Unnaturals

by Merrill, Lynna

  The doctor's smile faded. He looked at her, then back at his screen, then back at her. He was young, Mel knew. Yet, right now his eyes looked old.

  "You might have heard of the people who have left...of the dead people," he said in the end, softly. "One hears about people leaving all the time on the feeds. It is a normal thing, so who would pay attention? Who would pay attention for more than two moments, I mean? The people out there in the city don't know that there is a natural age range for leaving, Mel. Yes, it is not typical for some to leave, children for example, but people don't know that. If it happens, they accept it and move on. It is easy to move on, isn't it, with so many interesting things to occupy you, such as the latest cactus computer!—back off, medstat!—and no, Meliora, I am not shouting at you."

  He wiped the sweat on his forehead with a sleeve. "We never kept those who left secret. But something like this just does not make long-standing news. As for the trains themselves: why would we tell people about the trains? So that they forget the moment someone writes to them about the new pants in the mall or the new hair color? Why waste ourselves telling them at all? Or, imagine they didn't forget quickly enough. Do we tell them and watch them become afraid of trains—or worse, start treating the trains as some kind of wonderful experience? No, Mel, people don't need to be told. People are better off living in their own little bliss."

  "I wasn't better off," Mel said softly.

  "Which is why you're here now."

  "I... Doctor Eryn is not answering my questions, and I am not sure that even here is a place where... Tell me, please, did I make trains crash?"

  He sighed. "No. Yours was a controlled test. You couldn't have. We watched you all the time—or, Eryn did. I admit no one expected you to be a Doctor of Computers. You had showed the potential before, of course, being able to concentrate, but you hadn't shown much interest."

  "How could I show interest? Interest was unnatural. Tell me, Doctor, do you know of the City of Life? Or Nicolas? Was he on one of those trains?"

  The doctor sighed again. "I don't know of any city like this, Mel. If it is an old city, it will be out there in the feeds. As for the boy...was he a friend of yours?"

  Was he? Mel wondered.

  "I will check, Mel. I will let you know."

  She could not ask for more right now—no, she could.

  "Please, teach me about computers, Doctor."

  He smiled. "This is what we are here for. And, to tell you the truth, becoming a Doctor of Computers is better than becoming a Doctor of People—but don't tell Doctor Eryn. We work with consistency, systems and rules. In programming computers, we work with the world rather than expecting the world to work with us. Thus, we can leave our mark upon the world and be useful. Unlike most people." He smiled wider. "I wouldn't exchange being a Doctor of Computers for anything."

  "I guess I wouldn't, either, if trains depend on us. If we are the people to prevent train crashes in the future. I will learn everything about computers, Doctor Theodore."

  Old

  Learning was easier said than done. Ivan, also a future Doctor of Computers, learned faster than Meliora. The programming language that you typed into the computer came more easily to him. Theodore praised Ivan and said that he was smart and quick. That if he continued like this, he'd soon be given responsibilities that would impact the outside world.

  No such responsibilities for Meliora.

  Theodore tried to help, but he could not. He'd explain something, and she'd understand, but then, when she started making the program, inevitably she'd get stuck. Theodore's step-by-step explanations were of no use. Oh, she remembered his words and drawings and could reproduce them easily, but as for planning her own program—she got stuck, always.

  Besides, she was stuck with Eryn. An Academy beginner must study the basics of doctoring for both humans and computers, which meant lessons with both Eryn and Theodore. There were other people at the Academy, thirty or so at a time, but they didn't interact with the new recruits much. Mel talked to some of those people, ate with them, even messaged with them, but it was more like communicating with her friends from the outside. Superficial.

  The three of them still went to those intro classes together, though perhaps Ivan would stop soon.

  Lucky him.

  "Why doesn't Eryn ever close you off in the dark room?" Mel asked once. Ivan just shrugged. He never contradicted Eryn, never held a new baby in the wrong way for the medstat to make an injection, never touched a medstat behind the lid with a needle. He never asked questions of Eryn, either. He only cared about his study computer with the typing interface and about Theo's lessons.

