal writings will be considered the same as a published or viewed newspiece.
Hire an editor for your own work, you’re told. You will be watched.
We’re all watched.
So you become an observer and a detective, a recorder of your facts and a disbeliever in someone else’s. You need to verify and if you cannot, you risk losing your job.
You risk damaging the profession.
You risk losing your calling—because you might believe.
Finally, they take me to the person I had hoped to see. They take me into the medical tent to see a six-year-old girl.
She has her own air-conditioned section. It has a hospital bed, a holo-vid player (nothing new; only old downloads), several comfortable chairs, and a table covered with playing cards. Someone is teaching her poker, the international game.
An aid worker accompanies me. He whispers, “No one outside the family visits her. We’re not supposed to say she’s here.”
Until now, she has existed primarily as a rumor.
You know, right, of the little girl? The one who lived?
Permanently blind, she is …
They pay her millions of Euros just to remain quiet …
She lives in a palace in Switzerland …
… in Baghdad …
… in Singapore …
She lives in a corner of a medical tent in a refugee camp. Her face is crisscrossed with scars and the shiny tissue of a dozen different plastic surgeries. She has only one arm. You don’t realize until you come close that half her torso is a kind of clear plastic, one designed for the medical interns to monitor the fake parts inside her, the miracles that keep her alive.
As I say hello, her eyes move toward me. She can see, then. She says hello in return, her accent upper-class British with a touch of India in it. She looks wary.
I don’t blame her.
No parent watches over her. Her mother committed suicide—the real kind, the kind that’s personal, and lonely, and takes no one else with it—when she heard the news. The blast killed her father.
She was an only child.
I sit next to her, on her right side so that I don’t have to see that clear torso, the workings of her rebuilt interior, that missing—and soon-to-be-replaced—arm.
She is being rebuilt as if she were a machine. Someone is paying for this, real money that keeps this medical tent, and hence the people in the camp, alive.
Someone who, no matter how hard I investigate, manages to remain anonymous.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask.
“Reporter lady,” she says, just like my driver, which makes me nervous. I will not stay here two days. I will leave tonight, maybe even on foot. There are too many connections, too many people who know what I’m doing. Not enough ways to make me safe.
“That’s right,” I say. “Reporter lady. Can I talk to you about your accident?”
She makes a face, but half of her skin does not move. “Not an accident,” she says. “I sploded.”
The words, said so flatly, as if it is a fact of life. And, if I think about it, it is. A fact of her life.
A fact of all the lives I’ve touched here today. Every single one of them knew someone who became a bomb.
“Do you know why you exploded?” I ask.
She nods, runs her remaining hand over her stomach. “Someone put something in me.”
So flat. Like a child discussing rape.
“Did your daddy know about this?” I ask. Her father took her to an open-air market that day almost one year ago.
She shakes her head. Those bright, inquisitive eyes have moved away from me. Despite the flat tone, she hates talking about this. Or maybe hates talking about her father, the man who decided she was going to be a weapon.
“What did he say when he took you to the market?” I ask.
“Mommy wasn’t feeling so good,” she says. “We had to get her some medicine and a flower.”
“Nothing else?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“Nothing about going to a better place?” I don’t know what euphemism to use. I don’t know enough about her or her past, being unable to research much of it. I don’t know if she was raised Christian or Muslim or Jewish, since that open-air market catered to all three. I don’t even know what nationality she is, something these camps like to keep as quiet as they can.
“No,” she says.
“He didn’t hug you extra hard? Tell you he loved you? Act strange in any way?”
“No,” she says.
“Did your mom?”
“No!”
“Did they ever tell you that you were special?” I ask.
She looks at me again. A frown creases her brow, creating a line between the scars. “Yes.”
My heart starts to pound. “What did they say?”
She shrugs.
“It’s all right to tell me,” I say.
She bites her lower lip. This is a question she clearly hasn’t been asked much. “Special,” she says, “because I’m the only one.”
“The only one what?” I ask.
“The only one they ever wanted.” Her voice shakes. “Everyone else, they have two, three, four.”
I blink for a moment, trying to find the context.
She sees my confusion. Color runs up her cheeks, and I wonder if I’ve made her angry.
That fear returns—that odd sensation. Afraid twice in one day, after years without it. Afraid, of a damaged six-year-old girl.
“My daddy said I was so perfect, they only wanted me. Only me.” Her voice rises, and she squeezes something in her hand.
The aid worker appears at the door. He looks sadly at me. I stand. My time is up.
As I walk out, he says, “She was an only child, in a culture that frowns on it. Her parents were trying to make her feel good about that.”
“Is that what you think?” I ask.
“You’re not the first she’s told that to,” he says. “Investigators, officials, everyone tries to find the two, three, and four others. You people never seem to remember that she’s a lonely little girl, in a lot of pain, who can’t understand why everyone thinks she’s evil.”
I look over my shoulder at her. Her lower lip trembles, but her eyes are dry.
I want to go back, ask her different questions, but the aid worker doesn’t let me.
I am done here. I had hoped I would find my proof. Instead, I found a child whose parents told her she was special—because she was an only child? Or because they had planted a time-release bomb-chip in her?
Or both?
9:15 UPLOAD: SUICIDE SQUADRON PART 5 BY MARTHA TRUMANTE
The Paris bombings were the first and last time more than one child detonated in the same city on the same day. Ever since, these explosions have occurred at all times of the day, at hundreds of locations across the globe, at thousands of targets—some large, like the Eiffel Tower, and some small, like a deceptively normal home in a tiny suburban neighborhood.
