Interzone 251 (12 page)

One light blinked orange, and stayed that way even after she thumped the panel. Then she remembered the relay she’d swapped for a bad one; no one had fixed it yet. The retraction system was offline.

Oh well
, she thought,
I knew this was a one-way trip anyway
.

She punched a large hole in the side of the ship with the impact head. As it bored its way through the multi-layered hull, she opened the comm channel, found the open link. “This is mining rig
Furious Bitch
knocking. Can you hear me in there?”

The voice that came back wasn’t one she recognized, but the Basellan accent was thick; the ship’s Captain, no doubt. “Back away right now,” he said, “or we’ll be forced to take extreme measures. Once you’re off my hull, we’re willing to talk.”

Talk, right.
For however few minutes until they got the upper hand back, then they wouldn’t care about talking any longer. She could see the patrol bikes, along the perimeter of the rockpile, now converging fast and furious on the ship. Somewhere out there, out of sight, a ladybug was slipping past them, unnoticed.

“Is the Representative there?”

“I am.” The Rep’s voice made her whole body feel like ice. “Whatever it is you want, the Captain has my authorit—”

“Do you know what the difference is between people, and livestock, and vessels?”

“You wouldn’t d—”

“Vessels don’t bite back, Company Man,” she said. “And I do. So fuck you all the way to Hell.”

She withdrew the impact head and punched the injectors forward, depositing their twin payload of explosives into the ship’s hull. In moments she had emptied both microweb cartridges into the ragged holes after them, sealing them in.

“I say again, stand down and back off,” the ship’s Captain said. “You don’t have the arming code, so you can’t do any more damage than you’ve already done, and I’ve got men heading your way to take you out.”

“I guess we’ll see,” she said, and switched the comms over to the mine channels, seeking out Blue Team’s signature. Whatever further the Captain or the Rep had to say, she didn’t care to hear it.

“Mer?” she said, as soon as the comms locked on Blue Team. “You out there?”

“Fari, is that you? What happened? They said Rock 17 decompressed. I thought… And Huj—”

“Huj is hurt but okay, Mer. You’ll need to go find him. He’s in the old tunnels under our hab. Get him and yourself out, if you can. They’re going to be unable to chase you for a while, but when they come back, they’re going to be very angry.”

“Fari, what are you—”

“I’m almost out of time,” she said, and she saw that she was. The charges were ready to detonate, and she could see small lights now swarming up and over the hull towards where her rig clung, partially embedded, in the side of the cruiser. “There’s something you need to know. The miscarriage…”

“You don’t have to—”

“It wasn’t Leor’s, Mer. It was yours. She was yours.”

“I don’t… We didn’t… I was afraid to touch you, to hurt you the way he did. I— That’s why I—”

“I was already pregnant when he attacked me, Mer. The baby wasn’t early. I lied. But Mer, I couldn’t give another child to this place, especially not a girl. You understand that, right?”

“Fari, I don’t—”

“Shut up, Mer. I sent our daughter out of here. She’s beautiful, and tiny, and has your nose, and she’s gone now. If you can, try to get free yourself. I love you.” She closed down the link before he could reply, and because the tears were making it hard to see.

Damned goggles
, she thought, and pulled them off her face and threw them to the floor. She pulled up the keypad and began to punch in the arming sequence – the previous number, plus the next prime in sequence. Did they really think she wouldn’t pay attention, see the pattern? They never thought she could think at all, never even saw her as human.

There was a man leaping from the ship, weapon raised, towards the cabin viewshield. She typed in the last number, blew the man a kiss, and pulled the trigger. The ship before her crumpled into orange and white, blinding and growing and moving outward, and Fari thought, last of all, that she had never seen such a truly joyful thing.

***

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives on the top of an ice-covered mountain in western Massachusetts, which she tries hard not to fall off of. Though when she does, she has found that being stuck home with broken limbs is great for making extra writing time. Suzanne has been published several times in
Interzone
, and also in our sister magazine
Black Static
.

A DOLL IS NOT A DUMPLING
TRACIE WELSER

illustrated by Richard Wagner

This is the most perfect dumpling in all of creation.

***

“Thank you, come
again,” Yopu’s voicebox says, a dutiful, automatic monotone.

The customer grunts in response and hurries to an unoccupied section of brick wall near the street. Turning her face to the wall, she stuffs the immaculate white dumpling into her mouth with fingers that look like they’ve never seen the inside of a bathhouse. Her face is filthy, too, grimy under a shock of orange and green hair, and pale against her black unitard.

On slow days, like when stinging rain falls in sheets over the sooty alleys and crowded thoroughfares of the prefecture, Yopu might sell forty dumplings. Then he’ll spend the rest of his day lumbering from corner to corner on his daily route, and thinking. Not really thinking, just collating data according to program.

He decodes slogans hidden or overtly displayed in graffiti splashed across brick walls and bamboo fences, and thinks about what trends the words indicate. A popular one says
Die, Moddies
, and another reads
Go home
. A phrase, spray-painted with a swirling, elegant script in shades of purple, says
Free Nickelhart, assholes
. Yopu wonders what Nickelhart is, and why it should be free. Nothing is free, not in an exchange economy where a dumpling costs two credits.

