Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (36 page)

Mei took her breakfast and moved toward her end of the table, where the misfit girls clustered like a flock of awkward sheep. She sat next to chubby Fen Hua, who was attacking a bowl with her habitual total focus—she seemed to be the only girl whose body refused to relinquish its fat stores to the thing growing inside it. Crooked, simple Nuan mechanically spooned food into her mouth a little farther down, the occasional drop falling back into the bowl for recycling.

As Mei began to bury her hunger under the glop, a new girl sat down across from her. Mei had noticed that many new arrivals gravitated to her end of the table, perhaps sensing the lack of threat. Most graduated out to one clique or another soon after.

She looked very young, skinny in the shapeless gown they all wore. Her face was pale and her posture telegraphed fear.

Mei kept her gaze averted. She didn’t need to talk to the newcomer to know her story. She would be from a small village somewhere in the provinces surrounding Shantou. Her family would have faced privations, debts, deaths caused by flu and/or the domino fall of diseased crops.

A man would have appeared in the village, driving a clean truck. He would have had tea with the girl’s father or eldest brother and discussed something in low, urgent tones. And depending on the particulars of her family, her father or brother would have looked at her with calculating or desperate eyes. She would not likely see the sheaf of bills that passed from one hand to another. There would be a tearful parting, or not.

There were no tears when the man offered to take away the extra mouth that had befallen Mei’s uncle. She was the troublesome daughter of his city-living brother who’d died, along with his wife, during the flu season two years earlier.

“I will keep your share for you, for when you are finished,” he told her in farewell.

She knew he lied, but in her ignorance was cautiously excited to escape the resentfulness of his family, to make her own way. That feeling didn’t last long.

The new girl was still frozen in front of her bowl. Mei was halfway through her own.

“You should eat,” she said in a low voice, modulated to just carry over the murmur of conversation in the room. The attendants didn’t like a ruckus.

The girl didn’t seem to hear.

Mei nudged her slippered foot under the table. The girl’s vacant stare shifted up from the bowl. Mei pointedly shoved the western-style spoon into the mush and brought it to her mouth.

“Eat,” she said.

The girl hesitantly began to eat from her small, white bowl. It was the kind for newcomers and girls in their rest period, formulated to feed one, not two.

“It’s not so bad, see?”

She got no answer.

Back in her room, Mei settled herself in her chair. It was hard compared to the one in her old bedroom, but it was better than anything in her uncle’s small hut, with its thin mats on a packed earth floor. Sitting made her gravid state a little more bearable.

She turned on her tablet and listlessly flicked through the games. The attendants called the tablets a privilege, but Mei intuited that without them, the girls’ crushing boredom could become a problem for the operation.

In her case, the thing wasn’t much help anyway. She didn’t even bother with the video selection, mostly ridiculous state-approved soap operas. The games never changed. She settled on go and placed virtual stones on the board as the app’s limited AI tried to outwit her.

A car door slamming pulled her out of the game: comings and goings were rare for the derelict dorm complex. She went to her window and looked down at the cracked parking lot that fronted the building, sensed other girls in other rooms doing the same.

It was the bright orange Changfeng that appeared every two weeks or so. The usual young man, wearing dark augmented sunglasses and a leather jacket, carrying a small white and blue cooler. He trotted up to the entrance of the building, batting aside a skein of netting. Faintly, she heard him speaking into the intercom.

In the girls’ unchanging world, the young man’s arrival always inspired discussion—his appearance, his purpose, his eligibility. None had ever seen him closer than from their high windows in the otherwise empty building, but most had theories about his personality and his attitudes towards the princesses locked in their tower.

Mei didn’t follow their gossip. The man was an element of the factory, her enemy.

Her stomach was growling again when the bell rang for second breakfast. She knew it was the thing in her belly that absorbed all the energy, but she was the one who felt the hunger.

In the hallway, she found herself walking next to the new arrival, who surprised her by murmuring, “My name is Jia Li.”

