Visions of the Future (58 page)

Kaybe stared at the woman. “You think Brian is going to get me pregnant? With a drone watching us all the time? And speaking of which, where is my drone, anyway?”

A quartet of dragonflies descended from the ceiling, one in each corner of the room. “To ensure no further… incidents.” The woman held out a pill on her open palm. “Take this. Now.”

“Is this… what I think it is?”

“It will free you from the burden of having children, and ensure that only the obedient reproduce during this time of great species stress.”

The three men on the sofa had not spoken, moved, or gotten up. Nor did they do so now.

“What do you think, fellas?” Kaybe asked.

They said nothing.

She picked up the pill from the woman’s outstretched palm and looked at it. So tiny. But big enough to scar her ovaries for life.

“I’m so sorry,” her father whispered. He reached for her, but his arm fell short, and he sat back again in his chair. “I’m so sorry.”

She lifted the pill to her mouth. Stopped. “What happened to Brian?”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Brian?”

“The boy,” one of the men said. “Down by the creek.”

“Oh, that Brian. He is no longer with us.” The woman smiled. “Now please. Take.”

“You mean, he’s
dead
? Why didn’t you—”

“No no no no no.” The woman held out her hands. “He is not dead. Merely that he is no longer part of our… immediate community.”

“Is he coming back?”

“If the algorithms permit.”

“And… if not?”

A shrug. “Then, not. Now take your pill. You are not our only client this evening.”

Kaybe thought about running. She could get outside before they could stop her. But the dragonflies would follow after her. Even if she managed to shut the door in their faces, she’d heard of drones breaking windows and drilling holes in wood to get to their targets.

And then what? You’ve escaped with your ovaries intact… and you’re living in the woods like an outlaw with no food in the middle of winter.

Yay.

She popped the pill in her mouth and swallowed. Waited. Nothing.

“But I don’t feel anything.”

“Nor will you,” the woman said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I took my medicine when I was your age,” the woman explained. “And now I must go. We must go.”

The three men stood in unison. One held out a piece of paper.

“Genetic injunction,” he grunted.

Pa took the paper and lay it at his side. “I thank the good people at the Department of Austerity for taking such a close interest in our family circumstances.”

“Oh—almost forgot,” the woman said. “Here you go.” She held out a pill to Pa.

He stared at it from under hooded eyes. “What is it?”

“Chemical vasectomy. Painless.”

“So I should sterilize myself to suit your algorithms?” he said quietly.

Uh-oh.

“The algorithms never lie,” the woman said. “What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Pa said. “I’m fucking saying it.” He threw his glass against the wall, and it shattered in a spray of blackberry wine.

“Disobedient,” the woman hissed.

The dragonfly drones buzzed around father’s head. Kaybe screamed, “Dad, stop it!”

For a moment it could have gone either way. Then he sat back in his chair, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes. He held up the pill so we could see. He put it between his lips, and swallowed.

When the Austerity people were gone, father took her in his arms and held her. The four dragonfly drones watched from a distance. “It doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter. It mattered very much.

When her father passed out for the night, Kaybe made her way upstairs and into bed. She still had her secret project that nobody knew about. But she had to keep it that way. Hiding it from one drone was barely doable. Hiding it from four was going to be a lot harder.

She played movie star for the cameras, bathing and changing and brushing her teeth. She yawned, stretched. Crawled into bed and turned off the light.

Count to one thousand. Make them think you’re asleep.

She counted.

Slowly, slowly she reached under her pillow. Still there. She found the pencil and paper and headlamp, too, and turned on the latter, cupping one hand to the light to keep it from seeping through the covers.

Now. Where was I?

Squiggly equations swept across the page in a blinding smear. She worked in a hurry. She had little time. More than a few minutes of this every night and the drones would surely get suspicious and start monitoring her serotonin levels or something.

Demanding more math homework had been… awkward. She saw that now. But she had been desperate. She could re-invent the wheel, but what was the point of that? So much better to learn what others had done, and explore the empty territory on the map. But stealing that paper on abstract mathematics by Dr. what’s-his-name from the library… that was the no-no.

If it weren’t for your stupid obsession with squiggly lines, you wouldn’t have gotten sterilized, idiot.

True. But if she gave birth to an amazing idea that saved humanity, they would thank her. The algorithms could keep things ticking along, but could they do original research in abstract mathematics? She was pretty sure they couldn’t.

