21st Century Science Fiction (52 page)

“That’s true, it is.” At least, he imagined it would be for her. The bark on those trees could cut her skin open. It could cut his open, too, but he wouldn’t feel the pain. “Anyway, Dad taught me lots of things: how to talk to people; how to use things like the bus and money and phones and email; how stores work.”

“How stores work?”

“Like, how to buy things. How to shop.”

“How to shoplift?”

He pretended to examine her face. “Hey, you sure you’re organic? You sure seem awful smart . . .”

She giggled. “Can you teach me how to shoplift?”

“No way!” He stood. “You’d get caught, and they’d haul you off to jail.”

Abigail hopped off the bench. “They wouldn’t haul a
kid
off to jail, Javier.”

“Not an organic one, maybe. But a vN, sure.” He turned to leave the playground.

“Have
you
ever been to jail?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

They were about to cross a street. Her hand found his. He was careful not to squeeze too hard. “When I was smaller,” he said simply. “A long time ago.”

“Was it hard?”

“Sometimes.”

“But you can’t feel it if somebody beats you up, right? It doesn’t hurt?”

“No, it doesn’t hurt.”

In jail they had asked him, at various times, if it hurt yet. And he had blinked and said
No, not yet, not ever
. Throughout, he had believed that his dad might come to help him. It was his dad who had been training him. His dad had seen the policia take him in. And Javier had thought that there was a plan, that he would be rescued, that it would end. But there was no plan. It did not end. His dad never showed. And then the humans had turned on each other, in an effort to trigger his failsafe.

“Junior didn’t feel any pain, either,” Abigail said. “When you let him fall.”

The signal changed. They walked forward. The failsafe swam under the waters of his mind, and whispered to him about the presence of cars and the priority of human life.

• • • •

“What do you mean, he’s not here?”

Abigail kept looking from her mother to Javier and back again. “Did Junior go away?”

Brigid looked down at her. “Are you all packed up? Your dad is coming today to get you.”

“AND Momo, Mom. Daddy AND Momo. They’re both coming straight from the airport.”

“Yes. I know that. Your dad and Momo. Now can you please check upstairs?”

Abigail didn’t budge. “Will Junior be here when I come back next Friday?”

“I don’t know, Abigail. Maybe not. He’s not just some toy you can leave somewhere.”

Abigail’s face hardened. “You’re mean and I hate you,” she said, before marching up the stairs with heavy, decisive stomps.

Javier waited until he heard a door slam before asking: “Where is he, really?”

“I really don’t know, Javier. He’s your son.”

Javier frowned. “Well, did he say anything—”

“No. He didn’t. I told him that Abigail would be going back with her dad, and he just up and left.”

Javier made for the door. “I should go look for him.”

“No!” Brigid slid herself between his body and the door. “I mean, please don’t. At least, not until my ex leaves. Okay?”

“Your ex? Why? Are you afraid of him or something?” Javier tipped her chin up with one finger. “He can’t hurt you while his girlfriend’s watching. You know that, right?”

She hunched her shoulders. “I know. And I’m not afraid of him hurting me. God. You always leap to the worst possible conclusion. It’s just, you know, the way he gloats. About how great his life is now. It hurts.”

He deflated. “Fine. I’ll wait.”

In the end, he didn’t have long to wait. They showed up only fifteen minutes later—a little earlier than they were supposed to, which surprised Brigid and made her even angrier for some reason. “He was never on time when we were together,” she sniffed, as she watched them exit their car. “I guess dating a robot is easier than buying a fucking watch.”

“That’s a bad word, Mom,” Abigail said. “I’m gonna debit your account.”

Brigid sighed. She forced a smile. “You’re right, honey. I’m sorry. Let’s go say hi to your dad.”

At the door, Kevin was a round guy with thinning hair and very flashy-looking augmented lenses—the kind usually marketed at much younger humans. He stood on the steps with one arm around a Japanese-model vN wearing an elaborate Restoration costume complete with velvet jacket and perfect black corkscrew curls. They both stepped back a little when Javier greeted them at the door.

