by Unknown
I reach to pull Mildred from the bed, and she screams. “Get away! Who are you? Get out of my house!”
“I’m—” But suddenly I’m nobody. She doesn’t recognize me, but I have to try to win her confidence. “I’m Paul, Ma. Now let’s move. Quickly!” I pick her up. I’m far too large and strong for her to resist, but I must be careful so she doesn’t hurt herself.
The smoke grows thicker. Mildred kicks and screams. Then, when I try to put her into her chair, she stands on her unsteady legs. Before I can stop her, she pushes the chair back with surprising force. It rolls back into the medical monitors, which fall over onto it, tangling it in cables and tubes.
While I’m still analyzing how to untangle the chair, Mildred stumbles toward the bedroom door. The hallway outside has a red glow. Flames lick at the throw rug outside, and I remember the home oxygen tanks in the sitting room down the hall.
I have no time left to analyze. I throw a blanket over Mildred and I scoop her up in my arms. Somewhere deep in my nets is a map of the fire in the house, blocking the halls, but I don’t think about it. I wrap the blanket tightly around Mildred, and I crash through the picture window.
We barely escape the house before the fire reaches the tanks. An explosion lifts and tosses us. I was designed as a medical assistant, not an acrobat, and I fear I’ll injure Mildred; but though I am not limber, my perceptions are thousands of times faster than human. I cannot twist Mildred out of my way before I hit the ground, so I toss her clear. Then I land, and the impact jars all of my nets for 0.21 seconds.
When my systems stabilize, I have damage alerts all throughout my core, but I ignore them. I feel the heat behind me, blistering my outer cover, and I ignore that as well. Mildred’s blanket is burning in multiple places, as is the grass around us. I scramble to my feet, and I roll Mildred on the ground. I’m not indestructible, but I feel no pain and Mildred does, so I do not hesitate to use my hands to pat out the flames.
As soon as the blanket is out, I pick up Mildred, and I run as far from the house as I can get. At the far corner of the garden near the creek, I gently set Mildred down, unwrap her, and feel for her thready pulse.
Mildred coughs and slaps my hands. “Get away from me!” More coughing. “What are you?”
The “what” is too much for me. It shuts down my emulation net, and all I have is the truth. “I am Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, Mrs. Owens. I am your caretaker. May I please check that you are well?”
But my empathy net is still online, and I can read terror in every line of Mildred’s face. “Metal monster!” she yells. “Metal monster!” She crawls away, hiding under the lilac bush. “Metal!” She falls into an extended coughing spell.
I’m torn between her physical and her emotional health, but physical wins out. I crawl slowly toward her and inject her with a sedative from the medical kit in my chassis. As she slumps, I catch her and lay her carefully on the ground. My empathy net signals a possible shutdown condition, but my concern for her health overrides it. I am programmed for long-term care, not emergency medicine, so I start downloading protocols and integrating them into my storage as I check her for bruises and burns. My kit has salves and painkillers and other supplies to go with my new protocols, and I treat what I can.
But I don’t have oxygen, or anything to help with Mildred’s coughing. Even sedated, she hasn’t stopped. All of my emergency protocols assume I have access to oxygen, so I don’t know what to do.
I am still trying to figure that out when the EMTs arrive and take over Mildred’s care. With them on the scene, I am superfluous, and my empathy net finally shuts down.
Today I am Henry. I do not want to be Henry, but Paul tells me that Mildred needs Henry by her side in the hospital. For the end.
Her medical records show that the combination of smoke inhalation, burns, and her already deteriorating condition have proven too much for her. Her body is shutting down faster than medicine can heal it, and the stress has accelerated her mental decline. The doctors have told the family that the kindest thing at this point is to treat her pain, say good-bye, and let her go.
Henry is not talkative at times like this, so I say very little. I sit by Mildred’s side and hold her hand as the family comes in for final visits. Mildred drifts in and out. She doesn’t know this is good-bye, of course.
Anna is first. Mildred rouses herself enough to smile, and she recognizes her granddaughter. “Anna . . . child . . . how is . . . Ben?” That was Anna’s boyfriend almost six years ago. From the look on Anna’s face, I can see that she has forgotten Ben already, but Mildred briefly remembers.
“He’s . . . he’s fine, Grandma. He wishes he could be here. To say—to see you again.” Anna is usually the strong one in the family, but my empathy net says her strength is exhausted. She cannot bear to look at Mildred, so she looks at me; but I am emulating her late grandfather, and that’s too much for her as well. She says a few more words, unintelligible even to my auditory inputs. Then she leans over, kisses Mildred, and hurries from the room.
Susan comes in next. Millie is with her, and she smiles at me. I almost emulate Mr. Robot, but my third part keeps me focused until Millie gets bored and leaves. Susan tells trivial stories from her work and from Millie’s school. I can’t tell if Mildred understands or not, but she smiles and laughs, mostly at appropriate places. I laugh with her.
