Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Here is your list for today,” Mrs. Dudley said. The mirror showed her a list of addresses and tags. Not full case files, just tags and summaries compiled from the case files. Names, dates, bruises. Missed school, missed meals, missed court dates. “The car will be ready soon.”

  “Car?”

  “The last appointment is quite far away.” The appointment hove into view in the mirror. It showed a massive old McMansion in the suburbs. “Transit reviews claim that the way in is . . . unreliable,” Mrs. Dudley said. “So, we are sending you transport.”

  Lena watched her features start to manifest her doubts, but she reined them in before they could express much more. “But, I. . . .”

  “The car drives itself, Lena. And you get it for the whole day. I’m sure that allays any of your possible anxieties, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes. . . .”

  “Good. The car has a Euler path all set up, so just go where it takes you and you’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.”

  “And please do keep your chin up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your chin. Keep it up. When your chin is down, we can’t see as well. You’re our eyes and ears, Lena. Remember that.”

  She nodded. “I—”

  A fist on the bathroom door interrupted her. Just like that, Mrs. Dudley vanished. That was Social Services security at work; the interface, such as it was, did not want to share information with anyone else in a space, and so only recognized Lena’s face. Her brother had tried to show it a picture of her, and then some video, but Lena had a special face that she made to login, and the mirror politely told her brother to please leave.

  “Open up!”

  Lena opened the door. Her niece stood on the other side. She handed Lena the baby, and beelined for the toilet. Yanking her pants down, she said: “Have you ever had to hold it in after an episiotomy?”

  “No—”

  “Well, you might, someday, if you ever got a boyfriend, which you shouldn’t, because they’re fucking crap.” The sound of her pissing echoed in the small room. “Someday I’m going to kill this fucking toilet.” She reached behind herself, awkwardly, and slapped it. Her rings made scratching noises on its plastic side. “You were supposed to tell me I was knocked up.”

  Lena thought it was probably a bad time to tell her niece that her father, Lena’s brother, was the one responsible for upgrading the toilet’s firmware, and that he had instead chosen to attempt circumventing it, so it would give them all its available features (temperature taking, diagnosis, warming, and so on) for no cost whatsoever. He didn’t want the manufacturer knowing how much he used the bidet function, he said one night over dinner. That shit was private.

  Her niece didn’t bother washing her hands. She took the baby from Lena’s arms and kissed it, absently. “It’s creepy to hear you talking to someone who isn’t there,” she said. Her eyes widened. Her eyeliner was a vivid pink today, with extra sparkles. Her makeup was always annoyingly perfect. She probably could have sold the motions of her hands to a robotics firm, somewhere. “Don’t you worry, sometimes, that you’re, like . . . making it all up?”

  Lena frowned. It wasn’t like her niece to consider the existential. “Do you mean making it up as I go? Like life?”

  “No no no no no. I mean, like, you’re making up your job.” She glanced quickly at the mirror, as though she feared it might be watching her. “Like maybe there’s nobody in there at all.”

  Lena instantly allowed all of her professional affect to fall away, like cobwebs from an opened door. She turned her head to the old grey pleather couch with its pillows and blankets neatly stacked, right where she’d left them that morning. She let her niece carry the full weight of her gaze. “Then where would the rent money come from?” she asked.

  Her niece had the grace to look embarrassed. She hugged her baby a little tighter. “Sorry. It was just a joke.” She blinked. “You know? Jokes?”

  A little car rolled across Lena’s field of vision. Its logo beeped at her. “My car is here,” she said. “Try to leave some dinner for me.”

  “Is it true they make you all get the same haircut, so they can hear better?”

  Lena peered over the edges of her frames. Social Services didn’t like it when she did that, but it was occasionally necessary. Jude, the adolescent standing before, her seemed genuinely curious and not sarcastic. That didn’t make his question any less stupid.

  “No,” she said. “They don’t make us wear a special haircut.”

  Jude shrugged. “You all just look like you’ve got the same haircut.”

  “Maybe you’re just remembering the other times I’ve been here.”

  Jude smiled dopily around the straw hanging out of his mouth, and slurped from the pouch attached to it. It likely contained makgeolli; that was the 22nd floor specialty. Her glasses told her he was mildly intoxicated; he wore a lab on a chip under the skin of his left shoulder, in a spot that was notoriously difficult to scratch. The Spot was different for every user; triangulating it meant a gestural camera taking a full-body picture, or extrapolating from an extant gaming profile. “Oh, yeah . . . Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  “Why do you think I’m here, Jude?”

  “Because the Fosters aren’t.”

  The kid didn’t miss a beat. The algorithm had first introduced them three years ago, when his foster parents took them in; he referred to them, privately, as “The Fosters.” Three years in, “The Fosters” had given up. They collected their stipend just fine, but they left it to Lena to actually deal with Jude’s problems.

  His main problem these days was truancy; in a year he wouldn’t have to go to school any longer unless he wanted to, and so he was experiencing an acute case of senioritis in his freshman year. If he chose to go on, though, it would score Lena some much-needed points on her own profile. There was little difference, really, between his marks and her own.

