The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (75 page)

When they returned to their flat, they found that Dakota had been pried from his electronics and sent to bed, and that Gloria had returned and was huddled in fierce consultation with Uncle Saavit and the elder Mrs Chaudhury. These three looked up as Amrit and Meera came in. To their questions Amrit replied not a word, but marched Meera past them and into her little room. Less than a minute later, Amrit emerged from the room, sans her progeny, shutting the door firmly behind her. Then she went into the tiny kitchen to fix a pot of tea.

Gloria followed her into the kitchen and stood silently, waiting, her arms crossed over her chest, while Amrit filled the teakettle and lit the pilot light on the ancient propane stove. Gloria was nearly half Uncle Saavit’s age, and would have been a beauty, thought Amrit, had it not been for her absurd adoption of the latest youth styles from China: LEDs imbedded in her forehead and chin and chop marks tattooed on her neck. Gloria, Mumbai born and bred, had been working as a waitress in one of the new holo-discos when she had met Saavit, and Amrit was not blind to the effect Gloria’s excruciatingly modern presence in the house was having upon impressionable young Meera. Young! Amrit thought, waiting for the water to boil. In the old days, at fifteen Meera would already have been married a year, with a child on the way. She herself had married Meera’s father at seventeen, and now here she was, a widow at thirty-two, with a dead-end job and no romantic prospects, certainly. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she chided. You speak of the old days? In the old days, you would have been expected to have flung yourself upon your husband’s funeral pyre. At least you have a job.

The kettle sang. Amrit had readied the tea leaves in the next-best steeping pot; she poured the boiling water over them until the steeping pot was filled, then replaced the kettle on the stove and put the lid on the pot. Only then did she turn round and smile at the waiting Gloria. “Would you like some tea, Auntie?” Amrit asked.

It was an old joke between them. When first Uncle Saavit had brought his fiancée home, Amrit had judged her an opportunist fishing the river of senility, and had said as much to Saavit in so many words. But over the weeks and months, and after the wedding when a pregnant Gloria had moved in with them, Amrit had come to appreciate her probity, practicality, and intelligence; and she was certainly a hard worker, contributing to the communal treasury through long hours at the e-cafe a substantial portion of the revenues that Saavit’s ailing limousine service failed to provide. So Gloria and Amrit had taken to calling one another “Niece” and “Auntie,” and usually it eased the tensions that occasionally cropped up between them.

But this time Gloria did not smile. She said, “Saavit and Parvati just told me what has happened.” For reasons unclear to Amrit, Gloria was the only one in the house hold suffered to address Amrit’s mother-in-law by her given name.

“And how would Saavit and Mrs. Chaudhury know?”

“The Assistant Vice-Principal told them when he brought Meera home this afternoon.”

“Ah. Of course. No tea?” Gloria shook her head. In the dim kitchen, her LEDs were pinpricks of light. “Then you all know that Meera faces suspension for quarreling.”

“Yes. It is so unjust!” The words came out slowly, almost thoughtfully. “It was the other girl’s fault. Saavit says that the Assistant Vice-Principal admitted as much.”

“Nonetheless. Meera knew the rules. This was her fourth offense. She must take her share of the responsibility.” Amrit turned away, took down a teacup, saucer, and tea strainer from the shelf, and removed a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer. She noticed that her hands were trembling. She set the tea things on the little kitchen table to await the completion of the tea leaves’ steeping. Without looking round again, Amrit said, “Did the Assistant Vice-Principal also inform you under what circumstances Meera would be permitted to remain at school?”

“It happened to me.”

Shocked, Amrit turned. Though her expression was calm, tears were running down Gloria’s beautiful brown cheeks. “Sit,” Amrit ordered. The girl sat down at the table. Amrit sat down on the chair next to her. “What do you mean, it happened to you? What happened to you?”

“The nannychip. Saavit knows about it, but there are other things he doesn’t know about, and would not understand if he did.” Gloria glanced toward the parlor. “Promise me you will not tell him what I am about to tell you.”

“I promise.” Amrit pulled a handkerchief from a sleeve and handed it to her. Gloria took it and dabbed at her eyes. When she spoke, it was precisely and with an odd detachment, as though she were reading from a teleprompter.