“You must be Javier,” Kevin said, extending his hand and smiling a dentist smile. “Abigail’s told me lots about you.”

“You did?” Brigid frowned at her daughter.

“Yeah.” Abigail’s expression clouded. “Was it supposed to be a surprise?”

Brigid’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course not.”

The thing about the failsafe was that it made sure his perceptual systems caught every moment of hesitation in voices or faces or movements. Sometimes humans could defeat it, if they believed their own bullshit. But outright lies, especially about the things that hurt—he had reefs of graphene coral devoted to filtering those. Brigid was lying. She had meant for this moment to be a surprise. He could simulate it, now: she would open the door and he would be there and he would make her look good because he looked good, he was way prettier by human standards than she or her ex had any hope of ever being, and for some reason that mattered. Not that he couldn’t understand; his own systems were regularly hijacked by his perceptions. He responded to pain; they responded to proportion. He couldn’t actually hurt the human man standing in front of him—not with his fists. But his flat stomach and his thick hair and his clear, near-poreless skin: they were doing the job just fine. Javier saw that, now, in the way Kevin kept sizing him up, even when his own daughter danced into his arms. His jetlagged eyes barely spared a second for her. They remained trained on Javier. Beside him, Brigid stood a little taller.

God, Brigid was such a bitch.

“I like your dress, Momo,” Abigail said.

This shook Kevin out of his mate-competition trance. “Well that’s good news, baby, ‘cause we bought a version in your size, too!”

“That’s cute,” Brigid said. “Now you can both play dress-up.”

Kevin shot her a look that was pure hate. Javier was glad suddenly that he’d never asked about why the two of them had split. He didn’t want to know. It was clearly too deep and organic and weird for him to understand, much less deal with.

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” he said. “I’m sure you’re pretty tired after the flight. You probably want to get home and go to sleep, right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Momo said. Thank Christ for other robots; they knew how to take a cue.

Kevin pinked considerably. “Uh, right.” He reached down, picked up Abigail’s bag, and nodded at them. “Call you later, Brigid.”

“Sure.”

Abigail waved at Javier. She blew him a kiss. He blew one back as the door closed.

“Well, thank goodness that’s over.” Brigid sagged against the door, her palms flat against its surface, her face lit with a new glow. “We have the house to ourselves.”

She was so pathetically obvious. He’d met high-schoolers with more grace. He folded his arms. “Where’s my son?”

Brigid frowned. “I don’t know, but I’m sure he’s fine. You’ve been training him, haven’t you? He has all your skills.” Her fingers played with his shiny new belt buckle, the one she had bought for him especially. “Well, most of them. I’m sure there are some things he’ll just have to learn on his own.”

She knew. She knew exactly where his son was. And when her eyes rose, she knew that he knew. And she smiled.

Javier did not feel fear in any organic way. The math reflected a certain organic sensibility, perhaps, the way his simulation and prediction engines suddenly spun to life, their fractal computations igniting and processing as he calculated what could go wrong and when and how and with whom. How long had it been since he’d last seen Junior? How much did Junior know? Was his English good enough? Were his jumps strong enough? Did he understand the failsafe completely? These were the questions Javier had, instead of a cold sweat. If he were a different kind of man, a man like Kevin or any of the other human men he’d met and enjoyed in his time, he might have felt a desire to grab Brigid or hit her the way she’d hit him earlier, when she thought he was endangering her offspring in some vague, indirect way. They had subroutines for that. They had their own failsafes, the infamous triple-F cascades of adrenaline that gave them bursts of energy for dealing with problems like the one facing him now. They were built to protect their own, and he was not.

So he shrugged and said: “You’re right. There are some things you just can’t teach.”

They went to the bedroom. And he was so good, he’d learned so much in his short years, that Brigid rewarded his technique with knowledge. She told him about taking Junior to the grocery store with her. She told him about the man who had followed them into the parking lot. She told him how, when she had asked Junior what he thought, he had given Javier’s exact same shrug.

“He said you’d be fine with it,” she said. “He said your dad did something similar. He said it made you stronger. More independent.”

Javier shut his eyes. “Independent. Sure.”

