Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (26 page)

Lyric

A.F. Sanchez

“I found seven thousand one hundred and seven images that resemble the hologram,” Lyric says.

“Fields?”

“Mythology, popular culture.”

“Okay, Lyric. Stand by.”

You stare at Lyric’s top search results, fascinated by the variety of the Animal’s incarnations, but the resemblances don’t matter as much as the Animal itself. The design is not original, crafted instead to resonate with collective fantasies of a hybrid creature: a reptile’s slitted eyes and forked tongue, a wildcat’s dripping fangs, wide leather wings that unfurl in the black night, scales that glisten down its spine all the way to the tip of a prehensile tail. Its legs are goat-like, but too long and too thin, tapering down into hooves that might clip-clop on stone.

If you happen to meet this creature after sunset, on one of the poorly lit streets that infest your hometown, it is not the strangeness of its visage that will terrify you. You will not even see it coming. Instead, you will hear it approach, in the thickness of silence: the beating of wings which you will mistake for a blistering wind, and right behind you, so soft that you can pretend not to hear it, the ring of hooves on the pavement. You won’t even notice the odor of blood and rotting meat, not until you turn around and face the terrible gaping mouth.

But you do not encounter it outside. You come face to face with it in the airconditioned safety of your work cubicle where you have accessed the company catalog. You maneuver the hologram every which way to examine the Animal’s details. Fully grown! The typical Cosmetic Companion™ is bioengineered to only the size of a human child, programmed for elite lifestyles of sunshine and softness. Yet this item’s wingspan and too-thin goat legs only prove that whoever commissioned it had intended to push the limits of the experimental series. Is its lifespan longer or shorter than the regular series? Does it have more awareness of what it is than the others?

“Lyric, keywords.”

The app searches the catalog and selects what it deems the most syntactically important phrases from the product description. “Currently available, heavily damaged, discount,” Lyric announces, simultaneously flashing the phrases on your gadget screen. A discount due to damage—add to that your employee discount and you’re good to go.

Your supervisor Rae is conveniently out of town for a seminar. You send her the link to the image anyway, hoping that she is too busy right now to video-yell at you.

Your father, once:

“A woman in my old support group, she had an older brother who was pretty severe. Nonverbal, delayed, wore diapers well into adulthood. Bit her a couple of times, once on the arm, the second on the shoulder hard enough to need stitches. He had to be restrained on more than one occasion because of violent moods—one time, he took a knife from the kitchen and woke up their mother with it. When I heard the story, I kept thinking, he must have been in some kind of pain, his brain must have overloaded with who knows what stimuli. The woman telling the story, she was just so angry and sad. I mean, when they were kids, the other children simply called her older brother crazy, and they both had to live with that.

“But I wondered what her older brother felt, and I started wondering what feelings my own child had, and was I being selfish for prioritizing my own emotions and opinions about the matter, and in the end I thought what the hell, be angry with me for my selfishness or don’t, as long as the day comes that my kid begins to understand what I’m saying, and begins to say things back.”

The first time you saw Rae—young, slender, fair and foreign—you thought of hummingbirds from your old picture books: delicate, frenetic apparitions among flowers. Not that there was anything remotely flowery about your first meeting. It was at your hometown’s municipal hall, made unbearable that day by a rare international job fair that filled the lobby with tech booths, crowds, and the smells of sweat and desperation. At the entrance, private security turned away applicants who couldn’t comply with the dress code, like three of your neighbors, including a young woman who excelled at programming but couldn’t tolerate footwear other than rubber slippers.

Rae already worked in the marketing department of the local office of Cosmetic Animals International, but on that day she was volunteering at the consultants’ booth. You waited in line with your mother and the families of two of her friends. When it was your turn at the booth, you focused on Rae’s friendly smile. The results of the exam saddened you but didn’t surprise: you had above average scores for memory retention and spatial relations, but failed the other sections because you didn’t follow instructions.

“Your language impairment really gets in the way,” Rae remarked.