  “Is there any particular reason you’re not going to school, these days?”

  Jude shrugged and slurped on the pouch until it crinkled up and bubbled. He tossed the empty into the sink and leaned over to open the refrigerator. You didn’t have to really move your feet in these rabbit hutch kitchens. He got another of the pouches out. “I just don’t feel like it,” he said.

  “I didn’t really much feel like going, either, when it was my turn, but I went.”

  Jude favoured her with a look that told her she had best shut her fucking mouth right fucking now. “School was different for you,” he said simply. “You didn’t have to wear a uniform.”

  “Well, that’s true—”

  “And your uniform didn’t ping your teacher every time you got a fucking boner.”

  Lena blushed, and then felt herself blushing, which only made it worse. She looked down. True, their school district was a little too keen on wearables, but Jude’s were special. “You know why you have to wear those pants,” she said.

  “That was when I was thirteen!”

  “Well, she was ten.”

  “I know she was ten. I fucking know that. There’s no way I could possibly forget that, now.” He crossed his arms and sighed deeply. “We didn’t even do anything.”

  “That’s not what you told your friends on 18.”

  He sucked his teeth. Lena had no idea if Jude had really done the things he said he did. The lab inside the little girl had logged enough dopamine to believe sexual activity had occurred, but it had no way of knowing if she’d helped herself along, or if she’d had outside interference. The rape kit had the same opinion: penetration, not forced entry. When the relationship was discovered, the girl recanted everything, and said that nothing had happened, and that it didn’t matter anyway, because even if something had happened, she really loved Jude. Jude did the same. Except he never said he loved her. This was probably the most honesty he demonstrated during the entire episode.

&nbs
p; “I know it’s difficult,” Lena said. “But completing your minimum course credits is part of your sentencing. It’s part of why you get your record expunged when you turn eighteen. So you have to go.” She reached into the sink and plucked out the pouch with her thumb and forefinger. It dangled there in her grasp, dripping sweet white fluid. “And you have to quit drinking, too.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s stupid. I was just bored, and it was there.”

  “I understand. But you’re hurting your chances of making it out of here. This kind of thing winds up your transcript, you know. You can’t get a job without a decent transcript.”

  Jude waved his hand. “The fabbers don’t care about grades.”

  “Maybe not, but they care about you being able to show up on time. You know?

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I know.”

  “So you’ll go to school tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. I need a new uniform, first.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, it’s really just the pants. I threw them out.”

  Lena blinked so that her glasses would listen to her. “Well, we have to find those pants.”

  The glasses showed her a magnifying glass zipping to and fro across the cramped, dirty apartment. It came back empty. “You really threw them out?” she asked, despite already knowing the answer. Maybe he’d given them to a friend. Or sold them. Maybe they could be brought back, somehow.

  “I think they got all sliced up,” Jude said, miming the action of scissors with his fingers. “I wore my gym clothes home yesterday, and I put my other stuff in my bag, and then under the viaduct, I gave them to this homeless dude. He found the sensors right away. Said he was gonna sell ‘em.”

  She winced. “How do you know he’s not wearing them?”

  “They were too small.”

  It was beyond her power. She would have to arrange for a new uniform. She’d probably have to take Jude to school tomorrow, too, just to smooth things over. He tended to start a new attendance streak if someone was actually bringing him there. The record said so, anyway. For a moment it snaked across her vision, undulating and irregular, and then she blinked and it was gone.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow at seven to take you to school,” she said, and watched the appointment check itself into her schedule. “And don’t even think about not being here, or not waking up, or getting your mom to send a note, or anything like that. I intend to show up, and if you don’t do the same, Social Services will send someone else next time, and they won’t be so understanding. Okay?”

  Jude snorted. “Okay.”

  “I mean it. You have to show up. And you have to show up sober. I’ll know if you’re not, and so will your principal. He can suspend you for that, on sight.”

  “I know.” Jude paused for a moment. He reached for the fresh pouch, and then seemed to think better of it. “I’m sorry, Lena.”

  “I know you’re sorry. You can make it up to me by showing up, tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want them to send someone else. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I was just mad, is all.”

  “You would have better impulse control if you quit drinking. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you know what we have to do next, right?”

  He sighed. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. I can’t leave here without it.”

  They spent the next half hour cleaning out his stash. He even helped her bring it down to the car. “Are you sure this is it?” he asked, when it perked up at Lena’s arrival.

  “It’s on loan,” she said. “Some people lease their vehicles on a daily basis to Social Services, and the car drives itself back to them at the end of the day with a full charge.”

  “It’s a piece of shit.”

  “Just put the box in the back, will you?”

  Jude rolled his eyes as she popped the trunk. Technically, she shouldn’t have allowed him to come down to the garage with her. It wasn’t recommended. Her glasses had warned her about it, as they neared the elevator. She made sure Jude carried the box full of pouches and pipes, though, so that he’d have to drop it if he wanted to try anything. Now, she watched as he leaned over the trunk and set the box inside.