Yopu considers the shifting topography and demographics of the city, and adjusts his route as needed. The city’s sloping streets, carved out centuries earlier and paved with brick sluiced over in segments by black asphalt, steam and soften in the roiling heat of summer. The decaying geometries of proud old architecture slant and sigh against abutting modernity, brash in plastic gaudiness. Tenements skirt the market district, and light sleepers nest in alleyways near the commercial zone, alert to the urgencies of life and its sudden conclusion.

Yopu watches migrations from the outer bank of the river near the spaceport, where refugees land, to the inner city and its slums. He notes the numbers of reptilian Newcomers, forever blinking in the unaccustomed brightness. The recent immigrants are easy to distinguish from assimilated city-dwellers, who quickly abandon traditional woven skirts for bright jumpsuits and cheap, chromed sunspecs. He watches with reasoning curiosity as the numbers of non-humans grows and coalesces in the western sector of the city. Newcomers require dumpling service as much as anyone else. He makes calculations based on multiple factors.

No one but Yopu knows about the thinking he does. Even if he had someone to tell, and he doesn’t, he has no words in his speech programming to convey his thoughts.

His third daily stop brings him to the corner nearest the Municipal building, a crumbling red brick monolith that serves as the hub of bureaucracy and justice for the prefecture. Massive stone steps unfurl from its base like the silken lines of the Imperial flag that curls and snaps high on the pole above. Attorneys, lobbyists and lawmakers fast-walk in and out. Each is trailed by one or more modified bodyguards, bulky in their kevlar jumpsuits and often sporting tails or feathers. Most hurry through the chill morning air to waiting rickshaws, glancing back over their shoulders. Every day, one particular lawmaker, a man with bushy eyebrows, graying temples and lawmaker’s briefcase, stops on the corner of Lotus Blossom Lane for a dumpling. His blue legal robes flap in the damp summer breeze while he slurps his dumpling from the paper cup. Yopu lingers longest here, mostly for the abundant indigents and Newcomer children who cluster around him clutching precious credits.

On Tuesday, on this busy corner, Yopu sees the girl with the dirty hands again.

She waits in silence behind a diminutive man in a multicolored robe and two giggling female porcupine Moddies who appear to be exactly alike and are engaged in animated conversation. The girl orders two dumplings this time and pauses to regard him, looking directly into the dusty mono-lens mounted on Yopu’s torso.

“You’re a good ’bot, aren’t you?” she says in a low voice, deeper than her slight frame would indicate. She pats him once, a hand touching Yopu’s side just out of his camera’s range.

It is simple to match her face to previous encounters in a database of customer interactions. Her face is clean today, and her large eyes are wide unnatural pools of purple under her orange and green hair. She swipes a generic credchip, a no-name quickcard that functions like cash on the street, and hands one of the dumplings off to a lanky figure behind her whose face is hidden deep inside the dark interior of a stained gray hoodie. The pair squats together next to the decaying building, and they confer over the dumplings in whispers. She glances back at Yopu once, twice. Her eyes flick between the robot, her companion and the front steps of the Municipal building.

Yopu loses sight of the girl and her companion when a crowd of tussling Newcomer children surround him, shouting over one another for Yopu’s attention. A steady stream of customers occupy him until his red “empty” indicator clicks on.

“Sir or Madam, I regret to inform you that this dispenser’s contents are sold out. Please come again.”

“Damn,” says a single customer, the every-day lawmaker. He fumbles with his tattered briefcase as he tries to tuck away a blue government credchip. His owlish bodyguard stands a few feet away, disinterested in dumplings but on the alert.

A Newcomer child approaches.

“Hey, Mister Owl, can you turn your head all the way around?”

The Moddie bodyguard obliges, twisting to peer with enlarged eyes over his shoulder at the child from under tufts of brown-gold feathers. The child gives a reptilian squeal of delight and claps its leathery hands.

“Buy me a dumpling?” it asks.

“Scat!” says the owl’s human lips, and he raises his taloned hands in mock threat. The child dances away.

A subroutine activates, and Yopu’s servos power up. He steps off the curb and waddles down the street.

A while later, when he finds himself powering down in an alley in the warehouse district, Yopu begins to suspect something faulty in his programming. The coordinates of the alley do not match any prior destination record. The red indicator means he should return to the DDS warehouse, not squat in an alley in the dark. He switches on his headlamp, at low power to conserve energy.

A hooded figure stands in front of Yopu, illuminated in the lamp’s glow. A dog’s face, with the gold and black markings of a German Shepherd, emerges from the hoodie’s shadows and bares its teeth.

“Here he is, Injee.” The mechanical voice comes from a small box clipped to the dogboy’s hoodie. The bared lips do not move.

A scrabbling sound, and the dirty girl comes climbing down a nearby gutter pipe, catching toeholds as deftly as a ninja. She lands next to Yopu, her breath hanging in the air for a moment as a cloud of vapor.

“Here’s our good little ’bot,” she says in her curiously deep voice, and touches his side as she had earlier that day. This time, he hears a
beep
. “Come on, then.”

