Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

She said, “You have go?”

“Me, personally? No. I’m new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I’m actually one of the very last ones they made.”

“Why not legal?”

“You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?”

“Yes.”

“A couple of years ago the Council identified all artificials as stolen property, because the whole debate about natural versus engineered life just went on and on. We were monsters and abominations. Or we were the innocent victims of science, and deserved protection. There was talk of special preserves for us. Somebody in Texas invented and patented a soul-measuring apparatus, but the courts disallowed it. Finally the people who were most appalled by us came up with a solution. Because we were manufactured, simulos were declared the property of Biologe. And because we were walking around loose, we were stolen. We had essentially stolen ourselves. We were declared contraband. We were ordered to return ourselves. But Biologe was out of business by then. So, next best thing, we were to turn ourselves in to the authorities until our rightful owner came to claim us. Which of course was never going to happen. We would be held in a sort of escrow until that time, aka never. A few actually did it. As far as I know, they’re sitting in cells to this day with tags clipped to their ears. The rest of us did our best to disappear. But as stolen property, we’re inherently illegal. We break the law by continuing to possess ourselves.”

“And they hate?”

“Well, ‘hate’ may not be exactly the right word. You could say they think of us as a bad idea. A needless complication in the ongoing argument about the eternal soul. They just sort of want us not to be.”

“Nadians also.”

“Well. It’s different. You’re legal aliens. Being biological, your right to life is not in question. All your other rights are.”

“We live with no stroth.”

“Agonies are one of my changes of garments,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

The night hummed around them. Certain insects remained. The birds were probably gone forever.

Simon said, “I know you don’t like questions.”

“Some questions.”

“And I’m not going to ask you about your past or your family or any of those clearly forbidden subjects.”

“Thank.”

“But I would like to know. I mean, here we are. You had a job, you had a place to live. Granted, maybe not the greatest job, but given what’s available to you”

“To one like me.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. You know what I’m getting at, right? Why are you here? If we get to Denver, if by some miracle Lowell is actually there, what do you hope will happen for you?”

“Die in Denver.”

“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

“No.”

Then she went stare-y and blank. Although he could not see her clearly he knew what her nostrils were doing. He was learning to feel these conditions when they arose in her. The air changed between them. A legible and almost audible absence announced itself.

“Why do you do this?” he asked. “I mean, where do you go when you get like this?”

Softly, she exhaled the little Nadian song. Ee-um-fah-um-so.

“I’m asking,” he said, “because frankly it gets a little creepy for me when you zone out. I’ve pretty much come to understand that you tune back in eventually, but still. Would it be too hard for you to just, you know, hang in a little more? Would it be too un-Nadian?”

Nothing. The breathy song, soft in the darkness.

“Okay. Well, I’m glad we had this conversation. Let’s go find a place to sleep, okay?”

“Yes,” she said. She said that, at least.

They crossed the road and went into the development. It was one of the villages Titan had tossed up for the soon-to-be-rich. Front porches, dormers, window boxes. There’d been rumors that these places were made of something that broke down over time and produced toxic fumes, though the high incidence of cancerous tumors among the soon-to-bes could just as easily have had its roots in the soil or water of their various native lands.

Catareen led him straight to the third house in the first row. It seemed briefly that she must have been here before, must have had some connection to this particular house, though that of course was extremely unlikely. It was probably a Nadian thing about always choosing the third in a lineup or making arbitrary choices with a ritual show of certainty. Or something. Who knew? Who wanted, at this late hour, to go to the trouble of asking?

The front door was locked. Most people had expected to come back. The windows were locked, too. Simon suggested that they try another house, but Catareen had settled on this one. They ended up breaking a window with a plastistone Krishna that stood silently blowing into a silent flute among a circle of long-dead marigolds on the front lawn. The plexi, when it shattered, produced a sharp and hopeless musical sound.

After they crawled in through the window, they found themselves in a living room that had been stripped of all that could be easily carried. What remained was a sofa and two low, hulking chairs covered in pinks and golds and peacock blues bright enough to show even in the darkness. There was a low, carved table and a giant vid and a lightglobe in the shape of a period chandelier.

“Let’s see if there’s any food,” Simon said.

They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.

Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post-meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no business, where she was going simply because she could no longer stay in the place she’d been.

Simon said, “We’ll figure something out about food in the morning. Let’s just go to sleep now.”

“Yes,” she said. She laid the packet on the countertop carefully, as if it were precious and fragile.

They ascended the stairs, past the wall shadows of holopix that had been taken down. Upstairs were three modest bedrooms, each of which contained a stripped bed and an empty bureau. By some unspoken accord they both chose the rooms that had belonged to the children, as opposed to the slightly larger parental room, with the bigger bed in it.

“Good night,” Simon said. She gave him a brief, military nod and went into her room.

Simon stretched out on the modest child bed. The emptied room, with its single window that gave onto the window of the house next door, resembled a nun’s cell, though its vanished occupant had overlooked a holopic cut from a magazine and fastened to the wall, as well as a single pale-pink sock, which coiled like a question mark at the foot of the bed. The holopic was Marty Mockington, early years, twirling with a doomed and childish grace though a field of singing poppies. Simon watched Marty Mockington dance by, over and over, young and alive, glowing. It could not have been one of the kid’s favorite pictures, or it wouldn’t have been left behind. It must have been a lesser image among the dozens that would have covered the wall. Simon could briefly imagine the kid a girl, judging by the sock lying here before her wall of singing and dancing icons. Would she have imagined herself in the future, getting somehow from this little room to the world of the holopix? Probably. Kids believed in extravagant destinies. Now she must be… who knew where? Doing something slavish in the Southern Assembly, most likely, or, if she was lucky, if her parents had managed the paperwork, being trained for something semislavish up in Canada. Eurasia would be out of the question for people like this. The girl was wherever she was, and Marty Mockington, a lesser star in her private constellation, twenty years dead by now, went on dancing on her bedroom wall and would keep doing so for one hundred years or more, until the photons broke down, until the poppies started to fade and his exuberant interlude of dance (heel, toe, leap) slowed and slowed and finally stopped.