Expiration Day (2 page)

And then you see every kind of silliness that grown-ups can do. Blaming each other, fights—that's just the start. Divorce, suicide, even murder—though that last was in St. Mark's parish.

Just because nobody can have kids. Well, almost nobody. And nobody knows why. It's just something that's happened. Some said that it was all the radio waves and microwaves messing up our DNA. Others said it was the gigahertz radiation from all the computers doing it. Global warming and pollution got blamed, of course. And there were some really weird theories, too. There was one scientist who claimed that every generation lost a certain amount of information from the gene pool, so we'd just reached the point where we no longer had enough information left in our genes to build a fully working human.

Wow! So I'm a real rarity. An eleven-year-old girl. Just so you know, Mister Zog. If you have a waist, you really ought to bow. Otherwise you could wave your tentacles reverently.

So there's me (and a few like me). All the other kids in the world are just robots. Realistic robots—not clunkers like Soames—but like Julia Ellis, a near-perfect copy of a human child. Good enough to fool the maternal instinct. Good enough to stop the riots.

Even good enough to play with sometimes.

Sunday, July 25, 2049

Sunday. Family service, and Julia's Memorial Service. Pretty much as I expected. Photographs of her growing up projected in 3-D. A baby, sleeping peacefully.
Flick.
A chocolate-mouthed toddler, running in the garden.
Flick.
First day at school, angelic in her school uniform.
Flick.
Prize day—Julia collecting third prize for spelling.
Flick. Flick. Flick.

Dad stands at the front, delivering the eulogy. A beautiful little girl, with a marvelous future. A life cut short, tragically short, by an unspecified illness. God has called Julia home. May He bring comfort to the parents.

Ted's yawning. He's heard it all before. The young mums and dads, with their own kids, look smug or terrified.

There's no body and no coffin, of course. That would be silly. Oxted has already collected Julia and taken her back to Banbury.

 

 

Dad was late back after the memorial, and he was in a foul mood because of it. He hates memorials; he knows they're necessary, but he hates the lies. “It's not why I became a minister,” he says, every time.

Dad believes in God. But the Bible doesn't say anything about robots, and I guess that's confusing for a minister.

And when he's said that, he sighs and adds, “I wonder how they'll cope.”

As far as I can tell, they never do. I said robots were “good enough to stop the riots.” Well they were and they weren't. We still have our riots, though robots have taken them off the streets. Dad says it's just that now we have them one couple at a time, in the privacy of our own homes.

Saturday, August 21, 2049

We're on our holidays.

We're going to a theme park, of course, because that's what everybody does. It's escapism, and the parks make no bones about it. “Let us take you back,” they say, and they give you a week living in the past. Pick your era, there's a park to match. Any time—except the last thirty years, because that's a little too painful for most people. So, where do you think we're going, Mister Zog? With the whole of human history to choose from, we could go back to, oh, the time of the British Empire, or the Roman Empire. Oh, yes, there are such parks. Unfortunately we can't afford them, not on a vicar's salary. So we're going back to … the 1970s!

It's so embarrassing.

 

 

I have to admit I was curious about the 1970s. When Dad said that was where we were going, I nearly threw a wobbly myself. Oh, Mister Zog, where do I start about the 1970s? I knew a bit from history—the Energy Crisis, the Winter of Discontent, the IRA, the birth of Thatcherism. And Mum's got some redigitized old photos—really faded because back then they couldn't make color dyes to last—which she says are of her granny and granddad at Blackbushe in '78 for a Dylan gig. She sounds so awed whenever she says the word “Dylan,” like he was some amazing being from another planet, come to visit us. We've been listening to some of his music in the car to get us into the feel of the decade. It's all right, I guess, but I hope we don't have to suffer a Dylan tribute band. It's not the music, you understand, Mister Zog. I just think Mum and Dad will be too embarrassing.

But as for Great-Gran and Great-Grampy, I don't honestly know which is which. The hairstyles and clothing in the photo give nothing away—all perms and frilly shirts, and shades that make them look like weird half insects. Am I going to have to dress like that? It
might
be fun, but I think it's going to be just creepy.

