The Ones We're Meant to Find

by Joan He

  I don’t know what he is.

  I don’t know if I’m like him.

  There’s only one way to find out.

  I step out of the house and onto the sand. Grains push through my toes, dry and cold, then cold and damp. As I walk, I imagine the stars above me to be a million blinking eyes. What do they see? A girl in a baggy sweater, drawing a not-quite-straight trail of footprints down the beach?

  Stars or eyes, they can’t know my intentions, and when I reach the waterline, I realize neither do I. I’m just following the pull of my gut, the same one that draws me to the pool beyond the meadow. Now it leads me to sea. I bet it always has, even when I’m asleep. There’s a fishing hook caught inside me. The silver thread of moonlight spooling over the waves is the line. It disappears into the waters of the deep.

  Without thinking, I step in. The surf immediately washes over the backs of my feet. Welcome, it seems to be saying, clasping my ankles like the hands of long-lost friends. The water’s cold, but I don’t mind it, don’t feel it as I take another step in, and another, each one easier than the last. It could be even easier—and faster—if I lay myself down and close my eyes, let the waves carry me out like a raft. But I can’t do that, can’t surrender the little control I have over what I believe. And what I believe is simple:

  I could still turn back, if I wanted to.

  The waves reach my chest. The water buoys me off my toes. I stop walking, and swim. My strokes are flawless. My strength is endless. I swim until the eyes of the universe blink their final blinks and the moon submits to the sun. Mist blankets the waves, silver. I enjoy the light of the waking day for all but a moment before I take a deep breath, and plunge.

  I dive.

  And dive.

  The distance between me and the surface widens. I’ve gone too deep. The weight of the world above could pulverize me. But I can’t bring myself to panic, not even when the pressure in my chest builds and the primal need for air wins out over the need to survive.

  I breathe in the ocean. It scorches my nasal passage and blazes down my throat, burning every centimeter of the way. Pain without panic. Without panic, my body keeps on breathing and breathing, drowning and drowning.

  Then the pain stops.

  Everything’s quiet as I dive, deep and deeper.

  Deep, past schools of speckled fish, slim like darts. Past fat brown fish with noodle-like whiskers. Past fish with fins sharp as knives . . .

  Deeper, to a place where there are no fish . . .

  The puffer fish tattoo on the bodyworker’s arm flexes as she wheels in a pushcart filled with scalpels. I know I should be scrutinizing these archaic-looking instruments before they go into my brain, but I can’t look away from the fish, especially when it changes color, from blue to violet, then hot pink as she hands me a flask.

  “Drink up.”

  She snaps on a pair of gloves as I down the stuff. It’s thicker and sweeter than I expected. I cough on the dregs. “Nice tat,” I croak as she takes the empty flask.

  “Eli can throw one in for an extra fifty while you’re under. Right, Eli?”

  A grunt comes from the next-door operating room, followed by the squeal of a drill.

  This is what I want, I remind myself. A place where they don’t check ID. Someone will take my place in this chair the moment I’m out.

  No one will remember I came through.

  “Maybe in the future,” I say to the bodyworker as she puts on a surgical mask, then goggles. They remind me of Kasey . I swallow.

  “In a sec, the neuron-damper will kick in. The operation itself will last fifteen minutes. You’re free to pick up two doses of painkillers on your way out. Post-surg complications are on you. Got any burning questions, ask them now.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  The bodyworker pauses and finally seems to see me. For a second, I think she’s going to ask if I’m sure I want to do this. It’s not every day someone requests an Intraface extraction. I also don’t look like the typical clientele.

  “It might leave a scar,” she says in the end.

  A scar. I almost laugh and say, Have you seen my face? But of course she hasn’t. I’m hiding beneath a millimeter of concealer. My brain is high on psychdels. Without the pills, I wouldn’t even have been able to walk myself down here. A glance at my vitals would reveal everything wrong with me.