Susan takes Mildred’s hand, and the Henry part of me blinks, surprised. Susan is not openly affectionate under normal circumstances, and especially not toward Mildred. Mother and daughter-in-law have always been cordial, but never close. When I am Paul, I am sure that it is because they are both so much alike. Paul sometimes hums an old song about “just like the one who married dear old dad,” but never where either woman can hear him. Now, as Henry, I am touched that Susan has made this gesture but saddened that she took so long.
Susan continues telling stories as we hold Mildred’s hands. At some point Paul quietly joins us. He rubs Susan’s shoulders and kisses her forehead, and then he steps in to kiss Mildred. She smiles at him, pulls her hand free from mine, and pats his cheek. Then her arm collapses, and I take her hand again.
Paul steps quietly to my side of the bed and rubs my shoulders as well. It comforts him more than me. He needs a father, and an emulation is close enough at this moment.
Susan keeps telling stories. When she lags, Paul adds some of his own, and they trade back and forth. Slowly their stories reach backwards in time, and once or twice Mildred’s eyes light as if she remembers those events.
But then her eyes close, and she relaxes. Her breathing quiets and slows, but Susan and Paul try not to notice. Their voices lower, but their stories continue.
Eventually the sensors in my fingers can read no pulse. They have been burned, so maybe they’re defective. To be sure, I lean in and listen to Mildred’s chest. There is no sound: no breath, no heartbeat.
I remain Henry just long enough to kiss Mildred goodbye. Then I am just me, my empathy net awash in Paul and Susan’s grief.
I leave the hospital room, and I find Millie playing in a waiting room and Anna watching her. Anna looks up, eyes red, and I nod. New tears run down her cheeks, and she takes Millie back into Mildred’s room.
I sit, and my nets collapse.
Now I am nobody. Almost always.
The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty contract work. There was an insurance settlement. Paul and Susan sold their own home and put both sets of funds into a bigger, better house in Mildred’s garden.
I was part of the settlement. The insurance company offered to return me to the manufacturer and pay off my lease, but Paul and Susan decided they wanted to keep me. They went for a full purchase and repair. Paul doesn’t understand why, but Susan still fears she may need my services—or Paul might, and I may have to emulate her. She never admits these fears to him, but my empathy net knows.
I sleep most of the time, sitting in my maintenance alcove. I bring back too
many memories that they would rather not face, so they leave me powered down for long periods.
But every so often, Millie asks to play with Mr. Robot, and sometimes they decide to indulge her. They power me up, and Miss Millie and I explore all the mysteries of the garden. We built a bridge to the far side of the creek; and on the other side, we’re planting daisies. Today she asked me to tell her about her grandmother.
Today I am Mildred.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com.
CALVED
Sam J. Miller
My son’s eyes were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness was there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.
“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.
He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and might never give again.
“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said on the phone the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”
I hadn’t listened. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.
“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”
I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.
“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go, with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he? What have you done with him? Who is this surly creature? Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.
Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.
“How’s school?” I asked.
Thede shrugged. “Fine.”
“Math still your favorite subject?”
“Math was never my favorite subject.”
I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.
“What’s your favorite subject?”
Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.
I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.
“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.
At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.
And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.
Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”
His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq, back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities started sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede that I couldn’t.
“Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.
“I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have—”
“Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.
“Han one of your friends?”
Thede nodded, eyes escaping.
Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city—all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.
“I have something for you,” I said, in desperation.
I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.
Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most—my only—prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off, before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.
But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was—starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal—I belonged.
“Dad,” Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. “Dad. You love this shirt.”
But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead: “It’ll fit you just fine now.” And then: “Enough sea lions. Beam fights?”
Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.
Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalga
m of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion-Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80 percent of the city sunk, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.
They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then, for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.
Thede’s eyes burned with wonder, staring up at the fretted sweep of the windscreen as we rose to meet it. We were deep in a days-long twilight; soon, the Sun would set for weeks.
“This is not happening,” he said, and stepped closer to me. His voice shook with joy.
The elevator ride to the top of the city was obscenely expensive. We’d never been able to take it before. His mother had bought our tickets. Even for her, it hurt. I wondered why she hadn’t brought him herself.
“He’s getting bullied a lot in school,” she told me on the phone. Behind her was the solid comfortable silence of a respectable home. My background noise was four men building toward a fight over a card game. “Also, I think he might be in love.”
But of course I couldn’t ask him about either of those things. The first was my fault; the second was something no boy wanted to discuss with his dad.
I pushed a piece of trough meat loose from between my teeth. Savored how close it came to the real thing. Only with Thede, with his mother’s money, did I get to buy the classy stuff. Normally it was barrel-bottom for me, greasy chunks that dissolved in my mouth two chews in, homebrew meat moonshine made in melt-scrap-furnace-heated metal troughs. Some grid cities were rumored to still have cows, but that was the kind of lie people tell themselves to make life a little less ugly. Cows were extinct, and real beef was a joy no one would ever experience again.