The Need for Air Page 2

  * * *

  She sat up, pulling the hood from her head in one smooth motion, and then the lines connecting her suit with the bed. God, she was getting too good at coming out. She was steady on her feet as she rose and walked swiftly to the door of the ward.

  There was a robot in the hallway, apparently waiting for her. For a moment, she took it for the one that had brought Jared back from wherever he’d roamed, but then again, all of them looked alike. Robot personality programming had been purged several updates ago.

  “Where is he?” she demanded.

  The robot tilted its head as if unsure what she’d said. “This is your formal warning that repeated surfacing behavior will result in ejection from Sequester.”

  Lake sucked in her breath. “Just how many formal warnings do I get?”

  “One,” the robot replied.

  Lake blinked. “This one? This is it?”

  “Correct.”

  Lake’s hands clenched. “Then help me find my fucking son.”

  She pushed past the robot and let herself into the children’s ward. All the bodies looked so similar in their black suits, but at least none of the beds were empty. She breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted Jared’s artificial legs, gleaming in the dim light. She approached, and stared down at his form, suddenly wanting to scream at him, he’s caused them both so much trouble. They’re on the brink of being evicted, of losing this golden opportunity to improve their lives for good.

  But he was already on the other side, back where he should be in the virtual world. She’d have to save her fury for when she returned.

  She felt rather than heard the robot’s presence at her side. There was a displacement of the air, a large mass in her peripheral vision. Her memory worked the old way here, but it was vivid enough.

  “You mentioned you could put on a child lock,” she said. “On his hood. So he can’t take it off.”

  “It requires the legal guardian of the child to authorize,” it said.

  She chewed her lower lip briefly. “Then let’s do it.”

  The robot reached down. Its arm made two clamping motions, one on each side of Jared’s neck.

  “And take his legs,” she said, turning away.

  “Repeat?”

  “You heard me. Take his goddam legs off.” She exited, crossed the hall swiftly, and reentered her own ward.

  It’s for his own good, she told herself as she fastened herself into the bed. He’ll be fine. He’ll adjust. Everyone does. And he’ll thank me. He’ll thank me for this.

  * * *

  She sat in her beach chair, toes grinding into the black sand, and watched her son—her only son—stare out to sea. He hadn’t spoken to her for three hours, not since he’d obviously tried to leave, to come out of it, to do his little visit back to his body. He’d come bursting out of his room screaming, “Mom! What’s going on?” She’d tried to soothe him, of course. She wasn’t a monster. She was doing this because she loved him.

  “Honey,” she’d said as she held him close. “It’s because I care about you. I care about your future. You’ve got to believe me, this is better than out there. You’ll live forever, for one.”

  Then, because he hadn’t stopped crying, she’d brought him here, to the beach. He liked the beach. Kids don’t understand about mortality, she thought. Jared probably never thought she’d die someday, let alone himself.

  Jared was planted in the wet sand, letting gentle waves roll over his legs. His father, David, had liked the beach. He was always photographing the beach, and their seaside cottage, with that impossibly archaic camera with the bellows, and gargantuan negatives. He had to send for supplies halfway across the country, to make his blasted black-and-white photographs.

  “Why do you bother?” she’d asked him many times.

  “I like old things,” he’d responded. But there were some things he liked young, she’d discovered. He’d left her for a twenty-five-year-old man who’d majored in psychology at Sarah Lawrence. They got the beach cottage in the divorce. Lake had taken the two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, near Jared’s school.

  The morning she’d left him with Jared in tow, David had stood staring at the sea in the same way that Jared stared now.

  She reached up and ran her fingers over her hair, as if the memories would shake out with the sand and float down the shore. This programmed place she’d secured for herself, for Jared, was her new world now, an exciting and seemingly limitless place that she was helping to create with A.I., through her beta testing job. Cherry cherry lime, they’d told her. They’d been pleased. When would she be able to leave Jared again and go back to work? She’d love to be enveloped by the feed again. The current sidebar of goodies suddenly seemed outdated. She watched the offerings scroll by: mood boosters, a memory excision tool. She paused to read about the latter.

  “Mom? Mom!”

  It was Jared, kneeling in front of her. Black sand stuck to his arms and thighs like so much pepper.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she said. “You don’t have to shout.”

  “Mom, I have to go back. Now.”

  “Jared, you know you can’t. It’d mean—”

  “I have to feed the dog, Mom. It’ll starve if I don’t.”

  “Dog?” She couldn’t process this. “We can get you a dog, honey. Whatever you want.”

  “Mom. This is a real dog. There’s a place outside Sequester where I go. Mom.” He started to cry.

  “Go? What do you mean go?” But now guilt stabbed through the anger and made everything clear. She’d been so wrapped up in her new job, and being around A.I., and going to the Never-Ending Mixer, and worrying about what he was going to do, that she’d neglected to access her son’s space to look at his history of movements. She called it up now, even as he relentlessly stared at her with those serious eyes. And what she saw was unbelievable.