  But here they don’t check. And if they do check, then they’re under no obligation to care. This body shop is the opposite of everything Ester stood for, but I don’t think it undermines the human experience. If anything, it celebrates the fact that our bodies are ours and we’re allowed to treat them to nonessential procedures. Nonessential experiences. That’s all I wanted—to live and laugh without consequence, to feel the sea like people did in the past.

  And look how that turned out.

  “Hey.” Fingers snap in front of my eyes. “You okay there?”

  “Yeah.” My breathing has quickened. Thinking about your upcoming death is no fun. “Yeah. Just feeling the drug.”

  The bodyworker frowns. She’s about to say something else, when another voice interrupts.

  “Jinx. I’ll take this one.”

  The memory fades as I reach the bottom of the sea.

  It’s flat, without the ridges, grass, and trees of the land above. Just pebbly sand that stretches on and on, and I don’t know why I swim in the direction I do—it’s all more of the same—until something sparkles in the distance.

  A house-sized dome, emerging from the sand.

  It’s silver, like the lid to a fancy dish. It lifts like a lid too, when I reach it. I swim in without a second thought and it sucks me down, dumps me—seawater and all—onto some slick, cold surface.

  Coughing, I push onto my hands. The ground beneath my fingers emanates blue light—dim, too dim to illuminate anything beyond the curved walls to my immediate right and left. My eyes burn when I squint to see more. Weird. They didn’t sting before, even though I had them wide open in seawater. I also wasn’t freezing before. Now I shake from head to toe.

  I slosh to my feet—and almost faint. Static sands the backs of my eyes. My nerves feel singed. My spine crimps, and I double over, water geysering from my mouth and nose. My esophagus burns like my eyes by the time I’m done.

  Then the dam breaks. Emotion and thought chainsaw through me, and I scream as the numbness is drained from my veins, all the pain gone for a split second before it’s back, tenfold, because I remember.

  I remember.

  Hero . . . trying to kill me . . . but I killed him . . . he was dead . . . but then he was—is—alive . . . and I—I walked right into the ocean, swam and dove down and I drowned but kept on swimming, kept on diving until I reached the bottom and here I am, here I fucking am, inside some strange dome on the seafloor, alive, but have I ever been? Alive?

  Have I ever been alive?

  I reach for the wall for support—and flinch away when my touch triggers a row of lights to blink on. I’m in a tunnel that winds downward, built of some smooth, matte material.

  Slowly, careful not to touch any more walls, I walk down the tunnel. Lights pop on anyway. They’re the only sentient things in this cold, inanimate place, and the deeper I go, the more I lose my senses. I stop smelling the seawater. I stop hearing. The air is too odorless. Too quiet. Misgivings mushroom in my gut, but my gut nevertheless tugs me forward, brain telling me to turn around, but then what? Swim back to the surface? Confront the fact I literally dove to the bottom of the ocean? How long did it take? How much time has passed since I tied Hero to the bed? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m more scared of: the questions ahead of me, or the answers I left on the island.

  My feet pad on without a care, then stop on a patch of blue-lit floor that looks no different from the other patches of floor—until a disk of it sinks. I’m taken like a pill, swallowed into the ground. The disk deposits me somewhere at least 500 meters beneath the surface of the seafloor. I step off the di
sk before I can stop myself, into the darkness.

  Without fail, the lights come on.

  “HELLO, C” WAS SIMPLY A placeholder command, chosen by Kasey on the fly. After P2C agreed to endorse Operation Reset (and renamed it as such), she and Actinium had worked late into the night to build the model she now rolled onto the stage. It was harmless and mindless, at a glance, like all bots under the Ester Act, prompting confusion from her audience when she said, “This is the secondary barometer, meant to serve in conjunction with the primary system.”

  “Looks more like a cleaningbot than a barometer to me,” someone predictably argued, and Kasey could have sighed. People. Always so quick to judge by appearances. When would they learn that all the important things were on the inside?

  “There are two classes of re-habitation determinants,” she said, and projected a slide on the screen behind her.

