A Long, Long Sleep

by Anna Sheehan

  “Where was she?” asked Bren’s grandfather.

  Bren hesitated, then said, “Down in the subbasement. She was, ah, opening boxes. Trying to see if anything of her parents’ was left in storage.”

  I briefly wondered why he didn’t just tell the truth, but I was too sore to say anything.

  Bren’s grandfather stared at the stumble stick with his eyes narrowed. He glanced at me, then backed away toward the door. “I’ll cell the police, and an EMT,” he said. “Where’s the Plastine?”

  “Resetting itself in the subbasement,” Bren said. “I aborted its plan. It’ll take it a minute to formulate a new one.” As his grandfather turned his back to leave, Bren called after, “Take Mom, you’ll need her key card to open the door!”

  Things were swimmy and incoherent for a while after that. There were a lot of people coming and going. Someone sat me up and checked my vitals, then reassured interested onlookers that the stumble stick hadn’t done any of the tricks to my system that they are wont to do. My nanobots did need to be reactivated, but one of the EMTs had a remote that could manage it. My heart felt better after that. Someone tried to question me, but the same EMT had given me an injection of something that was supposed to ease the muscle tension. Unfortunately, it seemed to work in conjunction with the rest of the stass chemicals in my system, and I was basically down for the count. Through my stupor, I could hear Bren’s con fident voice telling everyone about what had happened to me.

  One moment stood out, when the sound of shouts half roused me. “What do you mean there’s nothing there!” That was Bren’s grandfather, and an angrier, more terrifying voice I had never heard. “You get down to that subbasement and you find that blasted thing!”

  Keeping my eyes closed, I cringed away from the shouts.

  “Dad, hush!” Mrs. Sabah said. “You’re waking her up.”

  A soft hand touched my hair, so gently that I felt my heart ache when it left me.

  If I’d been more awake, I’d have sighed. I wished my mom was still around to caress my hair, to care whether or not I was unhappy.

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said. He took whatever he was shouting at, his cell or the police, out of the room, and the irate conversation faded to a distant murmur. I lost track of time again.

  – chapter 14—

  When I woke up properly, my foster parents, Mrs. Sabah, Mr. Guillory, and one of the police officers were sitting around the room talking quietly. “I understand,” Patty was saying. “But how long are we talking, here? We gave up a lot to be here for her, and now you’re going to take her and leave us?”

  “Don’t sound so concerned,” Mrs. Sabah snapped with palpable sarcasm.

  Before Patty or Barry could defend themselves, Mr. Guillory reassured them.

  “We’d still need you to maintain this apartment until we bring her back, and isn’t there a dog? Wouldn’t want that to starve.”

  Barry groaned. “Why a dog?” he demanded of Guillory. “Why on earth did you send her a dog?”

  “You don’t like it?” Mr. Guillory said absently. “Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry, officer. I can keep her perfectly safe.”

  “If you can give us some assurances of that, Mr. Guillory,” said the policeman.

  The unfamiliar voice made me open my eyes. The cop was standing by the fireplace, notescreen in hand, while everyone else sat quietly on various chairs.

  Bren had squeezed in at the end of the green couch, and my feet had ended up on his lap somehow. I blinked at them a few times. Someone had taken off my shoes, and my socks were filthy. I hated to think what the rest of me looked like, after rolling around on the subbasement floor. Bren looked as fresh and pressed as a Uni Prep brochure. There was something too intimate about having my feet on his lap. I experimented with sitting up. It didn’t hurt too badly.

  “It lives,” said Bren with half a smile. “Drugs out of your system yet?”

  I groaned. “Unfortunately.”

  Mrs. Sabah laughed. “How are you, dear?”

  Bren smirked at her. “That’s a silly question. How does she look?”

  Mrs. Sabah twitched her eyebrows in acknowledgment, but it was Mr. Guillory who spoke. “Do you have any idea who did this to you?”

