Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (7 page)

“Excuse me,” I say to the teenage boy standing near the milk, stepping around the mess I’ve made. “But is that a Pilot implant?”

He looks at me uncertainly, then nods, one hand on the refrigerator door.

“How do you have one?” And where did you get it? And when? And why? I stick to one question, but he’s still eyeing me.

“Look,” I say. “I have one too. I’m just curious where you got yours?” And how. And why. I start turning my head so he can see mine, then remember that it’s off, and finish with an awkward gesture in its general direction.

“At the Neural Implantation Center in Bethesda. BNL. I thought that was the only place in the area.”

“I’m not local—Army.”

He smiles then. “Oh, cool. My dad is Air Force.”

I smile back and echo him. “Cool. So are you part of another test group?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I got it from my parents.”

“Cool,” I say again. “What kind of disabilities do you have, if you don’t mind my asking?”

He’s put off. “Why do you think I’ve got problems? It was a Christmas present, that’s all. It lets me play video games while I listen to lessons. Lots of kids have them at my school.”

“Cool,” I say for the third time, knowing I sound stupid. I move off with what I hope is a friendly wave.

I don’t have a phone, so I have to wait until I get back to the apartment to look up what he’s talking about. Balkenhol has opened a Neural Implantation Center. Pilots for the masses, or at least the masses that can afford them. I watch a video, then search for articles. My tablet reads them to me while I make dinner, taking my anger out on the sweet potatoes, dicing them into hash.

How can they think this is a good idea? The technology isn’t fully tested yet. Or maybe it is, and I’ve just missed all the news while I was deployed. It looks like they’re becoming a fad in private schools. The price tag is steep, as much as a good used car.

A separate page, buried several clicks deep, explains that the battery lasts about five years, and the only way to replace it is to replace the whole unit, though the leads stay in place. There’s no price listed for the battery replacement procedure, but I’m guessing it’s not cheap. You’re theirs by the time you need it; you’ll pay anything. Or maybe they haven’t priced it yet since most of their commercial clients are only in their first year of implantation. I want to call Balkenhol, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself if they’re still deciding whether to turn mine back on.

I’m not sure why I’m so furious. Is it the for-profit bit? The fact that they used me as a guinea pig and now they’re satisfied enough with how it works to market it for mass consumption? That they want to leave mine off when they’re stuffing them into the heads of anybody who can pay? I see how delicately everything is balanced. If I had been five years younger, if I couldn’t have signed for myself, the Pilot wouldn’t be for me. It would be for some rich kid with the same diagnoses I had and parents who could afford to upgrade his brain. Or anybody with money, with no diagnoses at all, who wanted an edge in school or business. I was cheap labor, some poor lab rat who’d gotten lucky for a while.

I check my bank balance, which is depressingly low. The automatic withdrawals for Granddad’s nursing home eat most of my paycheck. There isn’t anything I could go without to pay for the procedure, and I don’t have anything worth selling other than the Pilot.

New dreams that night: I’m again the victim lying on the ground, again the medic. This time I have oven mitts for hands. My brain is fuzzy, sluggish. I want to do my work but I can’t. I want to live, but I know I’m dying. There are sirens, car alarms, calls to prayer. Above it all, a droning voice telling me I’m not supposed to even be here, and I should report to the lab at once. I stuff my organs back into my body and walk off a fake street and into the lab, where I’m put on a gurney and rolled into a cabinet.

What am I if I’m not a medic? The Army is the only thing I’ve known, but it was supposed to be a temporary thing in any case. I only had another year to go. The discharge paperwork still hasn’t come through, but I don’t have any duties or even ID for the base here. It’s over. I just don’t know what comes next.

The local fire companies turn me down when I try to volunteer, say maybe when I’m fully healed. I’m fit enough, soldier fit, other than my healing gut. Paranoia says I’m being sabotaged, but I know my voice is the problem. I don’t sound fast enough to keep up unless I shout. Two extremes, neither particularly good for civilian life. In high school, I had a speaking device to do the hard work for me in class, but I was never allowed to take it home, and I could never afford one now.

