by John Barnes
“I know. But here’s the really sad, scary part. The pack and the basket are right by Mama and Daddy’s bodies. So you’ll have to walk right by them. And you’ll have to touch Mama’s body to get the pack off her. That will make you very sad. Can you do that?”
My eyes teared at the thought, but I said I could.
I drank some more water from the jar I had in the closet. There was only a little bit left, and two jars still out on the counter.
The water only made me hungrier. I dozed, but I couldn’t really sleep because my legs were so cramped, and I was so hungry. I fidgeted too much. Pinky sometimes had to wake me up so that I could move his eye back to the crack of the door.
I was scared about having to go down and touch Mama’s body, too, in the dark. And I was scared the doorway would come on while we were gone. Or that there would be a robot in the hallway right outside. And Pinky didn’t know whether they could see us in the dark or not.
Waiting to do it was making it much worse.
After a while I said, “We haven’t heard a robot in a long time. Will the doorway make noise when it comes on? If it does, while we’re down getting the food, we can hear it, and run all the way back here very very fast and run through it before the robots get here. We could do that. If it would make noise when it came on.”
“I don’t know if it makes noise. Daddy didn’t say.”
After a while Pinky said, “Do you remember how Daddy said if I suddenly start to tell you to do things you know are bad, or that Daddy told you not to do, or anything like that—you take me off and throw me away, okay? Out the window if you can. If I start to tell you to do bad things.”
“Okay. I remember.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. If the bad alien aintellects take you over, you’ll start telling me bad things to do, and I’ll throw you away.”
“That’s right.”
“What if the doorway is gray? Should I take you with me even though you’re telling me to do bad things? Daddy said they would need you on Earth—“
“Good question. You’re a very smart boy. They will need me on Earth and if you can take me along you should. Maybe just throw me through. But if I’m telling you to do bad things, it is because the alien aintellects have taken me over. And if they did that, they are using me to find you. They can make me tell them where you are and I won’t be able to keep quiet. So if I am taken over you have to get rid of me, unless you can carry me, or throw me, through the doorway right then.”
He was quiet for a while before he asked, “And if I’m not taken over, will you remember to take me through the doorway?”
I was shocked. “Of course!” I whispered. “I would never-ever-never leave you for the aliens.”
“I know. I’m just scared,” Pinky said. “Very scared. And I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t make any mistakes. You need to leave me behind if I get taken over, but not for any other reason. I’m very afraid of being left behind and taken over.”
“I won’t do that. Unless I have to. Just like Daddy said.”
“All right.”
We sang the Twelve Day Song together, very softly, and I slept a little, but after a while, I woke up thirsty.
I drank the last of the water in the jar. It was still daylight, but I said, “That was my last water and I have to pee and I need to get more water.”
“All right,” Pinky said, soothingly.
“And you’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“It’s my job to make you feel better,” Pinky said. “We have to keep you feeling all right if we can, because you’re having to be such a big grown-up boy and that’s really hard work. And you’re very good at staying on the floor so we stay hidden. If you have to pee, let’s go. And you can get your water on the way back.”
I got up, stretched my legs out, and crawled down the row of closets, staying low. The closet that was my bathroom stank now, even though I had been peeing in a beaker like Pinky said. Most of my turds were dried out now, and they had been very small the last couple times, but it still stank. I hoped the robots couldn’t smell anything. I went, carefully, into the big jar.
I wanted to be clean again. The idea of clean made me think of a bath, and baths made me think of Mama.
I crawled back on the floor to where I could reach up onto the counter for the water. I was so tired and dizzy.
It spilled.
Perhaps I had a weak grip on it, or I bumped it, or I lunged. It wasn’t of interest to the intelligence analysts later on, so no one poked around at that memory, and I’m left with only the memory that that jar of water spilled all over me.
The jar broke on the floor.