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Guillory,” said the policeman. “I think I’d better be the one to ask the questions.”

  “I think Rose would probably like to use the restroom first — wash her face,”

  Bren said. Without waiting for my agreement, he seized my hand and pulled me to my feet. I was shaky and sore, but he was right. I de finitely wanted to freshen up before I had to undergo an interrogation.

  “All right, make it quick,” said the cop.

  Bren led me out to the hall, where a female cop was talk-ing on her cell. Bren took one look at her, then came right inside the bathroom with me.

  The bathrooms in the condo were spacious, but there still didn’t seem to be enough room inside. He was too close. I could feel his heat not an inch from my skin, that wretched seductive scent of him. Between the stass and the drugs, my emotions weren’t working at their optimal. I wanted to throw my arms around him, and I wanted to hate him. Mostly I just wished he would go away, so I’d stop feeling like this. “What are you doing?” I asked as he closed the door.

  “Don’t tell them you stassed yourself,” he said.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting him to say, but that wasn’t it. “Why not?”

  “Because they’ll label you class- A maladjusted, and you’ll have half a dozen doctors shrinking your head,” Bren said. “That might not be a bad idea, except then Guillory would use every dirty trick in the book to see you declared un fit to manage your parents’ assets, and he’d be in control for life. You’d have everything you needed, and you’d technically own the company, but Guillory would own you.”

  I swallowed. “Oh,” I said. “Thanks. But what’ll we say about where I’ve been the last two days?”

  “Patty and Barry didn’t even notice you were missing until this morning,” Bren said. “I noticed before they did. And just because you skipped school for two days running doesn’t mean you went anywhere. Just say you were feeling nostalgic and skipped school to look through those old crates.”

  “What was I looking for?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Say that —say it didn’t matter, just anything.”

  I nodded. “Okay.” I glanced at myself in the mirror. I was filthy from head to toe. There were deep hollows under my eyes, and there was a crease on my cheek from the couch cushion. I looked like one of the beggars who used to mob me when I went into the cities. And Bren had to see me like this? “I really would like to use the bathroom now.”

  He took the hint. “Sure. I’ll meet you back in the living room.” He slipped awkwardly out the door.

  Five minutes later, I came back looking a little less like a street urchin. I considered changing out of my creased uniform but decided that in the end it didn’t matter. Someone seemed to be keeping the reporters outside. When I peeked out the window, I saw the white head of Bren’s grandfather, placating them by the front entrance.

  The first thing the police made me do when I got back was tell them everything I remembered about the first attack. Patty and Barry demanded to know why I didn’t tell them before. “I don’t know,” I said. “Partly, I wasn’t sure it had happened at all. I’ve been having nightmares, and they all seem pretty awful.

  By the time I got home, the maid had been and gone, and I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing up.”

  This was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The truth was that I hadn’t felt it within my rights to bother Patty and Barry with my problems.

  I followed Bren’s advice and told them that I was just poking through crates in the basement. I hadn’t run away. I hadn’t meant to frighten anyone. I had no idea that anyone would notice me gone and cell the police. Everyone reassured me t
hat I hadn’t done anything wrong. I wondered what they would have said if I’d admitted I’d gone to stass myself. Bren seemed to think their reactions would be pretty bad.

  “Well,” said Guillory. “You shouldn’t go poking around alone for a while. Not with a Plastine on the hunt for you.”

  “What exactly is a Plastine?” I asked.

  Three answers hit me at once. “A robot,” Guillory said.

  “A weapon,” said the policeman.

  “A corpse,” Bren said.

  I shuddered. “What?”

  “A Plastine is a human corpse that has been plasticized, which makes it virtually indestructible,” Guillory told me. “They were in the experimental stage around the time you were put into stass. They have all the functions and abilities of a human warrior, but they’re about twenty times stronger and entirely insensitive to pain. Amazing constructs. No emotion, of course, but they were able to integrate programming through existing neural pathways, which makes them almost as intelligent as a human. And humans are smarter than you’d think, if you consider all the calculations of trajectory and wind variance and a thousand other things it takes to, say, catch a baseball.

