Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“What?” he said stupidly.

“To get off SkyPower right away. It’s not the right way for us to go―”

He stared at her.

She had opened his office window the six possible inches mandated by the Sick Building Act of 2009. “Tell me from the beginning, Lillie.”

She looked perplexed. “There isn’t any beginning. You have to just get all the people off SkyPower right away, before the pribir correct it. That’s not the way we should go. It damages genes.”

“What do you mean, ‘correct it’?”

She glanced out the window. “Make it go away. It damages the right way.”

Keith said to his wall screen, “Oliver Wendell, turn on the TV to NewsNet.”

“—since eight o’clock this morning. Some of the children themselves have been calling SkyPower Corporation, news outlets such as this one, and the White House. No one knows what to make of this latest—”

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV off. Lillie… how do you know this?”

She looked impatient. “The pribir told all of us, of course. There are people —they don’t know how many ― on SkyPower and the pribir don’t want to hurt them when they correct it. Genes are the right way, Uncle Keith, not power sources or chemicals that damage genes. So you have to get the people off, because the pribir will only wait a little while.”

“How long?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. SkyPower is really a bad thing, you know. All the nuclear reactors are. They damage genes.”

She looked, sounded, felt like Lillie. She was Lillie. But the words were not. For the first time, something deep inside Keith recoiled from her.

Keith called SkyPower Corporation. But he was a secondary legal counsel, and the CEO and her staff had no time for him. They were “in meeting,” an assistant informed him neutrally.

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV on to NewsNet.”

“—no more than a silly hoax,” someone was saying, a wizened man with an indignant expression. “Elaborately organized, yes. But for a major transnational like SkyPower to listen to a bunch of children would be ridiculous. Nor is SkyPower going to ‘damage genes’ — anybody’s genes. Safety records show—”

Lillie said, “Aren’t they going to send the people back to Earth?” She looked troubled. Was that her talking… or them?

Did he believe there was a them?

He stayed riveted to the TV, canceling all his meetings. No one disturbed him; evidently the media still did not have Lillie’s name. Lillie went back to her computer games. At noon she looked up, frowning.

“Uncle Keith—they mean it about correcting SkyPower. Why are those people still on it?”

He could only shake his head.

“—NASA reporting that, like the Hubble, the Artemis II probe has detected no alien craft anywhere near Earth orbit—”

“Lillie… where are the pribir? In a space ship?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where is the ship?”

“I don’t know,” she said, not looking up from her game.

At 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, SkyPower blew up. The corporation had not removed its personnel.

Hysteria broke out on the Net. Terrorist acts, international provocation, cleverly obfuscated industrial sabotage… theories flew like bullets.

Half an hour later, Keith’s secretary stuck a frightened face into his office. “Mr. Anderson… the White House is on the phone channel!”

He picked up his phone, already knowing. They wanted Lillie, wanted all of them. As soon as possible, as anonymously as possible. In Washington. Highest national security. FBI agents on the way to his apartment.

Lillie turned off her computer game. “Let’s go, Uncle Keith. I need to pack some stuff at home. Where’s that red suitcase I took to Kendra’s for my last sleep over?”

No one spoke to them as they walked through the office. Everyone stared. Keith put an arm around Lillie.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “They just don’t understand yet. About the right way, I mean. But it’s okay. The pribir can explain everything.”

NASA announced the position of the spacecraft. Perhaps they’d just located it, perhaps they’d known all along. Keith knew he’d never find out which. The White House press secretary held a tense, almost belligerent session with the press in which he said, essentially, that he wasn’t going to say anything. He repeated only that the president would address the nation the following night. Condolences had gone out to the families of the seventy-three SkyPower employees killed in the explosion.

Two FBI agents, male and female, waited at Keith’s apartment. Within twenty minutes he and Lillie had packed and been escorted by car to La Guardia. They were shown to a heavily guarded private room in the airport terminal, and for the first time Keith saw some of the other kids that the press was already calling “the pribir puppets.”

They looked like any eighth grade class on a field trip.

Seventeen of them had been collected at La Guardia. They were white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The girls appeared about two years older than the boys, although in fact the sexes were distributed evenly throughout ages eleven, twelve, and barely thirteen. Newly pubescent, which had triggered the latent engineered genes. Some of the girls, like Lillie, had lush figures and wore make-up. The boys’ voices cracked when they called out to each other. At one side of the room, the parents sat looking shell shocked.

Lillie walked up to a dark-haired girl carrying an e-book. “Hi. I’m Lillie Anderson.”

“I’m Theresa Romero. You in eighth grade?”

‘Yes. At St. Anselm’s in Manhattan. I like your sweater.”

“Thanks. I got it at—hey, damn it! Keep away!”

A boy had bounced a basketball off her back. He grinned at her and she scowled. He shrugged and moved away.

“That’s Kenny,” she said with enormous disgust. “A real bonus. All the brains of a bucket of hair.”

“I know some like that,” Lillie said, and the two girls moved off, chattering. Lillie gave a little wave back over her shoulder at Keith.

He was drowning in normalcy.

They were loaded, kids and parents both, onto a military plane. Keith recognized the distinctive blue-and-white aircraft of the 89th Operations Group and guessed they were heading for Andrews Air Force Base. That made sense. Close to Washington, easily restricted and guarded, and containing Malcolm Grow Medical Center, the largest Air Force medical facility on the East Coast. Not to mention elite communications for connecting with everything from the White House to the Airforce Space Warfare Center in Colorado. Andrews was the entry point for all Air Force communications satellites, classified and not.

“I demand to know where you’re taking us!” a mother said to the Air Force major who, from the moment he appeared, was clearly in charge.

“Of course,” the major answered. “We’re going to Washington, D.C. If you’ll all get comfortable aboard, I’ll do a full briefing then.”

The woman hesitated, scowled, but shepherded her son aboard the plane. Probably, Keith thought, others had refused. There were no legal grounds for detention of these people. On the other hand, the military (or the president, or whoever) didn’t need all of the kids. They all said the same thing at the same time. That there were so many seemed to be merely deliberate backup.

Maybe. Who knew how these “pribir” thought?

Once everyone was settled, the kids talking or playing handheld games or gazing out the window at clouds, the major stood erect in the center aisle.

“Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Major Gerald Connington. As some of you already know, our destination is Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington, D.C. Let me say right off that the president of the United States personally thankf each and every one of you for your willingness to travel to Washington and assist him in this emergency. It’s through working together that this unprecedented situation can be handled most effectively.”