  It was just Mel and Adi in the dark room, and never both at the same time. Indeed, Adi only got there once, for loading a medstat with the wrong pills. She did it on purpose, Mel knew. Adi thought those pills were better but never dared tell Eryn.

  "What if it used them on a person!?" Eryn had screamed. "It believes its programming! It has no way of knowing what the pills really are!"

  Adi never made a mistake again. She checked everything at least five times, and she often looked behind her shoulder as if she expected someone, or something, to be there. She was never sent to the dark room again, but she grew as thin and pale as Mel had become, and her hands shook even more often than Mel's.

  We could fight her, Adi, Mel wrote one night. Look at what she has done to us. Together, the two of us could do something.

  You're mad, Adi replied after many minutes had passed. Just like those people eighty years ago you told me about. We don't fight. We don't break. We don't give wrong pills or poke medstats with needles. We learn what we are taught, and we create and heal.

  Their nightly messages grew sparser.

  Mel learned to pretend in front of Eryn and to avoid the dark room. Before that, however, she spent so much time there that she thought she'd climb to the ceiling soon—though she was scraping mortar and climbing the walls every time and hadn't reached it yet. For all she knew, the walls of that room might go as high up as the Academy's roof. She didn't eat or drink much. She couldn't do it in the room, and outside she'd stopped caring. The Academy medstats didn't force her, either.

  She cared about finally making a computer program! About stopping train crashes, about making everything better. She also cared about Mom, of course, which was perhaps the main reason she wasn't spending time in the dark room any more. Besides, she wanted to find Nicolas and the City of Life.

  Nicolas, at least, hadn't been on those trains years ago. That much Doctor Theodore told her.

  Now if only he could tell her how to really program.

  "Hey, Ivan," she told the boy one day in their third month. "Let me watch you work for a bit, all right?" Perhaps she could catch some knowledge from him.

  Today, they were writing a communication program, or what Theodore had called a demo version of one. It was like the hummie interface, but not the entire hummie interface. Mel and Ivan were only working with two notes instead of all seven, and with a melody of a set length of four intervals, set in only one octave. The number of variations was more limited than that of a full hummie, but the principle of the program was the same.

  The program took the melody hummed by the person sending the message and compared it against a database of note combinations and their meanings as pertaining to this person. When it found the correct meaning, it compared it against a second database, of meanings and their expression in words, pertaining to the message's receiver. The aim of the program was to get a person's humming and produce another person's words, based on meaning.

  Ivan took his stylus and started planning his program.

  "Where do you think the information for these databases comes from?" Mel asked.

  "From people's personal computers." Ivan glanced at her with a momentary expression that suggested she was daft. It was gone in the next moment. His politeness wouldn't let it stay—yet. Ivan had been very polite when they had first arrived and it still showed, th
ough politeness didn't matter much in the Academy.

  "How does it get into people's own computers, is what I am asking. Theo said that Doctors of Computers and People don't watch people all the time—only sometimes do they take a look into a person's computer habits and communication."

  "I don't know. It doesn't matter as far as the program is concerned, Mel." He started drawing again.

  "But how is the information gathered? Through another computer program? How can we know our own program is correct, when we don't know if the information it relies on is correct? We should be writing that other program, too."

  "Mel, I am designing this program now. The other one is none of my business!" He started drawing again. He hadn't started typing yet, and usually, by now, he would have.

  A moment later: "What, Mel?"

  She noticed she'd been tapping her own study screen with her stylus, tap tap, on and off.

  "Theodore wouldn't tell me how they watch people exactly. Why? It must be done through a computer program, too. Sometimes I think that Theo simply doesn't know, which is why he is not telling me."

  Ivan said nothing. He finished his design and started typing.

