“What I don’t get is why his so-called teacher, Maxine, doesn’t just tell him the whole story about the Pendragon Exchange right away,” Reggie said.
“Um, excuse me. No spoilers,” Jon muttered. “Not everybody has read book five already.”
“Can we talk about the themes of the book instead of nitpicking?” Teri crossed her arms. “Like, the whole notion that Norman can contain all these multitudes but still just be Norman is fascinating to me.”
“It’s a kind of Cartesian dualism on speed,” Jay Kagwa offered.
“Well, sort of. I mean, if you read Descartes, he says—”
“The real point is that the wizard wants to control all those souls, but—”
“Can we talk about the singing ax? What even was that?”
They argued peacefully until around three in the morning, when everyone finally wore themselves out. The sky and the ground still rumbled occasionally, but either everyone had gotten used to it or the most violent shatterings were over. Molly looked around at the dozen or so people slowly falling asleep, leaning on each other, all around the room, and felt a desperate protectiveness. Not just for the people, because of course she didn’t want any harm to come to any of them, or even for this building that she’d given the better part of her adult life to sustaining, but for something more abstract and confusing. What were the chances that the First and Last Page could continue to exist much longer, especially with one foot in either country? How would they even know if tonight was just another skirmish or the beginning of a proper war, something that could carry on for months and reduce both countries to fine ash?
Phoebe left Jon and Zadie behind and came over to sit with her mother, with her mouth still twisted upward in satisfaction. Phoebe was clutching a book in one hand, and Molly didn’t recognize the gold-embossed cover at first, but then she saw the spine. This was a small hardcover of fairy tales, illustrated with watercolors, that Molly had given to her daughter for her twelfth birthday, and she’d never seen it again. She’d assumed Phoebe had glanced at it for an hour and tossed it somewhere. Phoebe leaned against her mother, half-reading and half-gazing at the pictures, the blue streaks of sky and dark swipes of castles and mountains, until she fell asleep on Molly’s shoulder. Phoebe looked younger in her sleep, and Molly looked down at her until she, too, dozed off, and the entire bookstore was at rest. Every once in a while, the roaring and convulsions of the battle woke Molly, but then at last they subsided, and all Molly heard was the slow, sustained breathing of people inside a cocoon of books.
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford, and Locus awards and was shortlisted for a Hugo, and also a novella called Rock Manning Goes for Broke and a short-story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her latest book is The City in the Middle of the Night. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wired, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Reader, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and tons of anthologies, including two appearances in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and her story “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Anders hosts the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco.
OUR AIM IS NOT TO DIE
A. MERC RUSTAD
Sua’s phone chimes with a notification:
You are due for your mandatory Citizen Medical Evaluation in three days. Call your authorized health service center to schedule an appointment. Late responses will be fined and your record will show you are resistant to becoming an Ideal Citizen.
Sua stares at the full-screen decree, their hands shaking.
This is bad. They didn’t realize the biannual checkup was due so soon. That’s not enough time to shape their profile and generate a baseline of neurotypical-approved behavior to fool the medical professionals.
Shit.
Sua can’t risk being outed. They’ll be expected to respond verbally to everything. Their flat inflection will be flagged. Lack of eye contact will be frowned upon. It’ll all lead to the conclusion that Sua is wrong. Must be remade.
Neural reformatting therapy is the present’s term for lobotomy. At least in the past it was honest: a sharpened pick and a hammer to make you disappear.
The bus roars up to the stop. Sua flinches back into the grimy plastic wall of the shelter. Panic scratches at their throat. If they miss this guest lecture at U of M, it will look bad for their participation stats.
Yet the glaring notification is worse. It swallows all thought.
Three days.
Sua jerks their pass out of their jacket and staggers onto the bus. They hurry to the very back, slip their headphones on, and struggle not to cry. Blazing red banners overwhelm the adverts on the overhead panels: YOU ARE BEING RECORDED FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY.
Can I meet you after the lecture? Sua texts to Maya. They are careful to use approved capitalization and punctuation. It takes concentration to remember the rules.
An immediate response: Absolutely, Boo!
Sua hunches into the smallest possible object against the window seat. Three days until their future vanishes under medical correction.
* * *
—
The lecture is a blur. Sua automatically gives the speaker 10s in the survey, like a proper student should. He’s an esteemed professor, and more important, he’s an Ideal Citizen: white, male, straight.
Sua slips past the chattering college students clustered in the halls and rushes outside. Maya will be waiting. Sua just has to hold theirself together a little longer.
Already Sua imagines the checkup forms, the endless boxes on the medical questionnaire. What’s your gender? it will ask, and there will only be two boxes. Sua will hesitate, and that will be noticed. A mark against their record.
No official documents will recognize them as non-binary. And Sua isn’t sure they have the courage to push back. There’s no room for dissent against a binary that glorifies false biology. Trans is a word currently banned in the lexicon of approved gender discussion. So they hide under the checkboxes, slip head-down-embarrassed into women’s restrooms, say nothing when addressed as miss and ma’am. A thousand cuts, slowly bleeding them out.
