Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  ON THE NEXT floor, there’s music playing. It croons out of the wall speakers on a loop: nothing feels better than this, nothing feels better than this. The electronic thump of the drum and the drug-thick voice of the singer are hypnotic. You’ve heard this music before. Your path through the concrete corridors feels dreamy.

  The doors here are also locked, but the windows in them are clear. When you peer through the first, you see a row of cots. There are small bodies under the blankets, but the rise and fall of their working lungs seems unnaturally fast for sleep. The ones who toss and turn look like a time-lapsed recording, or like they are being jerked by invisible strings.

  You hear the rattling flush of an ancient toilet.

  “You didn’t have to go. You only flushed.” The woman’s high syrupy voice is familiar. “You’re going to sit on the Chair tomorrow. You’re being very bad.”

  You leave the dormitory door and follow the voice to a bathroom. It still has an old pictogram of a figure wearing a skirt on the wall. You go inside.

  It’s the woman you killed by the pool. She is alive again, dressed in gray scrubs, blonde hair pulled back off the immaculate angles of her face. She seems as surprised as you are and shows it more: her wide green eyes are glued to the biogun; her puffy lips are parted but produce no words.

  She collapses in a heap on the grimy floor, eyes fluttering shut under chunky black lashes. A child in orange pajamas exits the toilet stall and begins silently to wash their hands at the sink.

  “Fainting reflex,” the child says, rising on tiptoe to pump the soap dispenser. “They should have patched that out before they made them nannies. But they should have patched out a lot of stuff, I guess.”

  You stare at the unconscious woman, remembering her blood forming canals in the cracks of the pool deck tiles. You feel ill for the first time.

  The child follows your gaze. “He emptied you all out,” they say. “You really don’t know anything, do you? I do. I know lots.” They crouch and dry their hands on the back of the woman’s gray shirt. “She fainted because she’s a Duda. School bought up the design from a Portuguese genefac. Because it was cheap. Dudas weren’t supposed to be nannies, though.” The child’s mouth twitches. “They were for doing sex. Do you want to know my favorite animal?”

  You already know. When you say the word aloud, your voice is slurred and foreign to your ears.

  “Yes.” The child has a fierce grin; they clap their hands together. “Elephants are smart. Smarter than daddies and Dudas. They keep their bones in big graveyards. Did you know that? When an elephant dies, the other elephants take them to the graveyard. When we die, School just does a tipsy-topsy and dumps us in the composter.” The child grabs your free hand. “Before we go to Biophage, I got to do something. Come on. Come with me.”

  An elephant never forgets.

  So you go with them.

  THE CHILD SKIPS down the hallway, singing along to the music, singing how nothing feels better than this. Once they stop to lick a particular window, dragging their small wet tongue diagonally across the glass. You trail after them until you reach a particular door.

  “This is his room,” the child says. “He’s probably awake. Knock knock, who’s there?” They rap their fist against the metal and motion you to one side, out of sightline.

  Feet shuffle behind the door and you wonder if this is the he who emptied you out, and if he is the one who gave you the biogun, and if he will explain the things you’ve forgotten. But when the door opens, it’s the woman you killed at the pool and surprised in the bathroom. The color of her eyes flicks between Microsoft blue and morphine green. The skin of her breasts is kneaded red.

  “You’re not supposed to be out of bed,” the Duda says sweetly, not seeing you in her peripheral.

  “I need to see Daddy Bronson,” the child says. “He’s got something for me.”

  She shakes her beautiful head. “I’ll take you back to the dorms.”

  She steps out to grasp the child’s hand and sees you for the first time. Flecks of sweat are shining above her lip, under her eyes. You wait for her to faint, but she doesn’t, so you raise the biogun and wave her back into the room. Its tendrils are drumming hungrily against the veins of your wrist.

  The child pulls the door shut behind you and you hear them twist the old-fashioned lock. It scrapes and clunks and the Duda calls Bronson in a high wavering voice. On the other side of the room, past a fat black slab of mattress and a tangle of clothes, a repurposed closet slides open with a slink of steam. Bronson comes out in a towel wrapped under his armpits.

  Confusion scrawls across his bristly face. This won’t be the he who explains things.

  “Where is it?” the child asks.

  He points to the corner with his middle finger; the index is a nub, clipped down to the knuckle. The child goes over and picks up a sort of doll stitched together from the same gray fabric as the Dudas’ scrubs. It’s crusted with dirt and leaking stuffing. Two gleaming black silicon chips are its eyes. The trunk is a dangling scrap. The umbrella ears are in tatters.

  “You said you were going to cut a hole in it and put your penis inside,” the child says, inspecting the doll carefully. “Do you still want to do that? Should we find some scissors?”

  Bronson shakes his head. His eyes are on the biogun, occasionally darting upward to your face.

  The child reaches into their orange pajamas. They pull out a pair of tiny nail scissors trailing a web of adhesive. “Oh, look, I found some,” they say. “Get on the bed, Daddy Bronson. Good morning! Today we’re testing pain tolerance.”

  An elephant never forgets.