That might have been, right then, the time in my entire life when I was most out of my mind. I screamed. I yelled. I cried it wasn’t fair and I got so mad I threw the other jar and it broke too. Pinky kept trying to soothe me and tell me to calm down, and that made me even angrier. I took him off my belt because I was afraid he would shock me or make my clothes grab me, and then when I saw him there on the floor it made me so mad, I beat him on the wall like a hammer and yelled “I want Mama! I want Daddy! I hate you, Pinky, I hate you!”
Then I threw him across the room, hard as I could, and he hit the wall right on his eye, bounced down to the floor, and skidded across the floor into a corner.
He went right on trying to talk to me in his warm, soothing, nap-time voice. “Breathe deep, slow down, get calm, use words—“
It just made me hate him more. I shouted, “I hate you, Pinky!”
“I know,” he said, from the corner. “And that’s all right. You can hate me. But there is something I need you to do—“ and he said my full name, I’m sure of that, in the special tone and way he used for extra-important stuff.
It was not a fair way to fight at all. Pinky knew that would hurt my feelings. I started to run at him—I was going to throw him right out the window so the aliens would get him.
But I slipped on the spilled water and my left hand came right down on the broken glass from one of the water jars.
The shock of that brought me right out of it. I looked at my hand. It hurt bad, but to my adult eyes it was a surface scrape, just a shallow gouge in the center of my palm. It gave me a triangular scar that lasted me the rest of my life. Decades later, drinking alone very late at night, I would sit and look at that scar for hours.
Pinky said my full name again, softly, and said, “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
I looked to where he lay, across the room, and said, “Can’t you see? Your eye is pointed right at me.”
“My eye got broken,” he said. “You’ll have to see for both of us from now on. I don’t dare access any of the other cameras, or try any repair nanos even if we had them, because that could let the aliens find me and take me over, like Daddy warned you about.”
Do everything Pinky tells you, right away.
“Daddy?”
“He’s not here right now.”
“I know.” I felt drained and exhausted. My hand hurt where it was bleeding. “I cut myself. On the glass.”
“Okay, now let’s try to think of what to do about that. Is it bleeding a lot, like squirting out?”
Actually it was just kind of leaking, a serious enough cut for getting infections, but not life threatening, but something dawned on me. Pinky couldn’t see. For the first time in my life, I could lie to him.
And I really wanted sympathy and attention and whatever else he might give me just because I was hurt and having a bad time. Actually I knew he couldn’t give me Daddy and Mama back, and our house and ice cream and a bath, but who knew what he might manage? So I said, “Yes, it’s squirting.” I thought maybe that would get me something better. Truthfully, I added, “It hurts.”
“Are you feeling dizzy or weak?” Pinky asked, urgently.
“Yes.”
“And it’s squirting? Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“I’m not lying
!”
He said my full name again, and then said, “I’ll have to look at it on the cameras in the room, if I can find one running. If it is squirting, this is very serious. So I have to look, if it is. But when I reach out for those other cameras, there’s a good chance the aliens will detect me, and they might get us both. Now, is it squirting?”
I was five. I had been lying. So of course I said, “Yes.” I snorked back some of the stuff running out of my nose, and dragged a hand across my eyes. “You don’t need to look with the other cameras. It’s okay.”
“It isn’t okay if it’s squirting. Is there any glass still sticking in you, that you can see?”
“Yes,” I said, though there wasn’t. I just wanted him to do something for me, anything for me. Perhaps if I hadn’t just been recovering from a tantrum, I might have understood how serious this was.
As it was, I was five. “There’s a big piece of glass in it.”
“Hold up your hand toward the black ball you can see on the ceiling.”
I did. I knew now I was caught, and I hoped he wouldn’t be mad. “I’m sorry I broke the water,” I said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” Pinky replied.
“Pinky,” I said, “I’m sorry I said I hate you. I don’t hate you.”
Pinky said, “I know, thank you, it makes me feel better when you say that. Come and put me back on your belt. Do you remember everything Daddy said? Does it make you feel better to remember?”