You glanced at your mother who looked like she was about to cry, and one of the phrases that you have learned to use easily throughout the years falls from your mouth: “It’s okay.”

Rae nodded her head quickly. “My niece is the same. I had to bring her with me when the company branched out here, and I’ve seen firsthand the challenges in a culture where only English is used in school and local languages are used everywhere else. Lyric can help, you know?”

At the time Lyric was a relatively new language app that targeted non-English-speaking clients, but your mother had heard good things about Lyric from one or two other members of her support group—it’s just that no one in your circle of non-virtual acquaintances had the means to purchase it. Lyric required a specific brand of handheld device and monthly fees that your household budgets couldn’t accommodate.

Rae listened to your mother explain the general situation in the country, which is that the national government didn’t seem like it had ever heard of disability benefits, and the particular situation in your finances, which is that massive debts have resulted from years of various therapies and private special schools . “That sucks,” Rae says. “Maybe we can do something about this. I’ll make a few calls to our hiring department, all right?” Then she placed her hands on yours, and only then did you realize that you had been flapping them again.

For several months after you joined Rae’s department as an assistant layout artist—a position she created specifically for you—you wondered if she had hired and trained you simply out of charity. That suspicion faded into irrelevance when your mother died, and suddenly Rae was all you had.

Up close, or as close as the company regulations allow, the Animal looks even more impossible, but your disbelief is subdued by the nature of the damage that necessitated the multiple discounts. Between it and you is a fiberglass wall and the iron bars of a cage. Through the bars you glimpse one hoof—the other is nowhere to be found, the spindly goat leg ending instead in filthy bandages at the ankle. You don’t see its wings, either. You can’t even see if it’s still alive, not until it shifts its weight, moving a little in the light to reveal its silhouette.

What you do see in the shadows of the cage for which the Animal is too small are the lines of a human form. The torso is thin but with graceful slope, the arms limp but wiry, the neck, chin, mouth, nose all grotesquely human.

The eyes are not. They terrify you so much that your hands flap upward to block the view—an old habit you revert to in the presence of something that overwhelms.

But really, it’s impossible to look away.

The releasing officer is so bored that he does not care about your choice. He reveals that the Animal is set to be euthanized anyway, thanks to the wealthy collectors that commissioned it and then backed out despite having paid fully for the experiment. He is nonetheless obligated to suggest the smaller yet more expensive bestsellers, like the baby-faced Winged Song-Monkey Wanda or the miniature Deer-Centaur Darius or Palpatine the Platypus, all guaranteed Cosmetic Companions™, experts at greetings, small talk, moral support, even therapeutic functions. He informs you that the Animal you’re choosing doesn’t even have a brand name. “It doesn’t even speak,” he says.

You didn’t catch that detail in the catalog. Rae really won’t like this.

You sneak another glance at the caged monster. It has turned its attention down to its injured leg, licking the fur slowly above the amputated foot. You want to ask the officer if he knows how the scientists made the monster adult-sized, how difficult it probably was to grow it, what made it a failure, how it lost its left foot, why it was going to be euthanized. You start inputting keywords in your device so that Lyric can help you form the questions, but when the officer starts asking who your supervisor is, you reach out for the employee-purchase forms, the delivery forms and the disclaimer forms, signing your name everywhere the sleepy officer tells you to.

Your mother, once:

“You might remember the eyes of a snake, like the enormous python that you saw at that zoo we went to when you were a child, the thick one that the wranglers draped across our laps so that the three of us could take a souvenir photo. You were so terrified of the python’s head that you covered your eyes and howled nonstop from a dozen yards away until the photo was taken without you.

“Or you might remember the eyes of the cat your father adopted for you, because your doctor had suggested that having a pet might help you adjust better to new sensory experiences. A dog was out of the question, since barking of any sort hit your ears like a boxer’s gloves. The cat was an almost fully grown tabby, and I held her in my arms almost as often as I held you. It was soft and warm and furry, and you fed it and even tried conversing with it—it meowed at you and you babbled phrases back—but once, it sat on your lap and gazed at your face for a long time, and it unnerved you so much that you never let it sit on your lap again.”

