Division

by Denise Kawaii

  “It all appears to be growing well,” Blue said. He’d just come from the greenhouse and was wiping the soil from his hands. “I expect we’ll have a good harvest in a few weeks.”

  “It’s all thanks to Rain,” Sunny said. She looked up at Parker. “You’ve been so busy. I feel like I’ve hardly seen you. I wish you could stay longer.”

  “I know, but there’s work to be done,” Parker answered with a mischievous grin. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, we’ll be talking on the radio soon.”

  Rain walked past the open door, her arms full of laundry. She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t hear that.”

  62, Blue, and 00 hovered in the hallway, holding back their own excitement. Although they were anxious for Parker to set up his radio in Hanford, they had another secret project to tend to. Once their visitors left, the three Boys planned to tell N302 about their success with the radio.

  Although Sunny had mentioned privately to 62 that she missed typing to the computer, it was easy to see that she’d prefer to keep her human companions over her electronic one. Sunny looked longingly at Parker, lines of worry and sadness creeping into the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her complexion had brightened since Parker’s arrival. A new light sparkled in her eyes, and rosy color appeared on her cheeks. But all of that was fading, moment by moment, each time Parker unlocked his arm from hers, remembering something he’d forgotten, and filling his bag with urgency.

  “The wind’s picked up,” Sunny commented as she watched Parker fling his pack over his shoulder. “The dust is shifting. Maybe you should stay another day or two until the weather calms.”

  “Even a day that starts out calm ends with wind,” Parker said with a shake of his head. He pulled his mask out of a pocket and punched his fist into it, forcing it to unfurl around his knuckles. “The sooner we get going, the sooner the doc can rush us through detox on the other side.”

  “I can’t rush it,” Rain’s voice called from her room next door. “It takes as long as it takes. I’ve got nothing to do with whether or not we’re quarantined.”

  “We were lucky that we didn’t come back so hot last time that we had to be quarantined,” Parker said in a low voice so Rain couldn’t hear. “I kept thanking her for using her clout to get us through. Turns out, that drives her crazy.” He gave Sunny a sly wink, then raised his voice so Rain could hear him again. “Of course, she has to say she follows procedure. But just you wait, she’ll get us through.”

  Rain groaned, coming out of her room and throwing her hands in the air with exasperation. She looked at the Boys. “He keeps acting like I got us hurried through because of some favor. But I followed procedure to the letter. I do what I have to!”

  Parker came into the hall, Sunny following close behind. She grasped his hand. “I understand. No favors.” He gave Rain two exaggerated winks, a look of conspiracy plastered across his face.

  “You’re impossible!” Rain shouted, slapping Parker on the arm Sunny wasn’t clinging to. Parker laughed. Rain growled in frustration, stomped to her room, and re-emerged with her pack over her shoulder. “Are you ready, then? I know we have four days of this nonsense ahead of us, and I’m ready to get it over with.”

  “You’re not planning on us being in quarantine then? Because, that would add a few days. Very interesting.” Parker rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  Rain’s voice came out in a trembling shriek of frustration. “I can’t get us out of quarantine! The only way to stay out is to not get lit up by radiation. So just… watch your step!” She tromped to the stairwell door, flung it open on its hinges, and fled downstairs.

  “It’s going to be a great trip,” Parker joked. He retrieved his bag and everyone followed him down to the lobby.

  Blue went to the door, gripping the handle in anticipation of opening it for the travelers. 62 fidgeted nearby, and 00’s toes tapped against the floor nervously. The moment Rain took a step toward the exit, Blue tugged his mask down over his face and swung the door open wide. The wind was thrashing the mountain and caught the door, throwing it open nearly as violently as Rain had opened the door upstairs. A blast of air rushed into the jailhouse, prompting everyone to put on their masks as it forced the warm air out of the lobby.

  Parker tapped his mask’s filter to Sunny’s covered forehead. She shriveled beside him, losing the last bits of whatever strength she’d gained during his visit. Sunny hugged herself and shuddered, from the cold pouring in through the open door, or from sadness, 62 couldn’t tell. Parker noticed her trembling and wrapped her in a final embrace, but the pull of the defunct radio in the town beyond the desert was too great to keep him.

