Six months ago, Charlene had averaged three hours, forty-four minutes to open her cradlelock on any given evening; tonight it took her only forty-seven minutes. She wasn’t ready to celebrate that her physical development might finally, slowly be catching up with that of her mind. She wasn’t sure what that meant yet. She had an idea that it wasn’t entirely good news.
Again, she flexed the monster. She was four years old, and the limited mastery of her throat was still her only material proficiency.
The lock clicked. The cradle gate swung gently open. The voices in the next room became louder and clearer.
“Calm down, Gary. There’s still hope.”
“Think you’ll still say that after we’ve been changing diapers another twenty years?”
Daddy Oliver was calling Daddy Gary by his given name. That meant he was upset. When they weren’t upset, they called each other Chum or Babe, terms of affection rather than identity. She’d figured out all this on her own, from watching, from listening, from reading. She understood that degrees of isolation and socialization weren’t the only indicators of her potential, and sometimes her fathers did, too. But could observation, without interaction, adequately prepare her for life? Could she defeat the monster entirely on her own?
By eighteen months—mostly from whispers and entertainment screens and books her fathers left active where she could see them—Charlene had identified a few of the big ways she wasn’t like others her age. She was smarter and could better keep her outward displays of emotion in check. But, other than her relationship to the monster and a small amount of control over the power and timing of her breath exhalations, she was well behind her peers physically, as though her inner and outer development were incapable of progressing at the same time.
“…doesn’t make her disabled. God, I must’ve been twelve before I could whistle, and even now, I can maybe hit half the notes she can. And she reads all the time.”
“For all we know, she just stares at the words until we swipe a new page for her. And I don’t know about ascribing too much to the whistling. Maybe she’s just doing that instead of crying.”
“Only you could look at these test scores and take it as all bad. Look at this! Factoring out reaction times and fine motor skills, her nonverbal reasoning alone could be—”
“Suddenly off the charts? Sure. And if you also factor out the Troop test and ability to recognize her own name, she could be Mensa? God, what’s more likely? That she’s smarter than either of us, or that the doctors are as clueless as we are? And maybe, just maybe, those tests only apply to normal girls and not whatever random input they might be lucky enough to get from her if they wait around long enough.”
“Jesus, Gary. Just don’t give up on her. That’s all I’m saying.”
Charlene tumbled out of the cradle. She dropped to the ocean-themed carpet below. It had a pattern like the water’s surface, and it responded to the low pushlight of the wallpaper with the appearance of waves pulsing at twenty-second intervals. It was how she could count time, whenever she could measure by minutes or hours instead of days. The blue-green motif was intended to calm her constant fidgets, she supposed. But if she was right, and if she was successful, she would soon be able to communicate with her fathers in a way they understood. And one of the first things she would tell them is how the constant suggestion of moving water all around her encouraged much more frequent peeing, the consequences of which neither she nor they particularly enjoyed.
The carpet was soft enough to dampen the noise from her fall, but rough enough to make the skin on her bare legs hot and itchy as she attempted to drag herself to the play-fort in the corner. (She almost wished she had knee and elbow pads made from the same smooth and protective surface material of her diaper.) Each arm and leg eventually did her approximate bidding; she just couldn’t coordinate them to work in unison.
Daddy Oliver had built her fort out of synthetic cardboard shipping boxes. Charlene had torn out a “floor piece” of the fort and folded that switchboard panel up into a false wall deep inside her fort, against the actual wall of her bedroom. This had taken Charlene nine and a half nights.
But even that one-time task was easier than the repetitive practice of forming words with writing utensils. Each time she picked up a crayon, it was like learning to hold it anew. And pressing it to a writing surface didn’t yet resemble communication; the equal and opposite reaction from the surface was more likely to push the crayon out of her hand. At best she could make imprecise and meaningless dots and smudges before needing to pick up the crayon again. And touchscreens were even harder: programmed to intuit the most likely user intention based on gesture, the gap between the user interface’s interpretations and her finger movements only added to the broader gap between those movements and her actual intentions.
Cracking her cradlelock had been less technically challenging than writing longhand, but, using her tediously slow facility at freeing herself as a guideline, she guessed it would be another four months at least before she could write her first simple word with any practical speed or consistency. And that all assumed her motor skills would continue to develop through puberty, whenever—if ever—that would come. There were no guarantees that any part of her body, either organ or appendage, would be immune to obsolescence. Even her fathers suggested this when they thought she couldn’t hear or understand. She was something to be afraid of. Something new.
