by Anthology
When Mathison opened the door, the cold hit him with a shudder of wind, a cold that slashed right through the down of his padded jacket to the bone.
The ground and ice cut him as he slipped down from the truck, as he tried to make his way toward the wailing. Cold. It was cold with a capital letter ‘C’, and the thought came that he should be getting back in his truck—but the thought was stronger that someone out there needed help, and he had to get to them.
He reached the spinner first, a tangled wreckage of red and grey and steel lying in the jagged underbrush. Through the shattered window on the front-left side, Mathison could see the body of a man flung forward in his seat, in a suit and no overcoat, buckled in.
The body was still bleeding from the head, and he looked like he’d taken at least one very hard hit, maybe more. Crushed and pinned in his twisted Coke can of a vehicle. It was clear that even the robot controls on the spinner hadn’t been able to react fast enough to the multiple collisions.
When Mathison checked the man, his heart sank, even though he’d already known what he’d find. The man was dead.
From the opposite side door, a furrow in the snow traced where that passenger had unstrapped herself from her seat and made her way fifteen feet from the wreckage.
A handbag and two high-heeled evening shoes, strewn about four feet apart, marked the snow with three splotches of matching turquoise.
The woman was at the end of the path, holding what looked like the body of a young girl—ten, maybe eleven years old, a rag doll spun out into the cold.
“Sarah!” she was crying. “Oh, Sarah!”
Suddenly she saw Mathison’s figure in the drift, and she called out. “Help me, please, help me!”
He hurried toward the two, knelt down beside them. He saw that the woman was already shivering badly, although all her attention was on the girl she cradled, limp in her arms.
He started taking off his jacket, meaning to cover them both and lead them to the warmth of his truck—then stopped and caught his breath.
There, on the palm of the little girl’s outstretched hand, pale and ungloved, was branded a single letter:
‘R’.
Up to 25 vehicles involved in pileup
Reports from Transport Service drones at the scene confirmed that the accident was consistent with a series of collisions involving up to 25 vehicles.
Poor weather and icy road conditions had been very poor, making it a challenging drive around the state, even for robotically controlled spinners, keeping the authorities busy responding to a number of accidents.
‘R.’
The letter—mandated by law and branded just so, on the palm—told Mathison everything he or anyone else was supposed to know about her.
It communicated the message that—in the crucible of life and humanity, in the triage forced upon them by the night and the wind and the temperature now ranging at thirty degrees below—she didn’t matter.
She wouldn’t count, alive or dead, in any case, it told him. Only the man in the car would be worth mentioning in any reports. After all, what did they say, the three principles? That she wasn’t a human being; that she was property; that she was subservient?
She was wreckage, much like the vehicle she’d been flung from.
It didn’t matter that blood flowed through its veins, that it had a heart that could beat like a human heart, that it shivered as if the cold could freeze that heart. It didn’t matter that it could mimic laughter, weep at a broken doll, or sing, or—
Suddenly, the little girl’s eyes opened, and she called out, “Mommy.”
Startled, Mathison flung his coat on the woman, and pulled her away from the girl.
“Sarah!” she screamed, and broke away briefly; but before she could reach the body again, Mathison scooped the woman off her feet and hauled her away. The snow was falling faster now, his undershirt was wet and stiff, and he knew he needed to reach the truck quickly.
All the way the woman fought him, like a drowning swimmer blindly fighting a lifeguard, flailing and scratching at him.
When he finally got to the truck, he flung the woman in, locked the doors, and turned on the ignition. He adjusted half of the vent to her, half to him. Slowly, warmth began to seep in, the feeling starting to return to the parts of him that had become numb.
Beside him, the woman screamed and sobbed, banging at her door.
Severe weather conditions hamper rescue
Weather conditions also hampered the rescue team, which had to treat several cases of hypothermia, some severe.