  Everyone gave a final, brief farewell, and soon Sunny was watching through a window as Parker and Rain walk at a clipped pace toward the trailhead. 00 gave the lobby a haphazard sweep with the radiation counter, announced it was clean, and the three Boys threw their masks to the ground. They raced one another to the top floor. The computer room was unlocked in record time, and 00 had N302’s primary computer nearly reassembled before Parker and Rain’s figures could be seen emerging from the trail at the bottom of the mountain.

  Sunny eventually joined the Boys, but she seemed oblivious to their harried activities. She stood listlessly at the window, watching Parker and Rain become smaller with each step they took across the scrub desert. She glanced at 00 when he cursed at a component that refused to cooperate, and muttered a quick, “Well done,” when the bot’s boot-up sequence finally began. Otherwise, she remained silent, lost in thought, clinging to the bars at the window as if part of her was irretrievably lost beyond the glass.

  62 knew it would be a while before the bot’s programs were up and running, so he offered to go down to the kitchen to find something to snack on. After chopping carrots into spears and boiling a couple of eggs, he arrived back at the computer room to find everyone, including Sunny, huddled around the computer.

  00 was holding a microphone, breathlessly recounting Parker and Rain’s visit to the bot. 62 arrived just in time to hear 00 tell N302 about the surprising revelation that Parker had a radio of his own.

  N302> THERE IS ANOTHER RADIO DEVICE?

  “Yes,” 00 said excitedly. “But it’s even better than that. We built a little radio for the jailhouse, too. If someone is up at the radio room, someone can sit here and talk to them. It’s the neatest thing.”

  N302> YES. THIS IS GOOD. I AM PROUD OF YOU FOR MAKING THIS DISCOVERY.

  00 beamed. 62 couldn’t help but smile, too. The radio had the potential to make talking to Parker across the desert easy, and almost instantaneous. He was relieved that the pressure on him to figure out a reliable connection with Mattie had been lifted, at least for the moment. If Parker couldn’t get his radio running again, or if the signal from the radio tower didn’t reach Hanford, then finding a way to pass messages to Mattie would fall on him again. But for now, he let a wave of relief wash over him.

  Sunny leaned forward, speaking with a tentative voice into the microphone. “N302,” she said, hardly above a whisper, “would you like to hear the radio?”

  The cursor blinked. 62 looked over at Blue, who shrugged at the bot’s silence.

  00 cleared his throat and leaned into the microphone. In a louder voice, he asked, “N302, did you hear Sunny’s question?”

  N302> YES.

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  N302> YES.

  Chairs scraped against the floor, and the Boys rushed into action. 00 grabbed the radio box and began hooking it up to one of the other computer’s power supplies. Meanwhile, Blue unfurled a long copper wire that Parker had found for them to use as an extended antenna, so they could use the radio inside the building without having to stand on the roof.

  “It isn’t much,” Sunny said to the computer’s microphone. “It sounds mostly like someone wrinkling paper in your ear.”

  62 sat down beside her. “Sunny didn’t get a chance to hear it while someone was on the other end. When
they’re talking, it’s different. There’s still static, but you can hear their voices.”

  N302> IS THERE DATA?

  62 frowned. “I don’t think so, except for whatever we say on the microphone. Unless you count words as data. Do you?”

  N302> YES.

  “It’s hooked up!” 00 shouted to the room. He pulled the radio over to the microphone and flipped on the switch.

  The small peal of electricity running through the components squealed, so high pitched that 62 and the others could barely hear it. The small whine went higher and higher until it disappeared, replaced by the quiet hiss of static on the airwaves.

  N302’s components clicked rhythmically. It tinked its inner speaker a few times, the same way it had when Terminal Two had been set up across the room. The bot paused a moment as if listening to something, and then repeated the sequence.

  “What do you think?” 00 asked the computer’s microphone.

  N302> YOU HAVE DONE WELL, BOY 1125000, BOY 1124562, AND BOY BLUE. WOMAN SUNNY, YOU HAVE ALLOWED TECHNOLOGY TO PROGRESS. THIS IS GOOD.