Just thirty-one minutes after escaping the cradle, Charlene pushed at the top of her secret switchboard panel deep inside her fort. Lucky. And luckier still that it popped loose on the sixth try. She reached behind to grab at the three prepared components, two of which she’d wrapped in freezer bags over the course of the last month. She knew she should make a few practice runs with the equipment before going against the monster. She knew her failure to do so had undermined her likelihood of survival. But the growing tightness in her vocal folds—the monster’s growing strength—made it worth the risk. If she was to escape the monster’s trap, she couldn’t take half a year to get good at it, as she had with escaping the cradle. She had to beat it tonight or it would have her forever.
“Congratulations, ’Liver. We’ve created a monster.”
Charlene’s hand slipped on the switchboard while working the freezer bags toward her. The side of her chin banged against the floor. This was called “hyperbole.” It was the most difficult element of her fathers’ speech to identify, and often the most difficult to hear. Irony. Sarcasm. Exaggeration. Hyperbole. Maybe after tonight she’d try them out for herself. She could tell her fathers that it didn’t hurt when they said these things. That she knew they didn’t mean it.
“Listen to yourself. You know who you sound like.”
“Not the same thing.”
“Right. Now you don’t sound like him at all.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“Hate on yourself all you want, Gary. She’s still our daughter.”
“Doesn’t make me my father.”
Charlene’s first bagged component was a barely serviceable endoscope, a bundle of optic fiber with a lens and light on one end and a backlit OLED on the other. She’d ripped it from a cheap microscope designed as a science-learning toy, after it fell apart in Charlene’s clumsy hands. It had taken a month to reattach the inkcell battery.
Months before that it had taken Charlene just as long to arrange block letters to form the word “grandiloquent” on the nursery floor. It was an uncommon and difficult derivative of “tardiness,” meaning “slow in speech.” It only repeated one letter, and she could use the “zero” on a numbers block for the se
cond “O”. If one word could demonstrate both an advanced grasp of language and an inability to speak it, she figured that was it.
Her fathers had allowed the completed blocks to sit on the carpet for two whole days before they put them away without noticing or at least acknowledging the word. Smaller words, arranged in weeks, then eventually mere days, also failed to impress her fathers or even get their attention. And she couldn’t form them into phrases fast enough between room cleans.
This would be the third time Charlene half swallowed the endoscope’s lens to get a look at the monster. She’d rinsed the endoscope as best she could before each previous exploration. The last time, she’d used near-scalding water before placing it into the freezer bag. This weak sterilization attempt—adventuring out into the kitchen in the dead of night—had taken her only six nights, but she still had an itchy, minor burn on her forearm, thanks to the rush.
“Okay, so I hear you saying you think we made a mistake. It’s perfectly natural to doubt—”
“A mistake? No, using that meth-head surrogate would’ve been a mistake. What we did was a crime against laws not worth putting into writing because no one ever thought anyone would be so stupid.”
Hyperbole. Exaggeration. Daddy Gary didn’t mean it. The sooner she could ask him to clarify, the sooner he would say so in certain terms.
“God, I can’t even talk to you.”
“If only that were true.”
Charlene lay on her belly, tilting her chin up and forward, and sticking her feet out the fort’s entranceway. It afforded her the least amount of involuntary movement. There was just enough pushlight coming through the cracks between the switchboard boxes that she could keep time on the patch of carpet where the floor panel used to be.
She tore open the endoscope’s bag (eleven minutes), and shoved it into her throat (seven and a half minutes). It was a simple motion and it only took twenty-two failed attempts before she got the device past her teeth and squirming tongue. On the twenty-third try, she was able to pull her hand away quickly enough and not let those fat fingers of hers knock it out of place again.
Charlene gagged twice before managing the mild convulsions. She flexed and held the monster in front of the lens. As her tongue continued to try and wrap itself around the endoscope, she got the night’s first glimpse of the monster in the backlit OLED.
“I think we made the best choice we could’ve, given the information we had.”
“Thank you, doctor. And now she’s what? The worst of both of us? God, do you even care?”
When flexed, the monster was a porous flap of gray meat spiderweb out across her throat passage at the vocal folds. Charlene didn’t entirely trust the color representation of the toy-grade OLED, but she could believe the monster was gray. It looked nothing like the few pictures she’d found and descriptions she’d heard of cysts and other, more common, throat ailments. It was thin enough for her to wonder where exactly the muscles were hidden. For all the control she had over the sizes and shapes of the holes through which the monster graciously allowed air, perhaps the whole thing was a muscle, strangling her from the inside instead of visibly, the way a normal girl might be strangled.
When inflexed, the monster disappeared from view, even though she could feel it pressing flat against the point of the “V” where her vocal folds met. It didn’t restrict her breathing, but the way it smothered the surface of the throat had to be what prevented her from controlling the rapid changes in air pressure down there, which was how other children—children who couldn’t whistle as she could—generated normal speech.