  She moved closer to him. "Ivan, this design is not complete. It can't be. The whole program is wrong. It assumes that the person sending the message will always produce the same melody with the same emotion, but what if that changed? We must account for so many things, for variation of meaning, of moods, permanent changes..."

  "Meliora, just shut up! No wonder you can't write a program! 'Why?' 'What if?'—those are not our job. You have input and you must produce output—that's it! That's your task! Leave me alone now, I have a program to write!"

  She left him alone. She went to her room and wrote her program. When she took it to Theodore, she learned that this time she'd been faster than Ivan.

  No why-s, no what-if-s. Ivan, with his outburst, had given her more information than Theodore, with all his attempts for answers, ever had. The problem was that Theodore was nice. He tried to answer when, just like Ivan, he didn't know how.

  No why-s, no what-if-s. Just senseless, unthinking following of instructions, or creation of instructions for a computer. Mel could do it. She could do it, of course. But she'd thought that her job would be more than this.

  Theodore enthusiastically praised her progress and she made a good show of being happy. She'd lived in Lucasta all her life. She was good at pretending that she was like the rest of them.

  ***

  She took the train to Lucasta at softlights. When it reached the southern station in Lucasta and normal people started boarding it, Mel thought the visit might have been a mistake.

  She'd been to see Mom three times before. During those visits, she'd never wanted to grab the person on the train nearest to her and smash his head into the wall and shout, "What do you fools know!? You know nothing!"

  She sat still in her seat. She watched the person hum, and hum, and hum, into his computer. This person didn't know, would never know, that there was such a thing as a programming language and an Academy. He'd never know that information about his activities and emotions was stored into a database.

  Some of the people on the train sent messages to Mel. The woman on her other side wrote to her something about the theater of wonderful experiences.

  Go to Doctor Eryn, Mel almost sent, she'll give you wonderful experiences at no cost.

  She didn't send this, of course. She sent nothing at all, to anyone. She could not just open her computer on the train and use a needle to message—and after she'd had her questions about databases unanswered, she'd never trust a hummie interface again. She'd seen few of the actual hummie messages people got from her. Most of the time she only knew what she sent.

  You're all ignorant sheep, and I am only a little less ignorant than you.

  At least these days she knew what sheep were. Eryn liked to call her students sheep, or grass-eaters. There were no sheep in Lucasta. There were some in the Academy, and Mel would see them in her education, but only after she was done with babies.

  Of course, the sheep didn't really eat grass. Once upon a time they had, so long ago that even the old feeds didn't really mention it. There had been many different kinds of animals in those days, and they had all eaten something living, be it grass or other animals, Eryn said. For some time, Mel even thought that Eryn had lied, that this information was a new way to punish Mel for whatever transgression Eryn thought Mel had committed this time. The very thought of creatures eating creatures... But it was likely true. Eryn didn't lie often.

  Mom was waiting for her at the station closest to their house. She always did. For some reason, even though she hadn't cried for months, Mel threw herself into Mom's arms and wept.

  A medstat wheeled quickly to her. Mel had to tell it "No!" very firmly and in a very loud voice. It wouldn't obey anything less than that. Six months ago, it would have.

  "Mel, my love," Mom told her after they were both at home, Mel having been silent all the time they were walking, "Mel, do you want to go away?"

  "What... What do you mean, Mommy?" Are you asking me whether I want to die? Do you know what you're asking at all?

  "You're sad," Mommy said, simply. "You're angry. I've seen it before, Mel."

  Meliora looked at her mother. Mom met her eyes and held them for what for Mom was a very long time. Mom's eyes were deep and brown and sad. She wore her birth eye color today, and it wasn't even enhanced. Mel thought that Mom wasn't even wearing lenses.

  "Mom... Mom, what is it?" Suddenly, she was afraid.

  "You remember your dad, don't you, Mel?"

  After Mom had taken Mel to the doctor for the first time and blamed her ACD on Dad, they had never, ever again talked about him.

