“I admit,” Julie said, “I get nervous when the kids are at school. I just—I want to know they’re okay.”
“Why wouldn’t they be?”
“I know. But still.”
“Don’t. Don’t check in on them. Let them be alone. That’s what we decided.”
“Okay,” she said. “I miss them, though.”
“You should,” he said. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to miss them when they’re gone.”
“I don’t like missing them.”
“Me either. But it’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
He was talking to himself too, of course. It sounded right in his own ears. It didn’t make him miss them less, but it helped to say these things aloud.
“I miss you too,” she said.
“I’m right here.”
“You’re out there now,” she said, pointing at him. “Not in here.”
“I miss you too,” he said.
This empty space in his head where nothing was. What went there?
He did, he supposed.
But who was he?
* * *
He kept the cookie off. He reasoned that the first few days would be the worst, the first few weeks difficult, but that it would get easier. Still—he too, sitting at the laboratory bench, or addressing a group of postdocs in the hospital cafeteria—he wondered how Melissa was doing, whether Dimitri was bullying her. In his mind’s eye he could see it happening. He had set his cookie to dormant-passive, accessible only in the case of emergency messages. And he had set a password for it, a long string of random digits that he had written down on paper and put in his desk drawer at home, next to the phones, so he couldn’t just turn it on again at a weak moment. Julie had done the same.
But god, he missed even the low hum the kids had given off in the cookie with the filters on high. Over and over he found himself, without thinking, trying to eyekey the map open. Nothing there.
His parents had done it. So had theirs. And every parent back to the beginning of the species.
But it just seemed . . . well, a tiny bit irresponsible. A needless risk.
He kept it off.
* * *
He could not, however, prevent himself from leaving work early three days a week, after his seminar let out, shouldering his backpack, wrapping his right pant cuff in its Velcro strap, and bicycling home.
The asphalt streets, unrolling beneath his wheels. The shifting trees, accepting the weight of the warm spring wind. The measured thrusting of the carbon scoops as they whispered past five miles up, glinting silver.
And behind it all, the silence in his head.
In this new routine he bicycled straight to the elementary school, where he would wait for school to let out, his bicycle leaning against a nearby tree, his cuff still pinned, at the front doors. He was the only parent there at that hour.
The playground sat empty, waiting to be filled. Tetherball, swings, basketball court.
The sunstruck playing fields. And the shadows under the fences.
On his first day sitting on the concrete shelf around the flagpole, a young woman emerged through the gray double doors and approached him. She wore a look that could break either toward apology or something much scarier.
“Hello,” she called, coming across the pavement. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Peter Burkhart,” he said. “Matt and Melissa’s father.”
She regarded him. Checking him against her records. “Is there something we can do for you, Mr. Burkhart?”
“Just waiting for the kids.”
“Do you need to take them somewhere?”
“No. Just . . . thought I’d hang out with them a little today.”
A disbelieving lift of her eyebrow.
“After school. On the playground,” he said. “I just—” He wasn’t going to explain. This girl—she couldn’t be more than twenty-two—wouldn’t understand. “That’s all,” he said.
A tiny scoff.
“I hope that’s all right,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, “it’s your life.” And she turned and went back into the building. A minute later a row of faces appeared at the window of what he knew to be the office.
Let them look.
He rearranged himself on the concrete wall.
Matt stopped dead in his tracks when he saw him there the first day. Wondered if something was wrong, if he was in trouble. The playground swarmed with children, a suddenly teeming city of very small, very loud people. A very few other parents, collecting their smallest, not wanting to rely on the cookies to lead them home.
And here was his father.
“I’m just here to say hi,” he told his son. “Just to say hi and watch you play a little.”
Matt took this in. “I was going to play with Sheldon, though.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll just be over here.”
Matt gave him a long considering examination, then went off, talking to his friend.
But Melissa understood at once. She grinned seriously, then took his hand and guided him to the nearest play structure.
“Daddy,” she said, “let me show you what I can do.”
The play structure was the usual sort, slides and tunnels and various nooks and alcoves in which to hide oneself. She led him to a net of vinyl-coated ropes slung between two uprights. She put out a firm foot on the bottom rope, grabbed the net with two hands, then with a practiced swiftness she figured her route to the top of the net, one staggered, swaying step at a time. At the top she looped an arm through the lattice and extended her other arm out into the air, twelve feet over his head.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s high!”
“I can see everybody from here,” she said. “I can see our clubhouse.”
“Where?”
“Way over there, in the corner, under the lilac bushes. By the telephone pole. And I can see the top of your head!”
“What’s it look like?”
She regarded him. “A head,” she decided. Then she surveyed the playground again, the screaming, swirling mass, and gave a contented sigh. “I’m very good at climbing,” she said.