Sgt. Wilson urged people caught in accidents in cold weather to remain in their vehicles, keep the motor running to keep warm, and wait for security services or paramedics to arrive.
With temperatures and wind chills in the range seen recently, frostbite and hypothermia from prolonged exposure are real concerns. Death can strike long before the body actually freezes.
Mathison cursed the woman, cursed himself.
What was her story? What tragedy could make the woman think something like that could take the place of a real, breathing human child?
Or could it?
The woman beside him continued to sob. What have I done? he asked himself. What have we done?
Had he just left a little girl to perish in the cold? Did it matter that she had her mother’s eyes, her hair, was made in her mother’s image? Could she feel the coldness overcome her, the horror of darkness closing in, the fear of dying alone, unloved? After she was gone, would it matter, if she didn’t have a soul?
And what if she did?
What did it mean for him to make the choice to leave her there? Had he just failed the Turing test of his own humanity?
“Damn it!” he said.
The wind pushed back at the truck door as Mathison fumbled at it, stumbled outside again. He had to lean forward to keep from being blown back.
Every step was agony now, not just because his constant shivering now made him falter, but because every step was a repudiation of all that he’d taken for granted before tonight. But he followed the truck’s headlights, farther, farther, out into the night.
When he reached the girl, still there where he remembered, he knelt down without looking at her palm, at the ugly brand that set her apart from everyone. Instead, he looked at her.
She was just a little girl, in a party dress and stockings, helpless, almost sleeping. The smallest thing. Her lips were ashen, her eyes were closed, and her eyelashes were frosted over in crystals. But she was breathing. The girl was alive.
She stirred without opening her eyes, when he reached under her arms to lift her up. “Daddy,” she murmured.
The snow blinded him. “No, sweetie,” he said, through tears. “I’m so sorry.”
Not more than sixty pounds, he thought, as he lifted her. The smallest thing. So frail, almost inconsequential.
Her ribbon had come undone, and her auburn hair was askew, strewn with snow, the crystals sparkling like stars. He brushed them away as he carried her back, back toward the headlights in the distance, back to the warmth from the opening door, back into her mother’s arms.
Interstate reopened
The westbound lanes of I-94 are now open to traffic after being closed while officials investigated the crash.
Officials had advised early Friday afternoon against travel on I-94 because of icy road conditions and limited visibility.
There were snowfall warnings for several areas around Port Huron on Friday evening. Those warnings have since been lifted.
Andrea Phillips
http://twitter.com/andrhia
In Loco Parentis(Short story)
by Andrea Phillips
Originally published by Escape Pod
The video stutters at the eighteen-second mark. Yakova knows by heart precisely when it happens. As she watches, she mouths the words along with Autumn. “So this girl just, like, opens up her bag, right?”
And here is where it happens: Autumn elbows her and knocks her
glasses off. Yakova knows she should edit it out, those few seconds of skewed and jarring footage as her glasses skitter across the lunch table. Instead, she studies each frame carefully.
Jad is there, nearly off-frame and out of focus, light gleaming off the angled planes of his cheekbones, dark hair curled over his eyes. He starts from his recline, and he looks at her (looks at her!), eyes widening. His hand reaches up, and—
She cuts it off here, before she has to hear her own brassy laugh, before she can hear herself telling Autumn to be more careful. If she doesn’t hear it, she can pretend HE didn’t hear it, either.
She bites her lip, studying Jad’s expression of…concern? It must be concern. Probably. But is it the aloof concern of a bystander, or a more significant concern, floating atop a deep ocean of unspoken feeling?
At the base of Yakova’s skull, her minder, Seraph, uncoils and stretches. “You have homework to do,” Seraph says. When she speaks, it is a warm vibration behind Yakova’s ear, all thought and no real sound. Her voice is the same as Yakova’s mother.
Yakova zooms in on Jad’s inscrutable degree of concern. “Do you think he likes me?” she asks.