“It was when I was at Girls’ Reformatory. They were just experimenting with them then, the chips. I was thirteen and a half. I had been sent to Reformatory for selling pirated Mufti HDs at school.”

“Mufti?” said Amrit. “The singing group?” She had heard of it, vaguely, a neo-Raj rock band that had enjoyed a brief and shocking vogue in the Sixties.

The girl nodded. “My older brother had me sent there. It was a Christian school; very strict. He said I needed a lesson; that I had gone wild since our parents had died; that he couldn’t cope. The sisters were demons. Nothing one did was right. I fought back, so I was targeted for extra remedial discipline.” She looked up at Amrit, black eyes glittering. “They brought in the chips program. They had been tested in the prisons and were just then being reconfigured for less violent offenders. It was a government sponsored project. My brother signed the permission papers; Sister Kamala showed them to me. Then they made us go through with the operation.”

“Oh, Gloria.” Amrit took the girl’s hand. “What was it – how did –?”

The hand beneath Amrit’s balled suddenly into a small, hard fist. “There were six of us. They gave the chip to each of us. They implanted it here,” she said, pointing with her free hand to a spot on her skull. “We were kept awake for the operation; we had to be, for the testing: everyone’s brain is different, they told us; one’s chip had to be fine-tuned, they said. They touched us here and here and here and said, ‘Can you feel this, Miss? What about this, Miss?’ And, ‘What do you see now? What do you smell now?’ for the chips, they sometimes cause hallucinations.”

“Yes,” said Amrit faintly. “Yes, I read that. Auditory and olfactory hallucinations. Visual ones as well, if the chips are not adjusted correctly.”

Gloria’s fist did not unclench. “Do not misunderstand me,” she said. “The operation did not hurt. The doctors were not unkind. We were treated with great politeness. And of course we were not the only ones.”

“I read that also,” said Amrit. “The second-generation chips were tried in over sixty reform schools throughout India. Mostly state-run schools, but some religious institutions as well. There was no official pronouncement made; rumors on the Internet, that is all. Not until the change in governments, when the scandal broke.” She kissed the girl’s fist. “Oh, Gloria. I had no idea. I am so terribly sorry.”

“But wait,” said the girl. “I have not told you the best part of the story.” She did not seem young, now. Her voice, though still pitched low, had both cooled into ice and sharpened into steel, and her gaze was so intense that it was all that Amrit could do not to look away. “At first, the first week after they implanted the chips, none of us felt much different. I felt rather good, actually: calmer, insulated, as though I were wrapped in cotton wool. The others, they felt the same. We would meet in the lavatory and talk about it. When someone, one of the unchipped girls, would make a nasty remark, instead of flying into a rage I would simply laugh and walk away. It was as though nothing could trouble me, not even Sister Kamala.”

Her lips quirked into a small smile. “That was the best part of it, actually: feeling as though nothing that demon bitch might do could reach me. It drove her and the other sisters insane. You would have thought they’d have been pleased that their little hellions had been becalmed, but it seemed to disappoint them instead. I think they thought we were play-acting. So they used extra humiliations in an attempt to make us angry, so they would have an excuse to punish us again. But it didn’t work. We simply didn’t react, beyond, ‘Yes, Sister. No, Sister. At once, Sister.’ The other girls and I, we said to one another, ‘This isn’t half bad, really.’ It was as though our chips were our friends: better than drugs, because they didn’t ruin our lungs or spoil our concentration. We could still study our lessons. In fact, our minds felt clearer than ever they had before. Relaxed, but clear, the way the yogis say meditation makes you feel if you bother to practice it long enough.

“At the end of that first week, when they herded us into the center again for our first check-up, the doctors and sisters seemed very pleased. The technician who examined me joked that if the chips made everybody feel as good as ours were making us feel, perhaps everyone could benefit from an implant.” She laughed again, a hint of bitterness in her tone. “Then it changed.”

Amrit waited for a moment, then said, “I have read – that some of the second generation chip recipients – began displaying symptoms not unlike those suffered by autistics.”