Yopu finds no appropriate pre-recorded response to the request in his database, but when the dirty girl and her dogboy companion walk away, he follows.

***

“What does it
need language circuits for?” the girl asks. “You’re just reprogramming it to do the job.”

“You’re asking me?” says the dogboy’s talkbox. “Injee, you’re asking me, the talking dog, why it needs to be able to talk.”

Injee says nothing.

“I’m giving him the circuits because I want to, how’s that?”

Yopu watches Injee through his mono-lens. Zooming in, he detects a slight flush on her cheeks, and a three-inch scar on her temple at the edge of the orange and green hair.

“That’s not where I’d start, is all,” she says. She sits cross-legged on a sagging plastic chair, eating from a pink take-out carton with chopsticks. An overhead industrial lamp casts a circle of light around her and the dogboy, who works at a rolling workbench topped with a diagnostic monitor. Six separate cables run from the monitor to the panel on Yopu’s backside.

“Don’t you want to hear what kind of thoughts one of these has?” Not a touch of irony in the mechanical voice.

“It’s a robot, Blue. It doesn’t have thoughts. They just do what you tell them to do.”

“That’s what they used to say about dogs.”

“Until Nickelhart gave you that chip, you were just like any other dumb dog, following commands for a pat on the head.”

Blue puts down a pair of wire cutters and pushes back his magnifying goggles. The two regard one another for a moment, with Yopu looking on in silence.

“He can hear you, you know,” Blue says.

***

The light of
morning shines through the high windows of the warehouse, and Yopu scans the dusty space for signs of his captors.

Noisy words inside him, in his programming, where no words had been before. In the past, concrete words like
customer, Newcomer demographic analysis, credits
,
route
,
supply protocol
, and abstract but viable, quantifiable words such as
perfection
had been all he needed.

All he had possessed.

Now there are myriad words for sights and sounds, bumping and jostling against one another for his attention: in the beams of light streaming from the high windows,
motes
dance. On a pallet near the workbench, the dogboy Blue
snores
. And along the walls, visible now in the warm, growing light, faces that are not faces, rows and rows of them, of varying sizes.

Dolls
. Yopu knows these are called dolls.

Free of the cables, he tests his ability to move and finds that he can. He half-rolls on extended casters and takes three tentative steps forward on his square feet, a lurch of movement that brings him close enough to scan the faces of the dolls more closely.

“They’re not people,” says the muffled mechanical voice of the dogboy from the pallet. Yopu swivels to look in Blue’s direction.

“They can’t think, can’t talk,” says the dog, sitting up and straightening his hoodie, which has become twisted about his neck in the night.

“I know,” says Yopu. He stops; his metal head swivels from side to side. Curious, this sensation of knowing, like one sound among a chorus of clattering sounds seeping through into clarity.

“But they are beautiful, aren’t they? Perfectly formed.”

“Perfect. I know what that means.” A sense of wonder.

“Of course you do.”

“They’re perfect,” says Yopu.

Words, noisy words, in his mind.

So many words it hurts.

***

“We have a
job for you, little robot,” says Injee.

“My name is Yopu.” Yopu tries to roll towards her, but backs away instead, unsteady.

“How does it know?” Injee says, glancing over at Blue. The dogboy is twirling a screwdriver, watching a beam of sunlight bounce off its shiny stem, patterning the warehouse walls with tiny shimmers.

“He knows all sorts of things,” says Blue, teeth bared in a hideous grin.

Injee rolls her eyes. “Did you tell it about Nickelhart?”

“The programming has to integrate.”

Yopu continues shifting backwards until he bumps into the wall.

“Three days until the demonstration,” says Injee.

A doll dressed in red satin teeters, falls from the shelf in a splatter of porcelain shards.

Yopu scans the broken doll and emits a dismayed tone.

“Yes.” Blue growls, low and threatening. “He’ll be ready.”

***

“Protocols indicate I
should return to DDS warehousing,” says Yopu. A slight change in pitch works its way through his language circuits.

“Are you whining?” asks Blue. A hint of amusement is evident in his mechanical voice. He is squatting on top of the stool at the workbench, painstakingly gluing shards of doll’s head together into a more or less coherent face.

Silence from the bulky form of the robot.

“You want to go back? They’d erase your new programming.” Blue regards him with a steady gaze. The robot’s servos whir as he shifts backward and forward, side to side.

“No,” Yopu says.

Blue sets the fractured doll face aside. “Now, you’re ready.” His toothy muzzle seems to smile.

When Injee returns, Yopu is plugged into Blue’s programming tablet.

“Updating it, finally?” she says, flopping down on the dog’s tidy pallet with a yellow envelope in her hand.

“Get off my bed,” Blue says, not looking up from the tablet.

“I bought this blanket,” she says.

“You’re filthy.”

“Screw that. Here, I got what you wanted.”

“Right.” He hops down from the stool and takes the yellow packet from her outstretched hand.

“Ha. Made your tail wag,” she says. She rolls over and within minutes she’s breathing deeply, eyes closed, on the rough pallet. The broken edges of her fingernails, some cracked and bloody, curl around the blanket.

“What’s wrong with her hands?”

“Come on over here, Yopu.”