by Ann Christy
Slinging the rifle onto my lap so that it’s in just the right position to pick up and fire, I greedily open the note. It’s spattered with brown drops of dried blood, and some that seem fresher, but the writing is legible. Some part of me is filled with excitement at the very idea of opening a paper written by another hand, even while the rest of me fears what I’ll read, and how that might change the trajectory of my career in professional caution.
The handwriting is young, busy with big looping letters and circles instead of dots over the letters that need such. I run my hand over it before I can even read it, the indirect touch of another person almost overwhelming me for a second or two. One more look at the in-betweener and I read:
Hello! The man with this note is Sam and he won’t hurt you if you are careful. He was a teacher and he takes care of us, but then he got shot by accident. I timed it and he was gone for three minutes so he’s not as bad as most. But he is not doing well and we sent him to find you before something bad happens. He watched you but we didn’t get a chance to come to where you are. There are five of us but Penny and Jon are little and I can only carry one of them. Please come and find us. He can bring you but if not, here is our address. Love, Veronica
P.S. If you feed him animals he isn’t as dangerous.
Below that, the girl had drawn a row of hearts and noted their address. An address I don’t know at all. An address I know I will find.
Four Years Ago - A Life Saved Is a Future Saved
“Death from sudden heart attack may be a thing of the past!” the newscaster announces with a wide grin that speaks to me of a love of cheeseburgers. So I say that out loud.
My mother snorts and taps at her tablet, immersed in some bit of work that’s followed her home. Her fingernail makes a series of rapid clicks against the glass of the tablet, and then she makes a little noise of satisfaction. Another problem solved.
What my mother does in the military has nothing to do with fighting—at least I don’t think so—and everything to do with computer programming. That just means she’s always busy. For her, the fight is twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. She works at home every night and every weekend. She loves her job, though, so there’s that.
I turn up the TV a little to cover the sound of her taps. This is one bit of news I want to listen to.
This new nanite is a doozy and probably deserves a little excitement. Finding the cure-all nanite isn’t likely, but more and different kinds of nanites are now available to mix and match as the need arises. This particular type can be administered by emergency responders. It can restart the heart and fix heart tissue, rendering the heart normal again after the worst has happened. They’re calling them First Responders. I wonder how the real first responders of the world—namely, the firefighters and paramedics—feel about a bunch of nanites being given their name.
It’s true that most people won’t get that far down the road of heart failure. Anyone with clogged arteries is receiving injections of the plaque-eating nanites, but sometimes things just happen. I’ll bet there are a million sighs of relief coming from a million chests right about now.
After a moment of listening to the news anchor gushing on about these new nanites, my mother says, “Well, this is good news for the transfat people.”
I laugh and answer, “Well, there’s no transfat in ice cream but it’s got loads of saturated fat. Can I have some?”
She looks up from her tablet and winks. “Only if you get me some, too.”
We eat ice cream and watch the extended coverage of this new advance. Nanites are great, but they aren’t computationally complex enough to do many different things. They are purpose built.
Artery-clearing nanites travel the bloodstream, using pincers and jaws to remove plaque from cholesterol buildup. Others are engineered to digest other compounds or grab onto cells much larger than themselves and simply burst them, rendering them unable to carry out their biological imperatives. It’s complicated, but exciting.
A new segment comes on, this one very different from the upbeat tenor of the previous program, the tone this time far more serious. Gushing, cheeseburger-loving anchors are replaced by the serious faces of the typical older anchor and an expert guest.
“But, and this is a big issue, Troy, we’d be remiss if we didn’t examine the potential dangers,” the newscaster says.
To me, it looks like the expert is about ready to jump out of his chair and start waving his hands like those crazy people on the street corners always warning us about the end of the world. The newscaster barely finishes speaking before he jumps in.
“This is new technology, one in which the long-term impacts to health are entirely unknown,” he begins. He sounds reasonable, but excited in the way people who have bad news they can’t wait to share are. I can almost hear the movie music signaling impending doom in the background. “New nanites are coming out too fast for anything like the extensive testing we really need. And people are loading up on every kind of nanite, with no thought to how many different types they've got inside them and what might happen as a result.”
“Hey, Mom. Listen to this for a minute,” I say, putting my empty bowl of ice cream on the coffee table.
She looks up, then back down at her tablet, then at me. I know she’s trying to decide if work can wait, so I smile and point at the screen. That does the trick, because she puts her work aside and tucks her feet up under my blanket on the couch, all her attention now on the screen.
The newscaster is one I’m not particularly fond of. When he’s trying to be serious he always draws his face down in a frown so severe that it makes his facelift look weird, like it’s too tight or something.
He nods sagely at the expert’s words, then asks, “Even if that were true, don’t the nanites simply do their work, go inactive, and then get flushed out of the system? Should people be afraid and then pass up the chance for a longer and healthier life? Isn’t that overly cautious, even alarmist?”
