Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (19 page)

“There are new arrivals,” the stranger says. Ghent connects to their identity chip. Eric and Vienna. “They finished twenty more models at least this year.”

“There are always new arrivals,” Ghent says.

“One of them is your mother.”

Ghent stopped tidying the access station away and connected to the database again. As with everything else, Adela couldn’t remember her mother’s name, and he didn’t want to press her on the matter. She would only get upset again.

This was the first time someone from Adela’s sector had been removed from storage, so they’d never had to test her memory of people before.

Come on
, she said.
It doesn’t matter. You can connect as we walk.

She tried to seize control of their legs, but as he tidied the computer station away, the splintered remains of the screen crunched beneath their feet. She might be right. It might make her feel better to speak to someone from before.

A crowd of figures queue in the snow. They wait for the technician’s lab, or the storage bunker, or the generator battery, all hidden beneath the featureless ice. There is nothing else to see but the pylon, stretching its dishes and aerials up into the sky. If there were any more settlements out there, this may be why we haven’t found them. Even if we walked right over their heads, how would we know.

Ghent sends out a low whine of a signal. A figure turns and with an awkward wave, staggers and slides across the ice. Blank face, blue lights for eyes, stylized metal hair.

“Katherine Johnson?” Ghent asks.

“Yes.” Her arms jerk to her sides and her forehead tilts forward as she tries to frown with eyebrows she no longer has.

Even if I could remember anything beyond the essence of my mother, I would not recognize her in that face.

She leans nearer, glass eyes close to ours. But there’s a lot of wires and circuitry between her and me. “They… he, tells me you’re my son. I can’t…”

Son?
I reach out for the database. They’ve got this wrong.

Ghent throws up a block.
I already checked twice. She’s your mother.

“Will?” Her question hangs in the air, drifting like the snow. “Is that you?”

“It is,” Ghent says for me.

But that isn’t my name
. I reach for our legs. We have to leave, stop putting the poor woman through this. She has enough to deal with. From the stilted way she walks and talks, she can’t have been awake for long. She fell asleep years ago but to her it’ll be like yesterday. I see it every year even though that never happened to me. I was one of the first, Ghent tells me when I forget. They made him for me when they saw what was coming, one of many worldwide ideas for surviving the global freeze. There were other solutions and theories, but we haven’t found their children yet.

Not now,
he says.
It was your name, before. You changed it.

I don’t remember that.
No I didn’t.

We didn’t use it much. Now you are Adela. I made sure to add a note to the database.

I want to grab our hands and punch us in the face. Imagine that crinkled nose folding inwards. Ghent pretends he doesn’t care, but I’ve watched him checking our every repaired dent and scuff.

You just let me go on thinking…
But does it matter? I am Adela. Except I’m trying so hard to remember what I was before, and now I’m even less certain.

Ghent keeps on talking to my mother, explaining, but I don’t listen. Then he pauses to answer my drill of demands against our skull.
You called yourself that, so I thought that’s what you wanted.

Ghent didn’t understand. She saw herself as Adela, so what was the problem? A small adjustment in the database. That was nothing. But the figure in front of him fell still as he explained. Yes, this was the mother’s child, and she was called Adela.

“She’s confused,” Denver took over. “We’re still getting used to life.”

“Of course.” Even he and Adela had trouble with it sometimes, and it had been so much longer for them. Denver, a product of the workshops near the equator, where solar power was strongest, had only been brought online a few weeks ago.

“Perhaps we should just let them talk,” Denver suggested.

Ghent agreed. He’d noticed this before. Adela did like to prattle away in their head.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” my mother tells me as we sit in the snow. “I thought, when they said they’d build us all bodies eventually, that they were just saying that. When I went to sleep, I remember thinking, this is it.”

I want to ask about my father, because I must have had one, but it seems wrong. I wonder what my mother looked like. She looks like everyone else now. When she looks at me she sees Ghent, not Adela and not Will.