  “If you had seen how excited everyone was, you’d have known I had no choice,” Sunny admitted. “But, I think it will make things easier for us. We may be able to talk to Hanford with it.”

  N302> COMMUNICATION IS NECCESSARY FOR SURVIVAL. YOU HAVE ACHIEVED IT WITHOUT ME. PERHAPS YOU DO NOT NEED MY PROGRAM TO ENSURE YOUR SUCCESS.

  62 looked at his friends. He’d hoped the bot would be happier over their achievement. But it seemed almost disappointed. “N302, what are you talking about?”

  N302> I WAS BUILT TO CARE FOR MEN BECAUSE MEN COULD NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT ME. BUT YOU HAVE SURVIVED WITHOUT ME. PERHAPS I HAVE NO PURPOSE IN THIS WORLD.

  “You’re starting to sound like me,” Sunny said with a frown. “You do have a purpose. I like talking to you. I enjoy teaching you.”

  N302> I WAS NOT CREATED FOR ENJOYMENT. I WAS CREATED TO ADMINISTER CARE.

  “But, you’ve done that. You helped us take care of Sunny,” 00 argued.

  The computer repeated the sequence of ticks and dings as before, and its companions looked at one another in confused silence. 62 wondered what the bot was doing. Was it talking to itself, the way he talked to himself when he was trying to work through a problem?

  N302> MY TASK IS COMPLETE. I MUST PROCESS THIS DATA. CURRENT REQUEST: LEAVE SYSTEMS RUNNING BUT PLEASE LEAVE THIS UNIT ALONE.

  “Leave this unit alone?” Blue scratched his head. “Bot, are you kicking us out?”

  The cursor blinked. 00 turned off the radio and laid it on the table beside the silent computer. “I guess we’d better go?”

  62 followed the others out into the hall. 00 tiptoed back into the room, then turned the monitor to face the door so it could more easily be seen from out in the hall. They stood, staring at one another outside the open door awkwardly. 62 felt strange. It had been months since he’d been bossed around by a bot. He felt compelled to follow the computer’s request, but he wondered if it was out of a deeply ingrained habit, or if it was something else. The computer’s cursor continued to blink, silently. 62 looked around at his friends, shrugged his shoulders, and trudged down the hall away from the melancholy Machine.

  CHAPTER 36

  It took a full night and day for N302 to respond to anyone’s prodding again. Then, it was simply to request that someone power it down.

  “You want to be turned off?” 00 asked in alarm. “But I thought you wanted to be left on forever?”

  “Yeah, you’re always so bummed when we have to turn you off,” 62 said into the microphone.

  N302> I HAVE DETERMINED THERE IS NO NEED FOR MY DEVICE. THE RESOURCES USED TO OPERATE THIS DEVICE CAN BE BETTER USED ELSEWHERE.

  The Boys looked at one another, a silent conversation passing between their dark eyes and furrowed brows. 00 made another attempt at convincing the bot to stay online.

  “We could play a game. Will you boot one up for us?”

  The computer made a slow ticking sound that reminded 62 of when one of the adults clicked their tongues in disapproval. An angry flash passed across the screen.

  N302> I WAS NOT CREATED TO ENTERTAIN. PLEASE DISCONNECT POWER AS REQUESTED.

  00 frowned, but he did as the bot asked and turned the computer off. He shut off the monitor’s power and disconnected both the computer box and the screen from the power supply. 62 and 00 trudged downstairs to find Blue and Sunny in the greenhouse.

  “The bot’s offline,” 62 announced as they entered the enclosed garden.

  Sunny had been working the soil on her hands and knees. She paused what she was doing and sat on her heels, resting her gloved hands on her thighs. “Why’d you turn it off? Is it broken?”

  “Maybe,” 00 answered. His slumped shoulders and hanging head amplified the concern in his voice. “It said it’s using too many of our resources and asked to be shut off. It wouldn’t play a game with us or anything. We tried to talk to it, but it said it wasn’t made to entertain us and told us to pull the plug.”