“He looked so much like you as he said it.” Brigid was already half asleep. “I wonder what I’ll pass down to my daughter, sometimes. Maybe she’ll fall in love with a robot, just like her mommy and daddy.”

“Maybe,” Javier said. “Maybe her whole generation will. Maybe they won’t even bother reproducing.”

“Maybe we’ll go extinct,” Brigid said. “But then who would you have left to love?”

T
OBIAS
S. B
UCKELL
Tobias S. Buckell was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1979. As a result, some of his earliest memories are of “nervous adults and not being allowed near windows” during the collapse of the island’s government and the U.S. invasion of 1983. He spent the rest of his childhood on boats there and in the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, moving with his family to Ohio when he was eighteen. He has been publishing SF stories since 2000, and novels since 2006.

Much of his work draws on his Caribbean background, in direct and indirect ways, and “Toy Planes”—a gem of an SF miniature—is no exception.

M
y sister Joanie’s deft hands flicked from dreadlock to dreadlock, considering her strategy. “You always leaving,” she said, flicking the razor on, and suddenly I’m five, chasing her with a kite made from plastic bags and twigs, shouting that I was going to fly away from her one day.

“I’m sorry. Please, let’s get this done.”

I’d waited long enough. I’d grown dreads because when I studied in the United States I wanted to remember who I was and where I came from as I began to lose my Caribbean accent. But the rocket plane’s sponsor wanted them cut. It would be disaster for a helmet not to have a proper seal in an emergency. Explosive decompression was not something a soda company wanted to be associated with in their customers’ minds. It was insulting that they assumed we couldn’t keep the craft sealed. But we needed their money. The locks had become enough a part of me that I winced when the clippers bit into them, groaned, and another piece of me fell away.

In the back of the bus that I had pick me up, I hung on to a looped handle swinging from the roof as the driver rocketed down the dirt road from Joanie’s. My sister had found a place out in the country, a nice concrete house with a basement opening up into a sloped garden on the side of a steep hill. She taught mathematics at the school a few miles away, an open-shuttered building, and this would have been my future too, if I hadn’t been so intent on “getting off the rock.”

The islands always called their children back.

We hit asphalt, potholes, and passed cane fields with machete-wielding laborers hacking away at the stalks, sweat-drenched shirts knotted around their waists. It was hot; my arms stuck to the plastic-covered seats. The driver leaned into a turn, and looked back. “I want to ask you something.” I really wished the backseats had belts.

“Sure.”

“All that money you spending, you don’t think it better spent on getting better roads?” He dodged a pothole. “Or more school funding?”

Colorful red and yellow houses on stilts dotted the steep lush green mountainsides as I looked out of the tinted windows. “Only one small part of the program got funded by the government,” I explained. “We found private investors, advertisers, to back the rest. Whatever the government invested will be repaid.”

“Maybe.”

I had my extra arguments. How many people lived on this island? Tens of thousands. Most of our food was imported, leaving us dependent on other food-producing nations, who all used satellites to track their farming. What spin-off technologies might come out of studying recycling in space? Why wait for other nations to get to it first? Research always produced good things for the people who engaged in it.

But I was tired of arguing for it, and I had only sound bites for him, the same ones I’d given the media who treated us like kids trying to do something all grown up.

The market surrounded me in a riot of color: fruit, vegetables, full women in dresses in bright floral patterns. And the noise of hundreds constantly bargaining over things like the price of fish. Teenagers stood around the corners with friends. I wandered around looking for something, as we needed to fill the craft with enough extra weight to simulate a passenger and we still had a few extra ounces to add.

I found a small toy stall. And standing in front of it I was five years old again, with no money, and a piece of scrap metal in the triangular shape of a space plane. I would pretend it was just like the real-life ones I’d read about in the books donated to the school after the hurricane. And at night, when the power would sometimes flicker out, I’d go out and stand on the porch and look up at the bright stars and envy them.

The stall had a small bottle, hammered over with soda-can metal, with triangular welded-on wings, and a cone stuck to the back. It was painted over in yellow, black, and green, and I bought it.