The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (63 page)

“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?

Then she had grasped the girl’s wrist, and had knocked the teapot from her grasp; and, as quickly as she could, was turning on the cold-water-faucet and holding the girl’s hand beneath the resultant flow. Gloria made no attempt to resist. She simply observed the process, as though it were not her hand at all, but someone else’s, despite the fact that the pain must certainly have been very great indeed.

“What has happened? We heard a crash!” Mrs Chaudhury appeared at the door, Uncle Saavit close behind her. At a glance she noted the teapot, which had shattered upon the floor in its fall; the spreading pool of hot tea; the sodden detritus of steeped leaves; Gloria’s reddened wrist. “My God! Are you all right? Here, girl, let me. Saavit, get the mop!” She interposed herself between Amrit and Gloria and took the girl’s hand into her own. “Amrit, the aloe.” Dumbly Amrit turned and left the kitchen, pushing past Saavit’s concerned bluster. In the windowbox on the fire escape, aloe plants were growing; Amrit snapped off three large leaves and hurried back with them.

Meera had come out of her room and was standing in the middle of the parlor. She looked pale, but red around the eyes, as though she had been crying. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Nothing, Meera,” Amrit said over her shoulder. “There’s been a little accident, that is all. Return to your room; I shall be with you momentarily. I wish to speak with you.” She went back into the kitchen. Saavit was busily mopping up the spilled tea and rounding up pieces of broken pot, but otherwise the tableau was the same as when she had left it: her mother-in-law bent over Gloria’s raw wrist, laving it, while Gloria looked on, placidly unconcerned. “The aloe,” Amrit said.

Mrs Chaudhury did not look up. “Thank you, Daughter. If you would be so kind as to split the leaves and scrape the gel into a bowl.”

“Yes,” Amrit said, “Mother.” She took a knife from the drawer, sat down at the kitchen table, and carefully halved the aloe leaves, revealing their glistening interiors. Scoring the gel with the knife, she took the spoon from her saucer and used it to scrape the innards of the leaves into her teacup. Then she conveyed the cup to her mother-in-law, who took it from her without comment. Amrit stood there for a moment, uncertain what to do next; then she turned and left the kitchen.

Meera had left the sitting room. In the hallway outside of Meera’s closet, Amrit hesitated, then knocked. “Meera?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

She sounds so tired, thought Amrit. She pulled the door ajar. Meera was sitting crosslegged on her carpet. A schoolbook lay opened upon her lap. She looked up, saw her mother standing there, and burst into tears. Amrit went over to her and sat down on the carpet beside her. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Meera said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t let them chip me. Please, Mama, don’t let them, please don’t let them, I’ll be good, I’ll do anything, only don’t let them chip me, please please.”

“Hush now, hush.” Amrit took her daughter into her arms and pressed her head against her chest. “Hush, now. Nobody’s going to let anybody chip anybody.”

“But Assistant Vice-Principal said—”

“The Assistant Vice-Principal can go suck a mango,” said Amrit, “and for that matter, so can Vice-Principal Mehta. No one is going to nannychip my daughter, and that is the end of it.”

“But he said – they will expel me – and you work so hard—”

“Yes, yes, your mama works so very hard in her foolish pride to give her daughter the opportunities she was too timid to seek for herself. There are other schools, perhaps not as famous nor as fine. What of it?”

“But, Mama—”

“That is the end of it, Meera. There will be no nannychipping and that is that.” She kissed her daughter upon the top of her sweet head. Then she placed her lips close to Meera’s beautiful ear. “Do not stop feeling, Meera,” she whispered fiercely. “It is good to feel, however inconvenient those feelings may happen to be. For if you cease to feel, you are as good as dead, bugger the bloody Buddha. Do not forget, Meera. Promise me.”