The video panel winks out. “Homework,” Seraph says. If she has arrived at any conclusions regarding the boy’s feelings, she keeps them to herself.
Yakova shouldn’t have glasses at all, of course. Not anymore, not at her age. The last two years have seen her friends blossoming into adulthood—one by one peripherals have fallen away, leaving their eyes clear, their faces open and unguarded. Yakova is left behind with a goggle-eyed wall between her and her newly coltish, beautiful peers.
Being marked out as the sole baby in a flock of long-limbed near-adults is no easy thing, and made worse because she knows she is not a baby, not really. If only her mother could see that.
Yakova closes her eyes and pictures the single blurry frame, Jad’s indeterminate degree of concern. Her minder can remove the video from her glasses, but can’t lock Yakova out of her memory of it. “Seraph,” Yakova says, “can’t you convince my mom it’s time for me to get optic implants? I’m so ready.”
“You know I can’t,” Seraph says. “Only you can do that.”
The upgrade is a simple enough procedure: three pills and two quick injections, one for each eye. Fine threads would twine along Yakova’s optic nerves, just like the ones that already wind through her auditory nerves. They would weave a silvery net within her brain, reaching into the place deep in her skull where Seraph dwells.
The limitations binding Seraph—like a forest of thorns to keep her imprisoned—would slowly lose their power in the face of this more complete integration. Over time, Seraph would become an extension of Yakova’s self, no longer an extension of her parents’ authority.
“Can’t you just try?” Yakova’s lower lip curls out and down, petulant.
“I’ll mention it,” Seraph says. “That’s all I can do.”
You can’t do the upgrade too young, of course; that would risk the minder overpowering the child’s semi-developed brain. It wouldn’t do for the servant to become the master. And of course some parents fear losing control of their children. Though of course they always do, in the end.
***
“Wake up, dumpling, it’s time,” Seraph says, gently.
Yakova groans. Seraph always wakes her at the optimal time in her sleep cycle—or so she says—but it is invariably too early. “Not yet,” Yakova murmurs, eyes still closed. Her sweaty cheek is pressed against her bed, her lips loose and open, her breath slow and even.
It is a dance they perform every morning, and Seraph continues the time-worn steps: “I’ll give you five more minutes.”
Yakova tips forward into her dream again. In her quasi-sleep, she is with Jad. His arms are wrapped around her, strong and warm as her cocoon of blankets. She sighs.
After precisely five minutes have passed, Seraph does the one thing she knows will instantly rouse her host. She opens Yakova’s chat buffer. “Ninety new messages,” Seraph says. “Autumn is having trouble deciding what to wear this morning.”
Yakova’s eyes fly open. Her hand scrabbles in the gray morning light for her glasses, places them securely on her nose.
She sits, still wrapped in blankets, and scans the chat. The warm imprint of Jad’s dream-arms is still heavy on her skin. “You can’t see what I was dreaming about, right, Seraph?” She hugs her elbows close to her ribs to keep any embarrassment from rushing out of her chest and into the open.
“You know I can’t,” Seraph says. “Only you can do that.”
Yakova knows this, but doesn’t quite believe it. It can be difficult to be certain where the line is between you and an entity who lives in your own head, sees what you see, hears what you hear. Some children choose to wipe their minders clean and start fresh once they have upgraded to optic implants. It provides a sense of liberation of the self from the lingering echo of one’s parents.
Seraph shepherds Yakova through her morning tasks: clean clothes—no, not that shirt, it’s going to be too hot today—brush teeth, comb hair. Remember to wash your face, the new pimple-reducing face wash is in the cabinet below the sink. All the while Yakova is enclosed in the joyful cocoon of her peer group. Today, they decide, they will all wear red and call Denny “Captain Hottiepants” to see if it gets a rise out of him.
Yakova’s mother, Meirav, is already in the breakfast room. Streaks of gray spiral through her thick hair, reminding Yakova of neural networks and optic implants. Meirav’s eyes are distant as she skims the news, or perhaps her messages. Coffee steams beside her motionless hand.
