Under Their Skin

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  But Mom already knows all the answers, Eryn thought. Doesn’t she?

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Mom pulled into the parking garage under City Hall. It felt strange to be away from the constant beating of snowflakes against the car windows. The windshield wipers squeaked against the suddenly bare glass.

  Mom parked in the first space she came to and turned off the car.

  “Michael said he would meet us here, but I don’t see him yet . . . ,” Mom said, letting her words trail off.

  Eryn realized she hadn’t seen Mom call Michael.

  Maybe she did that while I was putting my coat on, Eryn thought. Or maybe it was when Mom was walking behind us in the snow.

  She’d just discovered that her mother was a robot. She wasn’t willing to accept that her mother and her stepfather might communicate by telepathy, too.

  “I don’t want to wait for Michael,” Nick said. “If he drives as slow as you, it could take him hours to get here.”

  Normally Mom would have answered a comment like that by firmly putting Nick in his place, telling him it was up to adults, not kids, to make decisions like that.

  But now she just reached over and opened the car door.

  “You’ll be meeting the mayor,” she said. “Please . . .”

  Normally she would have finished with be on your best behavior, or the slightly less positive don’t say or do anything that would lead to a very serious talk about manners afterward.

  But now all she said was “Be careful.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Mom, Eryn, and Nick stepped off the elevator in the City Hall lobby, the mayor was standing there waiting for them. She was a tall, powerful-looking woman with a severely angled haircut, and she wore the same kind of suit as Mom—the kind that seemed like a Professional Woman uniform. Nick thought maybe he’d seen the mayor on TV, at the grand opening of the library renovation or at news conferences explaining the latest city budget. The kind of television programming that Nick generally avoided or ignored.

  Nick had not quite gotten what Eryn meant about adults’ eyes looking different, but it made more sense to him as he gazed at the mayor. She looked plastic.

  But . . . isn’t that just how politicians are? He wondered.

  The mayor stuck out her hand to shake.

  “I’m Mayor Nancy Waterson,” she told Eryn and Nick, pumping their hands up and down in turn.

  To Mom, she said, “I’m so sorry,” in the exact tone that someone might use at a funeral, offering condolences.

  Incredibly enough, Mom shrugged. Nick could practically quote Mom’s lecture on that topic verbatim. (“In polite society, raising and then lowering your shoulders does not qualify as actual language, young man. It does not pass for a yes or a no or even an ‘I don’t know.’ You have to use words. You have to state what you think and feel politely and coherently. Shrugs don’t count!”)

  Mayor Waterson raised an eyebrow.

  “We all knew it was going to happen eventually,” Mom said, with such weariness that Nick wondered if the long walk through the snow had been even harder on her than it’d been on him and Eryn. “That’s why we have the protocol.”

  “Yes, but here?” The mayor said. “In Maywood? I always suspected the first case, when it came, would be in New York City. That or some other place where cynicism is part of the culture.”

  “There are smart kids in Maywood, too,” Mom said. “And it is a matter of intelligence, more so than cynicism. That’s just one of the paradoxes we’ve always had to deal with, that our original programming forced us to encourage some of the very traits—curiosity and intellectual inquiry—that could eventually lead to such . . . complications and challenges.”

  Is Mom bragging about how smart Eryn and I are? Nick wondered. Or . . . apologizing?

  He couldn’t think about that very deeply because he got caught on one of her other words.

  Programming? He thought. Of course robots can be programmed but . . . was Mom? And . . . Dad? Was he “programmed,” too?

  The mayor led them into a conference room at the back of the building. She pressed a button on the wall to lower all the shades.

  “A historic moment,” she said. “The first viewing.”

  What was she talking about?

  “Nancy,” Mom said, “you’re not running for anything.” She tilted her head to indicate Eryn and Nick. “They’re not old enough to vote.”

  “And yet we’re about to give them power over all of us,” the mayor murmured, still sounding as though she were commemorating a historic milestone.

  Power? Nick thought. We’re kids. We don’t have any power.

  To cover his confusion, he focused on peeling his coat off and shoving his gloves and hat into the pockets. Mom took his coat and Eryn’s and laid them across an empty chair.

  Just the kind of thing she’d normally do, Nick thought. Watching out for us. Keeping track of our stuff.

  But he noticed that Mom didn’t take her own coat off, even as she and the mayor sat down. Why did that make him feel like Mom was prepared to bolt if she had to?

  Not Mom, he told himself. She wouldn’t leave us behind.

  The mayor pressed another button, and a screen came sliding down at the front of the room. The lights dimmed.

  “They need fingerprint authentication,” the mayor said, holding out a pad to both Nick and Eryn.

  Nick hesitated, wondering if he dared make a joke about needing a lawyer present before being fingerprinted. He glanced sideways at Mom, whose face had settled into rock-hard grimness.

  No, I don’t dare, he thought.

  He pressed an index finger against the pad, and Eryn did the same.

  Immediately a video began on the screen, showing a man and a woman sitting at an ordinary-looking table. The people looked ordinary, too. The man had on a white lab coat. The woman was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt and had her dirty-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “If there is someone out there to watch this video, then our plans have succeeded,” the woman said.