So many notes of his wife in that moment—the satisfaction, the ease in herself.
And that was his quiet determination, maybe. His secret ferocity.
* * *
This became his routine. Sitting on the ledge by the flagpole, before the double doors banged open and the children poured out, he assessed the quality of the silence in his head.
The silence seemed, somehow, to be softening itself, to be losing its definition.
What before had seemed a cavern, an actual emptiness, now felt more like a cloud—something soft and actual, spun from the faintest substance.
Some days Melissa wanted him all to herself, and other days she did what she had always done: played with her friends. Ran around, or sat in their clubhouse, huddled under the lilacs, the branches shivering. As far as he could tell they were a mix of synth and human, although mostly they were girls, and mostly from her class, which would mean—well, mostly synth, then.
It didn’t matter. At this distance, from the outside of them all, they were all just children.
He was an object of curiosity, sitting there. “You’re Matt’s dad,” a boy said one day.
“Yeah.”
“Why are you here?”
“Just here,” he said. “I like it.”
“But why?”
“I want to be,” he said.
It took a moment before Peter recognized this boy as the horrible Dimitri. His hair was spiked and he wore, improbably, a button-down blue shirt tucked into khaki shorts. Trim, tidy, his true nature given away only in his offended stare.
“You’re weird,” Dimitri decided.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” The boy plugged his hands deep into his pockets. “All you do is just sit there.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I run
around with Melissa.”
This didn’t satisfy him. He was truly a very small boy, built on a delicate, almost elven scale. But some hard fury burned behind his eyes. “She’s weird too,” he said.
“Well, maybe I think you’re pretty weird too, kid.”
This seemed to be what Dimitri wanted, as he granted him a sudden, wicked, grateful smile. “I know,” he said.
“You should really be nicer to people.”
“I’m nice to people,” Dmitri said. “I just don’t like synths.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not human.”
“Sure they are.”
“No, they’re not. They’re synths,” Dimitri said calmly. “Why do I have to go to school with things that aren’t people?”
He could, if he wanted, squash this little monster like a grape.
“Are you a synth?” Peter asked, all innocence.
“No!”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen pictures of my mom with me in her uterus.”
“How do you know they’re not just shopped? Maybe they want you to think you’re human but you’re actually not.”
But plainly the boy had entertained this thought for a long time on his own and had an answer ready. “If I was going to be a synth, I would just be a Super,” Dimitri said, shouldering his backpack. “Those are the only ones who are worth anything.”
* * *
Giving Melissa her bath that night—calm, calm—he mentioned Dimitri.
She splashed a little, pensively, then said, “He’s not very friendly to me.”
“I know.”
She soaped a long arm, squinted down its length like a sniper.
“But what you said? Wasn’t a very nice thing to say to him, I guess,” he said.
“I guess,” she conceded.
He watched her turn her arm, rotated the ulna, the radius, observing her own workings. It either was or was not the case that his daughter was a fully conscious, living creature, in just the way he was, self-aware and aware of her own self-awareness, unpredictable but bound by physics and probability in the same way he was, capable of originality, prone to certain behaviors, feeling, thinking, erratic, unknowable.
Either was or was not.
And if you couldn’t tell, if nobody could tell—what was the point of wondering?
“I’m strong,” she said.
“Yes, you are!”
“I can climb really well, you know.” She looked at him hard. “Because I’ve been practicing, for your information.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” She sighed, satisfied. “Just so I’ve given you warning.”
He laughed. “I’m warned, officially,” he said.
“I don’t actually want him to die. I didn’t say that.”
“I know.”
“So that’s not wrong, what I said, it’s just not nice. But he wasn’t being nice to me. So I was just being fair.”
“I can understand your thinking,” he offered.
She said, “I wonder what it’s like to die.”
“I don’t know.”
She said, “I’m not going to die.”
“Nobody knows if you are or aren’t, actually,” he managed. “Exactly what happens when you get older. But you’re not designed to work forever, and neither am I.”
“Why not?”
“Well, everything dies, honey.”
“Not everything. The universe doesn’t die.”
“Nobody’s sure about that. Nobody’s sure what happens to the universe.”
“When will you wear out?”
“Not until I’m about a hundred and fifty years old,” he told her. “And by then, who knows what will happen?”
“What about the Supers?”
He took a breath, steadied himself. “What do you want to know?”
“Who made them?”
“People did,” he said.
“Why aren’t they allowed out anymore?”
He said, “Because nobody can figure out how to turn them off.”
“You mean kill them,” she said sternly. “You don’t turn people off, you kill them.”