“I’m Mei.”

They were scanned by the attendant, received their disks. Mei collected another large purple bowl, while Jia Li was given a white cup. They sat next to each other.

“It is too early for lunch,” observed Jia Li.

“There are six meals a day here. This is second breakfast,” said Mei.

Jia Li poked at the glop in the cup.

“We have not even started to work yet. Why so much food?” she asked.

Mei glanced at her.

“You don’t know what this place is.”

Jia Li stared at her cup.

“A factory.”

“A womb factory,” said Mei. From the silence, she guessed that the girl didn’t understand. “We make things inside us. Like babies, but not babies.”

Jia Li’s cup froze on the way to her mouth.

“Father said I was going to work in a factory,” she whispered.

“You are. But not with your hands.” Mei thought of the young man and his delivery. She was sure it was a new batch of eggs.

“Soon you will start. Don’t be afraid,” she said, thinking of her own terror when, ten weeks ago, the attendant had entered her room, shown her the white oblong shape and said, ‘Relax and this will be easier.’

“An attendant will put a small thing inside you. It doesn’t hurt. It will grow. In three months, the cycle will be finished, and you will rest for two weeks.” The girl would find out eventually that “rest” really meant “heal,” she thought.

“But. . . what. . . what are we making?” asked Jia Li.

“Have you heard of biobots?”

“What? No.”

“Well, it’s like a toy. But alive.”

Mei remembered the commercials she would see for something called a FurryBuddy while browsing on her tablet, when her parents were alive and the world still made sense. There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a couch in a sunlit room. Next to him was a smaller creature, covered in golden fur, like a cross between a monkey and a dog. Its oversized brown eyes shone in a face covered with short hair. Plush-toy limbs, stubby fingers. The bottoms of its feet, visible as it sat on the couch with its legs too short to bend at the knee, had dog-like pads on them.

It held an old-fashioned book on its lap and told a story in its high-pitched voice. The child squealed with pleasure. In another scene the pair frolicked in a field. In another they walked along a sidewalk in a prosperous neighborhood, with the creature calling out in English the names of objects they passed.

She’d asked her father for one, and he’d smiled thinly.

“Those are too expensive for a professor’s salary,” he’d said. He’d ruffled her hair, as if trying to brush away her disappointment. “You’re better off using your imagination to make your dolls talk.”

Jia Li was speaking. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is it?”

Fascinated by them, Mei had learned all that she could, even if she couldn’t own one.

“It is like an animal with a computer in its head,” she said. “It’s like a pet that talks. It plays games, teaches things, languages. . .”

“But, how can we make a computer?”

“The computer, they put inside us. We grow the animal around it.”

Jia Li digested that.

“Then it goes to school to be a teacher?”

Mei pictured a classroom full of the furry creatures and couldn’t suppress a grim smile.

“No, the important stuff is already in its computer.”

Back in the room, playing games, waiting for the lunch bell. Her attention wandered, as it often did, back to the tablet itself. It looked just like the one the attendants had, but only ran a few programs, distractions for the girls. There was, of course, no Internet access, no way to get messages out. Not that most of the girls would make a stink even if they could—any trouble would quickly find their families, which might mean that they had nowhere to return to at the end of their two-year contract.

Mei didn’t care too much about that.

The tablet was tantalizingly similar to one she’d been issued in school. It, too, had been restricted to certain functions, but plenty of kids knew that pushing an unfolded paperclip through a small hole in the back of the device while holding down two buttons made the tablet ask for an unlock code: because the school had never changed it, it was “00000.” Then you could play all the games you wanted.

If Mei could unlock this tablet, she had imagined a thousand or more times, she could do something
other
than play games. Maybe she could reach out for help.

She was certain that the operation was illegal. Real biobots like FurryBuddies were made in fancy bioengineering factories by big companies, not by little groups of girls hidden in abandoned worker dormitories. But it must be cheaper to grow something almost as good in people, just like the phones made in illegal backcountry factories were almost as good as the ones made by the big brands.

