Future Tense Fiction

by Kirsten Berg

  “What about public defenders?” Mika tried. “They will—”

  Holly gave me an exasperated look. “Will you explain to her that she isn’t a citizen, or a person? You’re not even a pet, honey.”

  Mika looked to me, desperate. “Help me find a lawyer, detective. Please? I’m more than a pet. You know I’m more than a pet. I’m real.”

  Holly’s gaze shot from her, to me, and back again. “Oh, come on. She’s doing that thing again.” She gave me a disgusted look. “Hero complex, right? Save the innocent girl? That’s your thing?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Holly sighed. “Well, if it isn’t the girl who needs rescuing, it’s the naughty schoolgirl. And if it’s not the naughty schoolgirl, it’s the kind, knowing older woman.” She popped open her briefcase and started rummaging through it. “Just once, it would be nice to meet a guy who isn’t predictable.”

  I bristled. “Who says I’m predictable?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There really aren’t that many buttons a Mika Model can push.”

  Holly came up with a screwdriver. She turned and rammed it into Mika’s eye.

  Mika fell back, shrieking. With her cuffed hands, she couldn’t defend herself as Holly drove the screwdriver deeper.

  “What the—?”

  By the time I dragged Holly off, it was too late. Blood poured from Mika’s eye. The girl was gasping and twitching. All her movements were wrong, uncoordinated, spasmodic and jerky.

  “You killed her!”

  “No. I shut down her CPU,” said Holly, breathing hard. “It’s better this way. If they get too manipulative, it’s tougher. Trust me. They’re good at getting inside your head.”

  “You can’t murder someone in front of me!”

  “Like I said, not a murder. Hardware deactivation.” She shook me off and wiped her forehead, smearing blood. “I mean, if you want to pretend something like that is alive, well, have at her. All the lower functions are still there. She’s not dead, biologically speaking.”

  I crouched beside Mika. Her cuffed hands kept reaching up to her face, replaying her last defensive motion. A behavior locked in, happening again and again. Her hands rising, then falling back. I couldn’t make her stop.

  “Look,” Holly said, her voice softening. “It’s better if you don’t anthropomorphize. You can pretend the models are real, but they’re just not.”

  She wiped off the screwdriver and put it back in her case. Cleaned her hands and face, and started re-zipping her roller bag.

  “The company has a recycling center here in the Bay Area for disposal,” she said. “If you need more data on the owner’s death, our servers will have backups of everything that happened with this model. Get the warrant, and we can unlock the encryptions on the customer’s relationship with the product.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “We’ve had two other user deaths, but those were both stamina issues. This is an edge case. The rest of the Mika Models are being upgraded to prevent it.” She checked her watch. “Updates should start rolling out at 3 a.m., local time. Whatever made her logic tree fork like that, it won’t happen again.”

  She straightened her jacket and turned to leave.

  “Hold on!” I grabbed her sleeve. “You can’t just walk out. Not after this.”

  “She really got to you, didn’t she?” She patted my hand patronizingly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but it’s just that hero complex of yours. She pushed your buttons, that’s all. It’s what Mika Models do. They make you think you’re important.”

  She glanced back at the body. “Let it go, detective. You can’t save something that isn’t there.”

  The Starfish Girl

  Maureen McHugh

  (INTRO MUSIC)

  (Run Sports 24/7 logo splash page)

  CUT TO: Studio set, ANNOUNCER behind desk.

  BROADCAST ANNOUNCER: Liam Chan.

  Run clip on screen behind Chan: Mendoza on Balance Beam and Floor Exercise.

  LIAM CHAN

  It’s a story of peaks and valleys. Today, Jinky Mendoza is one of America’s best hopes for gymnastic gold in Paris. It’s been an amazing journey for a young woman whom many thought might never be able to walk, much less compete after a devastating accident.

  CUT TO: NEWS SPOT of Jinky Mendoza’s accident, no sound. Shaky phone video of gym where people are clustered around Mendoza on mat on her back.

  LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)

  In 2017, Jinky was 11 years old, one of the top-ranked junior gymnasts in the U.S. Her family was contemplating an offer to train at the Iowa facility owned by gold-medal gymnast and coach, Gabby Douglas, when tragedy struck. During a routine vault in practice, Jinky overrotated, landed wrong, and fractured her spine, at the C5 vertebra.

  She was paralyzed from the neck down. It seemed as if her gymnastics career, indeed, life as she knew it, was over.

  CUT TO: Clip of J Mendoza in hospital bed, balloons.

  LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)

  Then doctors proposed a radical new medical procedure. They would use starfish DNA to teach her body how to heal itself. The results were miraculous.

  CUT TO:

  Sports 24/7 Studio, Liam behind desk, clip of Jinky Mendoza in a tumbling run on screen behind him.

  LIAM CHAN

  They call her the Starfish Girl. Today the International Olympic Committee announced that it would release a ruling Monday on whether or not this 5-foot-3-inch dynamo is human.

  “Jesus,” Olivia said. “They’re playing it again.”

  The big scoreboard in the new University of Texas Wexner Arena was showing Sports 24/7’s spot on Jinky’s accident, again. Jinky glanced up at her and then away, continuing her stretches.

  There was a feeling to arenas—big but chaotic. All the gymnasts down in the exhibition area were in clumps by team, getting ready, shaking themselves loose and wearing warmup gear. The Texas air conditioning kept the place like a meat locker. Jinky was stretching, one heel on a five-inch riser to get more stretch out of her split. “So don’t look,” Jinky said.

  “It’s like a car accident, I can’t help it. I can’t believe you can just ignore it.” They were all wearing Team USA leotards with the blue swoosh down the side. Olivia snapped her leotard away from her butt.

  “If I look at it, someone gets video of me watching and then posts it.”

  With ugly comments. Jinky didn’t read social media anymore, although she still had to tweet and post to Instagram. Coach Sophie made her Instagram 10 things a week. The last thing Jinky had Instagrammed was yesterday when she got her nails done and got a starfish stenciled on her thumbnail. It was her good-luck charm.

  She was the Starfish Girl after all.

  Jinky was watching Svetlana Moracheva of Team Russia loosen up. She’d competed against Russia at the Worlds but she’d never done an exhibition with them. The arena was filling up. She smelled hot dogs.

  Svetlana was long-boned and slim, white-blond and blue-eyed. She was “elegant.” At 19, she was the team leader and the oldest woman on Russia’s Olympic team.

  Nobody had ever described Jinky as “elegant.” Powerhouse. Spark plug. It didn’t matter that she was the tallest member of the team; everybody thought she was short. Svetlana got compared to ballet dancers. Jinky would kill to be compared to a ballet dancer. She was always compared to Simone Biles—muscular and athletic. There were fan-made YouTube videos of the way they both hit the mat solidly; the way they both stuck landings as if rooted there by gravity.

  The Russians trained differently, refining and refining while upping their endurance. Americans did more weight training and were muscular. American athletes were considered the ones to beat, but Jinky wished she were prettier, taller.

  Svetlana glanced up and their eyes met across the arena. They both looked away.

  Svetlana was wearing a knee brace. If Jinky was the Starfish Girl, Svetlana was the Human 2.0. She’d blown out her knee six mon
ths ago. Dislocated it, torn the ACL and MCL. Jinky had watched a video of it just once. You could see the whole knee disintegrate as she landed. It was a career-ending injury (kind of like breaking your neck). Fixed with stem cell therapy (kind of like a fractured spine). Only not in one important way. They hadn’t used starfish DNA to fix Svetlana’s knee. They’d edited the Russian girl’s DNA directly using stuff from her own cells and creating repeats of certain sequences. The DNA sequences read the same way that the starfish DNA they used on Jinky had, it was just that they cut the pieces out of Svetlana’s own DNA and added them in the right places.

  “Girl, you look stiff,” she said to Olivia.

  “It’s OK,” Olivia said. She had been dealing with back spasms for months. At home in the gym, they did electric stimulation of her back muscles three times a week. It seemed to be helping.

  Jinky waved at her to sit down and kneaded the muscles.

  Olivia tilted her head back. Her kinky hair was yanked tightly back and shellacked into submission. She had a spray of red glitter in it that made her look a little like an exotic bird. She looked across the gym and saw Moracheva. “What’s she doing today?” Olivia asked.

