Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Lauren looks surprised too, but only because she did not know. “You failed that? But that test was easy.” Her breathing has begun to slow. She sets her jaw, distracted from her own fear. “That one didn’t matter, though.” She’s right. The cull only happens at the end of high school.

Zinhle shakes her head. “All tests matter. But I told them I’d been sick that day, so the test wasn’t a good measure of my abilities. They let me take it again, and I passed that time.” She had scored perfectly, but Lauren does not need to know this.

“You took it again?” As Zinhle had intended, Lauren considers this. School officials are less lenient in high school. The process has to be fair. Everybody gets one chance to prove themselves. But Lauren isn’t stupid. She will get her parents involved, and they will no doubt bribe a doctor to assert that Lauren was on powerful medication at the time, or recovering from a recent family member’s death, or something like that. The process has to be fair.

Later, after the blotty toilet paper has been flushed and Lauren has gone home, Mitra walks quietly beside Zinhle for most of the way. Zinhle expects something, so she is not surprised when Mitra says, “I didn’t think you’d ever talk about that. The geo test.”

Zinhle shrugs. It cost her nothing to do so.

“I’d almost forgotten about that whole thing,” Mitra continues. She speaks slowly, as she does when she is thinking. “Wow. You used to tell me everything then, remember? We were like this—” She holds up two fingers. “Everybody used to talk about us. The African princess and her Arab sidekick. They fight crime!” She grins, then sobers abruptly, looking at Zinhle. “You were always a good student, but after that—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” says Zinhle, and she speeds up, leaving Mitra behind. But she remembers that incident, too. She remembers the principal, Mrs. Sachs, to whom she went to plead her case. Well, listen to you , the woman had said, in a tone of honest amazement. So articulate and intelligent. I suppose I can let you have another try, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

Zinhle reaches for the doorknob that leads into her house, but her hand bounces off at first. It’s still clenched into a fist.

She gets so tired sometimes. It’s exhausting, fighting others’ expectations, and doing it all alone.

In the morning, Zinhle’s homeroom teacher, Ms. Carlisle, hands her a yellow pass, which means she’s supposed to go to the office. Ms. Carlisle is not Ms. Threnody; she shows no concern for Zinhle, real or false. In fact, she smirks when Zinhle takes the note. Zinhle smirks back. Her mother has told Zinhle the story of her own senior year. Carlisle was almost in the cull , her mother had said. Only reason they didn’t take her was because not as many girls got pregnant that year as they were expecting. They stopped right at her. She’s as dumb as the rest of the meat, just lucky.

I will not be meat , Zinhle thinks, as she walks past rows of her staring, silent classmates. They’ll send their best for me.

This is not pride, not really. But it is all she has.

In the principal’s office, the staff is nervous. The principal is sitting in the administrative assistants’ area, pretending to be busy with a spare laptop. The administrative assistants, who have been feverishly stage-whispering among themselves as Zinhle walks in, fall silent. Then one of them, Mr. Battle, swallows audibly and asks to see her pass.

“Zinhle Nkosi,” he says, mutilating her family name, acting as if he does not already know who she is. “Please go into that office; you have a visitor.” He points toward the principal’s private office, which has clearly been usurped. Zinhle nods and goes into the small room. Just to spite them, she closes the door behind her.

The man who sits at the principal’s desk is not much older than her. Slim, average in height, dressed business-casual. Boring. There is an off-pink tonal note to his skin, and something about the thickness of his black hair, that reminds her of Mitra. Or maybe he is Latino, or Asian, or Indian, or Italian—she cannot tell specifically, having met so few with the look. And not that it matters, because his inhumanity is immediately obvious in his stillness. When she walks in, he’s just sitting there gazing straight ahead, not pretending to do anything. His palms rest flat on the principal’s desk. He does not smile or brighten in the way that a human being would, on meeting a new person. His eyes shift toward her, track her as she comes to stand in front of the desk, but he does not move otherwise.

There is something predatory in such stillness, she thinks. Then she says, “Hello.”

“Hello,” he says back, immediately, automatically.

Silence falls, taut. Rule 2 is in serious jeopardy. “You have a name?” Zinhle blurts. Small talk.

He considers for a moment. The pause should make her distrust him more; it is what liars do. But she realizes the matter is more complex than this: he actually has to think about it.

“Lemuel,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m Zinhle.”

“I know. It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Nkosi.” He pronounces her name perfectly.

“So why are you here? Or why am I?”

“We’ve come to ask you to continue.”

Another silence. In this one, Zinhle is too confused for fear. “Continue what ?” She also wonders at his use of “we,” but first things first.

“As you have been.” He seems to consider again, then suddenly begins moving in a human way, tilting his head to one side, blinking twice rapidly, inhaling a bit more as his breathing changes, lifting a hand to gesture toward her. None of this movement seems unnatural. Only the fact that it’s deliberate, that he had to think about it, makes it strange.

“We’ve found that many like you tend to falter at the last moment,” he continues. “So we’re experimenting with direct intervention.”

Zinhle narrows her eyes. “Many like me ?” Not them, too.

“Valedictorians.”

Zinhle relaxes, though only one set of muscles. The rest remain tense. “But I’m not one yet, am I? Graduation’s still three months off.”

“Yes. But you’re the most likely candidate for this school. And you were interesting to us for other reasons.” Abruptly, Lemuel stands. Zinhle forces herself not to step back as he comes around the desk and stops in front of her. “What do I look like to you?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t get her grade point average by falling for trick questions.

“You’ve thought about it,” he presses. “What do you think I am?”

She thinks, the enemy .

“A…machine,” she says instead. “Some kind of, I don’t know. Robot, or—”

“It isn’t surprising that you don’t fully understand,” he says. “In the days before the war, part of me would have been called ‘artificial intelligence.’”

Zinhle blurts the first thing that comes to her mind. “You don’t look artificial.”

To her utter shock, he smiles. He doesn’t think about this first. Whatever was wrong with him before, it’s gone now. “Like I said, that’s only part of me. The rest of me was born in New York, a city not far from here. It’s on the ocean. I go swimming at the Coney Island beach in the mornings, sometimes.” He pauses. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”