  Plastines aren’t as quick to adapt as a human, though, as Bren proved this afternoon.”

  “They’re deadly,” Bren said. “They’ll follow any order given to them, from taking out the garbage to committing genocide. The robots we make have an inability to harm humans hard-wired into their programming. Plastines have no such program. With human neural processors, there’s no way of even implementing such a thing. In that way, they’re all too human. They were developed as soldiers and assassins. They’ve been banned by international agreement for the last thirty years, though they’re still in use in some of the outer colonies, where it’s hard to find living humans for out- dome tasks. Bloody risky if you ask me.

  Not to mention a morbid exploitation of human remains.”

  “You’re just like Ronny,” Guillory said to Bren. “I don’t see you complaining about organ donations. You and your grandfather don’t see the potential for humankind if the ban were lifted.”

  “I see the potential for abuse in the whole system! Let’s murder people so we can ex more people.” Bren turned to me. “Plastines were mostly made out of executed prisoners who sold their bodies to get money for their families. They had to start healthy, you see, so they had to be killed—they couldn’t die naturally. China was one of the worst; the body probably came from there. The largest Plastine laboratory was in Germany, though. Ask Will. His granddad used to run the place. It was a slaughterhouse. Literally.”

  “But they volunteered —” Guillory began.

  “Perforce!” Bren shouted back.

  “Neither here nor there,” said Mrs. Sabah, interrupting an obviously old and multibranched argument. “The ban hasn’t been lifted, which means that whoever sent that thing is breaking international law.”

  The policeman cleared his throat. “Kidnap and assassination, no matter what tool you use, is a breach of international law.”

  I was shaking. That Plastine had scared me when I didn’t know what it was.

  Now that I did, it was ten times worse. “Can it be stopped?” My voice came out in a panicked whimper.

  “They’re difficult to stop,” the policeman said, with no attempt at reassurance.

  “It would take a tank, a flamethrower, and probably twenty men. Besides, there might be more of them ready to replace this one. It would be better to find who sent it and force them to rescind the order.”

  “Well, who’s after me? Do we know that?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Guillory. “You’re a public figure, and not everything UniCorp has done has been considered for the greater good. We all have our enemies. If someone fixated on something your parents did in the early days of the company, they might have decided to take their revenge out on you. It also might just be some nut who fears or envies your newfound fame. There’s no way of knowing.”

  “Couldn’t you ask it or something? Wouldn’t there be some way of reading its orders?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. “We could,” Guillory said, “but unfortunately the Plastine is nowhere to be found.”

  An icy grip of horror assaulted me. “It’s gone?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said a new voice, and Bren’s father poked his head around the door. I hadn’t seen Mr. Sabah since my stint in the hospital, when he’d visited once or twice with Bren. His facial expressions and movement patterns seemed African, and there was still the slightest hint of an accent to his deep voice as well. “We’ve been over that subbasement a dozen times with every sonar tool and olfactory sensor the police could find. Sorry, honey,” he said looking at me. “The thing has disappeared like a ghost.”

  Mr. Sabah looked so much like Bren, it was distracting. I wanted to smile at him, but I was too worried. “How is that possible? The door was locked.”

  “Yes, it was,” Mrs. Sabah said. “No one can understand it.”

  “Since we could not apprehend the Plastine,” the policeman said, “and you tell us it has attacked before in this very apartment, we’re going to have to take you someplace safe for a few days.”

  “Reggie’s got a lot of options,” said Mr. Sabah, sliding into the love seat, beside his wife. “Sky’s the limit for him, isn’t that right, Reg?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mr. Guillory.

  “For tonight, how about you stay with Roseanna and me? You’ll have to share a room with Hilary, but if you don’t mind . . .”

