by Cat Rambo
Too late. She had been there. I had Betsy, but my backup piece Roscoe was in the safe, and she knew the combination.
Empty now.
Velma. Darling Velma. Velma who had trusted me so many times and I’d failed every test. Every single god damned one. But she loved me anyway. I drank in the dark. I pictured her. And his big, knobby hands on her.
I knew what was happening. What was going to happen next. No, she wasn’t going to hurt herself. Velma wasn’t that kind. She was the kind to take the gun out of her boss’s safe. To go to the rally a monster is holding to announce his candidacy. To wait for an opportunity. Tonight, or tomorrow night, or the tomorrow after that. She was patient. She’d waited for me for ten years. Somewhere, someday, she would step out of a shadow and end him. And then she’d be spare parts in a medical pen, her lovely liver and eyes and marrow sold to the highest bidders.
I was the cause of all of it and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t. I couldn’t stop her and if she did it her life was over. There was only one thing I knew to do.
So that brings me back to where I started. Just me, standing in rain the taste and temp of fresh piss. I know that whatever she does, the law will find it in the cloud and those lovely eyes would view the world from someone else’s face.
That was just wrong. Couldn’t let that happen.
So . . . this one is on me.
I’ll just wait, in the rain. I know where the bodyguards will bring him out, where they’ll bring the car around.
I got to the parking lot first. Got to the limo. The driver was a side of beef with fast-twitch reflexes. Didn’t matter. Not when I see black. So . . . I’m waiting by the back door. Waiting for him to come out. Climb in the car. I have to do this now, Velma. Before you do. Before I lose my nerve.
The door opened.
Here he comes. Cadaver grin. Strangler’s hands.
One squeeze of Betsy’s trigger coming up. One last joke.
Wherever you are, you know me, Velma in the shadows . . . always good for a laugh.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Steven Barnes is considered one of the pioneers of Afrofuturism, with over three million words, thirty novels, and episodes of Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Andromeda, and Stargate sg-1 to his credit. Winner of the NAACP Image award as well as the Endeavor and numerous others, nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, his Emmy-winning “A Stitch In Time” episode of The Outer Limits is widely considered the best episode of the 80’s reboot. With his wife, multiple award-winning novelist and university professor Tananarive Due, he has created the “Afrofuturism: Dreams to Banish Nightmares” online course, as well as The Sunken Place black horror course. You can learn more at: www.afrofuturismwebinar.com
Editor’s Note
Here, Steven Barnes writes a story that unwraps itself with a deft, wry grace as it questions traditional tropes, starting with a touch of LA noir that might have come from a futuristic Raymond Chandler. We begin with the visit of Natalia Kishina visiting Jack Laff’s office and asking him for the impossible, breaking a dayveil. It’s a story starts off pretending to be a detective puzzle involving ethics and corporations and then evolves into a love story that comments on today, and is particularly resonant in the face of the #metoo moment and a President who brags that he can grab women “by the pussy.” Protagonist Laff makes his choice and we end in a moment that mingles triumph and tragedy until you’re not sure which is which.
One favorite note is the names of burgers served at Capital Burgers, particularly the question of which Obama burger he’s recommending.
Three Data Units
Kitty-Lydia Dye
When mecha died, their souls went to me. I say “died” and “souls” but they were just advertising slogans to make humans feel better. Polls showed they distrusted otherness.
When a mecha’s battery lost its charge or it got a glitch or was hit by a car, their memory units were installed in me to compile with the rest of my database. The units were tiny, pill-sized, and all it took was one swallow.
Sometimes parts of them got stuck in my throat. Their voices shouted a little louder in my head.
Not the mecha, we had no hearts, but the humans who knew and loved us.
Blackbird—I was a wedding gift to a bride who never showed her face to the outside world. He gave me to her on the day, in a chapel of broken stained glass, watched by a priest who kept glancing over his shoulder.
The bride’s white lace veil fell to her feet, and a cloak covered her entirely. Everything hidden, while her husband could smile and laugh and kiss her gloved fingers.
She did not speak either. Only bowed her head when she was meant to say “I do.”
She clutched me tight as he carried her to his car. Not to sit in the front seat, but to curl up in the car trunk. I rattled against my cage as we bumped along in the darkness. My sensors caught her fluttering breaths and pounding heartbeat.
He took her to a room no bigger than my cage. There was a window, too small to open, round and veiled, and the bed was a pretty thing. The walls were painted just like the sky.
He brought her food and wine, helping her lift up her veil so that she could consume them. Then he ripped it away, with the gloves and dress, and she laughed.
She sang as sweetly as me, voice thick and different to that of the man’s, words strange to the language installed in me, but beautiful. Her hand was so different in his hand.
It did not compute. My function was to be caged and sing, so why was a human needed for the same thing?