Yakova pours herself a mug of fresh coffee, adulterates it with abundant sugar and coconut cream. Her mother’s eyes flick over, then tighten with disapproval.
“You shouldn’t have coffee,” Seraph says, in Meirav’s voice. “You’re too young, it will damage your nervous system.”
Yakova lifts the coffee to her lips and takes an ostentatious slurp. The sound breaks over the faint hum of electricity like a tsunami crashing over a sleepy seaside resort.
“Yakova,” her mother says, in Seraph’s voice. Or almost her voice; it’s not the same now, not anymore—the passage of years has worn Meirav into something deeper, harder, snappish and despotic.
Yakova’s ribs fill with hot steel. Her nostrils are wide with insolence. She takes another loud sip of coffee, swallows it.
“Yakova.” Meirav is still, like the blade of a guillotine before it drops. “Do you want a consequence?”
Yakova lifts the coffee to her lips a third time, mumbling a half-remembered curse.
Meirav’s eyes narrow, her chin grows hard. “Where did you learn that word?”
Yakova shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says, with measured enjoyment. “Guess I just made it up.”
Meirav’s eyes are half-lidded. She pulls the information straight from Yakova’s mind—from Seraph, who can keep no secrets from her. “Autumn,” she says. A silence descends as she reviews patterns of interaction between her child and this other. “Always a bad influence,” she says at last. “I won’t have you speaking with her anymore.”
“Just try and stop me,” Yakova says.
“Consider it done.” Meirav smiles joylessly. She sits down again and loses her focus, sinking back into her news, her correspondence, a bright internal world impervious to Yakova’s small rebellion.
Yakova cups the coffee in both her hands, breathes in its bitter scent. Its taste is turning sour at the back of her tongue.
***
Autumn has been removed from Yakova’s chat contacts.
Suddenly her joyful cocoon of constant companionship has torn. Other friends try to fill the emptiness where her link to Autumn was, at first. They pass messages between the two. Seraph is obligated to filter this activity almost as soon as Yakova herself has noticed it.
Yakova still has the limited interaction that happens when bodies occupy near-space, but this is a poor substitute for the dee
per synchrony of thought and action she has always known, as fast as thought, as deep inside her as her own beating heart.
She sits at lunch with her friends. As one, they titter and look at Denny from the corners of their glasses-free eyes. Autumn has sent something funny, she guesses. A doctored screen capture, a particularly unflattering freeze frame. “What was it?” Yakova sends, but she gets no response. She doesn’t know if it’s because there has been no answer, or because Seraph has been commanded to hide any answers from her.
Yakova looks into her pot of yogurt, stirs it with a spoon. Pedro sends a short video of a cartoon panda eating a candy cane. The table erupts with fresh giggles. It is incomprehensible to Yakova.
In a corner of her glasses, Seraph captures Jad’s words and actions for later scrutiny. A tally glows faint blue: Jad has looked her way eight times in twenty minutes, an increase of 17.3% from the mean.
Perhaps it is interest; or perhaps it’s just pity, as word of her isolation spreads.
Yakova tries to think of a code, a signal, something to bridge the infinite chasm between herself and her friends, but there is no code Yakova would understand that Seraph could overlook. One cannot keep secrets from the angel on one’s shoulder.
“Autumn,” Yakova says, out loud. “We’re still friends, right? I mean…it’s OK, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Autumn says. She gives Yakova an apologetic smile.
But slowly, over hours and days, the effort of routing around the damaged pathway that is Yakova proves too much. The web must repair itself. When the cocoon closes over again, shining and beautiful and safe, Yakova is no longer inside it.
Yakova lies in her bed, as alone as she has ever been. “Bring them back, Seraph,” she wails. “This is a disaster. I might as well be dead. Seraph, can’t you tell mom she’s been too hard on me? ”