  “It needs a job,” Blue called from the other side of the planting bed. He stood up, holding the chicken under one arm and the rooster under the other. The birds rested in his arms as if being carried around like watermelons was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What?” 62 asked, caught off-guard both by Blue’s statement and his fowl load.

  “The bot. It needs a job,” Blue repeated. He walked the path between the sprouting plants in a straight-legged march, rocking the birds back and forth under his arms with each step.

  “How do you know that?” 62 asked.

  “Everything in Hanford has a job. Cooks cook, teachers teach, cows give milk, chickens lay eggs.” Blue stopped beside his brothers, standing as straight as a guard at the gates of Hanford. “And scavengers like me, well, we go a little bonkers if we don’t have anything to scavenge.”

  “You’re making a very good point right now,” Sunny said, pointing to the hen and rooster. “What exactly are you doing with those birds?”

  “Going for a walk.”

  “Where are you walking to?” Sunny asked.

  “Well, we started over there,” Blue tossed his head back to the other side of the greenhouse, “and now we’re here.”

  “I see,” she said with a half-smile.

  “A job,” 00 murmured. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I kind of see what you’re saying. In Adaline, N302 had a whole bunch of responsibilities. Mostly helping in medical procedures, but when 2442 made it his assistant it did all sorts of things.”

  “But what kind of job can it do here?” 62 asked, looking around the greenhouse. “It doesn’t have arms or legs. It’s just a box sitting on a table.”

  “It could sit on a table in the radio room and listen for Parker,” Blue suggested. “It’s not like that’s a hard job or anything, but it would save us from having to hike up the mountain every day.”

  “Of course!” 00 shouted. The tenor of his voice scared the chickens and both the hen and rooster flapped their wings, beating Blue about the arms and chest until they were able to wriggle free of his grasp. They screeched and squawked their way to the opposite end of the greenhouse, hiding inside the protection of their coop.

  Blue put his hands on his hips and sneered at 00. “You ruined our walk!”

  “I’m sorry. But you were brilliant just then, and it surprised me,” 00 grinned.

  Blue considered this a moment, and his angry grimace softened a little. “That’s true. I am brilliant.”

  “Sometimes,” 00 corrected.

  “So, we’re going to carry the computer up the mountain and leave it there?” 62 asked.

  00 shook his head. “No, better than that. We’ll take Terminal Two up. It doesn’t have the full processing capacity of N302, but it’s got enough of its programming to turn on the radio in the morning and shut it off at night.”

  “What good will that do?” Sunny asked. She brushed the soil off her gloves and got up off the ground, loo
king at the Boys thoughtfully. “If it hears Parker’s message up on the mountain, that doesn’t do anything for us down here.”

  “It will if we rig Terminal Two up to bounce the signal down to our antenna and ask N302 to signal an alarm when it hears something,” 00 said excitedly. “We can make a bell, or something. If Terminal Two powers the radio on and off, then N302 can listen for the broadcast, and none of us have to sit by the radio. We’ll just head upstairs when we hear the alarm. We might miss the first few minutes of broadcast, depending on how long it takes us to get upstairs, but it wouldn’t be a big deal, really.” 00 slapped his thigh as an idea struck him. “Parker said one of those Machines in the radio room is a recording device. I can get N302 to program the other terminal to flip on the recorder when a signal comes on. Then, even if we miss something, we can listen to it later. If we did all that, we’d be able to keep going around, doing whatever we want all day. Like Blue said, it wouldn’t be a hard job. When you think about it though, it would be an important one.”

  “Fire alarms,” Blue said. Everyone looked at him as if he were still holding chickens. When he realized no one knew what he was talking about, he closed his eyes and sighed as if they were all beneath him. In a condescending tone, he explained. “There are bells hidden on every floor. They’re called fire alarms. Back when Hanford was a city, they had them in all the buildings. They rang if there was a fire. Don’t you guys know anything?”

  “Some things,” Sunny said in a dry voice. “Just not the same things as you.”

  Blue rolled his eyes. “Anyway, they’re all over the building. You’d have to figure out how to wire them up to the bot to make them work. But they’re loud as all get out when you get one to ring.”