The expert shakes his head. “You make it sound like it’s an either-or situation when it isn’t,” the fellow shoots back, his irritation showing. “What I’m saying is that the current trend is to have nanites injected even when there’s no viable medical need. In particular, there’s a huge underground trade in cheap knock-off plaque nanites. Millions of people around the world, some as young as their twenties, are getting pumped full of nanites without a diagnosis or prescription. Young people whose arteries are almost certainly clean as a whistle are loading up on these things—all for no better reason than ‘just in case.’ Using a radically new and only minimally tested technology in this way is downright foolhardy.”
The newscaster nods again, giving the old wise-man imitation he’s known for. He says, “I don’t think anyone is encouraging irresponsible medical treatments, whether nanite-based or not. But you have to admit…”
I tune them out at that point, a thought coming to me.
“Mom, do you have nanites?” I ask.
She starts at that, then picks at the fringe at the edge of the blanket. I know my answer already.
“I do, but not like what that man is talking about,” she says, waving toward the TV and the talking heads.
I think that’s sort of funny, because she was very insistent about ensuring all my nanites left my system once my tumor was gone. I figured she was creeped out by the idea of me having machines inside me and here she is, adding them to her own bloodstream.
“What kind?”
She laughs. “Oh, well, the same ones everyone’s got now, I’d guess.”
“Which ones? The artery ones?”
She nods and smiles, but she’s examining my face for my reaction.
I’m not sure what I think of that. Mostly, I wonder if that means she had something wrong with her. There’s no denying that my associations with nanites lead me to think of them as the things that bring us back from the brink of death.
My mom must see something of this in my face, because sh
e reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and says, “I’m not sick, sweetie. I had a little build-up in my arteries from all that ship food and a lifetime of ice cream, but the nanites went in and did their stuff. I’m sure they’re probably gone by now. It was just a shot at the doctor’s office. Nothing more.”
I take that in and look back at the muted screen, the talking heads still in full debate. The remote lies on the arm of the couch, so I pick it up and click off the program.
My mom is still looking at me, waiting for me to say whatever it is I’d like to say.
“That’s cool, Mom. I want you to stick around forever. We can be all nanited up together.”
She laughs and picks my ice cream bowl up off the coffee table, holding it out for me.
“Then more ice cream is definitely called for. My pipes are all clean now,” she says.
I take our bowls and go into the kitchen, scooping rocky road from the carton and listening to my mother tap away on her tablet, her break over.
The expert’s words still twist about in my mind. We were so careful with my nanites. Granted, they were primitive compared to those being manufactured now, just two years later, but still. It does seem odd that people would just buy cheap knock-offs from who knows where and put them inside their bodies. They could be hacked, or carry malicious code or something. Everyone knows the country that provides most of our cheaper electronics always plants code in everything they make. Even toasters!
I suppose people risk it because the fear of death is so strong, probably the strongest fear humans have. With good reason. We’ll do almost anything to avoid dying. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me. I, of all people, should know how far someone will go to live.
Shrugging off the expert’s words, I make a point of looking at the positive side of this. Advances are being made every single day in the new wonderland that is medical nanite technology. By the time I’m old enough to worry about things like heart attacks, I won’t have to worry about them at all.
I like that idea. Another bowl of ice cream sounds like a perfect way to celebrate.
Today - In Between You and Me
In typical in-betweener fashion, the recently deceased guy at the fence seems to have lost interest in finding me, perhaps forgetting that I’m here at all. I study him with a new perspective from my hidden spot in the tall grass. I now know his name and at least a little of his past.
He’s a revived dead person—meaning his nanites restarted his heart and closed up major wounds—but he was dead. And dead for three minutes means massive brain damage. That’s what makes him an in-betweener. Not dead and not alive, merely functioning.
Yet, somehow, despite all of that, he is still trying to protect some children who aren’t even his. Out of all the things he might remember, that is what he’s holding onto. I figured that some memories might remain, but still, this is heartbreaking. They must have known I was here all this time and simply left me alone because, well, because people are dangerous.
More than likely, they—or he—didn’t want to risk contact with an armed girl who spends her days cutting up deaders so they can’t get up again. I can’t imagine what it must have looked like to a stranger to see me carefully severing the spines of deaders and then smashing their heads over and over before dragging them off to be pecked over by birds.
I shake my head and get back to the problem at hand. Namely, that I don’t know where this address is and this is a big town. It isn’t New York, but it isn’t a little village either. Second, I have very little confidence in my driving ability, particularly through debris-strewn streets. I was learning to drive when all this happened, but I didn’t even have my permit yet. Then again, my mom made sure there were arrangements for that contingency and I’ve continued according to her instructions. I just haven’t actually practiced much open-road driving.