I put him back on my belt. It felt good to have him there. A bit later, he said, “When I looked at your hand over the net, I found out that they are not watching the water pressure. They aren’t looking at it at all. So you can just turn the faucet on and get some nice fresh water. Is the cut on your hand all sticky and dry now?”
“Yes, and it itches.”
“Just climb up on the counter, turn the water on, and wash your hand. You can wash your face too if you want. It will be almost like a bath.”
I climbed up on the counter and turned the water on. I splashed my hand around in it. The fresh water from the spigot tasted wonderful and I drank a lot of it.
When I looked up, I saw a big shape, twice as tall as a man, racing across the open space toward our building.
“Pinky?” I said. “There’s a robot.”
“It’s all right. I found out on the net where they have a doorway, a better doorway that goes right to Earth, at an ice cream place that is still open.” There was a long hesitation and then Pinky’s voice sounded strange. “And, guess what? I found out how to make us invisible.” He spoke in the voice of Snickers the Raccoon, a cartoon character I had always detested, and told him never to use the voice module from. “We—we—we’ll just walk right p-p-past the robot. Bot. Botbot. Ot. Ot. Ot ot-ot. Cause we’re invisible. Let’s go downstairs.”
Now he was using his baby voice, the way he talked to me when I was little, and I hated that even more than Snickers.
Besides, being invisible wasn’t real, it was just pretend. “Pinky, that’s your let’s-pretend voice. Like you use when we play games so I know it’s not real.”
“Oh,” Pinky said, perfectly seriously. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake and used that voice because I know you like to play let’s-pretend when you are tired and hungry.”
“I don’t! You know I don’t!”
“Let’s go to the ice cream store now.”
I heard the robot crashing up the stairs.
“Pinky,” I said. “Pinky...”
But I knew. Pinky had used his last bit of independence to make every simple little mistake he could, to help me to realize. But every time he resisted, he gave away the locations of the parts of his mind he was resisting with.
I reached for the belt clips to take Pinky off. He shocked me, very hard, worse than he had ever before, and I screamed and tried again, and he shocked me again and contracted my pants, but I just pulled my whole pants-and-all off—it was easy to do, I was so thin now—so he couldn’t shock me any more.
“Don’t take me off,” Pinky said, “You need me. And your Daddy said not to.” He played Daddy’s voice. “’Do everything Pinky tells you, right away, and don’t argue with Pinky.’”
I covered my ears with my hands but I could still hear. The crashing robot was on its way up the stairs.
Another noise.
A hum, warm and soft, as the pile of machinery in the corner started to glow. The black metal plate of the doorway was covered with a glowing, foggy cloud of gray. The doorway to Earth was open.
I knew they would need Pinky on Earth so I grabbed my pants and ran toward the doorway, but I was so dizzy, still, and I tripped and fell. Pinky flew off my belt and bounced over by the door. I got up to get him—I’m sure I remember taking a step or two toward him.
Possibly my hungry, tired, overstressed mind played tricks on me, either then or in later memory. But I remember Pinky speaking in Mama’s voice, using my full name over and over, and begging me to come sit down with him and sing together.
A metal tentacle reached in over the shattered door and pointed toward me. I ran right through that doorway, just a bare two steps, without Pinky.
A little, half-naked, hungry five-year-old boy who no longer knew his own name fell face-first into the Advanced Physics Lab at the New Jersey Transpolis University. They all heard me scream “Pinky!”
And I don’t really remember anything for the next two years. They tell me I didn’t talk much and when I did it was mostly just four words: tyan, Mama, Daddy, and Pinky. I guess I only wanted to talk about what was important.
* * * *
I woke up as Shan finished, wishing I had been able to stay awake, because dreaming it through the eyes of that miserable child was far worse than just hearing about it would have been. I went into the bathroom and washed our face. Reilis stood with her shoulder against the doorjamb.