“So…” She looks to the iron sky. “Do you want me to call you Will…or Adela?” Her fingers burrow into the snow. “Not that it’s a problem, either way. I don’t mind. I just…”

I try to see myself as Will.

Will must have lived in a town that didn’t have an ocean, or palm trees, or a neat terraced house with green-framed windows. That was just his imagined home. That story became Adela. Adela became me.

If I don’t remember Will, does that mean Will is Adela, or not?

“Adela.”

“So… you decided to become…” And away her eyes go again. “I’m sorry, it’s just all so new.”

Let’s go,
I tell Ghent. I can’t think of anything to say.

Ghent had an idea, from his communication with the database, but he didn’t tell Adela. Something dragged her down again. Something her mother had said, in that short, fragmented conversation. Adela’s thoughts turned in on themselves and he didn’t like to interrupt.

Katherine called after them as he walked towards the warehouse bunker. “I don’t mind, really.”

It’s not for you to mind or not
, Adela muttered to herself.

In the warehouse, a small crowd huddled around the steel-topped accession table. Two accessioners—responsible for sorting the artefacts—took notes on a tablet. Several transparent vacuum flasks sat on the table, everyone leaning close to inspect their contents.

“Where were you digging?” Ghent asked.

Someone pulled a tablet over to show him the coordinates on a map, somewhere in the northern hemisphere, several hundred miles from the base. The searchers gathered annually to re-charge, update the records and see the technicians. Unlike Ghent and Adela, who explored alone along a route assigned by the system, these surveyors had gone out as a team to tunnel through the ice beneath the site of a former city. Such sites offered unique opportunities for items to reclaim and archive. When the ice spread, those unsure of what else to do, gathered their possessions, dug deep and left them in vaults below where they estimated the burrowing ice would reach. They couldn’t carry them south with the migrations, or up into space.

It seemed a lot of time and effort to expend on something they weren’t ever going to come back for. He couldn’t understand it.

Of course you don’t.
Adela reached out for their hands, attention caught by the nearest flask.

Well, they’re probably dead now anyway, or in storage.

Don’t say that.
I reach for our mouth, but I’m not really interested in arguing. The small army of vacuum flasks calls to me.
I want to see.

We move closer, Ghent responding to my urging so I imagine I have control of our limbs. He picks one up and we peer inside. A small light illuminates the contents, less precious than some of the other things, the accessioner informs us.

So we can take it out if we want.

I won’t know what it is, I fear, and try to close our eyes. But Ghent doesn’t let me. Inside the flask is an angel, with a faded lace collar and dented painted face. Responding to my imagination, Ghent raises it in the air to the height of a Christmas tree.

We had a star.

“What’s that?”

Ghent processes the stilted voice without turning and identifies my mother. He relinquishes our mouth and I turn with the angel still in our hands. Her eyes, like everyone else’s, stare back.

“It’s a Christmas tree angel. Do you remember, we had that star and the wire broke so we had to jam it down on the top of the tree?”

“It broke?” she says. “I don’t remember that.”

“It snapped when I was in my teens. And then the top of the tree broke too, but we kept on using it.”

Someone else moves to look at the flask in my hands. I lower it, torn between clinging on and letting someone else share the experience. They take it and raise it to their eyes.

“We had an angel,” they say. “It was from my mother’s mother.”

“Your grandmother?” A word I hadn’t used in years. It conjures a heady echo of a scent. Lilies in a vase and beeswax polish. Smooth wooden furniture glowing in the autumn sun. A phantom fist forces its way up my phantom throat.

Their head tilts. “I suppose. I never knew her though, so I never called her that.”

I pick up another flask. Everyone else has gathered more intently round the table, hands clutching the forbidden, priceless things inside their tiny glass prisons.

Ghent reclaims our mouth. “Open them,” he says.

The two collectors stop their tapping. “What?”

“Open them. We can’t see them properly through the glass.”

One accessioner scoops the flasks towards them, batting the others away as they try to skip in and steal the artefacts back. “No. Look with your eyes, like everyone else. These things are precious. If those who fled into space return, or if we find those who went south, they’re going to need them. They are memories.”