Her pencil flew across the page, tracing squiggles as fast as she could write. Her idea was coming together. She wasn’t sure yet, but the proof was almost done, if she could just figure out how to—

A nip at her toe made her yelp.
Dragonfly. Shit.
She flicked off the lamp before it got suspicious.
Or maybe it already was. If they found her work…
She stuffed it back under the pillow. Nowhere else to hide it. She closed her eyes and laid still. If she could stay still long enough, maybe she could trick it into thinking she was asleep.

Kaybe counted to five thousand this time, but somewhere in the three-thousand four hundreds she trailed off, and when she opened her eyes the sun was shining in the window, and the dragonflies were buzzing in circles over her head.

“I’ve got an alarm clock,” she said. “When I want your help I’ll ask you for it.”

She got up and got dressed, doing her best not to look at the pillow on her bed. Almost there. She could taste it. If she could make this proof work… if she could show them what this work means, for mathematics, for humanity… they might even regret sterilizing her.

School went by in a blur. The anthem, classes, kelp for lunch, teachers droning on. All she could think of was that proof.

Tonight. Tonight’s the night. A breakthrough. I can feel it.

Father was sober when she flounced into the house.

“Hi, Pa!” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “What’s the special occasion?”

His eyes were full of fear and rage and loathing. He pointed to the sofa. Where the goon squad had sat. “Bum in chair, dearest.”

Uh-oh. He only ever called her “dearest” when he was really pissed off.

Kaybe dumped her backpack on the ground and curled up on the sofa. “Rough day at the kelp factory, Pa?”

He had lost his job as a history professor some years previous. The algorithms had detected a hint of bias against computer-assisted species survival. Ever since he had slaved in the local kelp factory, grinding up the tough fronds into digestible powders.

“What. Is. This?”

Pa clenched a sheaf of papers in his fist.

She chuckled. “I have no idea, you tell—”

But then Kaybe recognized her own handwriting. It was her proof.

“You can’t—what are you—give that here!” She snatched for it, but he held the papers out of reach.

“As the algorithms are your witness,” he said, indicating the dragonflies with a jerk of his head, “I want you to promise me. No more math. You know what happens next, you don’t stop.”

“But that won’t happen to me!” she protested. “It’s not like I’m—”

“You think the algorithms care about you?” he said. He was talking for both her and the cameras, she realized. Filter the meaning. “You think they care who has to be pruned in order to save the ‘tree of humanity’?”

“But I—”

“They will prune you in an instant if they think you are a threat!”

“But I’m trying to save humanity!” she protested.

Pa leaned forward, lowered his voice. More for dramatic effect, she supposed. “Humanity does not want to be saved. Get that through your thick skull.” He lit a match, held it to her proof. “If I catch you doing math again, I will personally beat your ass till its black and blue. Do you understand me?”

Kaybe watched the flame catch, her proofs disintegrating into flowers of black and gold, petals fluttering down to the ashtray on the coffee table.

“I asked you a question,” he growled. “I said, do you understand me?”

“Yes, Pa,” she whispered. She did not look at him. Could not look at him. “I understand you.”

That night she got into bed fully dressed. She yawned a lot beforehand, made a show of how tired she was. Collapsing into bed. Emotionally exhausted. Been a long day. Nothing to see here.

Kaybe waited what seemed like a suitably long time—although for the ruling algorithms, she supposed time was not like it was for people. Just something in a database. That’s all. When she could wait no longer, she threw off the sheets, reached under the bed for her tennis racket, and raced for the hallway. Two of the dragonflies managed to escape before she slammed the door. She slashed at one with the tennis racket, and it went down. The other zapped her, but missed. She swung for it, and it dodged out of reach. Shit.

Down the stairs she raced, an angry buzzing behind her. At the bottom she swung around, racket in hand, and took an electrical blast to the chest. She fell, twitching. When the effect wore off, she played dead, tennis racket in hand.
Now what do I do?

“Hunny-bunny?” Pa groaned from the living room floor. “That… that you?”

The buzzing noise changed pitch.

Kaybe leaped to her feet and slapped the tennis racket against the dragonfly so hard it flew across the room and crashed into the wall. Out the front door, slamming it behind her, down the darkened street, towards the woods she ran, forgetting her shawl, shivering in the cold, her heart pumping, sweat pooling in the small of her back, still she ran, ran until she could run no more, and she stood, lost, in the midst of the woods, dead leaves at her feet, a broken tennis racket in her hand.