Under Their Skin

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Eryn and Mom seemed poised for one of their mother-daughter spats, where Eryn would get more and more upset, and Mom more and more calm, until it seemed like Eryn was molten fury and Mom was so chill she didn’t even have a pulse.

  Mom’s a robot, Nick thought. She really doesn’t have a pulse.

  Nick couldn’t look at Mom right now. He swiveled his head back toward the video still playing on the screen.

  “We knew it was possible to fully automate the care and maintenance of the frozen embryos—or the ‘Snowflakes,’ as they began to be called,” Dr. Speck was saying. “‘Snowflakes’ because they’re frozen—get it?”

  “Dylan, there’s no need to explain nerdy science humor,” Dr. Grimaldi said, rolling her eyes. “It wasn’t even funny before the threat of extinction.”

  “When we began to plan Project Return of the Snowflakes—a name I shouldn’t have to explain—we had to improve our freezing techniques to ensure that the embryos would last in good health for as long as it took for the danger to pass,” Dr. Speck said. “Obviously, this was one of the many aspects of the project that we couldn’t test ahead of time. We just had to hope that everything would work out, centuries into the future.”

  “Centuries?” Eryn repeated. Apparently she’d managed to hold off on fighting with Mom, and was watching the video again now too. “They kept us frozen for centuries? Those people died centuries ago?”

  The video had only been playing for ten or fifteen minutes, and yet Eryn made it sound like Dr. Speck and Dr. Grimaldi were people she’d known, people she now grieved for.

  “We also didn’t want humanity to be forced to start over from, say, the caveman era,” Dr. Grimaldi added. “What if Humanity 2.0 simply repeated our mistakes, and crawled out of the muck to reach technological advancement only to fail again in exactly the same way?”

  Personally, Nick liked the term Humanity 2.0 better than Snowflakes. Snowflakes made it sound like all of them could melt away so easily the next time the weather changed.

  Maybe that was the point.

  “Also, our ancestors had mined out all the easily available metals and minerals that enabled them to advance,” Dr. Speck said grimly. “It would be quite possible that our Snowflakes wouldn’t even get out of the Stone Age.”

  “So some of the best minds of our generation studied exactly where we’d gone wrong,” Dr. Grimaldi said. “How far back in history would we have to go to find a point where it was still possible to avoid the mistakes humanity made the first time around, leading to our inevitable destruction?”

  “They settled on the early twenty-first century,” Dr. Speck said.

  “But—that’s now!” Nick blurted out.

  Eryn flashed him a disgusted look.

  “Of course it is,” she said. “Because this is the twenty- first century the second time around.” She gazed toward Mom and the mayor. “If everyone older than twelve is a robot, then Nick and I are in the oldest group of Snowflakes, aren’t we? We’re among the first of the experiment, right?”

  Mom nodded slowly.

  “You are,” she said, seeming to speak through clenched teeth.

  How was Eryn figuring out everything so quickly, while Nick might as well be one of those cavemen still crawling around in the muck? His brain mostly kept sputtering out, This can’t be true, none of this can be true. . . .

  But what if it was?

  “Okay, okay,” Nick said, holding out his hands like he was trying to stop everything—or maybe just stop Eryn from jumping ahead of him again. “Let’s cut to the important question. What do we have to do to keep from having everybody go extinct all over again?”

  He saw Mom and the mayor exchange glances.

  “We don’t know,” Mom said faintly.

  “Nobody ever told us,” the mayor added.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Nobody ever told you?” Eryn repeated. “Didn’t you ever ask?”

  “Who do we have to ask?” Nick asked. “The governor? The president?” He narrowed his eyes at the mayor. “Do you know a way to call one of them to find out?”

  “We always assumed the answer would be in this video,” Mom said, almost as if she were the mayor’s spokesperson. Or the president’s.

  “But you never watched the video before, just on your own? Just to find out?” Eryn asked.

  The mayor and Mom both shrugged, almost as if the move had been choreographed.

  “We were instructed not to do that,” Mom said.

  “It was in our programming that we had to wait for the first child who began asking the right questions,” the mayor said.

  What was our trigger question? Eryn wondered. Was it something like “Why are there wires hanging out of Mommy’s stomach?” Or “Why’s the rest of our stepfather’s family all robots?”

  That stopped her. Because, even as upset as she was, she remembered how anguished Mom had been, pleading with Nick and Eryn to keep their knowledge of Ava and Jackson secret. Mom lifted her hand slightly—helplessly—and Eryn could see just the ghost of a smudge where the words “Please don’t say anything about Ava and Jackson. Our lives depend on it,” had once been written.

  Nick and I probably didn’t ask the exact right question to get to see this video, Eryn thought. Not on our own. Mom just set everything up by showing us the wires in her stomach and acting like we’d seen that by mistake, and so we had to watch the video. Did she do that just to stop us from asking more about Ava and Jackson?

  How could asking questions about Ava and Jackson be worse than this?

