by JT Lawrence
The front door bangs closed. Bonechaser jumps up from her bed and runs to the front of the house. A flurry of happy pink barks peels into the air around Kate.
“Mally? Is that you?”
“We’ll be in the cineroom!” shouts Mally, and a different door bangs shut.
What is it about teenagers slamming doors?
“If he breaks that Securodoor again, it’s coming out of his allowance,” says Seth.
“If a moody sixteen-year-old can break a hundred thousand rand security door, it deserves to be broken,” says Keke. “I mean, what are you going to do in event of a Zombiepocalypse? You’re going to not slam the door?”
“You’re like them, you know,” says Seth. “You have an answer for everything.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment!” Keke bats her eyelashes at him.
“No wonder you guys get on so well,” says Kate.
There’s something about Kekeletso that’s always been youthful, quick curiosity and lithe limbs. She’s always up for trying something new; just last week she was learning how to fly a Volanter. Her hot energy makes her skin glow.
On the other side of the scale, trauma and the sleep-dep that comes with parenthood has taken its toll on Kate, as she’s reminded every morning when her swingbed mirror chime wakes her. She can feel she’s growing older but is still surprised when she notices new textures on her skin: hashtags on the sides of her fingers; overnight crêpe on her wrists. Keke, on the other hand, gets work done regularly, after years of saying she’d never. She calls it ‘saving face’.
I can’t do lunch today. I’m at the spa, saving face.
But even on haggard days, Kate’s not tempted to inject neurotoxic proteins and stem cells into her wrinkles. In a way, she’s happy to grow older, finds herself less anxious, and more at ease with life, despite the constant challenges the kids throw her way. The vacuumbot glides in, seemingly happy for the opportunity to do some work, and inhales the sweet crumbs off the kitchen floor.
“Would it be wrong to go with the same cake for the twins’ party on the weekend?”
“The funeral cake? Probably,” says Keke. “But who cares? What have you planned for their birthday, anyway? Barcade? Light Jugglers? Mars Immersia? Drone ballet? None of them quite say Sweet Sixteen, do they?”
“Ha,” says Seth.
“More like Not-So-Sweet.” Kate calls up the twins’ party-planning list and ticks off ‘CAKE’. All the other boxes remain unchecked.
“What are you talking about?” asks Keke. “Your kids are the best. You know they’re the best.”
“Ha,” says Seth again.
“Have you met other teenagers? They’re vile. They’re despicable. I cross the street when I see teenagers.”
“Okay, so ours aren’t that bad,” says Kate, “but—”
“What’s up? Is it Mally? His new girlfriend?”
Kate shudders.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” says Seth.
She shoots him a look: sorry-not-sorry. She can’t help it that she gets chills when Vega walks in the door.
“It’s just … weird, you know? It takes some getting used to.”
First a robotic dog and then—
“And you just let them spend time in there, unchaperoned? That’s very avant-garde of you.”
“Their quality time is the least of our worries,” says Seth. “It’s Silver who’s giving Kate grey hairs.”
Kate touches the silver floss in her fringe. The streak of white has multiplied overnight.
“How very Marie Antoinette of you,” says Keke, and smiles at the plates, empty of cake.
“I want to get her into some kind of rehab,” says Kate.
Keke flinches. “What? Silver? Why?”
“You’re overreacting,” says Seth. “Silver’s behaviour is totally normal.”
“Her behaviour is not normal!” says Kate. “She’s immersed all the time.”
“Normal,” says Keke.
“Sometimes she doesn’t speak to us for days. She forgets to eat, because she eats in the immersion, but then forgets that she has to eat in real life too.”
“Normal.”
“Have you seen how skinny she is? She fainted the other day, and couldn’t figure out why. Then we realised she hadn’t eaten in two days.”
“So pack her some iso-protein bars and get her jackmate to set a reminder on her interface. And one of those smart sippycups that bump you to hydrate.”
“Are you being serious?”
“What? It’s a thing.”
Kate holds a hand up to her forehead. “That’s no way to live.”
“It’s the new way to live,” says Seth.
“She wants to get meshed, and I don’t know how to stop her. All her friends are doing it.”
“You can’t stop her, Kitty,” says Keke. The words burn Kate’s stomach. “I mean, once the tech gets a bit more sophisticated I’m going to do it too.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Me too,” says Seth. “It’s scary now, but it’ll seem completely normal to Silver’s and Mally’s kids.”
Morgan has been nagging Kate to get meshed. He says an analogue brain is only capable of so much; that if they don’t lace up soon then they’ll be in danger of being on the same level as domestic cats to advanced AI, which is currently lapping them at every turn. Both scenarios fill Kate with a deep sense of foreboding. She doesn’t want to be a house cat, and she doesn’t want her brain to be upgraded. So where does that leave her?
“And it’s normal for us to resist it, just like our parents resisted cell phones and ebooks. Besides, wouldn’t it be great to ditch these lenses and mandibles?” Keke touches the translucent transmitter that runs from her ear to lips.
“I don’t even feel mine anymore,” says Seth.
“Just so that you guys know,” Kate massages her temples. “I’m freaking the fuck out right now.”