  “You’ve hardly been sequestering at all,” she whispered. Every time she’d been at work, every time she’d gone to the Never-Ending Mixer, he’d been sneaking out. He’d hardly attended school at all, since they’d arrived.

  “How can you still be here?” She meant how was he not expelled from Sequester, but instead it sounded like she didn’t want him around. Yet she didn’t have the words to correct herself. The silence between them was an almost measureable distance.

  “They’ve been letting me go outside to get fresh air,” he said. “It’s only when you get involved that they care. Mom, please. I need to go.”

  God, that place was so lax, that they wouldn’t even protect a child.

  “I’ll buy you a pet.” God, she was shouting. She wasn’t angry at Jared, but the system. It was seriously messed up. There should be a warning light on that parental access icon, to let someone know they should be monitoring their child’s activities.

  He leaped to his feet and glowered down at her. “I don’t want a fake dog!”

  Lake made an effort to lower her voice. “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m not mad at you.”

  But he was screaming now. “I can’t believe you put a lock on my hood!”

  “Jared.” She was calm now. She had this. “They weren’t doing you any favors, letting you go outside. The whole point of Sequester is to weaken your attachment to your body. So you can adjust to being here permanently.”

  His brows drew together. If he’d been older, he’d look menacing. “I don’t want to be here. I want to stay a breather.”

  Lake stared up at him. “I’m not sure you understand what that means, honey. You’re too young to think long-term.”

  His expression had gone blank. He was reading his feed. She hoped he was looking at the dogs he could have, but she doubted it.

  “Mom?” His voice was a whisper. “Did you tell them to take … my legs?”

  Again the guilt threatened to overwhelm her, just as it had with his father. Why hadn’t she seen that one coming, either? It had only been when her heart had broken that she’d seen the truth, could trace the history
of the betrayal. She lifted her chin. “I did. For your own good. Honey, I love you. You need to let me provide for you.”

  He was backing away from her across the sand. Then he exited the beach. Lake flipped on her parental access. She’d never neglect that again.

  She saw at least he wasn’t trying to surface, to claw at his hood. But where he’d gone was puzzling. What was he doing at Human Affairs? Well, let him learn for himself that she was well within her rights to make decisions for him.

  She rose, brushing sand from her thighs absentmindedly. While he was occupied, she could go to work.

  * * *

  She was special. She’d known that by the assignments they’d given her, but it was all confirmed at the Never-Ending Mixer. She arrived after work, when another invigorating round of what she’d begun to call feed immersion helped her recover from her argument with Jared. She dropped the term casually at the mixer—the first time she’d mentioned her job—and instantly found herself the center of a small crowd’s admiration.

  You’re still in Sequester, and you’re beta testing?

  Yes, she was, she said proudly.

  But you’re so new to the virtual world. You can’t possibly have adjusted to standard functioning yet.

  She was used to having a job. There happened to be openings for beta testing, she’d signed up, and was accepted. It pays well.

  It carries a certain amount of risk. Adjustment problems, primarily, which places a strain on one’s mental health.

  Actually, she found the work interesting.

  Then came a barrage of questions about A.I. She could answer few of these, but it was obvious they were jealous of her interactions with artificial intelligence. The crowd was hungry for any tidbit of information. She got the distinct impression she was viewed as a courageous pioneer. Well, she’d had to be that, and resourceful as well, as a single parent. Providing for her son had made her tenacious. Bringing Jared here was part of her natural pioneering spirit. This was the wave of the future.

  She was still having fun at the mixer, regaling the crowd with some of her testing experiences, when she received a message in her feed. She was being summoned to Human Affairs. She sighed. Undoubtedly she was being asked to retrieve Jared. She didn’t want to leave. Everyone was absolutely spellbound. Well, it was a sneak preview of their future, after all. But being a parent came first. She left right away, voicing sincere apologies to her admirers.

  * * *

  Jared’s shoulders were hunched, and his gaze was on his shoes as he stood next to the arbitrator, a tall woman with extremely short gray hair and wearing a blush pink blouse over gray trousers. The pink looked decidedly unjudicial. When the arbitrator spoke, she sounded too informal.

  “Hi, Lake,” she said. “We’re here to talk about Jared’s request to be emancipated from you. If granted, your parental rights will be terminated.”

  She did not have words for this … betrayal. Jared was just like his father. “There must be some mistake,” she told the arbitrator.

  The woman’s eyes were not unkind. “Please answer this question, Lake. Did you order the robot to remove your son’s prosthetic legs?”

  Something deep inside her ached, threatened to overwhelm. She was going to buy that memory excision tool she’d seen in her feed. “I did. The stakes were high. We were close to being expelled from Sequester.”

  The arbitrator regarded her, inhaling slowly. “And you ordered this, aware that Jared’s prosthetics are fully integrated into his body? That they aren’t readily removable?”

  “Of course,” Lake replied, irritated. Only the best for her son. This wasn’t the olden days, when people took their artificial limbs off to go to bed.

  The arbitrator blinked once, quickly. “Are you aware your request in this matter was denied?”

  Lake was taken off guard. “No. I mean … I was…” She didn’t want to admit she’d given the order out of anger. She’d only wanted to make sure Jared stayed put. For his own good.