  Mom’s eyes met Eryn’s, and Eryn winced. It seemed like Mom was still trying to say Don’t tell, don’t tell, be careful . . .

  “I guess we just have to watch the rest of the video,” Eryn huffed.

  Dr. Grimaldi was talking about how hard everyone had worked to replicate the world of the early twenty- first century, how they’d programmed robots to restore buildings and raise children and fake the appearance of normal human society.

  “Of course, we’re still very human,” Dr. Speck interjected. “We couldn’t resist some tinkering. When we saw the opportunity to make improvements, we did try that. For example, if everything worked as planned, you have grown up in a world without poverty, racism, sexism, or child abuse.”

  The only one of those terms Eryn had ever heard before was poverty.

  “We have people who are poor,” she protested.

  Mom snorted.

  “Not like there used to be,” she said. “Everyone you’ve ever met has enough money to eat and to live in a decent home. You think people are poor if their kids can only afford four days a week of after-school activities, instead of five.”

  How much poorer could people possibly be? Eryn wondered.

  On the screen, the two doctors seemed to have moved on to another topic.

  “We tried to be careful, though, knowing that the next generation would be entirely human, not to set up some impossible standard of robotic perfection,” Dr. Grimaldi added. “For example, we easily could have ensured that every Snowflake grew up in a two-parent, married-couple household. But we wanted to model the possibility of divorced parents who are civil to each other too.”

  “Because, how could we not try to model the example of people recovering from their mistakes?” Dr. Speck said. “Us, of all people?”

  Eryn could tell that he’d shifted once again, from talking about marriage and divorce to the frozen embryos and the end of human extinction. She wasn’t quite so ready to move on.

  “Then . . . then . . . you and Dad could have stayed married?” she asked Mom.

  Mom tilted her head.

  “It wasn’t how we were programmed,” she said. Then, as if flipping a switch, she went back to her usual middle-school-psychologist soothing voice: “Divorced parents can still provide loving homes for their children.
Indeed, such families might increase their offsprings’ resilience and adaptability—”

  “But we didn’t have to go through that,” Eryn said. The excuse her parents always gave for their divorce swam in her mind—the whole head-versus-hands thing. It was all a lie. “The problem wasn’t that you didn’t love each other anymore. We could have had you and Dad both with us all the time. We wouldn’t have ever had to leave in the middle of holidays to go to the other parent. We didn’t have to always be torn in two!”

  Mom just looked at her blankly.

  “But we were programmed to be divorced parents. Good divorced parents. So you did have to go through that,” Mom said.

  That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it! Eryn wanted to yell at Mom.

  But maybe Mom really didn’t know what Eryn meant. Maybe she wasn’t capable of it.

  On the screen Dr. Speck and Dr. Grimaldi were giving more details about Project Return of the Snowflakes. It was all dry, logistical information—how Dr. Grimaldi had planned and arranged for an army of robots to become the most skillful parents ever; how Dr. Speck had arranged for the stored embryos to be unfrozen and born and raised in orderly waves over the course of more than thirty years. Dr. Speck had planned for the last of the Snowflakes to be born about the same time some of the oldest Snowflakes started having children of their own, but he’d done scientific calculations so the birth rate would stay steady during that transition. And then eventually all the Snowflake embryos would be used up, and the robot parents wouldn’t be necessary anymore. It would only be real, live human beings giving birth to more humans.

  Eryn hoped Nick was paying better attention than she was. Maybe she was slipping into shock. She couldn’t seem to listen to anything new. She couldn’t seem to get past the same handful of thoughts playing again and again in her brain: Mom and Dad are really robots? Really? And They didn’t even have to be divorced. This is all a setup. And But this still doesn’t explain about Ava and Jackson. Why are they illegal? If there are other robot kids—everyone older than twelve—then why are Ava and Jackson such a big secret?

  It was this last question that finally forced Eryn to pay closer attention, because she heard Dr. Grimaldi say “robot children.”

  “Of course, we plan to phase out those fake robot children at every childhood age and stage as the real human children reach it,” she said. “And we will use the same principle for the robots in every stage of young adulthood, middle age, and elder years.”

  “So,” Dr. Speck said, “within a century or so, we can once again have a fully functioning, fully human society.”

  “Really, this is not much different from the passage of any generation,” Dr. Grimaldi said, though her face seemed contorted with worry even as her voice sounded bland and soothing. “One generation passes away as the next one comes up behind it. . . . You are simply the next generation after the robots.”

  Mom made a tiny sound in the back of her throat, almost like a whimper. But when Eryn turned toward her, Mom just said, “No generation wants to think about passing away.”

  On the screen Dr. Speck and Dr. Grimaldi squared their shoulders as if they were almost done and preparing to say good-bye.

  “So you see, we are placing all our hopes in you,” Dr. Speck said. “We would love to give advice, but we have no idea what issues you might be facing now. So all we can say is, please, consider your future carefully.”

  “It is the future of our entire species, all of humanity,” Dr. Grimaldi added solemnly.

  “God bless all of you,” Dr. Speck said. “God bless and preserve each and every one of you.”

