Lettie Prell: The Need for Air

“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.