“You look calm to me.”
“Years of parental practice.”
What does Arronax always say? You can’t stop progress. But that doesn’t mean she has to like it.
“I just want you creeps to know that if you ever mesh, I’m going to … I don’t know. Run away. Join the tribe of Disconnects. Escape to somewhere—”
Bonechaser starts barking.
“What’s that sound?” Keke looks behind her, in the direction of the cineroom.
“It’s the hound,” says Seth.
“No, the other sound.”
They all cock their heads. It’s a siren, and it’s getting louder. Bonechaser’s barking rises a notch.
Something about the barking sounds off to Kate. It’s the wrong note and there’s an edge of ferocity to it. She’s never heard him sound like that before. Is that siren … coming from this apartment?
A loud snarling sound rushes at them. Mally starts yelling.
“Down, Chaser, down!” comes his muffled shouting. “Down!” and as Kate and Seth rush towards him, Mally begins to scream.
Chapter 2
Chaser
Kate, Seth and Keke run towards the rabid growling. The siren, with Mally’s screaming, scores yellow lines in Kate’s vision. As they tumble into the cineroom, there is a wet, meaty sound of teeth tearing into flesh. Mally shouts in shock and pain; his face is a mask of pure horror.
“Chaser!” shouts Seth. “Down!”
But the snarling dog continues to attack Mally. With another crushing bite to his upper thigh, the boy falls to the floor. When the dog goes for Mally’s face, Kate shouts “No!” and there’s a blast so loud it blinds her. She can’t work out what’s happening until she smells the gunpowder and hears Bonechaser whine. Her vision returns in spectral shapes: four people shifting and stirring around her, and a dying dog on the floor. Mally is holding his injured leg, watching his pants bloom with petals of crimson. Kate rushes to him, landing on her knees and throwing her arms around his shoulders.
“You’re okay!” she says, as if
she’s shouting an order.
Mally’s pale mouth trembles.
“Are you insane?” Kate yells at Seth, who’s gazing down at his gun as if he can’t remember what it is. “You could’ve shot Mally!”
Seth looks up at her. “You’d rather your son be mauled to death by a robotic dog?”
Keke doesn’t move. They all look down at Bonechaser, whose whine has faded to a thin whimper, as she pants and follows her tail around and around in a circle, a great big hole blown into her skull.
Kate’s shaking inside and out. “The fuck just happened?”
“Bonechaser is sick,” says Vega, making Kate start. She’d completely forgotten Mally’s girlfriend. Vega is, as always, perfectly unruffled. “We’ll need to take him to the PeTTech vet.”
Mally swipes away his tears. Bonechaser and he had been inseparable until Vega arrived on the scene.
Kate peers sadly at the dog. At first Chaser gave her the creeps, but over time they’d become attached. In fact, now more than ever—with the kids being teenagers—it seems that Chaser is the only one who’s ever really happy to see her. The dog stumbles, and Kate automatically reaches out to help her, but Seth grabs her arm, shakes his head.
I just want to say goodbye, she thinks, as she watches the K9000 power down. One paw taps the floor in a death tic.
“Mally is in need of medical attention,” says Vega.
Seth activates his Scribe. “I’ll order an ambudrone.”
“That is not necessary,” says Vega.
“Of course it’s bloody necessary,” says Kate, with more venom than she intends. “He has a mangled leg. He’s in shock.”
“I have performed a thorough body scan,” Mally’s girlfriend says. “His wounds are superficial.”
“Well, I’d still like to take him to a doctor.”
“It is not necessary,” says Vega. “I have the correct equipment to treat him right here.”
She unbuttons her blouse, revealing perfect C-cups in a lacy push-up, and out of the top of her ribcage slides a neat compartment. Vega extricates the first aid kit from inside, and the drawer closes again, with hardly a hint of it on her skin. A headlamp snakes out of her temple, and when it turns on she smiles at them.
“May I use your kitchen table?”
Vega picks up Mally as if he weighs nothing, despite him being almost as tall as Seth, and carries him to the kitchen. She lays him gently on the table and opens her medikit. Kate hovers while Vega scissors his jeans open and sprays the wounds with disinfecting anaesthetic.
“Ah,” he says with a sigh. “That’s better already.”
“Hold still,” says Vega, “this will only hurt a bit.” She holds the pieces of skin together and runs a surgical autostapler over the wound, leaving a miniature railway track of skin-coloured sutures. Kate finds herself uneasy, but fascinated. It’s like Vega’s just zipped him up.
“They’ll dissolve in a few days,” says Vega. “You’ll be as good as new.” She covers the smaller gashes with platelet plasters and packs the kit back into her ribcage, passing Mally an inhaler. “For the pain.”
Seth puts a call in to Arronax. Her mermaid avatar spins open with a splash. “We’ve got a problem.”
Kate walks out onto the balcony, and Keke follows. She holds onto the rail, then, with shaking hands, presses a button to roll open the invisi-screen, and they look out onto the hot city, grey embroidered with green, and breathe in the toxic air that smells of ozone and ash.
“You know that kind of defeats the object of the screen, right?” says Keke.
