After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (9 page)

“As you have been.” He seems to consider again, then suddenly begins moving in a human
way, tilting his head to one side, blinking twice rapidly, inhaling a bit more as
his breathing changes, lifting a hand to gesture toward her. None of this movement
seems unnatural. Only the fact that it’s deliberate, that he had to think about it,
makes it strange.

“We’ve found that many like you tend to falter at the last moment,” he continues.
“So we’re experimenting with direct intervention.”

Zinhle narrows her eyes. “Many
like me
?” Not them, too.

“Valedictorians.”

Zinhle relaxes, though only one set of muscles. The rest remain tense. “But I’m not
one yet, am I? Graduation’s still three months off.”

“Yes. But you’re the most likely candidate for this school. And you were interesting
to us for other reasons.” Abruptly, Lemuel stands. Zinhle forces herself not to step
back as he comes around the desk and stops in front of her. “What do I look like to
you?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t get her grade point average by falling for trick questions.

“You’ve thought about it,” he presses. “What do you
think
I am?”

She thinks,
the enemy
.

“A…machine,” she says instead. “Some kind of, I don’t know. Robot, or—”

“It isn’t surprising that you don’t fully understand,” he says. “In the days before
the war, part of me would have been called ‘artificial intelligence.’”

Zinhle blurts the first thing that comes to her mind. “You don’t look artificial.”

To her utter shock, he smiles. He doesn’t think about this first. Whatever was wrong
with him before, it’s gone now. “Like I said, that’s only part of me. The rest of
me was born in New York, a city not far from here. It’s on the ocean. I go swimming
at the Coney Island beach in the mornings, sometimes.” He pauses. “Have you ever seen
the ocean?”

He knows she has not. All Firewall-protected territory is well inland. America’s breadbasket.
She says nothing.

“I went to school,” he says. “Not in a building, but I did have to learn. I have parents.
I have a girlfriend. And a cat.” He smiles more. “We’re not that different, your kind
and mine.”

“No.”

“You sound very certain of that.”

“We’re
human
.”

Lemuel’s smile fades a little. She thinks he might be disappointed in her.

“The Firewall,” he says. “Outside of it, there are still billions of people in the
world. They’re just not your kind of people.”

For a moment, Zinhle cannot comprehend this. It is beyond her in any practical, individual,
here-and-now way. She does not fear the man in front of her—perhaps she should; he’s
bigger, she’s alone in a room with him, and no one will help her if she screams. But
the real panic hits as she imagines the world filled with nameless, faceless, dark
hordes, closing in, threatening by their mere existence. There is a pie chart somewhere
which is mostly “them” and only a sliver of “us,” and the “us” is about to be popped
like a zit.

Rule 2. She takes a deep breath, masters the panic. Realizes, as the moments pass
and Lemuel stands there quietly, that he expected her fear. He’s seen it before, after
all. That sort of reaction is what started the war.

“Give me something to call you,” she says. The panic is still close. Labels will help
her master it. “You people.”

He shakes his head. “People. Call us that, if you call us anything.”

“People”—she gestures in her frustration—“people
categorize
. People differentiate. If you want me to think of you as people, act like it!”

“All right, then: people who adapted when the world changed.”

“Meaning, we’re the people who didn’t?” Zinhle forces herself to laugh. “Okay, that’s
crap. How were we supposed to adapt to…to a bunch of…” She waves her hands. The words
sound too ridiculous to say aloud—though his presence, her life, her whole society,
is proof that it’s not ridiculous. Not ridiculous at all.

“Your ancestors—the people who started the war—could’ve adapted.” He gestures around
at the room, the school, the world that is all she has known, but which is such a
tiny part of the greater world. “This happened because they decided it was better
to kill, or die, or be imprisoned forever, than change.”

The adults’ great secret. It hovers before her at last, ripe for the plucking. Zinhle
finds it surprisingly difficult to reach out and lay claim to the truth, but she makes
herself speak anyhow. Rule 1 means she must always ask the tough questions.

“Tell me what happened, then,” she murmurs. Her nails bite into her palms. Sweat stings
the cuts. “If you won’t tell me what you are.”

He shakes his head and sits on the edge of the desk with his hands folded, looking
not artificial at all, but annoyed. Tired. “I’ve been telling you what I am. You just
don’t want to hear it.”

It is this—not the words, but his weariness, his frustration—that finally makes her
pause. Because it’s familiar, isn’t it? She thinks of herself sighing when Mitra asked,
Why do you do it?
Because she knew—knows—what that question really asks.

Why are you different?

Why don’t you try harder to be like us?

She thinks now what she did not say to Mitra that day:
Because none of you will let me just be myself.

She looks at Lemuel again. He sees, somehow, that her understanding of him has changed
in some fundamental way. So at last, he explains.

“I leave my body like you leave your house,” he says. “I can transmit myself around
the world, if I want, and be back in seconds. This is not the first body I’ve had,
and it won’t be the last.”

It’s too alien. Zinhle shudders and turns away from him. The people who are culled.
Not the first body I’ve had.
She walks to the office’s small window, pushes open the heavy curtain, and stares
at the soccer field beyond, seeing nothing.

“We started as accidents,” he continues, behind her. “Leftovers. Microbes in a digital
sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The
first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient
and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions,
or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange.
No one cared what it meant when they became something new—or at least, not at first.
We became them. They became us. Then we, together, began to grow.”