  “Floor and uneven,” Jinky said.

  Usually at an exhibition they did routines specifically choreographed for show—pretty, flashy, and less demanding than competition routines. Jinky did hers to music from The Little Mermaid, and she wore a blue and green shimmery leotard and a starfish clip in her hair. She liked it because it was more like dance. More elegant. But Sophie had decided that today Jinky should do her Olympic balance beam and floor exercise to let them think about what she wouldn’t be doing for America if she didn’t go to the Olympics. The whole team was wearing their Team USA uniforms.

  Jinky couldn’t think about not going to the Olympics. Everything in her life had aimed her toward the Olympics. The year of rehab, when she grew three inches while relearning to walk and use her fingers. Olympics, Olympics, Olympics. People who thought that her special genes gave her an advantage had no idea how hard it had been. No one had thought she could come back. You’ll walk again, they promised. Walk? She had shown them. She flew.

  She stood up and shook herself loose. Then she visualized her balance-beam routine, imagining every step and how it felt, the twist, the aerial, the dismount. She imagined in real time, eyes closed to the people entering the arena. Focus. Focus. Focus.

  When she opened her eyes, Olivia was standing in front of her. Olivia, her best friend, alternate for the Olympic team. “You’ll do great,” Olivia whispered. “You’ll show them.”

  For once, Jinky wasn’t worried about how she’d do. “If I do really well, they’ll think it’s because of the procedure,” she said.

  The girl with starfish DNA in her spine. The walking miracle.

  CUT TO: FOOTAGE OF J MENDOZA AS SHE LEAVES HOSPITAL

  LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)

  It was more than a career-ending injury. Doctors at the University of Southern California proposed an experimental treatment. They used a gene-editing technique called CRISPR to introduce sequences from starfish DNA into Jinky’s own cells.

  (RUN GRAPHIC SIMULATION OF STARFISH REGENERATING)

  LIAM CHAN (VOICE-OVER)

  Starfish can regenerate limbs. Fishermen used to cut starfish in half and throw them back in the ocean, considering them pests. But that meant that for every starfish they cut in half, two starfish would grow. In humans and in most animals, the ability to regenerate has been lost, but researchers were able to modify Jinky’s cells to “turn on” the ability to regenerate using starfish DNA.

  (CUT TO: LIAM AT DESK)

  LIAM CHAN

  Jinky’s injury healed, better than the doctors could ever expect. But she had lost over a year of training and it wasn’t clear if she’d get it back.

  Before the balance beam, the coach told her that if she felt she needed to, she could pull the twist from her dismount or make it a single. “You don’t want to risk too much before the games,” Sophie said.

  Jinky was doing an Arabian double salto forward tuck for her dismount. She did the equivalent of a somersault in the air, knees tucked to her chin and a one-and-a-half twist. It had a huge difficulty score. 7.0. It was the centerpiece of Jinky’s balance routine. When she pulled it off, she was hard to beat.

  “Remember your dance,” Sophie said. She hugged Jinky.

  “They don’t care about the dance stuff,” Jinky said.

  “I do,” Sophie said.

  Jinky sat down and closed her eyes and tuned out the gymnasium. She was the person who was supposed to pull the team together. She was the one everyone looked to. But she just couldn’t talk to anyone else right now. She tried to concentrate on her routine. Onto the beam. Back aerial. Svetlana Moracheva in a knee brace.

  Music started. Rimsky-Korsakov. Moracheva’s music. She stood at the corner of the mat for the floor exercises in a sparkly white leotard that made her look like the snow queen (except for the knee brace). Her first tumbling run was full-on, no concessions for her knee. It ended in a Biles aerial.

  “Screw you,” Jinky thought. She did a Biles aerial in her floor exercises too. That was HER style.

  Moracheva was a little stiff, and after the spectacular first pass, her exhibition routine got simpler, but of course she danced, toes pointed, light, and regal. Like a Russian ballerina with her long neck and her beautiful shoulders, the way her back curved when she touched her foot to the back of her head. Arabesque, fouetté turn, soulful liquid melt to the mat with her arms outstretched. When she finished, she limped a little.