  “Nice gloves.” He reached in and brought something out: Lena’s good leather gloves. They were real leather, not the fake stuff, with soft suede interiors and an elastic skirt that circled the wrist and kept out the cold air. They were a pretty shade of purple. Distinctive. Recognizable. “Aren’t these yours?” he asked.

  “I. . . .”

  “I’ve seen you wearing them, before.” He frowned. “I thought you said this was someone else’s car. On loan.”

  “It is. . . .”

  “So how did your gloves wind up in the trunk?”

  Lena wished she could ask the glasses for help. But without sensors, the glasses and the gloves had no relationship. At least, nothing legitimate and quantifiable. They had only Lena to link them.

  “I must have used this car, before,” she said. “That must be it. I must have forgotten them in here, the last time, and not used the trunk until then. And the owner left the gloves in the trunk, hoping that I’d find them.”

  “Why the trunk? Why not on the dash? How many times do you look in the trunk?”

  Jude slammed the trunk shut. He held the gloves out. Lena took them gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. They felt like her gloves. A little chilled from riding around in the trunk, but still hers. How strange, to think that they’d gone on their own little adventure without her. Hadn’t the car’s owner been the least bit tempted to take them? Or one of the other users? There were plenty of other women on the Social Services roster. Maybe they’d been worn out, and then put back, just like the car. Maybe the last user was someone higher up on the chain, and they knew Lena would be taking this particular car out on this particular morning, and they put her gloves back where she would find them. That would explain how she’d never seen them until just now.

  “Don’t look so creeped out,” Jude said. “They’re just a pair of gloves, right?”

  “Right,” Lena said. “Thanks.”

  By the end of the day, Lena had to admit that the car did not look familiar in the least. That didn’t mean it looked unfamiliar, either, just that it looked the same as all the other print-jobs in the hands-free lane. The same flat mustard yellow, the same thick bumper that made the whole vehicle look like a little man with a moustache. It was entirely possible that she had used this car before. Perhaps even on the same day that she’d lost her gloves. She didn’t remember losing them. That was the thing. She kept turning them in her hands, over and over, pulling them on and pulling them off, wiggling her fingers in their tips to feel if they were truly hers or not.

  When had she last used a car for Social Services?

  “February of last year,” Mrs. Dudley said. “February fifteenth, to be exact.”

  Lena did not remember speaking the words aloud, either. But that hardly mattered. It was Social Services’ job to understand problems before they became issues. That was how they’d first found Jude, after all. Surely the glasses had logged her examination of the gloves and the car and the system had put two and two together. It could do that. She was sure of it.

  “You subvocalized it,” Mrs. Dudley said.

  Yes. That was it. People did that, sometimes, didn’t they? They muttered to themselves. It wasn’t at all unusual.

  “People do it all the time,” Mrs. Dudley told her.

  Lena forced herself to speak the next words out loud. “Did the owner of the car save the gloves for me?”

  Mrs. Dudley paused. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Outside, the highway seemed empty. So few people drove, any longer. Once upon a time, four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in late October would have b
een replete with cars, and the cars would have been stuffed with mothers and fathers lead-footing their way into the suburbs, anxiously counting down the minutes until they earned a late fee at their daycare. Now the car whizzed along, straight and true, spotting its nearest fellow vehicle every ten minutes and pinging them cheerfully before zipping ahead.

  It felt like driving into a village afflicted by plague.

  “I think we need to bring you in for a memory exam, Lena,” Mrs. Dudley said. “These lapses aren’t normal for a woman in your demographic. You may have a blood clot.”

  “Oh,” Lena said, perversely delighted by the thought.

  “But first, you have to do this one last thing for us.”

  “Yes. The house in the suburbs.”

  “You must be very careful, Lena. Where you’re going, there’s no one else on the block. It’s all been foreclosed. And it’s going to be dark, soon.”

  “I understand.”

  “The foreclosures mean that the local security forces have been diminished, too. Their budget is based on population density and property taxes, so there won’t be anyone to come for you. Not right away, anyway. Everyone else lives closer to town.”

  “Except for the people in this house.”

  Another pause. “Yes. The ones who live there, live alone.”

  Jackson Hills was the name of the development. The hills themselves occupied unincorporated county land, the last free sliver of property in the whole area, and the crookedness of the rusting street signs seemed meant to tempt government interference. That was an old word for molestation, Lena remembered. You came across it in some of the oldest laws. Interference. As though the uncles she spent her days hearing about were nothing more than windmills getting in the way of a good signal.

  Was it an uncle that was the trouble, this time? The file was very scant. “Possible neglect,” it read. The child in question wore old, ill-fitting clothes, a teacher said. His grades were starting to slip. His name was Theodore. People called him Teddy. His parents never came to Parent/Teacher Night. They attended no talent shows. But they were participatory parents online; their emails with Teddy’s teachers were detailed and thoughtful, with perfect spelling and grammar.