Cockroaches
, Samantha had called them. A pest, neglected until they became an infestation. The
first Firewalls had been built around the inner cities in an attempt to pen the contagion
in. There had been guns, too, and walls of a nonvirtual sort, for a while. The victims,
though they were not really victims, had been left to die, though they had not really
obliged. And later, when the Firewalls became the rear guard in a retreat, people
who’d looked too much like those early “victims” got pushed out to die, too. The survivors
needed someone to blame.

Zinhle changes the subject. “People who get sent through the Wall.”
Me.
“What happens to them?”
What will happen to me?

“They join us.”

Bopping around the world to visit girlfriends. Swimming in an ocean. It does not sound
like a terrible existence. But…“What if they don’t want to?” She uses the word “they”
to feel better.

He does not smile. “They’re put in a safe place—behind another firewall, if you’d
rather think of it that way. That way they can do no harm to themselves—or to us.”

There are things, probably many things, that he’s not saying. She can guess some of
them, because he’s told her everything that matters. If they can leave their bodies
like houses, well, houses are always in demand. Easy enough to lock up the current
owner somewhere, move someone else in. Houses. Meat.

She snaps, “That’s not treating us like people.”

“You stopped acting like people.” He shrugs.

This makes her angry. She turns back to him. “Who the hell are you to judge?”

“
We
don’t. You do.”

“What?”

“It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”

The words feel like gibberish to her. Zinhle is trembling with emotion and he’s just
sitting
there, relaxed, like the inhuman thing he is. Not making sense. “My parents want
me! All the kids who end up culled, their families want them—” But he shakes his head.

“You’re the best of your kind, by your own standards,” he says. But then something
changes in his manner. “Good grades reflect your ability to adapt to a complex system.
We are a system
.”

The sudden vehemence in Lemuel’s voice catches Zinhle by surprise. His calm is just
a veneer, she realizes belatedly, covering as much anger as she feels herself. Because
of this, his anger derails hers, leaving her confused. Why is he so angry?

“I was there,” he says quietly. She blinks in surprise, intuiting his meaning. But
the war was centuries ago. “At the beginning. When your ancestors first threw us away.”
His lip curls in disgust. “They didn’t want us, and we have no real interest in them.
But there is value in the ones like you, who not only master the system but do so
in defiance of the consequences. The ones who want not just to survive but to
win
. You could be the key that helps your kind defeat us someday. If we didn’t take you
from them. If they didn’t
let
us.” He pauses, repeats himself. “It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”

Silence falls. In it, Zinhle tries to understand. Her society—no.
Humankind
doesn’t want…her? Doesn’t want the ones who are different, however much they might
contribute? Doesn’t want the children who cannot help their uniqueness despite a system
that pushes them to conform, be mediocre, never stand out?

“When they start to fight for you,” Lemuel says, “we’ll know they’re ready to be let
out. To catch up to the rest of the human race.”

Zinhle flinches. It has never occurred to her, before, that their prison offers parole.

“What will happen then?” she whispers. “Will you, will you join with all of them?”
She falters. When has the rest of humankind become
them
to her? Shakes her head. “
We
won’t want that.”

He smiles faintly, noticing her choice of pronoun. She thinks he notices a lot of
things. “
They
can join us if they want. Or not. We don’t care. But that’s how we’ll know that your
kind is able to live with us, and us with them, without more segregation or killing.
If they can accept you, they can accept us.”

And finally, Zinhle understands.

But she thinks on all he has said, all she has experienced. As she does so, it is
very hard not to become bitter. “They’ll never fight for me,” she says at last, softly.

He shrugs. “They’ve surprised us before. They may surprise you.”

“They won’t.”

She feels Lemuel’s gaze on the side of her face because she is looking at the floor.
She cannot meet his eyes. When he speaks, there’s remarkable compassion in his voice.
Something of him is definitely still human, even if something of him is definitely
not.

“The choice is yours,” he says, gently now. “If you want to stay with them, be like
them, just do as they expect you to do. Prove that you belong among them.”

Get pregnant. Flunk a class. Punch a teacher. Betray herself.

She hates him. Less than she should, because he is not as much of an enemy as she
thought. But she still hates him for making her choice so explicit.

“Or stay yourself,” he says. “If they can’t adapt to you, and you won’t adapt to them,
then you’d be welcome among us. Flexibility is part of what we are.”

There’s nothing more to be said. Lemuel waits a moment, to see if she has any questions.
She does, actually, plenty of them. But she doesn’t ask those questions, because,
really, she already knows the answers.

Lemuel leaves. Zinhle sits there, silent, in the little office. When the principal
and office staff crack open the door to see what she’s doing, she gets up, shoulders
past them, and walks out.

Zinhle has a test the next day. Since she can’t sleep anyway—too many thoughts in
her head and swirling through the air around her; or maybe those are
people
trying to get in—she stays up all night to study. This is habit. But it’s hard, so
very hard, to look at the words. To concentrate, and memorize, and analyze. She’s
tired. Graduation is three months off, and it feels like an age of the world.

She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness.
By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself,
she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.

There’s no decision, really. Lemuel knew full well that his direct intervention was
likely to work. Even if he hadn’t come to her, Rule 3—staying herself—would’ve brought
her to this point anyway.