The cold October air smells of dying leaves. The gray sky promises early nights and damp chills. Snow isn’t forecasted for at least a month, though. Maybe winter will never come. An Ideal Citizen is never worried, because everything about the climate is fine, no cause for concern.
Sua’s nineteen but feels decades older. Exhausted. Was it only two years ago they thought they had a future, that things would get better when they scraped out of high school and took a job and enrolled in online courses? Sua almost laughs at their younger self. Weird how hopeful they were back then. Or is that the depression draining color from memories, making it seem like forever ago they could imagine a future where they are alive and whole?
It doesn’t matter.
Three days.
* * *
—
Sua waits for Maya in Loring Park, on one of the cold benches strung like thumbtacks along the trails in a topographical map of joggers, students, trash.
Maya strolls bold and bright down the cracked asphalt path, head bobbing, nir hands shoved deep into denim jacket pockets.
“Boo, how are you?” Maya flashes a grin and holds out nir arms. Sua hugs their friend back, holds on a second too long, trying not to shiver.
Maya sits next to Sua, arms draped across the back of the bench. There are fewer cameras in the park; this bench is one Maya favors, because it’s just outside the radius of the security fields.
“What’s up?” Maya asks.
Sua shows nir the alert on their
phone. “Dunno what to do,” Sua says.
Maya nudges Sua’s hand down, miming to put the phone away. Sua does. Their sweatshirt pocket will muffle any audio records.
Maya folds nir hands behind nir neck. “You heard of the Purge app?”
Sua shakes their head.
“Might be helpful,” Maya says.
Sua stares, waits, unsure how to respond without more information. Maya doesn’t look at Sua when ne speaks. Just talks to the air, where secrets are less dangerous.
The Purge app is sourced by anonymous devs, Maya says. It works like this: It clones your phone and overlays a state-approved version that stalls security sweeps. In the background, Purge dumps all your private data into a blacklisted server, inaccessible to anyone, including the devs, and then deletes any unapproved apps. Yeah, it deletes itself. Once your phone is “clean,” it’ll unlock and you can pass security checks. A great thing about Purge is that it tracks the timestamps on your phone so when you’re in the clear, it’ll send you an anonymous text asking if you’re safe. If you reply affirmative, it’ll restore your data, wipe the server of your files, and reinstall Purge if you run into trouble again. Best thing is, it can trace records—such as GPS, social updates, and correspondence—and corrupt or erase the trails, acting as a virus to protect sensitive info from being used against you.
Sua picks at their fingernails.
That’s a lot of power for any group. Humans can be corrupted like hard disks and files.
“What I like,” Maya says, “is that with enough forewarning, Purge can tweak old records just enough so as not to raise red flags, and make your behavior and files appear…acceptable.”
“How?” The breeze rattles the tree, and leaves spiral down. Sua watches the drifting leftovers and wishes they could capture that effortless movement in sketches on paper.
“Not important,” Maya says, and then, quieter, “best not to know yet.”
“Okay.” Sua bites the inside of their cheek and the sharp pain sidetracks the surge of fear. Breathe in, breathe out. “Do you trust it?”
People can be bribed. Bought. Broken. If the Purge database was hacked, if the devs got found—fuck. Sua shivers, because they can’t not imagine the horror that would follow. The disappearances. The investigations. The examples-made-of.
Maya scrunches nir face. Sua wishes they had an app to correctly identify expressions so they wouldn’t misinterpret.
“More than other methods,” Maya says. “Friends who’ve used Purge haven’t been caught yet.”
“Yet?”
Maya shrugs. “Everything crumbles in time. I’m walking a razor edge. We all are.”
Sua keeps still, locking their fingers into the loosened folds of their jeans to stop from flapping their hands. Maya wouldn’t comment—ne never has—but Sua doesn’t want to get noticed by the surveillance drones. Stay hidden. That’s what’s safe. They miss holding a pencil or stylus. Drawing used to be their outlet, but they aren’t a child anymore.
“Look,” Maya says. “It’s a risk, sure. I know more than I can share. I don’t want to get you in trouble. But keep it in mind if you need it. It won’t come up in the stores. I’ll give you a number you can text.”
That’s not safe, Sua thinks. Data passed from one device to another can get intercepted. They don’t want to bring harm to Maya, if it’s their phone that gets bugged. “Don’t,” they say quickly. “I’ll…tell you if. When.” They shove their hands into their pockets, their arms itching with the need to stim. Not out in public.
“It’s cool,” Maya says. “You know where to find me.”
A headache crinkles at the inside of Sua’s left eye. The city noise rumble-thumps from the streets and planes overhead. Even in the park, the world is never quiet.
“I should go,” Maya says. Ne pops nir headphones on and slides nir sunglasses down from nir bandanna. “Stay safe.”
“And you,” Sua says.
* * *
—
The Ideal Citizen is playing reruns on TV when they get home. Sua slips through the living room and shuts their bedroom door. Their household will be docked if they turn off the approved programming. What’s supposed to be a comedy, full of smiling white faces and brass instrumentals, is their nightmares manifest onscreen. People jailed for not speaking correct English and therefore dubbed illegal. Neural reformatting therapy treated as a miracle. Only heterosexual relationships permitted. Once there was a self-described asexual character on an episode, but he turned out to be a serial killer and was issued a death sentence.