  “We thank you,” the man said. “Thank you for everything you’re going to do to continue to make it all work.”

  “And thank you to those who raised you,” the woman said. She seemed to be staring over Nick’s and Eryn’s heads, almost as if she knew Mom would be sitting just beyond them.

  “Thank you—” the woman paused, as if temporarily overcome by emotion. “Thank you for bringing the human race back from extinction.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “What? Extinction? That’s crazy!” Nick exclaimed, jerking back in surprise and jarring against the table. He knocked it two or three inches closer to the screen. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Doesn’t he see that nobody’s laughing? Eryn thought numbly. Doesn’t he see that nobody’s jumping out from a hidden door, yelling “Ha-ha! Fooled you! You should see your faces!”

  Eryn was so stunned she just felt paralyzed. But she managed to move her head, turning it left and right, hoping she would see someone jumping out and yelling Ha-ha! Fooled you!

  She saw only Mom and the mayor, their faces sinking even further into grimness.

  “So it’s true,” the mayor murmured. “What they told us wasn’t just a programming error.”

  “Did you ever really believe it could be a mistake?” Mom said disdainfully.

  On the screen, the man and the woman hesitated before they spoke again, as if they knew they had to allow a certain amount of reaction time.

  “I’m Annalies Grimaldi, PhD, professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” the woman said.

  “And I’m Dr. Dylan Speck,” the man said. “Former head of the medical school at Johns Hopkins University. Current director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine.”

  Bo
th of them glanced to the side then, and flinched as if they’d seen or heard something threatening. Eryn found herself wishing that the camera had followed their gazes, or that the microphone recording their voices had been sensitive enough to pick up every sound.

  Or maybe she didn’t wish that. Dr. Grimaldi and Dr. Speck both looked unbearably sad.

  “It has become undeniably clear to us and our colleagues—and to all our fellow human beings—that our days are numbered,” Dr. Speck said. “There is no longer any hope for us.”

  “But how could we stand to see humanity end completely?” Dr. Grimaldi asked, the ache in her voice almost a palpable thing.

  “It’s too late to save ourselves,” Dr. Speck said. “But we’re hoping that our two fields of professional inquiry, linked together, can provide one last chance for humanity itself.”

  Eryn was having a little trouble following their conversation, but she didn’t think it was because she was listening to two professors. She was used to Mom using big words; she was used to hearing Michael throw around all sorts of technical computer terms.

  No, it was the weight of sorrow in these people’s voices that threw her off. She had never heard an adult sound so despairing.

  These aren’t robots, she realized.

  Somehow she was certain of that, even without peering closely at the two people’s eyes. For all she knew, this video was of the last two adults in the world who hadn’t been robots.

  “We’ve told you who we are—I wish we could know who we’re talking to,” Dr. Grimaldi said wistfully.

  “We would like to believe that we are talking to perhaps an eighteen-year-old who’s reached a well-adjusted adulthood full of thoughtful, reasonable questions after a safe, happy childhood,” Dr. Speck said.

  “But we’re well aware that the slightest miscalculation on our part—especially on my part—could have led to an entirely different scenario,” Dr. Grimaldi said. “We may have set up the human race to fail again, with no hope of another chance.”

  “Eryn and Nick are too young!” the mayor said, half standing as though she planned to shut off the rest of the video. “They’re years ahead of schedule!”

  “The doctor said perhaps an eighteen-year-old,” Mom reminded her. “Eryn and Nick have questions now. They can’t wait another six years.”

  Eryn was glad Mom understood at least that much about her and Nick.

  The mayor sank back into her chair, and the video continued.

  “If you are coming of age in the midst of wars or famines or a struggle against a repressive government, then—” Dr. Speck began.

  “Then we are so sorry,” Dr. Grimaldi finished for him. “Please don’t give up. Even in these, our final days, we still have faith in the promise of humanity and human lives, and we hope that you do too.”

  Wars? Eryn thought. Famines?

  Why were they talking about things that had happened only long ago in the past, or only in faraway countries?

  Eryn guessed these two people would think she and Nick had had safe, happy childhoods.

  “Here’s what we did,” Dr. Speck said. But then he stopped and looked over at Dr. Grimaldi with a bemused twist to his face. “It just occurred to me—what if we’re talking to a five-year-old? What if the unanswerable questions kick in and trigger the first showing of this video much earlier than we expect? I feel like I’m explaining the birds and the bees to my kids all over again!”

  “You’re a doctor of reproductive medicine,” Dr. Grimaldi said wryly. “You can handle it.”

  For adults, they were so . . . loose. So different from Mom, who always acted so rigid and so certain that everything she did was right. Even different from Dad, who was more laid-back, but thought nothing of cleaning a toilet at three a.m. if the mood struck him.

  Dr. Speck shook his head and looked back at Eryn and Nick. Eryn knew he was really just looking at a camera, but somehow it felt more personal than that.