And as if I needed to add more to the pile, I have no idea how I’ll corral five kids and then take care of them. And I don’t know what to do about this Sam fellow, either. Those kids might think he’s safe, but I don’t have any past with him. There’s no history of kindness and companionship between us to blind me to the menacing creature with snapping jaws he devolves into at the least little thing.
No, Sam is not safe to be around. I wish with all my might that I didn’t know his name.
Trying to keep as low as I can in the grass, I make my way back to the sign. I can hide behind it and say what needs saying, do what needs doing if it comes down to that.
Sam has gone still again, looking at the deaders with a blank look on his face and his hands slack at his sides. In-betweeners are rarely still, so even this is odd and outside the expected norms, if that’s even the right word to use.
Once I’m behind the big sign and peering through the narrow gap between its frame and brick base, I call out, “Sam.”
He jerks like I’ve poked him with a stick and swings back toward the fence, his attention on the truck I was behind before. He’s got enough memory-making capability inside him to remember that, so he must have been strong when he died, very healthy. It’s a shame. It feels creepy to think it, but even like he is now, he’s sort of cute.
Of course, that might be just the untrustworthy opinion of a teenaged girl who’s been alone for a year and enjoyed a grand total of one date before the world went to crap. But, yeah, creepy thoughts.
It takes him a moment, but he seems to have regained his focus. No gnashing teeth or hungry eyes. He grips the rails again as if fortifying himself, and says, “Zam. Ya.”
“Do you remember where the children are? Where Veronica is?”
He jerks at that name, his face twisting into something like pain. Then he bounces on his knees again. I’m growing more certain that’s his way of nodding yes.
“Is it far?” I ask, and then realize how difficult it will be for him to answer that question. I amend it, asking, “Did you walk from there today?”
He bounces again, but I can clearly see the confusion on his face. I don’t think he really understands the question. Time and distance are fairly advanced concepts.
“Which way to Veronica, Sam?”
One fist leaves the fence and, with great effort, he extends his fingers and moves his arm until the direction is as he wants it before grunting, “Da.”
It’s no more than I expected really and not nearly enough. I was sort of hoping—okay, really hoping—that he would point the other direction. Back that way lies the rest of the industrial park and some businesses. I’ve traveled that direction and there are no houses, hotels, or anywhere else where people might congregate after the end of the world. There’s a big animal hospital down there, the one I went to in search of medicine for my mom, but that’s about it for interesting destinations.
The direction he indicated leads into the city and the suburbs beyond. Basically, everything lies in that direction. Which doesn’t narrow things down for me much. But, if I really think about it, he knew I was here, which means wherever he's from—wherever those kids still are—probably isn't too far away. I guess it's possible he came here because he was aware of the trucking hub and food distribution warehouse, and so has traveled some great distance, but I can’t imagine many people knowing about this place. If that were the case, I would have been overrun at some point, and I haven’t.
“Could we get back there today?” I ask him, not hoping for much because, you know, time is hard.
Sam shakes his legs in a sort of half-bounce, half-shuffle that is neither a yes or a no but says, “Ya. Kahm.”
I may be a little too eager for company, but I’ve not lost all my senses. I can’t just run off and follow an in-betweener who could turn on me at any time. He has bloodstains on him and those aren’t from his wound. That means he’s been eating. Maybe those kids are feeding him birds or something, but I don’t know that and I doubt he’ll be able to communicate that in a way I’d believe anyway. So, no, that’s not going to happen right now.
; “Are they safe? In a building? With food and water?”
“Ya,” he answers. “Pardnad.” Then his face twists again and I can see an agony of some deep sort in that twisted expression.
What a pardnad is I have no idea, so I think about his other words, the way he puts them together. Clearly, he meant that word to describe the situation the kids are in or the place they’re at. That narrows it down some, but not enough.
“Is that where they are? Pardnad?” I ask.
He bangs his head against the rails of the fence again. The movement is so sudden and sharp that I almost stand, which would be a mistake. He grips the fence hard, his bloody and dirt-encrusted fingers paling with the force of it, and says, “Ah-pard-nad.” He draws the word out, clearly trying to make it as intelligible as possible. It’s amazing to me that a three-minutes-dead person can get out that much. But it works, because I understand him.
“They’re in an apartment!” I call out.
He bounces, seeming to want me to go on. And I do want more information. An apartment rules out most of the suburbs, except perhaps at their edges. Downtown and the older parts of town are covered with them. And, of course, near the university there are endless blocks of them.
“Apartment complex or just a building?” I’m not sure he’ll be able to get that one, so I try something different and say, “Wait. I’m going to say some things. You let me know when I’m right. Okay?”
He bobs and says, “Ya.”
For a second, just before his face moves back into that strange expression that flits between fear, hunger, anger, and combinations of those too complex to really understand, I think I see him smile. It’s weird and crooked, but I think that’s what it was and for some reason, it makes me feel good. Humans were simply meant to be smiled at, I think. Without the smiles of others, we lose our idea of what happiness looks like.