  “I’d love it!” I said too quickly. Then I looked over at Bren, and I half wished I hadn’t agreed. But what were the alternatives? And I liked Mr. and Mrs. Sabah, and despite everything, I still liked Bren.

  Half looking for a reason to back out, I said, “But . . . what about Patty and Barry? If that thing comes looking for me and finds them . . .”

  “Plastines don’t think that fluidly,” said Mr. Guillory. “If its orders are for you, it will look for nothing but you. Patty and Barry could walk right past and hit it with a baseball bat and it wouldn’t bother hurting them. As long as they didn’t impede its progress toward you, it would just let them go.”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to spend the night alone. “Can I bring Zavier?”

  “Just for tonight,” said Guillory. “We can’t bring a dog where I’m planning on taking you.”

  “Is that all right?” I asked Bren’s parents.

  They nodded. I went into my room to collect an overnight bag. I grabbed enough clothes for a long weekend and then slipped into my studio for a fresh sketchbook. I looked longingly at my oil paints. I hoped they’d find this robot corpse soon, so that I could have my studio back.

  Mrs. Sabah was waiting in the hall with Zavier on a leash. “You ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Sabah.”

  “Please call me Annie.” She took the bag from my hand despite my protests.

  “You’re still suffering from the stumble stick,” she said. “I’ll bet every muscle is screaming. The first thing I’m going to do is put you in a nice hot bath, with sea salt and bubbles.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she asked.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me, Mrs. Sabah . . .

  Annie.”

  She laughed. “Actually, it was Bren who suggested it to Mamadou. You should thank him.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Bren’s apartment was a mirror image of mine. But while mine was quiet, and still echoed from a sense of emptiness, Bren’s suite was constantly filled with noise and movement and usually trouble. Bren was the oldest of three.

  Hilary was golden brown and kept her hair in tightly man-aged cornrows. She had just turned fourteen and was going to start at Uni Prep next fall. Kayin was ten, black as ebony, jumpy as a cricket, and
going through a horse phase.

  I’d apparently met them both in the hospital after I’d first gotten out of stass, but I didn’t remember them at all. Half the country, it seemed, had passed through my hospital room in those days. Remembering everyone was impossible.

  While Zavier was commandeered into the garden by Kayin, Mrs. Sabah followed through on her threat to stick me in a bathtub. But not just any bathtub. All the tubs at Unicorn Estates were huge sunken whirlpools, but Mrs. Sabah poured in enough bath salts and perfumed oils and designer bubbles that sinking into the water was almost like going into stass. I nearly found myself falling asleep, but Hilary came in with a plate full of delicacies, and I realized I was ravenous. I hadn’t eaten since lunch on the day of my doomed attempt at romance with Bren, and then I’d been too nervous to do more than nibble. That would have made it more than twenty- four hours, even if the time in stass didn’t count. Which to an extent, it did, because after you digested what you had in your system, stass just kept you from needing any more. I made sure to eat slowly so that the nausea wouldn’t hit.

  When I crawled out of the bath, I looked at myself in the mirror. I usually didn’t spend much time looking at myself. Before that final stass, Mom used to spend much of her time dressing me up, sometimes several times a day, so I never had to worry about what I looked like. And lately, I’d been so blitzed from stass fatigue and culture shock, I hadn’t developed a habit of looking in a mirror. I saw myself enough to brush my teeth and hair, and that was about it.

  Standing alone in my silken pajamas, I really looked at myself now.

  No wonder Brendan thought me a ghost. I was all but emaciated. Nearly two months out of stass hadn’t been enough to fill out my muscles. My cheeks were hollow. Shampoo and vitamins had almost restored my hair to the lustrous blond mane I remembered, but my skin still looked very pale. My eyes frightened me. The calm brown pools I remembered from my childhood were now shadowy places hiding devils. I gulped and scrabbled in my bag. I pulled out a charcoal pencil and set about sketching this horri fic face that stared back at me. I always understood things better when I sketched them.