I want to see them,
I insist, cheering on our vain attempt to claim them. If their owners had wanted these things, really wanted them, they would have taken them. They would have found a way.

“Let my daughter see them.” My mother’s awkward arm grips the assessor’s shoulder. She’s worked out how to turn up the volume on their voice.

Someone else darts round the side and steals two of the flasks. They put them at the end of the table, leaning over to try and find the switch for the light that will illuminate their contents in the dim room. But Ghent is ahead of them. He pulls the cord near the door. It flicks and bounces when he lets it go. It jars. Something from my old life. Who on Earth had designed something archaic? Accessioners and their focus on the past. It joins the old posters on the walls, the metal signage. My sculpted mouth tries to smile but can’t.

“Stuff this.” The figure with the flasks tosses his head. They press a button on the top of the flask and unscrew the cap. Air floods in with a hiss. Everyone stops their arguing and turns to look. Already closest, Ghent relinquishes our hands so I can take one of the flasks.

The assessor slams down the tablet. “You should all keep a hold of your human minds. That’s what you’re for.”

I freeze, expecting Ghent to reclaim control of our hands, but he doesn’t. I upend the flask. A pile of little metal cars spill out onto the table and my mother catches one as it skids off towards the floor. She puts it back, wheeling it around the others in a circle. Then her hand stops. She whips it away and reaches instead for mine. Something in my brain reacts, skipping a beat in my imagined heart. The real one keeps on beating regardless. I look at the car and it’s as if something slams into our side. I glance down but there’s nothing there. Blackness, recalled confusion. I don’t know…

I close my eyes.

Ghent reached out for their hands, sensing the building anger. Every scrap leftover from Old Earth was vital to keeping its memory alive. Especially when the minds they had hoped would do that seemed to fade so quickly. But, the figures around the table moved with a new enthusiasm, their animated chatter swelling as they saw the objects from their old lives.

Do you want me to keep our eyes closed?
he asked Adela. It might be easier that way.

No. I want to see.

He took the fingers.

No. I have to feel. And if we could smell, I’d do that too.

He paused for a moment, which she seemed to find funny.

Well, a moment is so much quicker for you
, she said.

Your mother can smell. The technicians worked out how to do that years ago. We can go and see the technician and they might be able to…

He was so primitive, compared to these new models. But not as primitive as he’d been when they first awoke. He hadn’t thought about much back then, before those years of talking to Adela. She’d made him so much more aware.

She clenched and unclenched their fingers as he gave her them back and said,
Stop trying to distract me.

I open our eyes, pick up one of the little cars and hold it out in front of me.

“Do you remember?” my mother asks.

Someone else upends the other flask. A plastic device falls out and they try to turn it on but nothing happens.

“The battery is flat.” The accessioner jabs at their tablet, as petulant as a robot can be. “We’ve been trying to work out how to charge it. It looks like…”

The figure cuts him off. “A phone.”

Ghent is sending out a signal. I don’t know what he’s saying until everyone relinquishes command to their companions. I can tell from the way their faces linger and their hands hover, uncertain. Flasks hiss open, contents fall to the table to be turned over and over. Objects we haven’t touched in many years rekindle memories, set neglected pathways sparking.

“Remember these,” says the figure holding the phone in their outstretched palm, going through some reflexive motion of slipping it back and forth. “I’d forgotten. But… I never went anywhere without it. Do you remember?” He looks up. “Everyone had one?”

I didn’t though. Will and Adela—they are the same—had something simpler. The memory drifts back and I don’t want to seize it or interrogate it for fear it will run away.

“Do you remember?” my mother repeats.

I stare at the toy in my hand, the toy that caused my heart to skip a beat. Four wheels, windows all around. A car like every other. Like the one that gave me Ghent. I stepped off the pavement, eye on the little green man, and woke with a body that wasn’t mine. There should have been pain. But they took my mind away before I felt it, and stopped me ever feeling it again. True pain. Unfettered agony as the blood rushes out and the body shuts down. I wonder what that feels like.