We're in our hotel room now, and we've come in through the modern entrance. Once we've changed, we have to put our modern clothes into sealed storage, and stay in theme for the rest of the week. There's no vid (
again
. Why do we always go on holiday where there's no vid?) and no TeraNet access. They had computers in the 1970s, but they were huge things, with whirring tapes (yes, really) and disk drives the size of a car wheel. You could afford a computer if you were a big university or a hospital—they were called mainframes—and there were minicomputers and …

Sorry, Mister Zog. Too much detail.

Anyway. My point is that once again we're stuck in a techno-desert, and my folks have
chosen
to come here. When I finish writing this, I'm going to have to put my AllInFone into storage with the clothes and any other contemporary gadgets, and go down to the
other
lobby in the hotel—the 1970s lobby. I'm going to try and keep notes, but the rules say only pen and paper.

 

 

They caught Dad trying to sneak his AllInFone out of the room. There's a detector at the other door, which picks up the keepalives that all AllInFones have to transmit by law, and a very polite porter informed him, “You can't take that with you, sir.”

“Oh, I didn't realize…”

Which was a complete lie. Daddy, you'll have to confess that to the bishop—I was watching in the mirror, and I saw you look round most furtively as you sneaked it into your pocket.

We went down to the lobby.

It was fascinating. I've done a project on the '60s and '70s, with all the fast-changing styles, and this place captured them all. Everyone was glammed up for the disco, our opening event. Everyone was covered in glitter and makeup—Dad had done a mini-strop in the room, when he realized that everyone meant
everyone
—and the clothing was equally over the top.

Platform shoes.

Huge shades.

Flares.

Hot pants.

Yep. I was wearing hot pants. Lilac hot pants. They're like shorts, but mine had a bib front and it went over a plain white blouse that was all frills and cuffs. Short little white gym socks—cute (
not
)—and the unevolved distant ancestors of a pair of trainers. I'd nearly had my own strop, but Dad beat me to it, and you don't show up your dad by out-stropping him.…

It was truly awful. Not least, because I still have preteen legs—like sticks, they are. There's a word for legs like mine. Gangly. I count my knees, sometimes, and I know I have just two, one on each leg. But dressed like that, I felt like it was more—a lot more, with different numbers on each leg. And hot pants are designed to go over a proper bottom and hips, and I don't have either yet.

Mum and Dad, of course, were now throwing themselves into character; they were loving it. Dad was wearing near-luminous green flares and a sleeveless knitted jumper over a magenta shirt with a huge collar. I love my dad to bits, of course, but nothing could have been better designed to show off his pot belly. Mum … well, Mum had ended up in a pale lime party frock with orange polka dots. And she'd chosen to wear platform shoes, so she was … wobbling. Now Mum has a nice trim figure—she exercises regularly, plays squash and tennis with some of the other young mums of the parish. So she shouldn't have been
able
to wobble. Yet, wearing
those
shoes, she quivered.… It was just
gross,
and I really wanted to hide. If you ever manage to break the encryption on my AllInFone, Mum, and you're reading this, I'm sorry, but that's the honest truth, written for Mister Zog.

But there wasn't anywhere to hide. I looked around me and the scene was repeated twenty-, no, forty-fold, with minor variations. The worst excesses of 1970s dress, rolled up into a lobby-full of garishly attired holidaymakers, making their way toward the temple of tastelessness that is a grown-ups' disco.

It wasn't just adults, of course. This was a family holiday, and I wasn't too surprised to see myself in duplicate. Not literally, of course, but dotted around were a dozen or so embarrassed kids from maybe ages seven to thirteen, trying hard not to look at their parents, trying not to be seen by anyone at all.

We drifted over to the dance floor and found a family table. There was another family at the next table, with a young lad, who looked about my age, plus or minus. He smiled at us, a big, freckly smile beaming out from under a ginger mop. I nodded back, and his mum caught the motion, and she smiled, too. It wasn't long before we'd pulled the tables together, and the adults were chattering away. And then my dad and his dad were wandering off to the bar to get drinks.