  The arbitrator cut into her thoughts. “Your order was denied because it was a reckless request. Sequester is not a prison.”

  The robot had said the same thing. Lake was fuming inside. They let her son get up and leave Sequester multiple times, for hours. But one careless comment from her, uttered when she was justifiably angry and fearful of the consequences, and it was grounds for this? Well, she wasn’t about to blow up now. She stood, seething, facing the arbitrator and her son, and said nothing.

  The arbitrator paused, and then nodded. “Because Human Affairs has jurisdiction over these matters, and they’ve given me authority to make a decision on this, I’m declaring Jared emancipated from your authority. Is there anything you’d like to say to Jared, or to me, at this time, Lake?”

  Lake shook her head, not to mean no, but to express her disbelief. “Where is he going to go? Who’s going to take care of him?”

  The arbitrator put a hand on Jared’s shoulder and he looked up, grudgingly, into his mother’s eyes. “I’ve talked to Dad.”

  Lake’s shoulders stiffened.

  The arbitrator spoke to Jared. “Your dad. You want to go live with your dad.”

  Jared nodded. “He’ll come get me tomorrow. And Hope, too.”

  “Hope?” Lake echoed. The word didn’t belong here. “Hope for what?”

  Jared smiled sheepishly. “Hope is the name of my dog, Mom.”

  Again that dog. She accessed her son’s space—she still had her authority to do that— and clicked to access his memories.

  She—in Jared’s point of view—bounded up the stairs and out a gray utility door. There was a stark contrast of bright sun and deep shadow that she recognized as late afternoon. She looked left, then right, along the deserted side street, little more than an alley, really. Then she darted across the street and into the back of a place.

  Inside she emerged into a small grocery, a mini-mart. It was deserted, but there were still a few cans and boxes on the shelves. There was a shadow under the front window that moved. It was a black dog wagging its tail slowly. It was lying on several thicknesses of old blankets. It leaned heavily on its front legs as it stood. It approached with a hobbling gait, and Lake soon realized why. The dang thing was missing a right hind leg.

  She watched Jared’s hand go out and pet the dog’s head. Hi, girl. Are you hungry?

  The dog wagged its tail in reply, and followed Jared around the corner of an aisle, where a food and water dish stood up against a darkened refrigerator case that still contained a few bottles of water and soda. The crude simplicity of the scene, and the fragility of biological life, touched her.

  There were tears rolling down her cheeks as she withdrew from the memory. She understood now why Jared was drawn to that pitiful dog. There was something in him that was like his mother, after all: a headstrong determination to provide for another being’s needs, even if it meant self-sacrifice.

  Her son and the arbitrator were looking at her. She needed to say something. “Fine. Go.”

  Jared ran to her and encircled her torso with his arms, putting his face alongside her neck. She closed her eyes and thought about the beach: the sun on her face, and the wind gently playing with her hair.

  It was she who broke the embrace at last, prying his hands from around her. “So go feed your dog.”

  His lips quivered as he smiled. His eyes glistened with tears of his own. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Lake wanted to say the dog looked like a good one. She wanted to say something encouraging. But she couldn’t. She was reliving the challenges of dealing with all those physical things out there. Buying food. Making meals. Taking showers. Needing a car to drive yourself to work. Shoveling snow. Dusting. Laundry. Calling someone to come fix stuff when it breaks down. God, and the body breaking down. Surely Jared would come to understand mortality when he was older, would come back to Sequester. Everyone would come here, eventually, who could afford it.

  Jared reached up and put both hands on her shoulders
. It broke her reverie, and she looked down into a pair of sincere eyes. “Bye, Mom. I know you’ll be happy here. I know how much you like it.”

  Then he was gone. His virtual form didn’t deflate as before, but simply winked out, like it was no big deal. It was hard to believe he was gone for good. She was seized with the desire to clap her hands, go to him, just to say goodbye again, in her old body, one human to another. But to do so would kick her out of the garden of paradise.

  She left Human Affairs and went to the beach, where she bought a mood booster and looked out at the waves rolling in. Up the beach a ways there were several women in burkinis, and children running along the beach. She thought they might be the same Muslim family, the girl Aminah among them, who had helped Jared do a handstand. Lake waved, feeling the freedom in her arm, light as the breeze. She could go to her beta testing job now, and work as long as she liked.

  She bought the memory excision tool, and carved away the worst about David and Jared, leaving just enough of the pain so she wouldn’t miss them. Then she went into her settings and deselected her feeding functions. She may as well speed things up.

  She received a message a few days later that her body had been vacated and cremated. There was no going back now. She was fully instantiated. What a relief, she told herself.

  David and Jared could reach her through the interface, but the outside world operated at a much slower pace. By the time they initiated messaging through the interface, they’d be old as history to her.

  In the meantime, she’d made it. She was in the better world for good.

  About the Author

  Lettie Prell’s short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Best of Apex Magazine anthology, Paranormal Underground, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, StarShipSofa podcast, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the novel Dragon Ring. You can sign up for email updates here.

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