“I suppose you could put it that way.” Gloria stood up abruptly, pulling her fist free from Amrit’s hands, and crossing her arms again, uttered her next remarks with her back half-turned and her hair half-mantling her face. “By the third week two of us were dead – suicide; one of us was in hospital suffering from concussion – self-induced; and two of us had gone straight round the bend: full-fledged delusional – UFOs, past-life recall, bloody Krishna and the shepherd girls, what have you. Or was that Vishnu and the shepherdesses? I can never bloody remember.”

“That makes five,” said Amrit. “You said there were six of you implanted. Were you – ”

“Was I the concussion victim or one of the nutters? None of the above, Niece. I was the success.”

“The success?”

“That’s right. The success.” Her profile was beautiful and still, a statue’s profile. “Throughout it all – Pinnai leaping from the chapel roof, thinking she could fly; Fatima setting herself afire so she might free herself from the wheel of karma; Varali trying to pound the voices out of her skull – I felt nothing.”

She looked at Amrit then, the LEDs shifting the shadows on her brow. “Do you understand me, Amrit? I felt nothing. Nothing at all. I saw these things – I was there when Pinnai jumped – and it was as though I were watching a thriller on the telly. None of it reached me at all. I even helped Sister Kamala clean up the mess in the chapel yard. By that time, I couldn’t even hate her. And now we come to the part you mustn’t tell my husband.”

“I don’t understand,” said Amrit. “I thought – the reformatory – ”

“No. Saavit knows about that. He knows about the chip as well. I told him, the night before the wedding. I thought it was only fair, considering his kindness to me. But I was afraid to tell him everything.”

“No, Gloria, wait.” Amrit found herself upon her feet. Suddenly she felt terribly afraid. “Perhaps – perhaps it would be best not to tell. Not to tell me.”

The girl’s face was implacable. “But I must. Because if I do not, your decision concerning Meera will not be a fully informed one. And I care about Meera, in my way; she reminds me so of myself at that age. Well, of myself as I would have been had I reached that age intact.

“What I need to tell you, Amrit, so that you know precisely and without a shadow of doubt the possible repercussions of chipping your daughter, is that the detachment the chip gave me? It never went away.”

After a moment Amrit said, “I do not understand. They took the chip out, didn’t they? I mean to say that I have seen you: angry, sad, happy. I have seen you with Saavit. You seem happy with him. They did remove the chip?”

“Yes. They removed it,” said Gloria. “They removed it. And yes, I could feel things again. The entire range of human emotion was available to me once more. But I found that I no longer cared. My body cared: it experienced revulsion, and lust, and terror, and comforts. But I did not. I feel all those things – I watch my body experience all those emotions – but at the core of me, there is nothing.

“It’s all right,” she added, smiling at Amrit. “I’m used to it, now. I do care for Saavit, as much as I can care for anybody; he has been very good to me. And for Dakota, of course. And for all of you. I am very grateful to be a part of the family,” and somehow the way she said it made Amrit wish that the girl would shout, and curse, anything other than what she was doing, which was simply standing there, speaking of those closest to her as though they were very distant relatives she had read about in a history book. “And that is why I spend so much time working at the cafe, I suppose. I do it, not only because by doing so I am contributing materially to the family’s welfare, but because there I do not have to pretend to have a self I can lose myself, in the Net, in the graphics programs, whatever it may be. I become – information, if you will.” She cocked her head. “Perhaps I am not putting it very clearly.”

“Do you mean,” said Amrit desperately, “that you experience a disconnect with the feeling part of yourself? As in post-traumatic stress disorder?” Even as she said it she knew that it was not what Gloria had meant at all. Her horror mounting, she looked at her uncle’s young bride again, and it was as though she were seeing her for the first time. So that, when the girl said, “No, this is what I mean,” and picked up the pot of barely cooling tea, and lifted it over to the kitchen sink, and held out her slim-wristed hand with its long lacquered fingernails, and calmly poured the scalding tea over it with no trace of concern upon her face. Amrit watched the skin redden and the fingers twitch in agony and thought, She is not human. She is not human anymore. And nearly laughed, because was not this supernal recognition of non-existence what the Buddhists always seemed to be striving for? The enlightenment of no-self? Was not this what the Christians meant when they said, Not I, but Christ in me?