It wasn’t until after the last specialist visit that Charlene learned to flex and reveal the monster. From what the doctors had said in front of her, she later guessed that the inflexed monster was indistinguishable from normal tissue, hidden from body scans as though designed to do so. They thought her inability to speak was a problem of emotional development. Perhaps she should have let herself cry more. She’d been trying to be less of a burden.
Still, Charlene believed her vocal cords were normal and functioning beneath the monster. She had to believe she was a normal and functioning girl underneath. Or at least she could be so, once her body finished developing. But she was also sure that the monster was hardening—its muscles strengthening—and if she waited too long to stop it, she was convinced it would prevent her from ever using them, and ever speaking to her fathers in a language they could understand.
“Leave the dishes.”
“No, I’ll do them.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I said I’ll do them. Jesus.”
The second bagged component was a sliver of shaving mirror, attached at an angle to the hollow casing of a steel pencil. She’d patterned it after a professional dental mirror. She’d broken both her fathers’ shaving mirrors before identifying a fragment small and safe enough to use.
Though the edges were sharper than she would have liked and it was the most difficult to assemble originally, this component was the easiest of the three to position once she got it out of the bag (twelve minutes) and beyond her lips (five minutes). She inserted it past her teeth, and let the mirror end simply slide toward the back of her mouth. She remembered the proper position by the specific discomfort of the placement: tickling but not quite triggering her gag reflex. Just six small nudges and it nestled into the right spot.
“Have you calmed down?”
“I’m calm.”
“You don’t look calm.”
“Would you rather I be calm or look calm?”
The third and final component was a small laser, about the size of her fist. It was the heart of a kitchen toaster-slicer with the protective casing and mirrors removed. Charlene had spent three days disconnecting a wire without permanently damaging the machine. Then she waited until her fathers tossed the whole thing into the disposal before stealing it away into her fort. It had been the longest, most physically exhausting night of her life. Until tonight.
She slowly, gently wiggled both herself and the laser into remeasured places inside the fort, limiting her movement and maximizing the likelihood that any movement she would make would be small and, given time to correct her many mistakes, deliberate. She opened her mouth as wide as she thought she could hold it, and approximately aimed the laser toward the center of the mirror at the cusp of her throat. The laser would take ten seconds or so to slice through and gently toast a bagel positioned a few millimeters from the beam’s source. At a distance of about thirty centimeters, and with the impurities in the mirror, she hoped it would diffract enough that it would require at least a few extra seconds’ concentration to do more than heat up its target. Charlene counted on this, that she would have time to adjust the position of the beam before she cut into the wrong thing.
Lying on her belly, Charlene stared forward at the endoscope’s OLED. She hadn’t the coordination or the skill or the even the best tools to defeat the monster. All she had, all she ever had, was endless time alone. She’d done nothing but prepare for this battle for a significant percentage of her life. If she failed tonight, it was because she’d already failed a day or a week or many months ago.
She reached for the laser’s power button. This would take a while.
“Look, yes, fine. I’d do it again. Okay?”
“Do what, Gary?”
“Have a child with you. Ours. From both of our DNA. Charlene. Yes. Knowing the risks.”
“I suppose you think that makes you less of an ass?”
“I was hoping.”
Almost half her lifetime ago, Charlene had se
en an older girl at a support group for parents of cloned dependents. Like Charlene and a few of the other kids at the meeting, this girl had seemed physically undeveloped. Her hair was thin and patchy. She had little apparent control over her motor skills.
Still, Charlene had thought this girl interesting because she had whistled softly throughout the adults’ discussion. At first it had seemed random, as uncontrolled as most of the things Charlene’s body did. Then Charlene realized the girl’s lips weren’t pursed or otherwise positioned to whistle, at least in the ways Charlene understood whistling worked. And when the girl caught Charlene’s eyes and began to whistle louder, even generating two or three notes at once, Charlene got the impression that this girl was trying to get her attention.
Later Charlene learned just how impossible it was for the typical human whistle to produce double-stops in the mouth, much less in the throat. And when still later she learned to flex her own monster and to whistle with just as much complexity, she wished she could go back to that meeting and find out whether this older girl, too, had a monster and two fathers who argued behind muffled doors. And were there others?
Charlene wondered whether her (or their?) ability to hit two or more notes simultaneously meant she could eventually create complex chords. She could imagine using this to communicate with others like herself: individual notes as an alphabet, musical chords and dissonance as words or phrases. She could imagine it might be her responsibility to invent a language, if there were more children out there like them, and if that older girl hadn’t started already on developing such a language. How wonderful it would be to talk to someone, no matter how much time or effort it took. How wonderful to be part of something. Maybe they weren’t even human. Evolution—at least as she understood it—didn’t work that way. It was more random and much slower than that. But maybe they were better than human, and that was the point of all of this. Something new in their fathers’ eyes. Foreign, which didn’t have to mean “grotesque.”
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