Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (37 page)

Mei took a deep breath. There was a number. If it wasn’t random, she had a chance of figuring it out. But she was still clueless when the bell for second lunch rang.

First dinner. Second dinner. A night of twisting dreams and fragile sleep. She woke once to screams leaking from the delivery room: one of the girls in the chair. She briefly wondered who, then realized she didn’t care and drifted back into nightmares before the sounds stopped.

First breakfast. Second breakfast. First lunch. The bells, the bowls, newly unendurable.

I let myself hope, she thought. So much worse than not having hoped at all.

She was peripherally aware that Jia Li was sitting next to her. Had asked a question. She tapped Mei’s shoulder softly, which stirred memories of tentative taps during other recent meals. As then, Mei fixed her with a flat stare, wanted to say they could talk later, but speaking seemed far too difficult. She turned back to her food, and Jia Li remained silent.

“. . .number. . .”

The word landed on Mei’s mind like a leaf on water, drifting out of context. She shook herself alert. A conversation down the table. Two girls, part of the clique headed by Ai Bao. Mei’s concentration bored into their words, barely audible above the murmur of conversation in the room.

“He must have connections,” said the first girl.

“Or money.”

“Or both!”

“How much do you think a car like that costs?”

It sounded like gossip about the young man with the Changfeng. But could it be linked. . .? She turned to the girls.

“Excuse me, what number were you just talking about?”

The pair turned and glared, and Mei realized that in her excitement she’d stepped out of place.

Ai Bao noticed.

“Hey city girl,” she said with quiet venom, “our business isn’t yours.”

Mei looked down, choking on her frustration, her heart hammering. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jia Li stand with her tray and walk down toward the other girls.

“Can I sit with you?” Mei heard her say. “I’m from Yangtouqui.” A village tiny enough that Mei had never heard of it.

“My cousin married a man from Bianshan, not far away,” said one of the girls.

“I know it, I have an aunt who lives there,” said Jia Li. “Who is he?”

Mei, now ignored by the other girls, stared at her bowl and struggled to keep back tears. She had been alone before, and now she was again. She should get used to it.

Meal times flashed by. She’d tried “12345″ on the tablet but didn’t dare guess again.

She was getting green bowls now, meaning she was due within two weeks. She’d known despair when her parents died, but this was different, open-ended, extending to the horizons of her being.

It had been four days since her failure to guess the code when Jia Li again sat next to her at first breakfast.

“The number they spoke of is the license plate of the Changfeng that comes here,” she said. “It is a very auspicious number. They think he must have bribed someone, a lot, to have gotten it.”

The droning static of hopelessness in Mei’s mind was suddenly quiet.

“Do you know it?”

“They say it is A99988. Though they also say in a week, he should be back again.” With more eggs.

Mei looked at Jia Li, her face flushing as she realized how unfairly she had discounted the girl.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“It woke you up. I guessed it was important. Why?”

Mei hesitated, not wanting to give hope and then take it away.

“It could be useful,” she said quietly. “I’ll tell you more when I can.”

Jia Li nodded. Mei noticed that her bowl was now blue, no longer white.

“The attendant came to you. . .”

“Yes.”

“Are you. . .?”

“I didn’t like it. But there are many things I don’t like,” said Jia Li. “Ai Bao, for example, is cruel. Her friends are frightened. But you are angry. That is better, for being here.”

“Maybe. But it’s hard.”

“I know.”

Back in her room, Mei keyed in 99988. The tablet’s start page flashed up, offering many more options than before. She shook with excitement, and felt an extra thrill as she saw the local and wide area connectivity icons at the top of the screen. . . but it began to waver as they remained transparent. No connection. Jiggering settings didn’t help.

She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t accept that her progress had been towards a dead end. She tried the browser, the various pre-installed messaging apps, but always ended up at the same error message: “No Internet connection found, please check settings and try again.”

She felt despair hovering around her, waiting for her to weaken so that it could retake her.