Sua pulls their hoodie up over their scalp, wraps their arms about their knees, and rocks back and forth on their bed.
Caspian, their roommate, is out for the day—at work, according to his GPS tracker, and later he’ll stop for groceries. Caspian pretends to be their boyfriend so both their social profiles won’t be flagged as unpatriotic. In reality, he’s gay and he sees his boyfriend off-grid. He too needs to escape.
Sua wonders if he’ll risk using Purge—he’s much braver than them. He’ll deny it but it’s true. Sua is scared of everything.
It’s 6:15 P.M. Shit. Sua scrambles to log in to their social-media hub. They haven’t posted anything today. What to say? The desktop screen blurs.
Sua sucks in air. They “accidentally” left a paperback lying against the facial sensor on the base of the computer. They’ll have to remove it tomorrow.
First, a post. Just something to pretend they’re engaged in society. That’s always the hard part: finding the right words—the approved words—to make it sound like they’re living a productive and balanced life.
Met a friend for afternoon stroll in park. No names needed. Friend is a good word, a neutral word. If a verification request comes in, they will ask Maya to sign it. Ne’s done that before. What else?
Came back and saw Ideal Citizen on TV. Yay! An exclamation point for enthusiasm. Should they add a smiley face? No, that might overdo it. They can use the emoji tomorrow. That will be one less thing to worry about.
Sua hits POST, and their fake words spawn across their profile and their Engage chat, and their participation meter ticks upward a fraction of a percent. Their hands are sweaty, trembling. They flap their arms and then curl under the blankets. The headache is worse. They can log it as allergies. That’s still safe. Not: sensory overload. Not: stress, anxiety, depression.
Three days.
* * *
—
The verification request comes an hour later.
Hi, Brooklyn Sua Harper. You posted that you were with a friend today. That’s good, but you didn’t name the friend. You must identify the fellow Citizens you are engaged with in public updates. This is the third time in the last calendar week you have used friend instead of a proper name. Please have your friend verify your post or your account will be flagged with a falsehood and you will be fined for incorrect use of social media. Thanks!
“Shit.”
Sua squeezes their eyes shut. The notification woke them up from an unhelpful nap. Their head still hurts. They have two hours to respond to the verification. Is Maya online? Sua taps their friend’s profile. A bubble pops up, showing a row of tiny cartoon Zs. Maya Idowu is getting some rest right now!
They send a quick message: Need to prove I was with you today doing friendship. Tag me?
Fuck, that sounds more accusatory than they meant. Sua bites their lip. Okay. It isn’t bad yet. Maya has an outstanding social profile: extroverted, engaged in the community, supportive of the approved arts, always a loyal citizen. Ne works full-time as a mechanic for a small-appliances repair shop.
Sua is still a student—economics major, since their dream of animation was crunched because they aren’t biologically male—and works in the corner bakery. Their boss is an older Hmong woman, Jong, who knows of Sua’s sensory needs and lets them work in t
he dim back office, where they digitize old paper records. Loafin’ Around is trying to comply with the mandate that all data must be banked and governmentally searchable by next year. Sua isn’t sure how they got so lucky, finding someone like Jong, who understands and quietly resists. Another employer might have outed Sua as autistic, gotten them taken away to be “fixed.” After all, informing the Medical Board for Ideal Health and Safety of noncompliant employees and hiring only Ideal Citizens results in the businesses gaining benefits like a better tax bracket.
Their phone buzzes. A message from Caspian. Coming back early. Need to talk. You at home?
Sua taps a thumbs-up emoji in response. Something is wrong.
* * *
—
“There’s going to be an audit at work tomorrow,” Caspian says. He lies in bed beside Sua, who had pulled a blanket around their shoulders so he could spoon against them. Sua doesn’t mind his body weight against their back or his arm over their side, so long as there’s no skin contact.
“Why?”
“Fuck if I know.” His breath shudders out, warm against their shaved scalp. “I haven’t…shit.” He swallows audibly. “I was seeing my friend, right, and he got flagged for illicit behavior. Paid the fine; we thought we were in the clear. But I forgot to leave my phone in the car and…”
“You have a GPS trail,” Sua says.
“Yeah. It’ll place us in the same area. And if I delete anything now, it’ll show up on the audit as suspicious.”
Sua’s heart pounds. “What happens?”
“Best case, I lie like fuck and hope I get lucky. Tell the auditors it was just a casual run-in. We deny any association. But with him getting so recently fined…”
It’ll look bad. Real bad. It’ll probably trigger a deeper investigation. Processors will scrutinize his records, judge his bio-feeds, examine Sua’s profile, as well. There will be gaps neither of them can explain: how little time they spend together, the long breaks Caspian takes at work, their lack of Future Plans on their profiles. Caspian has a someday! in his matrimony text box, and Sua has left theirs blank; neither wants kids. Sua won’t have to technically fill in their required desire for babies until they’re twenty-one. Caspian is twenty-three, but being an approved male, he isn’t under pressure yet.
A People's Future of the United States Page 4