  "Mel, of course you remember him. You're such a smart, remembering child. Just like him. I don't remember many things in my life"—Mom laughed, trying to sound natural a bit too hard—"but him, I remember. He was also studying to be a doctor. They broke him, Mel. They broke my mate. He told me, once, 'They will always try to break you. They will try to push you away. You have no place there unless you can bear it. You must keep on. Always, you keep on.' But he didn't. A month later, he was gone. You keep on, Mel. Don't let them break you. Never, ever let them break you!"

  Mom was crying. It was so soft and quiet that even the medstat took its time to notice and edge closer to her. Time enough for Mel to stand up and shoo it away. This should be Mom's decision, not hers—yet, some tears must be cried. Even for a person who had let the medstat administer to her whenever it wanted throughout her life, some tears must be let go.

  "They won't break me, Mom."

  Mom met her eyes again. She wasn't even messaging. The computer was lying lonely on the table by Mom's chair. Mel didn't know if she'd ever seen Mom's computer anywhere but in Mom's hands or elsewhere on her body.

  "They won't break me! I'll never, ever leave you, Mommy. Don't worry about this, don't worry at all!"

  She had thought about leaving, but she had kept this hidden even from herself.

  "Oh, but what an old fool I am! Was this how I sounded—trying to keep you here tied to me? You go if you wish, love. You go wherever you wish, whenever you wish! I certainly wouldn't stop you, Mel, only make sure it is your own choice. Don't let them break you. Don't let anyone, ever, break you."

  Mel remained silent. Mom laughed softly. "I've surprised you, haven't I, talking about choice. Your old mom, who throughout her life has always done what fashion and being natural dictated, talking to you about choice. Strange, right?"

  "No, Mom. It is not strange. It was your choice, all of that. I know this. It still is our choice. And you aren't old, Mom. You aren't old."

  "Mel, I am. That much even I know. He told me, Mel. He told me when it is that people go away forever, even though he wasn't supposed to tell. I am close to this time. A year more for me, two at most. I am old—and even if he hadn't told me, I would know something. Those of my friends m
y own age do know something. We all...feel it, Mel, deep in our bones—Oh, Mel, my sweet love, don't cry! What did I do now? Stupid, stupid woman, Bunny, can't you do something right once in your life? You know, Mel, he hated Bunny. He said it was a stupid name to use on the interweb. He liked Erika, the name my parents gave me. Don't cry, Mel. Please, don't cry. These are the facts of life, Mel. You must accept them, for your own happiness. I want you to be happy, Mel."

  "I will be happy, Mom—Erika. This is prettier than Bunny, certainly. Why don't you change your interweb address, Mom?" Updating all your connections and all the consequent stupid little stuff will occupy you for days, and you'll even enjoy it. You won't be thinking of being old. I'd like to be here to occupy you myself, but right now I can't afford it.

  "Yes, Mel, my love." Mom smiled. "This is such a good idea!"

  I won't cry, Mom.

  Because I won't let you die.

  Gods

  She would have left. She knew it on the train back to the Academy, when she didn't feel like smashing people's heads into the wall any more. One brightlights period she would have woken up and gone where Nicolas had gone—or anywhere.

  No longer.

  Neither would she have the pleasure of not seeing Eryn any more after the first six months were over, even though a Doctor of Computers didn't need more human doctoring than that.

  She missed her class with Theodore. She went straight to Eryn. She'd never been to Eryn's office before, and she'd certainly never gone looking for the woman.

  There was a human gatekeeper outside the office, though usually the doctors only had machines, if that. Jerome, whom Mel had met on her first day here. He was a doctor himself, one of those who preferred to stay at the Academy. Yes, Eryn was special here. As for this man, he was as harsh as Eryn, from the vague information Mel had from others. She felt herself want to cringe and use the meek voice, to very cautiously ask him for permission to enter.