  RE-HABITATION can be defined as:

  • fulfillment of survival motivations, or the ability to attain and maintain physiological health

  • fulfillment of happiness motivations, or the ability to attain and maintain psychological health

  “Once the primary barometers indicate that the toxicity of the land, air, and seas have fallen within acceptable levels, the secondary barometers will be released from their own pods and sent to locations all over the world. They will be outfitted with biomonitors to track caloric intake, sleep cycles, and other measurements of survival motivations. When those are sufficiently met . . .” Kasey highlighted the happiness motivations. “. . . the biomonitor will measure stress levels and emotional well-being.”

  Actinium started the time-lapsed simulation. The SURVIVAL MOTIVATIONS bar filled in; a second bar appeared underneath, labeled HAPPINESS MOTIVATIONS.

  “The bot starts off focused solely on survival.” A shell of a human, like Kasey herself. “But when conditions grow more favorable to re-habitation, the bot will seek fulfillment through other avenues. Goal-setting is one example. Goals give the bot a sense of purpose. Any progress toward a goal will be positively reinforced by the release of identity-reaffirming memories. Identity building will enable the bot to develop more abstract goals, such as those pertaining to the environment outside of itself, increasing fulfillment and the scope of what it can measure.

  “This feedback loop will continue until happiness reaches a certain threshold and activates the final goal, in the form of a command. This command . . .”

  The HAPPINESS MOTIVATIONS bar crept to completion, and the bot turned toward Kasey.

  IN A CAVERNOUS ROOM, SUFFUSED in blue light, I stand before a maze of walls. Each wall is an arm-span wide and spaced by narrow corridors. I have to angle sideways to fit.

  As for why I’m trying to fit, I’m not sure. Not sure why I turn right, right, left, then right again, and come before the dead end that I do. I walk in closer. Faint lines run through the wall’s expanse, dividing it into uniform rectangles, imprinting upon it a pattern of man-sized bricks. My right hand, developing a mind of its own, shoots out and splays itself in the center of one of these bricks. Its outline glows blue. Then, slowly, the brick slides out like a drawer. It floats down, lowered by some invisible mechanism, comes to a rest on the ground, and I realize it’s no brick, but a casket, like the one I saw in my fragmented memories, when Hero choked me and I was lapsing in and out of consciousness. My gaze rises, to all the bricks in the wall before me, and around me. So many caskets. Are they filled with bodies? I don’t want an answer. Get out, screams every fiber of my being, but my feet remain planted on the ground, even when the casket that slid out hisses, releasing a cloud of chemical smelling steam. The topmost surface retracts like a lid and—

  And—

  But there is no “and.”

  “And” means incomplete. “And” means still searching.

  Before, I was both. Incomplete and still searching.

  But now—

  Tears, hot in my eyes. They blur my vision. Still, I see her. I see her as clearly as I do in my dreams. Clearer. Because this isn’t a dream.

  I choke back a sob and whisper her name.

  KASEY STARED AT THE BOT, and the bot stared back at Kasey as best it could without real eyes. Outwardly, it was even more clumsily designed than a cleaningbot, but its core system was kilometers above.

  It had a goal.

  It could develop a plan for attaining that goal.

  And in time, it’d have the memories to color the goal as congruent with its self-concept. That self-concept was key. The bot would see itself as a protector. Above its survival, it would value a person, someone they would try to locate, the moment Earth became re-habitable, because the thought of life without this individual would be unbearable.

  Unlike Kasey, the bot would be the perfectly calibrated human. She’d make sure of it.

  “This command,” she repeated as the bot rolled toward her, “is ‘Find me.’”

  TURQUOISE GOO SLUICES OFF HER body as she sits up in the casket. Her eyes stay closed. Is she okay? Is she hurt? I can’t tell; a skintight gray suit covers her from the neck down. It looks thin. She must be cold.

  “Kay . . .” I reach for her, then stop. Now that I’ve fought back my tears, I notice she’s different from how I remember her. Older. Closer to twentysomething than sixteen. Her hair is short—shorter, I should say, than the bob I’m used to.

  But what do looks matter? She’s Kay. My Kay. My mind floods—not with memories this time, but emotions. The pain of not being able to share her world, and the love in spite of it, when I realize we will always be there for each other when it matters most.