Almost idly, not allowing herself to consider the death of hope, she browsed through the rest of the newly available apps. Mostly, it was basic stuff—the usual calendar and note-taking kind of thing. But then she found an unusual subfolder.

Brightleaf Biomanagement.

She worked straight through the first night. The applications were configuration interfaces for biobots. At first they seemed impossibly complicated, but by poring over the help and scrutinizing the embedded tutorials, she built a rudimentary understanding. She became adept at identifying what she could ignore so she could focus on the relevant elements.

At first breakfast, Jia Li looked at her with concern.

“You seem tired. . . is it. . .?”

Mei smiled, and Jia Li hesitantly smiled back.

“I’m tired, but it’s OK. It’s not that that’s keeping me awake. It’s. . .”

She wanted to tell her everything, how she’d figured out that the tablets were linking to the biobots in the girls, fine tuning their development. How Mei could now interact with the thing inside her, could control some aspects of it. But with the attendants, the other girls, who knew what ears listening, she couldn’t. She shook her head.

“Insomnia. It’s just something that happens to me sometimes.”

The day seemed to move in fast-forward. She buried herself in the programming apps, and during meals her mind churned furiously over the latest setback, often finding a solution by the time she finished eating.

Jia Li sat next to her at each meal. The two exchanged brief smiles, but her new friend seemed otherwise content to let Mei focus inward, and she was grateful for it.

At second dinner, Mei noticed that Jia Li was among the last to arrive. She looked pale.

“Hey, are you OK?” she asked.

“I don’t feel too good.”

“If you’re really sick, you can tell the attendant,” said Mei. “But don’t bother her if you don’t need to, you know.”

Jia Li nodded. “I’ll see. Maybe.”

Mei turned to her food, let her mind drift back to programming problems.

That night she fell asleep while working with her tablet, and woke with a start in her chair. She rubbed her eyes, disoriented, with the vague sense that she’d heard something.

Then a girl’s scream echoed in the corridor. It froze her, sent her pulse racing. She heard the murmur of voices as well, receding, and sobbing. More screams, now muffled behind the delivery room door. She wondered whose turn it was, and the dinner table with its colored bowls flashed in her mind’s eye. She tried to visualize who had a yellow bowl, the last color. She couldn’t.

Mei didn’t realize she was looking for Jia Li until the door to the dining room closed. The last girls were getting their trays. Jia Li wasn’t among them. Nor was she further down the table. Mei craned her neck, just to be sure.

Maybe she overslept, since she had been sick. Maybe they let her stay in her room.

She looked up from her bowl to see Nuan staring at her from across the table. The shy, slow girl looked down, but Mei kept watching her, and after a few seconds she looked up again.

“The white truck came last night,” she said softly in her nasal voice.

“What?” There was a white truck that dropped off supplies sometimes, but Mei had never seen it come at night.

“At night, it takes girls,” said Nuan.

Mei felt ice run down her spine.

“What do you mean?”

“It hears the screaming, sometimes. It comes.”

Mei couldn’t speak. A bit farther down the table, Fen Hua had stopped chewing.

“Some girls get sick from the egg,” Fen Hua muttered to her bowl. “Makes bad problems. Screaming. They go. Nobody sees.”

Mei took a shuddering breath, then plunged her spoon back into her bowl. She forced her mind back to the programs, felt like she walked a tightrope over despair.

When her time came, it was bad. As she was led to the reclined chair with its stirrups, she was seized by an image of Jia Li writhing there in agony, her body rejecting the thing that had successfully taken hold in Mei’s womb.

Then the pain drove the image away, but it couldn’t dispel the sense of her body out of her control, enslaved to this creature that now wanted out and demanded her participation. And out it eventually came.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut as the attendant cut the cord. She heard its first mewling squeals, high pitched like a kitten’s. A morbid curiosity opened her eyes and she glimpsed it as the attendant carried it away, much smaller than a human baby, wriggling and pink and red.

It was bad. But it would have been so much worse without the knowledge that she’d made her mark on the little beast, that it was in a way her servant as well.