He left upon nightfall. On the door was a hook. He took off his wedding ring and hung it on there, then put his finger to his lips.
“You promised not to sing alone, or else they’ll catch you.”
The door was shut and locked. She did not scrabble at her cage.
Sighing, she lay on the bed and put on a pair of headphones. My button was pressed to sing. I did so, beak silent, my voice transmitted into the headphones. Not birdsong, but classics: Sinatra, Presley, then . . . my voice stuttered. I kept playing, singing songs with words I did not recognize, that I struggled to convert, that pounded in my breast—songs in her tongue.
And she went to sleep crying and smiling.
He always came upon sunrise, and stayed until sunset. It wasn’t always smiles and songs. She would pace or look out of the window, or bang her hand upon the walls and shout at him.
I learned, I was constantly learning, what some of her words meant.
She always said: “Too small!” Or “Air!”
He always responded with: “It’s not safe.”
The words soon changed. I did not know them. But her stomach rose, not with breath, and another beat registered on the sensors. They looked like children, shocked, as though they thought this would not happen.
Then joy, fear, faces twisting. Flesh was always squirming; it was never constant like metal.
“Things have to change,” he said. “They cannot ignore a child.”
And he ran down to get a sparkling drink. The bride bit her lip and lifted part of the curtain to peer out of the tiny window, shadows dribbling down her face.
He left once more, I sang for her, and when the sun rose, I kept on singing. Singing until my throat glitched, my battery flashed—red glowing in my eye—and she told me to hush, pressing the button under my wing. I watched her, though, beak half open.
There was food for her, and a pitcher of water. She did not touch them, kept on glancing at the door. Night came. She paced until the moon was replaced by the sun.
Then she started clawing at the door, banging, screaming. He did not return. The wedding ring remained on the little hook.
He did not come the next day. No one heard her. Only me, a song-less bird.
Humans could wind down just as we did. Their batteries ran out.
What I recorded was her begging for help.
Then she threw me outside and I flew. Everything flashed and throbbed, lights sharp and electronics buzzing in a gray, smoky day. Every building had a screen upon it, all tuned in to the same news channel. There were no street names, only districts and numbers upon signs.
I flew alone. My originals, the soft feathered birds, were gone.
I alighted upon a tree that had a silver glare when caught in the weak eye of the sun.
“Help me, help me,” I called, in the bride’s language, to a crowd of men and women. They did not hear. I sang louder.
“What’s that noise?”
“It certainly doesn’t sound like English.”
Faces looked up to me, all twisted in sour confusion. They were like an assembly line; they all looked alike. None resembled my bride. They all fitted the man, the husband.
“Get it out—It’s not from here. Chase it back to its own district.”
A stone was thrown, but it missed me.
“Blasted machine. Must be glitched.”
“Some Deviate trying to be clever.”
I flew. It was all it took. Their heads lowered, they continued on, not caring.
There were walls as high as the buildings, made of steel and stuck in so furiously they must go as deep as tree roots. Districts, a city cordoned off into chunks. I learned quickly. Another district I must go—Her district?—and if I sang, they might understand.
I flew over the wall –
– and lightning struck me.
The district’s defenses fried the bird’s hard drive. They found it strewn amongst the rubbish behind a fast food store, swept up by a mecha cleaner.
Nothing from another district must taint or intertwine with the others. It might cause a conflict in their thoughts. New ideas might bloom. And that was a hated thing.
Another unit. Another voice. None could be ignored, as I had no ears to cover.
Caregiver—“Please say you hate me. Please. I said such awful things to you.”
“It goes against my programming. I love you.”
“That makes it even worse.”
My processor stuttered. “Does it make you unhappy?”
“Yes!”
“Then I . . . mildly dislike you.”
“Thanks.”
We were in the back of the auto-taxi, watching the wheel turn as the car maneuvered itself through District Seven. My ward, Analise, had a pillow clutched to her stomach. Her dress was the same one she had worn going into the hospital. The complications had been a deviation to the schedule; I packed insufficiently. I had spent the last hour resetting my timetables.
“Your parents will visit you tonight,” I reminded her.
“Can’t I cancel?”
“They have to apply for a pass to enter D7. It would not please them.”
“They couldn’t bother coming when they thought I might die.”
Her hair hung, limp. She would need assistance in keeping her hygiene levels up. She grimaced when she ran her fingers through it, then put her head on her hand and looked outside at the chain fences.
“They would have needed to replace you quickly had you died,” I said, “or else they would lose their position.”
“Yuck.”
TV screens were set in the backs of the seats in front of us. The Sorter was muted. On the screen statistics scrolled too quickly for humans to see. They were only for mecha to read: one thousand newly born humans had been sorted into suitable districts, and two Deviates had been successfully rehabilitated.