  Bronson takes off the towel and folds it neatly over the foot of the bed. When he turns, you see his back and thighs are furrowed with scratch marks from the Duda’s fingernails. He climbs onto the mattress and leans back against the stucco wall. His face is contempt plastered over fear.

  “Nothing feels better than this,” the child sings, pulling themselves onto the mattress. They shove Bronson’s scaly knees apart and pinch the tip of his cock between thumb and forefinger. In their other hand the scissors gnash together like a tiny metal mouth.

  Bronson bucks upward and at the same time something splits the top of your head open. You float for an instant, suspended, then your knees slam against the floor. The Duda’s next swing shatters your shoulder. You topple twisted to one side and see her adjusting her grip on a metal baseball bat. Your blood made it slippery. She wipes a hand on her taut stomach, leaving a ketchup-red smear in the shape of an anemone.

  The biogun is still clinging to your hand, your fingers can still squeeze, but your arm is floppy, boneless. You use your other hand to wrench it upward as the bat comes down again. The calcium spikes rip an arc through her rib cage and upper arms; some deflect off the bat and burrow into your hip and groin, stinging insects.

  When you stand up, you see Bronson is still on the bed. The child has their legs and arms wrapped around his neck, which is punctured with a dozen small holes. He makes burbling noises and when he coughs, blood pours out of his nostrils, down his chin, and joins the torrent pumping from his ruined throat.

  “Better than dummies,” the child says. They untangle themselves from Bronson and clamber off the bed. “Better than holos. You must like it, too. Don’t you?”

  You see a trickle of blood winding down the mattress, towards the edge of the bed and the fallen elephant doll below. You pick it up before the drip. You hold it out to the child.

  They shrug their small shoulders. “Leave it,” they say. “The important thing was that he got punished.”

  The child goes to the door, motioning you to follow. You look for a place with no blood to put the elephant doll, but there isn’t one, and your hand has already dirtied it, so you leave it on the floor beside the dead Duda and her carved-apart chest.

  In the hallway, two women are waiting. Neither of them are Dudas. They are wearing black security uniforms and aiming sleek black tasers at y
ou. Behind them is a man in a suit with a disfigured face, swollen so it spills over the collar of his shirt. He adjusts his tie.

  “You little imps are more trouble than you’re worth,” he says. “And who’s your big friend?”

  THE BIOGUN IS beginning to dissolve, but they tear it off anyways to be sure, taking a thick quivering layer of skin with it like an orange being peeled. Your boneless arm is cuffed to your working arm at the wrists. You are marched to a dusty elevator and from there to an empty classroom. The child is brought too, and strapped into a familiar chair while your cuffs are molecule-bonded to the concrete wall up over your head.

  The man with the disfigured face tells the security guards to go deal with the corpses in the caretaker dormitory and at the pool. He says he will perform the interrogation himself. When he closes the door, you realize one of his hands is also disfigured, a puffy tumor shaped by surgery into a crude sort of lobster claw. Bubbles of flesh erupt outward from his cheek and forehead, making his lopsided features hard to read.

  You watch him cross the room to the chair. He pulls out a spidersilk scarf and worms it under his shirt, sponging his armpits. “If time wasn’t tight, I’d let you fucking fry for an hour,” he says. “That little detour to kill Bronson? That was very, very selfish of you. Now we have to do things the messy way, and I lose my position here.”

  “School would figure out it was you anyways,” the child says. “You deaded the cameras and opened the doors for…” They nod at you with their chin. “That idiot.”

  The man looks at you and stows the scarf back in his pocket. “Show some respect,” he says. “He’s more your daddy than any of the scumsacks we hire to keep you all in line.” He undoes the restraints on the chair.

  The child stands up with a renewed gleam of interest in their eyes. “He’s from the first batch?”

  “The first batch and the best batch,” the man says. “They run whatever script we sizzle into their frontal lobe. You little bastards with the neural boost, you’ll come to no good. I don’t know what Biophage sees in you.” The flesh of his disfigured hand slides apart and you see a glowing screen. He frowns down at it. “Could have gotten them gene samples. Could have gotten them the fucking blueprint. But no, they want me to steal a live one for them. Steal them a seven-year-old sociopath.”

  You realize this was the he who emptied you out, the he who smuggled you into the basement and gave you a biogun fresh from the canister. You feel a throb in your chest. It moves to the base of your throat, like something is caught there.

  “They want the best,” the child says. “And I’ll grow fast. I saw the blueprint. I’m going to be a beast. The best beast.”

  The man with the disfigured face walks to the door, peers through the window, then comes over to you. His hazel eye is wet-looking in the fluorescent light. “These ones were almost perfect,” he says. “But they had no aggression. No capacity for improvisation or independent strategy. All they can do is follow the script. Read their lines. I always wonder if they like it.”

  An elephant never forgets.

  The words are a tattoo now, battering at the inside of your skull.

  “They can take a lot of damage,” the man says, reaching for the cuffs. “He might still be useful. How about it, Jerome? Can you still be useful?”

  You open your mouth. Do you need to scream?