  “Years before we, ah, planted the seeds of our own destruction,” he said, “humanity had found new ways to deal with the problems of infertility. That’s what you call it when people who want to have children discover that they can’t.”

  “I think we could have figured that out,” Nick muttered beside Eryn.

  Eryn wasn’t going to admit that she kind of appreciated the definition. She’d heard the word fertile before, but she’d thought it only had to do with growing food. Hadn’t there been something called the Fertile Crescent her social studies teacher talked about at school?

  “Scientists like myself figured out how to develop and freeze embryos for future use by infertile couples,” Dr. Speck continued.

  “What—you’re not going to define embryos as, let’s say, the seeds of a new human being?” Dr. Grimaldi teased. “Putting it in language a five-year-old can understand?”

  “I have decided to believe that I am talking to a teenager,” Dr. Speck said, with an air of insulted dignity that somehow seemed just as much of a joke. “And that you have programmed your robots to do a good job of providing appropriate background information to children at every level.”

  Dr. Grimaldi snorted.

  “I’ll add that to my list of things to double-check,” she said. “There are a million items on that list—what’s one more?”

  If these doctors—these human beings—really thought they were only days away from destruction, how could they joke around like this? How could they laugh?

  Mom doesn’t have much of a sense of humor even when she isn’t staring destruction in the face, Eryn thought.

  On the screen, Dr. Speck rolled his eyes.

  “It was always seen as a problem that certain infertility treatments generally produced many, many more frozen embryos that a typical couple would use,” he continued. “Most Americans, for example, would want no more than two or three children, but when they were done having babies, they might have another eight or ten frozen embryos left in the embryo bank.”

  “Please don’t go into that whole debate about whether a frozen embryo counts as a human being, with all the rights of a human being,” Dr. Grimaldi begged. “Time is running out—remember? I don’t want to spend any of my remaining life on debates that humans fought about for decades!”

  “But it was that debate that kept so many frozen embryos alive,” Dr. Speck said. “There were so many parents who had beloved children who had once been frozen embryos, and a lot of those parents found that they couldn’t bear to let their remaining frozen embryos be thrown away like so much garbage. They kept paying the embryo banks to keep them alive. Even though, legally, they would have been well within their rights to have those embryos destroyed.”

  “Oh,” the mayor said suddenly, jolting the table just as much as Nick had. “Really? They didn’t have laws against embryo destruction? And yet they programmed us to treat every last embryo as the most precious thing ever?”

  Mom frowned at her.

  “Surely even a politician can figure out the psychology of that,” Mom said icily. “Because those embryos became humanity’s only hope.”

  “Why are we even talking about embryos?” Nick asked in a petulant voice that made him sound younger than twelve. Nick always sounded younger when he got tired and grumpy. Twelve years of growing up together meant that Eryn could recognize every single one of Nick’s moods. And now he had shifted into his this is boring mode, his can we just skip ahead to part I’m interested in? mode.

  I know what he’s thinking because of the whole twin thing, too, Eryn thought.

  But just the little bit of the video she’d seen so far made that thought twist in her mind. Mom and Dad were robots. She and Nick weren’t. If Mom and Dad weren’t really her parents, was it possible that Nick wasn’t really her twin, either? Was it possible that he wasn’t even her real brother? The two of them certainly looked alike, but how . . .
<
br />   The truth hit her hard. She couldn’t hold it in.

  “Nick, they’re talking about those frozen embryos because they’re us,” Eryn cried. “We’re them. That’s where we came from!”

  THIRTY

  Nick blinked.

  “You mean Mom and Dad had to have some kind of weird infertility treatment to have us?” he asked. “I really didn’t need to know that!”

  Eryn whacked him on the arm, a little too hard to count as playful.

  “Think!” she told him. “Mom and Dad are robots! We’re human! We don’t have their genes! I bet they don’t even have genes to give us! So they had to get us from somewhere! And that somewhere must have been—”

  “One of those frozen embryo banks,” Nick finished for her.

  He wanted to add Okay, whatever. Can we never talk about this again?

  But his brain seemed to be thawing out—maybe twelve years late from being a frozen embryo.

  This wasn’t something he could say whatever to.

  “So a lot of people died somehow,” he said. “Maybe everyone. But those two people—” he pointed at the screen, where the video still played—“they and maybe some other scientists did something to make sure the leftover frozen embryos stayed alive. And then, when it was safe, I guess, robots they’d left behind took the embryos out of the freezer and let them grow into kids? Like, like . . .”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to say Like us.

  “Yes,” Mom said, nodding gently. “The two of you started out as those frozen embryos. So did just about every kid you know. The ones who are twelve and under began that way.”

  Nick heard Mom speak, but he couldn’t make sense of her words.

  Evidently Eryn could.

  “So we’re just some sort of science experiment?” Eryn wailed. “We don’t even have real parents? We don’t have—”

  “I gave birth to you,” Mom said, and now there was a steeliness to her voice. “I may not be human, you may not be genetically mine, but I did give birth to you. We were designed to be able to do that. That, and other normal human activities. And your father and I—and Michael—we’ve raised you. That still makes us your parents.”