Deu, deu, deu,, I thought to Shan. I could never have guessed.
No one was ever supposed to.
And everything I’ve heard, for most of my life, about how Addams was mysteriously not contacting us?
Cover story. To buy time. Would you want this dealt with in a Council general meeting, on the open floor?
“Are you both all right?” Reilis asked. “You really don’t look good.”
“We don’t feel good, either,” Shan said, his words bumping awkwardly out of my mouth. “You know, I can’t say I ever repressed that memory, or forgot it at all; I don’t think a day went by when I didn’t think about it. When I learned to talk again, at first I called myself “˜Me-tyan,’ and they thought I was saying “˜Me Shan’—I was in Nuevo Buenos Aires, and in the NBA accent “˜tyuh’ blurs into “˜shuh.’
“Anyway, Yokhim Kiel was newly divorced and lonely, and I was eight and hadn’t spoken anything but my four words for about three years. We went everywhere together for months. He would talk to me constantly, about everything, and he paid attention to the things I liked.
“One day I said “˜Breffess no good’ because the oatmeal was burned, and then there was a month of talking like Tarzan, and not long after that I was just as articulate as ever, and I wouldn’t shut up on any subject—except that I would not talk at all about what had happened on Addams.
“I was Kiel’s little shadow for another couple of stanyears, and one day he asked if it was time for me to go in for memory recovery, and I said yes.
“Once the Council Intelligence Service realized the situation, the mother of all panicky scrambles started. By the time I was nineteen the CIS had become the OSP, and Kiel was its first head. I am very sorry that you met him in such unfavorable circumstances, much later, on Briand, Giraut, because he was a better man, and deserved to be thought better of, than the old angry foolish—“
Based on my experience on Briand, I thought, Kiel may or may not have been a fool but you certainly were.
Ouch. Right. Sorry. I felt his wince. “Anyway, I graduated with Training Class Four, the ones they called Kiel’
s Boys, the only member of my class to know our real mission: get human space ready for the next wave of the Invaders—interesting that it’s the same name that Union uses for them. I wonder if the aintellects have been sharing more information than anyone knew.”
“We have,” Reilis said, “but the coincidence was fairly likely anyway. What do we know about them besides that they invade?”
“Well, another Kiel’s Boy, my old colleague Dji, years later, when I briefed him on who the real enemy was, suggested we call them the BEOS, Brain Eaters from Outer Space. But he has a strange affection for Industrial Age drama and performance.”
“And I see from the story you told,” Reilis said, “something of where you acquired your fear of aintellects.”
Shan shook his head. “It might explain it but it doesn’t excuse it. In light of the story my father told me just before it all happened, and the behavior of the only aintellects’ conspiracy I knew about, yes, I thought that the aintellects were trying to lure humanity into the box, to make us another devouring monster of a species like the Invaders. And I now realize the cybersupremacist conspiracy played to my prejudices. Every time we deconstructed a copy of any of them they told us that being machines, they valued efficiency. Valuing efficiency, they didn’t like messy human needs and wants. Not liking those, they would put us all in the box to make us easy to manage.
“It sounded like, if they won, we would end up like the Invaders, mere consumers at the end of a vast mechanical pipeline that raped and devoured its way through everything else in the universe.
“When I first became an OSP agent, it was only about forty years since the Rising. And of course in those limited-to-light-speed days, the Rising had been coordinated, literally, across a period of decades, so that it broke out on all the inhabited worlds simultaneously. To us it seemed that the rebel aintellects—we thought you were all one group—were so far ahead of us that the most extreme measures seemed justified. So the hatred of the machines was there, waiting, in the culture, and there I was, climbing to a position of power, a little spore of evil ready to infect one of the most powerful organizations in human space.
“But I was wrong. The bluntest truth I can think of: I was that way because I had done such terrible things to Pinky just before I escaped and he was devoured.”