I try another tack, writing to local hospitals and ambulance companies, attaching my certs, offering myself as a triage expert. I warn them about my speech impediment, and I try to be as eloquent as I can on the page, so they remember that when they hear me speak.

Only one responds, and I offer to do a ridealong, a working interview. It doesn’t go well. It’s a slow shift. The EMTs exchange glances when I try to make conversation. They can’t wait to get rid of me. I don’t care what they think; all I want is a chance to show them what I can do, but nothing comes. I shouldn’t wish for emergencies. I sit in the back and dig my nails into my palms, listening to the radio and the tires and the traffic around us and the voice in my head that says there must be something I can do.

I dream I’m in a cage when the lab around me starts to burn. I try to tell people to leave, to let me out so I can help, but they all act like they can’t understand me.

I buy a phone and an app that lets me listen to the emergency radio frequencies. Maybe I can make it to some crisis first and impress the EMTs as a good Samaritan. It makes me feel like I’m doing something useful. I wander my new neighborhood picking up trash, waiting to be in the right place at the right time.

Balkenhol doesn’t call, and I’m not about to remind them I’m out here. I wish I had the contract, so I could see if they have any obligation to maintain the Pilot, but if I still have a copy, it’s in my storage unit in San Antonio. There’s only one person unaffiliated with the lab or the Army who might know.

I take a train up to Baltimore, flag a cab, direct the driver on a “this is your life” tour. He drives me to the high school. I’ve paid him enough to stick around and take me to Granddad’s nursing home next, but he takes off the second I close the door. I don’t blame him: I don’t know why I’m here either.

There are supposed to be guards at the metal detectors by the door, but the machines are off and nobody stops me. I wonder which statement they’re trying to make: that everyone is too apathetic to bother causing trouble, or that things have gotten so bad here there’s no point in pretending. The halls smell like the flu. There’s graffiti on the lockers. It’s been five years. Was it always this bad, and I was too focused on getting out to notice? Entirely possible.

I look for Pilots on the kids that I pass, but I don’t see the telltale lights. Nobody here can afford them, I’m guessing.

The receptionist ushers me into Principal Ramos’s office. I’d only ever been in there once before, the day she introduced me to the doctors. Her office is still slightly nicer than everything else around it, though shabbier than I remember. Solid furniture, a bit dinged up. An ancient Turkish rug, worn in front of all the chairs. These are things I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid. A persistent fly throws itself against the top pane of the window behind her.

“Acacia, lovely to see you.” Her voice is warm, though she doesn’t get up from her desk. She directs me to the same worn armchair I had sat in my last time here. “Are you still in the Army?”

She isn’t anyone to me. We only met the once. The vice principals were the ones who brought me in every year to tell me which classes I had failed, how long I had left before they’d be able to stop bothering with me. The only reason Ramos still recognizes me is because she sold me as a lab rat.

“Why did you do it?” I ask, slow and steady.

She tenses, but doesn’t betray herself. I imagine a lot of students must have confronted her over the years. “Why did I do what?”

“Why did you pick me?”

“Acacia, I can honestly say nobody ever tried harder to graduate than you did. I thought with a little more help than we could afford to give you, you could succeed. And you were going to go into the medical field, to help people. Have you done what you wanted to do?”

I nod. “Did they pay you?”

“Yes. They paid for a whole new chem lab.”

That isn’t what I expected. I had pictured her in a Lexus or a new apartment. “It feels like they tested on poor kids and now they’re going to sell it to rich kids and nobody like me will get a chance again.”

She meets my gaze. “That’s probably true.”

“So was it worth it?”

“I’ll admit I had hoped they might offer more help for students like you. But we needed those supplies. And it helped you, right?”

There are more things I could probably say, but I’m losing steam. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. One last thing. Do you remember the terms of the agreement?”

She frowns. I follow her out of her office, across the reception area and into a file room. My file is thick. All those extra years, extra services, successes and failures. She leafs through it, then pulls out a thin folder and waves it in the air. Runs it through an ancient copier that sounds like an airplane taking off, hands it to me. The copy has thick lines running lengthwise down the page, but it’s readable. I see what I’m looking for: they have no obligation to maintain it once they’re done observing me. I’m on my own. I used to know that, but I must have forgotten.