The problem was that this tablet wasn’t quite like Mei’s old school-issued device: it had no pin hole in the back. She’d tried every possible combination of button presses, but all she’d managed to do was freeze the tablet a dozen times. If there was a workaround, it would be online—meaning it might as well be carved on the dark side of the moon.

She was trapped by the lack of some trivial thing, and that lack would cost her two years in this place.

A sudden fury uncoiled in her chest. Before she realized what she was doing, her hand swept the tablet off her lap. As it spun through the air, she was seized by a child’s terror. She was misbehaving, and she would be punished.

But by the time it clattered to a stop on the linoleum floor, she’d mastered the feeling. She was already in hell. Whatever this exercise of will cost her, she would pay it.

She tottered over to the dark tablet, stooped with a grunt, and picked it up. The casing flexed and she saw that the front and back halves had come loose in the impact. At least the screen wasn’t cracked.

She was about to try snapping the split halves back together when a thought froze her. There had been no hole for the paper clip. Now, there was a hole of a sort.

Gently, she pried the two halves further apart, until the back suddenly popped free. Inside was the usual green plastic with metallic traceries, a gray block that was likely the battery.

And right where the hole in the case of her school-issued tablet had been was a tiny white circle. She pressed on it with her finger nail and it clicked in. Release, and it popped back out. The paperclip switch.

The lunch bell rang.

Mei mechanically packed the food paste into her mouth, trying to speed up time. She hadn’t felt hope like this since. . . she blinked. Since before her parents got sick. Part of her tried to rein in that feeling, but it was impossible.

She looked up, and realized that Jia Li had asked her a question.

“What?” She didn’t mean to sound irritated, but knew she did. The other girl looked down.

“I was just wondering why we have to spend so much time alone. In our rooms,” she said softly.

“Oh. It has to do with the eggs. They can connect to things from inside us, like what happens with the tablet when the attendant checks you in for a meal. They keep us apart so that they don’t interfere with each other.” Mei had overheard this from girls who had been there longer, and it seemed believable as anything.

“It’s lonely,” said Jia Li.

“It’s better than having to deal with that lot,” said Mei, cutting her eyes toward the other end of the table.

“They aren’t nice?”

“Well, they can be pretty mean to Nuan there, or fat Fen Hua. And if you aren’t careful, they may decide they don’t like you, either,” said Mei, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“And you? Why don’t they like you?”

“Can’t you hear the city in my accent? They can, and that’s all the reason they need.”

But she knew that wasn’t all of it. The others seemed to accept that this place was their lot, that it was what their families needed of them. Sure, they had been scared, but for the most part they’d settled into it, made friends.

But Mei couldn’t. She could try to help Jia Li understand what was happening, but she couldn’t relax and make small talk about something else. In her mind, this was an ongoing violation, and pretending otherwise would be acquiescing to it. So the others mocked her city background, but she knew that was just shorthand for their resentment of her resentment.

Jia Li didn’t say anything for a while, and Mei half figured she’d decided against aligning herself with a pariah and was plotting her way into the safety of a clique. But she finally spoke.

“Well, they must be quite stupid.”

Mei couldn’t help but smile.

After the eternity of first lunch, the door was closed behind her again. She carefully took up the tablet, and lifted the back cover away. Pursing her lips, she held down the two buttons on the front and pressed the little circular switch.

The screen went blank. The China Telecom logo came up. And then a dialog for entering an unlock code.

Holding her breath, Mei touched the “0″ key on the onscreen keyboard five times. The screen blanked for a moment, then came back. . . unchanged. The same request for a code. Failure.

A harsh bark of frustration escaped her throat and she stared unbelievingly at the screen. She had been sure. It had to work. And it had not.

I can guess it, she thought, it’s only five numbers. . . but she knew she couldn’t. After a few tries, the tablet would lock itself entirely, become useless.