2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 18

  “Mommy,” the girl called behind her. “It’s here.”

  Kara54 blinked. She looked like a girl, didn’t she? She tugged at her hair, wondering what it was that made her look less than human. Kara54 swallowed, the motors inside her body working to mimic the movement.

  “Oh fantastic, so glad it’s here!” the woman before them said. She looked like a larger version of the child, nearly clone-like, and Kara54 wondered how something so natural could appear so artificial.

  “You’ve come just in time,” the mother addressed Kara54’s handler. “Lila Jo had quite the spill this morning, a traumatic fall down a flight of stairs. She needs to store the memory and forget it. Don’t want her being afraid of heights in the future, do we?”

  The handler shifted uncomfortably behind her, and Kara54 wanted to turn and wrap her arms around the handler’s waist. At the plant, the handler took pity on Kara54, placing electric self-healing Band-Aids over her torn skin and had given her chicken soup-flavored software when virus 29 infected her bunks. She’d spent her entire life off of the assembly line in the handler’s care.

  “I’ll have you sign here and here,” Kara54’s handler told the mother, gesturing to the form. The handler did not look down to meet Kara54’s robotic eyes as her adapted mother signed the adaption papers.

  The mother nodded and scribbled on the paper. “Is that all?” she asked, impatiently, wanting to help Lila Jo get rid of the trauma she had suffered.

  The handler hesitated on the house’s front porch and then crouched down beside Kara54.

  “It’ll be okay. The Worthys will take care of you, Kara. I promise.”

  Even though Kara54 loved it when her handler used the human part of her name, there was despair in her words. She detected the lie, small and tight, at the back end of her handler’s sentence. She squeezed Kara54 once, hard, released and then turned from her.

  For a moment, Kara54 felt the overwhelming, unidentifiable impulse to just run after her handler, sprint down the stairs to her hovercraft and ask her to be her adapted mother. But that wasn’t how Kara54’s life worked. The handler had no child and no need for a storage robot as Kara54 was often categorized. And Kara54 was not supposed to feel anything like attachment, anything that could compel her to chase after her handler.

  So why did she?

  It took a single, quick-body shiver to shake it off. She didn’t have enough time to process or analyze the strange emotional feedback as her adapted mother motioned for her to enter. Strangely, Mrs. Worthy never met her eyes, always seemed to be looking above her head somewhere.

  “Come in, come in,” Mrs. Worthy said and shut the door with a quick auto click. The place smelled, strangely enough, of dust and pollen even though there weren’t any open windows. “Did you come with an instruction manual?” she mused absently.

  “No,” Kara54 said. “I’ve been preprogrammed to tell you what you need to know.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Worthy said as she wiped her hands on the pants of her regulation suit and tugged at her ponytail. Mrs. Worthy motioned for Lila Jo to step forward. The girl jutted out her split lip, hands on her hips. Kara54 had never seen anyone look so defiant, so brave.

  “What does she need to do?” Mrs. Worthy asked.

  Kara54 turned to the girl before her. If Kara54 had been human, she would have been a good five years older than Lila Jo, nearly 12. She’d never felt like a child before and neither had any of her fellow adaption bots.

  “I want you to remember what just happened, your fall down the stairs,” she said slowly. She could see Mrs. Worthy’s hands tensing at her sides just behind Lila Jo. Kara54 then closed her eyes, the handprint locators on her arm opening to receive the little child’s memory.

  “Put your hands on my arms,” she instructed. “I’ll do the rest.”

  There was a half a beat between when the locators powered up with a low thrum and the moment where they reached out toward Lila Jo to accept her pain. Even though Kara54 made the motion with expertise, she had never had a live test before.

  Kara54 was ultimately unprepared for what happened next.

  Lila Jo’s memories hit her like a wave, sucking her under, filling her lungs and her body. It made Kara54 want to claw for air even though she wasn’t suffocating. In excruciating detail, she relived Lila Jo’s fall down the flight of stairs, each bump tattooed on the hard drive where a normal human’s brain would be. She felt the pain, tasted blood, as she hurtled through Lila Jo’s memory.