  “Kay.” My voice wobbles. “Open your eyes, love.”

  She does, and every fear I’ve had these last three years—about forgetting her or perishing before I find her—melts as our gazes meet and lock and she smiles.

  “You’ve finally found me.”

  AT THIS POINT IN EVERY presentation, all hell broke loose.

  “A bot that can pursue happiness?”

  “With emotions?”

  “That’s a violation of the Ester Act!”

  Trust people to always state the obvious.

  “Would you rather it be a human?” The auditorium quieted at Actinium’s question. “Think of this as a clinical trial; the bot will test the treatment before it’s released to the masses. Does someone want to volunteer in its stead? Be the guinea pig?” Silence. “I assumed not.”

  “The bot’s happiness is just a means to an end,” said Kasey, who had less patience for the audience than Actinium. The bot continued to roll toward her from across the stage. “Once it completes the ‘Find me’ command . . .”

  The bot reached her.

  IN MY DREAMS, WE HUG. We cry. We hold each other so tightly our limbs become one.

  But there are no hugs. No tears. Not from Kay’s end, anyway. She hasn’t moved since opening her eyes, and though I know she needs time and space, my worry builds until I can’t stay silent any longer.

  “Are you okay?”

  She draws a breath, reminding me to do the same. “Yes.” She lifts a hand, her nails trimmed practically short as always, and slowly curls her fingers shut. “Just the side effects of . . .” She trails off.

  “Of . . . ?”

  “Take a seat, Cee.”

  “Okay . . .” I look around at the seatless space. “Um—”

  Four faucet heads rise from the ground before the casket, shooting out beams of red light that crisscross to form a cradle.

  “Sit,” Kay repeats, and though I trust her, I still prepare to butt-plant on the ground as I lower myself onto the light-cradle.

  It holds.

  A nervous laugh escapes me. I just dove to the bottom of the sea, and now I’m sitting on some chair made out of light while Kay’s in a casket. Also, Kay is older than me, which—unless my memories are screwed up and spotty—isn’t right. I should be two and a half years older.

  But I feel small under her gaze.

  Gue
ss I’ll start with the whole bottom-of-the-sea thing. “I thought we lived in some city in the sky,” I begin. “Which, I know—ridiculous.” So is this, says a voice in my head. “I’ve been having trouble remembering things, but I thought—”

  “Tell me about your life on the island, Cee.”

  “Oh.” Something in me sinks. I’m not sure what, or why. “It’s been all right,” I say with a shrug. “Not exactly comfy, but not bad, either.”

  She’s nodding along, but she’s not really listening. Instead she’s looking at a . . . projection of some sort (holograph! I remember triumphantly) that’s rising up from the foot of the casket, filling the air between us with translucent images of graphs and numbers. She frowns as she considers them. “Calorie readings are a bit on the low side . . .”

  “Oh yeah. There was a bit of an issue with the taros—”

  “But happiness levels . . .” The frown deepens. “Cee. Has something happened?”

  “I don’t think so?” I try to mimic Kay, squinting at the graphs, but all the numbers are backward to me. “What’s wrong, love?”

  “Well there’s this spike right here . . .” She’s talking to herself again, but I look to what she’s referring to: a graph with a line, mostly stable, before the line randomly jumps up.

  “It’s been nine hundred eighty-nine years,” mumbles Kay, “so it’s close to the estimated date, but if not for this spike . . . perhaps a couple years later . . . Cee.” Her gaze cuts to mine and I sit straighter. “Are you sure nothing unusual has occurred during your time on the island?”

  “Unusual . . . like suddenly being able to see in color?”

  She shakes her head. “Anything else?”

  “Sleepwalking?”

  “No, that would be . . .” More muttering. From what I recall, Kay never thinks out loud. She’s rubbing her right wrist too, like it pains her. She’s never done that before, either.

  Concerned, I look to the graph again. I see the words HAPPINESS MOTIVATIONS running beneath the X axis. “I mean, like I was saying, living on the island hasn’t exactly been a blast, love. Maybe things got a little better with Hero around, but—”