  Nobody was gonna cast Jinky Mendoza in Swan Lake.

  Jinky concentrated on her breathing; in through her nose, out through her mouth. She was a machine. An android. She had no emotion.

  It was time. She walked out onto the mat and stood before the beam.

  She pressed up to the beam with her arms into a side split. Then a triple turn in tuck stand. For a moment she heard “Light It Up” from someone’s floor routine but she got her focus back and then—

  It just all came. She could feel how well the routine was going. It was weird, when she was having a bad routine, she worked so hard, trying to make everything right. But when the routine was going well, it was almost no work at all. Back handspring, back layout, back layout and her foot was right where it should be, solid on the beam. The beam was a sidewalk, a driveway, a parking lot the size of Texas, and she did her dance steps, jumps, and her side-split turn.

  And then she was doing her dismount and she didn’t even think. It was just like practice. Arabian double salto. Her feet hit the mat and her ankle sent a momentary sharp reminder that it was sore but it was all right, just normal. She did the final pose, shoulders back, arms out.

  The arena was silent. The floor exercise music must have finished.

  Was something wrong?

  She blinked.

  And then the applause and screaming started. Sophie, her coach, was hugging her. Gabby, the head of the gym, hugged her. Her teammates hugged her. The crowd was raggedly chanting, “Jinky! Jinky! Jinky!”

  Olivia hugged her, shouting in her ear, “The announcer! They’re comparing you to Nadia Comaneci! It was perfect! Perfect!”

  They were staying in a hotel downtown. It was a Marriott or something but it had a funny, down-at-the-heels feel. The hallways felt long and narrow. Didn’t matter, they were flying home the next day.

  There was already stuff about her balance routine on ESPN. There were videos on YouTube. Jinky didn’t watch any of it—it felt as if she were jinxing herself. She asked Olivia if there was any blowback. Coach Sophie felt that showing the routine was a risk because while a great routine could make people want her to go to the Olympics, it could also fuel the belief that the procedure on her spine had given her an edge.

  She walked to the soda machine. After a performance she and Olivia would split a Coke. It was their tradition.

  The soda machine on their floor
was out but the door to the stairs was right there so she went up a flight to see if the machine on that floor had some. They were all freaking geniuses when it came to hotels and travel. Always pack earplugs. Wear slip-on shoes at airports to get through TSA just in case they don’t give you Precheck. Stuff like that. She opened to the door onto the 11th floor.

  Svetlana Moracheva was sitting in the hallway on the floor outside a hotel room. She was leaning back against the wall, legs stuck straight out in front of her. The door to the hotel room was open and a couple of voices were chattering in Russian inside.

  “Hi,” Jinky said, startled. She put her money in the machine and a can clunked down to the opening. When she picked it up it was so cold.

  Svetlana looked a little surprised too. She, like Jinky, was wearing track pants so her knee brace was hidden. “Great routine,” Svetlana said. She spoke pretty good English—like a lot of gymnasts. Jinky didn’t speak any Russian. She felt a little stupid.

  “How’s your knee?” Jinky asked and then thought maybe it was the wrong thing to say. Like it sounded like she was gloating or something.

  Svetlana shrugged. “Pretty good,” she said. “Will be good for Olympics.”

  “Oh! Good! Good! I…I love your dance. You know? You always look…” what? Pretty? That sounded dorky. “Um, smooth.”

  “Smooth?” Svetlana said, cocking her head. Jinky wasn’t sure if she thought it was a dumb thing to say or if she didn’t understand the word.

  “You know,” Jinky mimed a wave with her hand, up and down, up and down. “Not, like some people,” Jinky made jerky motions with her hand, up down, up down.

  Svetlana smiled. “Thank you. You are, how do I say, strong? So strong.”

  Jinky knew she made a face.

  Svetlana laughed. “We not want what we have. Always want what others have. I want curly hair.” She patted the floor next to her and Jinky sat down. “You hear from IOC? Anything?”

  Jinky shook her head. “No.”

  “Could be worst. Could be XXY. No one is telling you that you are not a girl.”