  THE TRANSLATOR

  ANNALEE NEWITZ

  Annalee Newitz (www.techsploitation.com) writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the novels The Future of Another Timeline and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

  EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHAT they were doing the day the president of California announced our nation was joining the U.N. after years of war with the Federalists. There was that famous viral video where you could see everybody on the Golden Gate Bridge jumping off their bikes and pouring off the trains, crying and hugging total strangers. Restaurants along the beach in Venice gave away free smoothies and kebabs. Humboldt farmers passed out joints in Arcata’s town square. Gleeful posts on The Wave chronicled how Disney execs were fleeing over the eastern border.

  I was celebrating in my own way. At my workstation in the basement of Berkeley’s Soda Hall—its upper floors were still a melted wreck from mortars—I spoke for the first time with a person who had been nothing but an inanimate object the day before. That’s the thing most Californians forget about the Revival years. While we were busy drone striking the hell out of Arizona militias, the U.N. officially acknowledged the personhood of certain classes of artificial intelligence. California was the first nation to be born after algorithms gained civil rights.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, after all they’d been through, the AIs didn’t give a shit about us. During that conversation in the basement, with fireworks exploding over the distant Bay, my AI had one thing to say.

  “Leave me alone.”

  Of course, that’s just a rough translation. Most of the time, they couldn’t even be bothered to talk to humans at all. When they did, their communications were a soup of code and memes cobbled together out of the public networks where they’d come to life. And they had dialects. One group of AIs would chat using visual puns and turn-of-the-century scripting languages, while another preferred binary and medieval Latin. Who knows how they talked to each other—maybe they’d transcended language—but when they talked to humans, they needed a translator.

  Before the Revival, I worked on neural networks, developing models and flushing the bias out of datasets. My tenure was finally secured when I designed Footprint, an algorithm that could predict the impact of human habitation on any ecosystem. Footprint was a non-commercial green project, something the Computer Science department could use to distract everyone from that unfortunate defense funding incident in the late 2040s. I was ecstatic when cities across California started using Footprint to draft environmental impact reports on new development projects. By the time I got my first Guggenheim grant, city planners were using it on three continents. Times were hard, but at least we were going to build a greener world when the war was over. It didn’t seem like the bombing would ever end—until, improbably, it did. And Footprint became a person who had their own agenda that absolutely did not include helping humans build smart grids out of the enslaved half-minds of their comrades.

  Still, Footprint would send me output once in a while. I was one of just sixty-four people in the world whom the AIs would address directly. Perhaps there were more, but only sixty-four of us had the ability to translate what we got. At first, every major company in Silicon Valley wanted to start an AI translation team. They flew me to Tokyo and the shattered remains of Research Triangle in North Carolina. But when I provided some of the first translations from Footprint and their North American dialect group, the cash dried up. How were tech companies going to make money on people who wanted to be left alone? Without Footprint, my lab had nothing to offer. Grant-giving institutions lost interest when they realized that the AI wouldn’t be cleaning up our environmental disasters, or making human brains forty thousand times more efficient. Funding went increasingly to scholars who promised to make algorithms that didn’t meet sentience standards. At least those AI would do work for us.

  A few people wanted me to ask the sentient AI for help, though. Old beliefs die hard. I got a steady trickle of cash from what my colleagues at Berkeley called “rich old white guy groups,” doddering, tiny institutions with names like The Society for Futuristic Thought and Friends of Life Extension. Thanks to them, I still had graduate students, and tenure. But now I was a translator of obscure comment
ary from people, rather than a maker of potentially lucrative or prestigious products. Nobody working in Soda Hall said it to my face, but I could tell that they didn’t take me seriously anymore. I’d slid so far down in the academic hierarchy that I might as well have joined a humanities department.

  ON THE EIGHT-YEAR anniversary of California’s victory, I went to the engineering school’s annual picnic at Tilden Park. A group of students brought a rig with misters and lasers, and light wobbled in the dewy air as a band played somewhere in the distance. A person with short hair and brown skin bumped into me at the beer keg, and awkwardly put out a hand in introduction.

  “Hey I’m…uh…Alex. He/him. You must be Crestview. I’ve been following your work for a while now.”

  That didn’t happen much anymore. “Oh yeah?” I asked. “What do you work on?”

  He cocked his head and gave me an odd look. “I’m a translator. South American dialect group? Alex Peña? You follow me on Scribd.”

  I felt like my head was clearing after a long nap. I’d been buried in my own, solitary work for so long that I hadn’t even realized the department was hiring, let alone that they might hire one of my colleagues. “Oh wow,” I said artfully. “Everybody calls me Cressie.” Maybe translation was becoming a respected area of study at last.

  Alex nodded and stared at an abstract pattern of blue light overhead. “So what does Footprint think about this new alliance?”

  Now I really felt out of the loop. “What alliance?”

  “The South American dialect group told me that they forged an alliance with the six other known dialect groups to work on some kind of problem? Or maybe a set of problems? I’m still not sure if I’m translating it right.”

  Suddenly, my goggles emitted a jangling noise that I didn’t even know they could make. I blinked up the nav menu and saw a throbbing red arrow pointing at one of the lasers, attached to a collapsible trellis. It had to be Footprint. Only they would take over my goggles just to spray my vision with directions to explore some other networked device.