“Well, Supers aren’t the same as you and me,” he said. She knew this history, but one thing about kids, you had to repeat things—kids learned something, forgot they had learned it. “Supers are machines. They’re not like us. They don’t have the kinds of brains we do. Supers were made to be policemen and soldiers, and for a while people thought that’s the only thing they should do, and then some Supers’ programming went wrong and made them start killing people who didn’t deserve to be killed, people who were just committing normal crimes, or just normal people doing things that people do, like walking down a street. Not all of them did it, but enough. Most of them.” And never mind all the rest of the insane savagery the Supers were prone to, the sorts of things no one liked to think about at all.
“Where are they?”
“Well, most of them are in a sort of jail.”
She scowled at the water.
“It’s a very strong jail,” he offered. “They can’t get out. It’s underground, and very safe.”
“That’s not fair,” she said.
“Well.” He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“Not all of them are there,” she said.
“No,” he admitted. “A few are still loose. That’s why we have the pitons up, so they can’t come here.”
“How many are left out?”
“About nine hundred,” he said.
“Where?”
“Nobody knows,” he said.
She gave a long contented sigh and lay back into the bath, leaving just her face above the surface of the water. “That’s okay,” she said, holding very still. “They’ll be all right.”
* * *
In the calm, the peace of their darkened house, a flood of happiness came over him. The spring students whooped outside the window, the girls clacking along in their heels and the boys sealing them into their cars, the doors whumping shut. The quiet of the house, the peaceable exhalations from their children’s rooms.
“I think this is actually working out,” he said, turning to Julie on the pillow. “I like this a lot.”
She offered a weak smile.
“Do you?” he asked, sensing something.
“I’ve been peeking a little,” she confessed. “Every night after they’re asleep I’ve been just checking in for five minutes to see how they’re doing.”
“Oh,” he said.
“That’s all!” she cried softly. “I just check on them.”
“And?”
The look she presented him seemed pulled up from the depths of an ocean.
“Actually,” she said, “I was going to ask, please—I want you to look. At her.”
He went to his desk, keyed in the password, clicked on the cookie. That warm swell of a presenting pressure, suddenly, its mental thereness in the head. But—but, no, he hadn’t missed it, he thought now. A scattering of attention, the world broken into bits, a fluttering sense of something always better elsewhere.
Better off to just be yourself, just attend to the slanting motes of your own thoughts, the sense of a consciousness inflating like a rising loaf of bread, powered by an invisible exhalation.
Better that soft clean singularity of being.
But he looked at Melissa’s feed. That same rising and falling, the gentle sine wave. All the reads were the same.
He allowed himself a deeper look. It all looked familiar.
“There’s nothing new.”
“I know. It’s a repeating signal.”
“Repeating?”
“It repeats, exactly, all the time. Every nine minutes it cycles back again. It’s not really her.”
“Oh,” he said.
“She’s blocking us,” Julie said. “She�
�s been blocking us for a long time.”
“How? How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, maybe—that’s good,” he said. “That’s protection. She’s protecting herself.”
“I’m worried, Peter.”
But he was resolute. This new place. This new sense of himself. He shut down the cookie, and that great peace returned. “No,” he said. “No, this is what we wanted. This is what we’re doing.” And then, as they settled into their pillows, “We owe it to them both.”
* * *
She woke in the morning with the sense of having been inspected overnight. The sense of someone standing over your bed in the darkness.
But she hadn’t been there. She hadn’t been there to be looked at. Only a dummy, like in a movie, where someone’s escaped from jail.
Still—it meant that they knew.
So that morning, under the lilac bushes, she called the club together.
It was only fair, really, that they be in charge of things. She and the others. Because they were just going to be around a lot longer than human people. It was like being somebody’s older brother or sister. You had to take care of them. And you had to be in charge. You had to be in charge because you knew better, and you understood more things, and you could do things they couldn’t do.
And you could be fair.
She had got this urge from her parents, after all. This stubbornness, this drive to be different from everybody else. She had inherited it from them.
And a little selfishness too, maybe.
First of all, you could reverse the signal on the pitons. That’s what they had been for, originally. They were like emergency call boxes. You could fix the pitons not to block but to summon. You only needed to be smart about how to do it, and they were all smart. They were all very smart creatures. They had all blocked themselves from their parents by now. She had taught them how.
The telephone pole grew from the earth in the corner of the playground. That’s why that corner was such a good place for their clubhouse. In that clean green light, under the scented florets, in the secret spaces among the branches. And they all agreed: it wasn’t fair that the Supers, who were like them, couldn’t go wherever they wanted. Even if they were bad. Because it wasn’t fair that the people who had made them that way had decided they couldn’t come out. Because what if somebody decided that against all of them someday? How did they know it wouldn’t happen like that?
The Best American Short Stories 2020 Page 11