  And then the screen went dark.

  Eryn whirled around toward Nick.

  “Wait—did I miss something?” she asked. “What did they say was going to make them extinct? What are we supposed to do to keep from becoming extinct all over again?”

  “They . . . they didn’t say,” Nick said.

  He looked so dazed Eryn wondered if he’d been in shock and not listening well either. She turned to Mom and the mayor. Both of them shook their heads.

  “They didn’t,” Mom confirmed. “They didn’t give any of that information.”

  “But—what happens now?” Eryn asked. “What are we supposed to do? What good does it do for them to tell us to avoid something when we don’t even know what we’re avoiding?”

  She expected more blank looks and shrugs from Mom and the mayor. After all, they’d already said they didn’t know what made humans go extinct before. But both women were eagerly leaning forward.

  “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, for the past twelve years,” the mayor said. “The moment after the first viewing.”

  “Why?” Nick and Eryn said, practically speaking in unison.

  “Because,” the mayor said, “now we get to ask you questions.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “What does ‘I think, therefore I am,’ really mean?” the mayor asked.

  “And ‘To be, or not to be—that is the question,’” Mom said. “Why is that the question? Why don’t humans always choose to be?”

  “Why isn’t the unexamined life worth living?” the mayor asked.

  “And who’s God?” Mom asked. “What’s a soul? There’s this whole category of human thought called religion—and another category called philosophy—that we’ve mostly just avoided dealing with because we can’t understand it. Can you explain these things to us?”

  “How are we supposed to know about things you grown-ups never taught us?” Nick retorted. “How are we supposed to know anything you don’t know?”

  “Because you’re human?” the mayor said.

  But it almost sounded like she wasn’t sure what they were.

  The door to the conference room rattled just then, making Nick jump.

  Then the door opened.

  It was Michael.

  “What did I miss?” he asked, peering around frantically.

  He’s worried about Ava and Jackson, Nick thought. More than he is about me and Eryn.

  What did that mean? That he loved them more?

  Once, Nick would have thought, Well, yeah, they’re his real kids and we’re not. He’s only known us for a couple of years, and he’s known them their whole lives.

  But now he just thought, But they’re just robots, and we’re real humans!

  He thought about what he’d said to Mom and the mayor only a few moments ago: “How are we supposed to know about things you grown-ups never taught us?”

  If Mom and Dad were robots and he’d spent his entire life being surrounded by robots, why did he have such a strong feeling that humans were better than robots? Why would he think that, when Mom and Dad and all his teachers and every other adult he’d ever come in contact with had told him that people with all different colors of skin were equal, and males and females were equal, and rich people and poor people were equal. . . .

  Yeah, because they’re all people, Nick thought. Robots just pretend to be human.

  He didn’t bother answering Michael. Eryn just pursed her lips. Mom gave a little shake of her head—so quickly that Nick thought the mayor probably didn’t notice.

  “We’ve just finished watching the video,” Mom told Michael. “And Mayor Waterson and I have asked the kids some of the longstanding questions, but they said they didn’t know the answers either. I think everyone’s too tired to concentrate. I’m afraid you’ve arrived here just in time to go home.”

  “Oh,” Michael said.

  He leaned against the door, almost as if he were relieved.

  Though, can a robot really feel relief? Nick wondered. Or is he just pretending?

  Mom was right about one thing: Nick was too tired to sort out anything else about what was real and what wasn’t. But he wasn’t too tired to ask the big question.

  “Do you know what
happened that made humans go extinct?” he asked Michael.

  Michael shook his head, throwing off little droplets of water where the snow had melted in his hair.

  It’s not actually hair, Nick told himself.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Michael said. “I do know nobody seems to be in danger at the present moment, so maybe it would be best to just go home.”

  Does he want to get away from the mayor, or does he want to get Eryn and me away from the mayor? Nick wondered.

  Mom stood up, and the mayor did the same.

  “We’ll stay in touch,” the mayor said. She turned to Eryn and Nick. “You two know you absolutely cannot share what you’ve learned today with any of your friends, right?”

  “You think you’re going to be able to keep this secret forever?” Eryn asked incredulously. “Secret from all the other humans, I mean. You think—”

  “We think the other human children need to find out this information at their own pace,” Mom said. “Just as children grow and develop at different rates, they will be ready for this potentially devastating news at different stages as they move toward adulthood. Some may never be ready.”

  She looked and sounded as calm as when she was explaining math homework. Except that she darted her eyes toward Michael, and then away again.

  The mayor didn’t seem to notice. She was peering intently at Nick and Eryn.

  “And since you two are among the oldest of the Snowflakes, you must be sensitive about protecting the rights and needs of all the younger children,” the mayor said. “As well as the rights and needs of the children your same chronological age who might not be as intellectually or emotionally advanced.”

  Nick glanced at Eryn. No matter how “advanced” they were, neither of them seemed capable of doing anything but gaping at the mayor right now. Did Nick look as much like a stupid fish as Eryn did?