The small bombings lend credence to the rumors that have plagued this weapon from the beginning: that these children and their parents are innocent victims of fanatics who have wormed their way into the medical establishment, that the true bombers aren’t suicidal at all. Instead they are nurses, doctors, interns, who piggyback the detonator chip onto a relatively normal chipping procedure — giving a child an identity chip, for example, or the standard parental notification chip that must now be inserted into every newborn—a procedure that’s a law in more than 120 countries.
Hospitals insist that medical personnel are screened. Each chip brought into the building is scanned for foreign technology. Each chip has its own identification number so that it can be traced to its source.
None of the chips found at the thousands of bomb sites since the Paris bombings have had hospital identification. Yet the rumors persist.
Perhaps it is wishful thinking on the part of all involved. How much easier it is to blame a nameless, faceless person hidden in the impersonal medical system than a parent who knowingly pays someone to place a bomb inside a child—a bomb that will not go off in days or even weeks, but years later, after that parent spends time feeding, clothing, and raising that child.
Bonding with that child.
Treating her as if she’s normal.
Treating her as if she’s loved.
One of the soldiers gives you a ride back to the Green Zone. You lean your head against the back of his modern, hydrogen-powered, air-conditioned behemoth—too big to even call a truck—and close your eyes.
The little girl has shaken you. Some stories do that—some interviews do that—and the key is to hold onto your professionalism, to remember what you can prove.
But in that space between wakefulness and sleep, you find yourself thinking that you live your life in three distinct ways: You have your everyday experiences, which are so different from most people’s. How many people travel from war zone to war zone, from danger spot to danger spot, running toward the crisis instead of away from it? Such behavior is now second nature to you. You think of it only at odd moments, like this one, when you should be asleep.
You also live through your articles, your “live” reports, your blogs. People who see/read/hear those things believe they know the real you. They believe they have walked with you into the valley of the shadow of death, and they believe that they, like you, have survived some kind of evil.
Really, however, you live inside your head, in the things you’re afraid to write down, afraid to record, afraid to even feel. You lied when you implied that fear hasn’t been in your life in decades. Fear is in your every movement. But you speak truth when you say you haven’t felt fear.
You haven’t felt anything in a long, long time.
That’s the most important thing they fail to tell you when you sign up for this job. Not that it could kill you or that you might even want it to kill you.
But that you can look at a little girl who has lost everything—her health, her family, her belief that someone once loved her—and you think she does not measure up to the rumor. She isn’t the story that will save you, the news that will make you even more famous than you already are.
She doesn’t even merit a mention in your long piece on suicide squads because she doesn’t change anything. She is, to you, another body—another item—another fact in a lifetime of useless facts.
She is not a child, any more than you are a woman.
She is a weapon, and you are a reporter.
And that’s all you’ll ever be.
The Prophet of Flores
TED KOSMATKA
New writer Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a steelworker, and is now a self-described “lab rat” who gets to play with electron microscopes all day. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to Ideomancer, City Slab, and Kindred Voices.
Here he takes us sideways in time to a world where a certain pesky Theory was “disproved” early on, even though facts in support of it stubbornly continue to appear … facts that can be extremely dangerous to mention.
If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?
—Voltaire
When Paul was a boy, he played God in the attic above his parents’ garage. That’s what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That’s what he called it the day he smashed it all down.
Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he’d found behind the garage and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. While his father was away speaking at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he’d drawn during the last day of school.
Because he wasn’t old enough to use his father’s power tools, he had to use a hand saw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother’s sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father’s unused workbench.
One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. “What are you doing up there?” she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.
Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. “I’m just playing around with some tools,” he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn’t lie to his mother. Not directly.
“Which tools?”
“Just a hammer and some nails.”
She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain re-glued subtly out of alignment. “Be careful,” she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools, and about his father.
“I will.”
The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. In reality, the cages were enormous, overengineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they’d be holding. They weren’t mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletopsized enclosures that could have housed German Shepherds. He spent most of his paper route money on the project, buying odds and ends that he needed: sheets of plexi, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked.
He bought exercise wheels and built walkways; he hung loops of yarn the mice could climb to various platforms. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.
While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept the mice in little aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. On the day he finished the last of the big cages, he released the mice into their new habitats one by one—the first explorers on a new continent. To mark the occasion, he brought his friend John Long over, whose eyes grew wide when he saw what Paul had made.
“You built all this?” John asked.
“Yeah.”
“It must have taken you a long time.”
“Months.”
“My parents don’t let me have pets.”
“Neither do mine,” Paul answered. “But anyway, these aren’t pets.”
“Then what are they?”
“An experiment.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.
“This represents the number of daughter atoms. And this …” He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. “This is the number of parent atoms.” He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. “Can anyone tell me what the point of intersection represents?”
Darren Michaels in the front row raised his hand. “It’s the element’s half-life.”
“Exactly. Johnson, in what year was radiometric dating invented?”
“1906.”
“By whom?”
“Rutherford.”
“What method did he use?”
“Uranium lead—”
“No. Wallace, can you tell us?”
“He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium.”
“Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?”
“That was Boltwood, in 1907.”
“And how were these initial results viewed?”
“With skepticism.”
“By whom?”
“By the evolutionists.”
“Good.” Mr. Finley turned to Paul. “Carlson, can you tell us what year Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species?”
“1867,” Paul said.
“Yes, and in what year did Darwin’s theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?”
“That was 1932.” Anticipating his next question, Paul continued. “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 92