Principal Ramos is watching me, waiting to see my reaction.

“Thanks,” I say. “And, um, if you ever need a new nurse…”

She smiles. “We haven’t got the budget for a nurse anymore, but I have an opening for a guard at the front door. I could put in a good word for you.”

“I’d appreciate that.” It’s something.

Without the cab, I’m stuck walking to the nursing home, just like in high school. The neighborhood is as bad as it ever was: no better, no worse. I put in one of my earbuds, leaving the other ear to pay attention to my surroundings. The reassuring static of the emergency channel fills my head. My boot heels grind broken glass into even smaller pieces. Kids bike lazy circles on the corners, waiting for word from the dealers who employ them. As it ever was.

What will it be like being back in my old neighborhood? Is it a defeat? I don’t think so. I can be a good door guard, for now. A job is a job. I can save up for the Pilot battery, and go back to school on the GI bill once my paperwork comes in. Wasn’t that what I wanted in the first place, back before I’d ever heard of the Pilot? To be able to take care of people like my grandfather? If I thought I could make it through school then, pre-Pilot, surely I could do it now with the discipline I’ve learned. If discipline is enough.

When the sirens start, I close my eyes to catch their direction, then pick up my pace. The dispatch comes through my phone. It’s for a collapsing building; I actually hear it fall when I’m a block off, a muffled whump. I remind myself where I am, that I don’t need to scan for snipers.

The building is an old rowhouse repurposed as apartments. The whole front has caved in. At least two people out front in the rubble, probably more inside. Assess the situation, the first rule. We can’t go inside while it’s unstable, but maybe we can help the people out front.

I can tell the EMTs are thinking the same thing. They’re talking it out as they swing from the ambulances, attention focused on the victims. Which means I’m the only one who notices when the adjacent building shimmies.

“Don’t move!” I shout, my voice ringing clear at that volume, Army-weight behind it. They stop. We’re out of the way when the wall buckles, and then that building gapes open too. My ears are ringing, and dust billows and obscures everything, but the EMTs aren’t under it, and now they look at me for the okay and I nod, my attention split between where I want to be and the potential threats posed by the other rowhouses, almost as if my Pilot were still working. I realize: the Pilot helps me, and I want it back, but it’s not all of me.

In the distance, more sirens. For the first time since getting back, everything feels like it’s settling into place. Chaos is my milieu, noisy and messy and home.

I bend over the first victim I reach. “Lie still.”

I am awake for the first time.

Invisible People

Margaret Killjoy

The last light of the sun came down through the broken windows, all pretty and shit, catching on that big jagged shard of glass and then pouring out into the room over my bed. Over Marcellus. He snored in that way he always did, endearing and soft.

I hurried to dress in the last of the daylight, but once I was done, I lingered. I paced, I ran my fingers through my beard, I watched the twilit horizon and counted the silhouette bones of the buildings Portland calls its skyline.

Anything but go to work.

It had been a lot easier, stealing from rich people, back before the anxiety had hit. I miss those days, when my biggest problems were external. It’s easier to steer clear of cops than it is to get away from whole chunks of my brain.

I can’t get on the net, either. I mean, I can still get in… the people in the office next door haven’t updated their wifi encryption since 2019. I just can’t bring myself to sign on. Not even the Darknet. It may not be corporate, but it’s still the net. There’s just too much data in the feed. Too much shit to worry about. Every day, someone’s sick. Some friend of a friend’s got cancer or your ex-boyfriend—the one you haven’t seen since high school—is in for surgery. Someone you met at a party six months ago got caught doing something and needs bail. The awful shit tragedies of two thousand “friends” pile up worse than the latest mass shooting or another pandemic scare. And those are bad enough. I can’t get on the net. I won’t.

But I’ve got to eat.

The room went dark and I stumbled my way through the warehouse. Five paces out of the room, I turned the corner. A window let in enough street light and, there, past the accumulated junk of fifteen squatters, I could see the door at the bottom of the stairs. I pressed my body into the bar and I was outside. The squat’s chemical smell was gone, leaving only that sickly shit stink that comes in off the Willamette, dampened a bit by the endless winter rain.