Meanwhile, for humans, the subtitles flashed: the district’s supporting football team had won, the United Sciences committee had debunked climate change, 100% marriage/0% divorce statistics.
Yet, in other districts, another team had won, the Arctic was nothing but a sea of melted ice, and marriage was an outdated concept.
“How are your pain levels?” I asked, as I was instructed to every half hour. Her medicine times were installed into my internal clock.
“It’s fine. I can manage . . . I’m a tough old girl.”
“You are only seventeen.”
“Might as well be eighty.” She stretched, winced.
“I have updated your profile.”
My sensors were made to be delicate, to check a baby’s every breath and heartbeat. She stilled completely.
“Tell me.”
“Analise. Will become a teacher. Will marry a man of the same district, race, with an age difference of at the most ten years, and he will be a doctor. Most suitable candidate: Theodore Hanson. Change: two children, a girl and boy. Updated to: will adopt suitable children when they become available, upon agreement with husband.”
“Maybe I don’t want kids.”
“You cannot change your profile. Only your parents and I have access.”
“And they decided what they wanted, before I’d even popped out, and you get the fun of molding me to fit. I might as well be one of those consort mecha dolls made to order.”
“Caregivers do not have fun.”
“I don’t want children. I don’t want to be a teacher, spouting whatever this district believes. I don’t want a husband!”
“With your pedigree, your social status, your education, that is how you shall turn out.”
A person was born and, no matter what, they would become what their circumstances made them. It was how the Sorter fixed this broken country.
To aspire, or mix with those unlike yourself, only led to frustration, conflict, differing opinion. Culture clash. Agreement and similarity meant harmony. Discord was the enemy.
At first, this country started with two leaders, appealing to either side. It worked for a while, just as a stitch would start to dissolve, the wound fading. But the skin hadn’t healed—it ripped.
We were made to control whoever remained. We made the districts.
A bubble was bliss, until it popped.
“How many districts are there?” Analise asked.
“Over one hundred.”
“So, not a sliced pie, but crumbs and crusts. The lower the number, the brighter the sky.” I could not see her face, could not access what emotional state she was in. “There must be nightmares in District One Hundred.”
“There are no mecha there, they cannot document, so I am unable to provide you with answers.”
“My imagination can do that . . . We don’t fit into tight, ticked boxes—female, single, straight, Catholic. They’re just fragments that cling on to what makes us, well, us. So many conflicting thoughts and ideas, you can’t slot us in neatly. My parents can’t, either.” She turned, but I still couldn’t compute her facial expression. “What if I said I didn’t believe in God, I love another girl, and I hate cheerleading? I don’t want to teach, I want to build and fix mecha–”
“The female quota for fem-mechanics is full.”
“–And all I want to do is adopt a dog, not a kid. When then? Am I shunted off to another district?”
“You are ruining your prospects.” My eyes shuttered, calculating. “There is a 10% chance of you deviating.”
“Deviate. The teacher wrote that against a boy’s name at school, then he went somewhere. Came back with a scar on his head—did you drain all of the questions out of there?”
It was better that parents and children remained in separate districts. Children learned, just as A.I. did. It was natural, but difficult to control. Questions only upset adults.
She went on, “Would you take me away if I was a Deviate?”
“You are not deviating. You are having a
tantrum.”
The auto-taxi paused. Analise removed her seatbelt.
“Please reinsert your seatbelt.”
She grasped the door handle.
“Analise, we are not at the end of our journey.”
“I know. I love you.”
She was escaping.
I was not built for running. She had run before, as a girl when playing games, but I didn’t think this was the same. Soon, she went out of my peripheral vision.
She would be in agony. I had her pain medication still tucked in my chest drawer.
I tried her tracker—there was no response. A glitch? A possibility. But more likely she had done this. Planned.
It was not suggested that caregivers monitored social media past the age of fourteen. It lowered trust levels. Only a cursory glance, checking for bullying, too much time spent online, or tweaking the parental controls. There was no need to worry about the web anymore; everything was heavily regulated, so there were no differing opinions.
A minute was all it took to hack into her accounts and trawl through her messages. There were blanks. She’d been deleting things. Nothing. I went through her browser history—one link that had been missed.
A forum called Uncensored. A place without districts. The free web. She had been messaging another girl from a lower district, initiating a mating courtship, using quotes from books that were banned.
They had planned to run away weeks ago, before the surgery. Then Analise collapsed. Their schedule was mistimed. Mistakes would be made—humans always made them.
Another message, sent just before I picked her up from the hospital. It was Analise, asking for her friend again. A reply: Yes. Meet me at the wall.
There had always been cracks in the district walls. Quickly sealed, but they were there. Cross contaminations would be eradicated swiftly.
My ward must not experience this, or else I would have failed.
Target set. Location inputted and reached. Scanning. Facial recognition. Scent trail. Heart monitor. Sensor output.