The online community you belong to have a name for people like that releasing officer, and even for your late parents, Rae, and most of your co-workers. NT, they’re called. You’re not sure exactly what makes someone NT—people who don’t quite get you, maybe? Who either don’t have much patience for you, or worry too much about you? A lot of your virtual acquaintances post lengthy essays that not even Lyric can help you understand, but there’s also a good number of image-based posts, and in these threads you participate regularly, linking photos and videos you enjoy, and even the occasional painting you manage to finish.

Riding home on the company’s service transport, you have just latched onto the transport’s network to surf image threads when Rae attempts to video-call again. Travel time these days takes a couple of hours because of the heavy traffic further worsened by the recent accidental derailing of one of the metro trains. Lyric highlights keywords in the news sites so that you can understand the gist: “Poor maintenance, diverted funds,” says Lyric. The transport crawls onto the expressway as you finally decide to accept the call.

“Hi, Rae.”

Rae’s lovely face is red with emotion. “Why haven’t you been answering my calls?”

Why-questions are the hardest to answer any given day, but not as hard as it is this moment. On the one hand you have missed your morning sessions with her, missed how patiently she waited for your sentences to unfold, how skillfully she feigned interest in the random videos of your favorite animals or favorite singers or favorite cooking shows just so you can get it all out of your system and focus on the day’s work. On the other hand…

Finally you say, “Afraid.”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“Rae.”

She catches her breath at this, and then calms down. “Fine. I won’t be angry. I just wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t get that item. It’s a waste of your money. Do not buy it, understand?”

“Why?” you ask. Lyric corrects you: “Why not?”

“It’s marked as damaged! That means it’s a failure, that it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. And it’s almost as big as an adult human—how would you be able to control it?”

Lyric identifies the keywords you have been looking for, and you ask Rae, “What was it supposed to be?”

“A menagerie resident, according to the details you sent me. But if it’s damaged and now for sale at a discount, that means the original clients didn’t want them anymore, and how badly must it have turned out to be discarded? These Animals are so expensive to make, especially the experimental ones.” She widens her eyes at you—her virtual way of holding your hands. “Look, the point is, it wasn’t designed to speak or interact like the other items were, so what good is it to you? You need something else. Something like my niece’s parrot. Or the cat types—but not the dogs because they still bark and I know you hate the sound. But something you can hug and talk to and bring to family reunions. You understand? Or better yet, wait for me, I’ll be back in a few days.”

With effort you avert your eyes. “Sorry. Didn’t wait.” When she doesn’t reply, you repeat, still without looking at the screen, “Sorry, Rae.”

You raise your head to meet her gaze, and it is a stony one, the kind that tells you she is trying very hard not to explode. She says, “You are already so bad with money and then you do this.”

When your mother died, the only person you could bother about it was Rae. You knocked on the door of her office and showed her the papers your mother had left behind: a life insurance policy, pre-paid funeral arrangements, the deed to the tiny rowhouse that was all she could afford for you and her to live in after having paid off your deceased father’s hospital bills. Rae stared at you with those big bright eyes of hers and then wrapped her arms around you tightly. Because you could not explain the immensity of your grief, you spent the next twenty minutes quietly breathing in her perfume as you wept.

You want to remember it now, that scent. “Sorry, Rae.”

“You know you got a bad deal, right?” She sighs. “Fine. I’m not mad. I’ll see you once I get back.”

For the rest of the ride you gaze out the transport. Traffic becomes slightly lighter as you go past one of the most exclusive villages in the metro. Among several ads being projected near the entrance is one for Cosmetic Companions™ featuring the most expensive item in the regular series:
Dragon Dagger
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A Cosmetic Companion™ by Cosmetic Animals International. We engineer the perfect pet for your perfect lifestyle
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