When the screen is employed, the air on the balcony is filtered and cooled. It’s supposed to make you feel as if you’re standing in the fresh air—sans pollen and pollution—Protecting You without Sacrificing the View (TM), but it just makes Kate feel claustrophobic. Being shut in an invisible box is still being shut in a box.
“Seriously, what the fuck just happened?”
A drone speeds right past them. It’s branded with a popular Chinese restaurant chain logo: three chopstix on a plate forming the ‘A’ symbol for anarchy, because who doesn’t love rebellion and noodles?
“Angaz’. No idea. Robopup rabies?”
“Twelve years,” says Kate. “Twelve years that robot’s been Mally’s best friend. The perfect pet. Loyal Labrador, they said. Programmed to be loyal. What’s twelve human years in doggie years?”
Keke shrugs. “I don’t know. But twelve human years is like twelve centuries in technology. Chaser’s ancient. When’s the last time you had him upgraded?”
“2029. They don’t upgrade his model anymore.”
“It makes you think.”
“Of?”
“You know—” Keke gestures inside with a subtle flick of her eyebrows. “The Stepford girlfriend.”
“Don’t go there. I have enough to worry about.”
“You must admit—she is kind of handy to have around.”
“Yes.”
“What else do you think she keeps in those compartments of hers?”
Chapter 3
Electrosmog & Sunlight
“Do you ever still think of the … you know, the prophecy?” says Keke.
They’re sitting down now, on the balcony floor, barefoot and stripped to their underwear, drinking whisky that looks like liquid gold in the last light of the sunset.
“Of course I do. Every day. Especially when I get frustrated with the kids. Then I feel guilty, because really we’re all still here by the grace of … what?”
“Lady Luck,” says Keke. “Luck. And love.”
An image of Lady Luck appears in Kate’s mind, a hallucinogenic mash-up of the Statue of Liberty, Wonder Woman ReDux, and her memory of Solonne with her quiver of diamond-tipped arrows.
They clink their glasses and take a sip.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty. You know you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about.”
“It comes with the territory,” says Kate. “Being a parent is a sentence to a lifetime of guilt.”
They sit in companionable silence for a moment.
“Do you know that Solonne still sends the kids balloons every birthday?”
“Really?”
“White ones. I know she means well, but they spook the shit out of me. They float around for days reminding me of that stupid prophecy.”
“I try not to think about it,” says Keke, “but—”
“I know,” says Kate. “Then another one of their predictions comes true and it’s terrifying all over again.”
“The Mars one! Shit.”
One of the Celestial Prophecies is that the people stealing from the Red Planet would become a burnt offering to the multiverse to appease Celestia. The prophecies are mostly dismissed as charismatic cult claptrap, but people started to pay a bit more attention when the latest returning Mars ship disappeared in space, blipping the lives of fifty-two space miners, twelve tourists, and hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of equipment.
“Seth’s always saying that anyone can write a ‘prophecy’ and then find some kind of data to support it. But it’s just … It’s uncanny, right?”
“Downright fucking terrifying,” says Keke. The golden threads woven into her cornrows glint in the golden light. The whisky buzzes behind Kate’s eyes. Amber Purr.
“Do you still remember the exact words?”
“Of course I do. I couldn’t forget them if I tried. It’s like they’ve been carved into my brain with a hot scalpel.”
Sometimes she wakes up to Lumin whispering in her ear—
The last living Genesis Child will lead us to the Ledge.
—and she claps the lights on and she’s alone, and his words slither away to hide somewhere in her bedroom, only to flicker in on her dreams another night.
“If the boy survives into his fourth summer then he’ll live to be sixteen and that will be the end of days.”
“And Mally turned sixteen a couple of months ago, right?”
“Right.�
�
“And Silver’s birthday is in…thirty-six hours.”
“Yebo.”
“Do you think the world will end before or after their birthday party?”
“It would save me some planning if it happened before. I still don’t have a theme. All I have is some funeral cake.”
“Well, that’s easy, then,” say Keke. “We’ll have a rapture party.”
Seth opens the balcony door to find the friends chuckling into their glasses. “You two had better come in.”
“Nope, nope, nope,” says Kate. “This is the most fun I’ve had since …”
Kate searches her recent memory and comes up blank.
“She needs some downtime, Seth,” says Keke. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
Seth’s eyes rest on Keke’s exposed skin for a second too long. There is no time for desire.
“You have no idea,” he says, spotting their discarded mandibles. “You’re not connected?”
“We disconnected an hour ago. We needed some analogue time. Some electrosmog and sunlight, to feel human again.”
“We have a problem,” says Seth. “You need to see something.”
Kate tips the rest of the whisky into her mouth. Birch and beeswax. “We’ll sort out Bonechaser tomorrow.”
What do you do with a broken pet, anyway? Is there some kind of memorial party planning service for them too? She wouldn’t be surprised. Long gone are the days of choosing between being buried or cremated: humans can now pick from a menu of options including, among hundreds of others, vertical cemeteries, forest pods, essence amulets, and cryogenix. She wouldn’t be surprised if the same options weren’t available for beloved pets, although she guesses that robotic dogs have a different fate.