“Would you like to hear a story?” asked Doodles.

It had been a week since Karin’s mother had bought her the creature, in one of the little shops down on Canal. It was cute, but despite its soft, warm fur and the fact that it could speak, there was something about it that made her uncomfortable. Watching it daintily opening a pack of the dense, hard biscuits that it ate, the fact that they had to leave a bathroom door ajar because it couldn’t reach the knob, the bottle of antibacterial gel it fastidiously used next to the toilet. . . it was like having a pet that was also a house guest. Yet it seemed to have less personality than her cat Sandy—it was too chipper, too much like the annoying guide AIs that popped up alongside new apps to “help” you use them.

It wasn’t even a real FurryBuddy, though Karin didn’t have the heart to tell her mom that. It was glitchy, sometimes spouting garbled nonsense or freezing in place for a minute or more before popping back to life as if nothing had happened.

But sometimes the stories were fun. Weird fairy tales, or stuff about monsters and aliens. It was as if someone had just dumped the text of a bunch of old books into the thing’s memory—which was actually pretty likely, given its knock-off status, she thought. As it told the stories, its emphasis and pauses were sometimes off, its body language often out of sync, but not enough to ruin them.

“OK,” said Karin.

Doodles nodded, but it seemed to pause longer than usual before saying, “This story is in a Cantonese dialect. Would you like me to translate it into English?”

“Uh, sure.”

The creature smiled vacantly and swayed gently back and forth, a sign that Karin knew meant the computer in its head was chewing over something.

Then it stopped moving and looked at her. Karin had never seen the expression it wore before: flat, no hint of a smile, eyes hooded rather than brightly wide. It began to speak in an affectless voice, arms at its sides, staring straight at her.

“Hello. My name is Mei Feng. I made this toy. I did not want to. This is my story. . .”

About the Author

Peter M. Ferenczi has written extensively about technology for national magazines and the web, sometimes as a cheerleader, sometimes as a catcaller and concerned citizen of the world. He writes speculative fiction in the hope that he may infect others with the bone-deep reading addiction thats plagued him since he resolved the alphabet into words.

Born in California, he’s drifted east, living in North Carolina, New York, England, and now France. Along the way he acquired a couple of degrees, a love of photography and a taste for travel. He lives in Paris with his wife.

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

Brian Francis Slattery

American popular culture—science fiction and otherwise—feasted on the Cold War’s stew of paranoia, incessant competition couched in terms of progress, and threat of mutually assured destruction right up until the tension could, without a doubt, be declared over with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that Soviet-phobic films like
The Day After
(1983) and
Red Dawn
(1984) got made when they did. In the ’80s the Soviet Union wasn’t nearly the threat that it had once been. By the time the U.S.S.R. was in obvious decline, we’d been treated to four decades of apocalypse and post-apocalypse, in movies, television, books, and even music. Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”— the 1954 song often credited with putting rock ‘n’ roll on the map—was first issued as the B-side to “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town),” which tells the story of a man who has a dream similar to what happens to Burgess Meredith’s bookworm bank-teller in the
Twilight Zone
episode “Time Enough at Last,” except that instead of books he’s left with after the bomb drops, it’s women. And his glasses don’t break.

Just in case you’re the last person on earth who doesn’t know what a double entendre is, the music of “Thirteen Women” clues you in to what the lyrics are talking about: The saxes are swinging, the fingers are snapping, and the guitar makes catcalls. Not to be outdone, Dinah Shore re-recorded the song with a Cuban pulse as “Thirteen Men,” and Ann-Margaret recorded Dinah’s version as a cocktail number. Also equating the split atom with sex (and also from 1954) is Fay Simmons’s “You Hit Me Like an Atomic Bomb.” In addition to its flagrant metaphors, it has one of the most shameless—read: shamelessly terrific—organ parts ever heard. By 1957, the metaphor had been used often enough that it started to get kind of meaningless. The Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” of that year uses the couplet “Atom bomb baby, little atom bomb / I want her in my wigwam”—five times in the same song.