“What's your name?”

I didn't catch on at first. Ginger Mop was talking, but I didn't register the words. I'd been looking at Mum kind of sideways. Actually, now she'd sat down she'd stabilized, and was back to Trim Mum again.

“What's your name?”

“We're the Deeleys.”

He looked annoyed.

“I know that. What's
your
name?”

“I'm Tania.”

I really didn't want to say any more than that. The disco was playing early Bowie—“The Jean Genie,” I think—and I was worried Ginger Mop was going to ask me to dance. Then he'd count my knees, and it would be some large odd number, and he'd laugh, and I'd have to kill him, and they'd throw me in jail—end of holiday.

“John.”

“What?” I really wasn't with it.

“John. My name's John. You can use it, you know, if you want to attract my attention.”

“I'd tagged you as Ginger Mop.”

I didn't want company, at least, not some robot kid, so frankly, I was trying to be rude. Just a little bit, but it was water off a duck's back to him. He just grinned and pushed his fingers through his hair.

“Yeah, it is pretty scruffy. I could get a job as a mop, too. So if you're going to call me Ginger Mop, what do I call you? Raven?”

“I suppose so.”

Well, my hair is pretty black, and I didn't mind him noticing. He was so determinedly friendly and cheerful, too, and he wasn't at all put off by my get-lost tactics.

“Well, then, Miss Tania Raven Deeley, how about a smile and a hello for John Ginger Mop Czern?”

I smiled briefly and nodded hello. Without much thinking, I raised my hand and carefully brushed back a stray black hair. He grinned back at me, and futilely pushed his own wild locks back, only for one to drop straight back in front of his bright blue eyes. I couldn't help myself, and gave him a broad grin in return. For a robot, he was an all right human.

“Okay, John. I give up. I'm friendly.”

“That's better.”

It turned out Mr. and Mrs. Czern were from London. They owned a little corner shop, selling groceries, magazines, what-have-you. If you needed something and you couldn't be bothered to get the car out for a trip to the supermarket, the Czerns would sell it to you. John helped out in the shop, when he wasn't at school or doing his homework.

“I help out quite a lot. They treat me a bit like a servant. You know: do this, do that…”

“Don't you have a domestic robot to help?” But I knew what the answer would be.

“No. We don't make much money in the shop. Enough for a decent holiday. A robot, though, that would be a luxury.”

Two robots, I thought.
Two
robots would be a luxury. The
first
robot is a necessity. And I thought of that gift of clunky old Soames. If my parents hadn't had good genes, there was no way they could have afforded even that necessity.

“I know. Dad's a vicar, so we don't have much money, either. We were given our robot, secondhand.”

Our conversation was getting rapidly depressing. Any longer, and we'd be crying into our drinks. Which reminded me, where were the dads with the drinks?

Right on cue, they appeared out of the faceless crowd, Dad leading the way and Mr. Czern carrying the drinks on a tray. Mr. Czern served everyone from the tray. He was a round, jovial man, quite short, and he chuckled and flourished as he doled out the glasses.

“Babycham for the ladies. Watneys Red Barrel for the men. And a cola for the kids. Pretty authentic, huh?”

I wondered how he could be so sure. As Dad drank his Red Barrel he grimaced, and I asked myself, if a beer were that awful, why would anybody have kept the recipe for more than eighty years?

I caught John's eye, and I think he must have been thinking something similar, because he mimicked Dad's grimace, and then pantomimed tipping the beer away. He winked, and I winked back, and took a sip of my own drink.

Yeuch! It was foul! Cloying and sweet. Another recipe that should have been left in the vault …

 

 

I don't think I'll dwell on the awfulness of that disco. Or indeed the rest of that week. The '70s music was perhaps the best bit, but what did Dickens say? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.…” Perhaps it was true of the '70s, too, except I didn't see any wisdom on show at the theme park.