  It could have been years or merely minutes before Kara54 resurfaced in the Worthy’s foyer. Mrs. Worthy’s hands were clutched around Lila Jo’s shoulders and somehow, the force of Lila Jo’s memories sent Kara54 to her knees. Her body shook, her mainframe rattled as she absorbed the rest of the impact.

  “You okay, sweetie?” Mrs. Worthy asked, but her words were directed to Lila Jo, not Kara54. The child wore the strangest expression on her tan face, her eyes meeting Kara54’s.

  “I was fine. I was always okay, mom,” she said, but there was a deep line between her eyebrows as if there was something she couldn’t entirely get her head around.

  Kara54’s body finally processed the shock and she pulled herself back up to her feet, staggering slightly. She gazed up at the stairs and her mechanical heart clenched inside her chest. She’d never been afraid of heights or falling before, but now she could barely bring herself to think of climbing the steps.

  She bowed her head as Mrs. Worthy hustled Lila Jo into the kitchen for cookies. Her handler had sort of explained what happened to the children Kara54 had been built to help.

  “You’re a memory repository,” her handler had explained. “You’ll have the important job of holding the fears and pain of whoever you’ve been assigned. You protect them from things that could damage them later in life. You help humans attain their potential.”

  There had been glory in her handler’s words, but now, as Kara54 stood alone in the hallway, terrified to lift her foot to the step, she wasn’t so sure. She’d never asked what would happen to her own mind in the process. A surge of anger swept over her, unchecked. The handler had probably known the suffering Kara54 would endure but never really explained it to her.

  Kara54 wasn’t entirely sure how long she stood there in the hall, unable to move forward and unwilling to turn to the door and let herself free. It wasn’t until a creak sounded behind her that she realized she wasn’t alone.

  “Are you the new adaption bot?”

  The voice originated from a boy who could have been Lila Jo’s twin but closer in age to Kara54. He had the same dark, open eyes. But instead of standing like his sister did, he sat on a metal chair whose legs hovered a few inches off the ground.

  “Kara54,” she said.

  He had a serious face, a wrinkle forming between his brows as he looked her over. “You’re living with us now?” he asked.

  She nodded, swallowing. He watched her muscles move, fascinated. “We’ve never had one before,” he said. “I thought you’d look different.”

  More metal than human, he meant, but Kara54 understood. She was a strange combination of gears and skin, with intelligence modeled after her free-thinking creators. She developed like a child and even though her bones and organs were artificial, they were made of a plasma that could grow and collapse just like a human’s.

  His chair rolled closer to Kara54 who remained rooted in her spot. His legs were strapped to the bottom of his chair, though his fingers and hands could move freely. He stopped inches from her, regarding her curiously.

  “Can I?” he reached out and her receptors on her forearm activated, willing to accept whatever pain he offered to her even though the entirety of her body shook.

  He recoiled as the jelly and electrodes glinted. “No, not that. Not yet,” he said. His voice was quiet. “Can I touch your skin?”

  Kara54 looked at him as a mixture of confusion and relief settling across her fibers. Her receptors retracted and he approached once more.
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br />   His finger was cool against her arm as he poked the skin on her wrist. Goosebumps traveled up her arms and he raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re so human,” he said.

  He was such an oddity, this boy strapped to the floating chair. Kara54 wasn’t sure what to make of him as they stood there, his finger still light on her arm. A door slammed behind them.

  “Timothy, you’re supposed to be studying,” Mrs. Worthy said as she moved between them, her arm held out as if protecting the boy from Kara54. There was a strange expression in her eyes, one that Kara54 wasn’t familiar with but, if she had to guess from watching the recordings her handler had shown her for training, it looked a bit like hatred.

  Timothy’s shoulder hunched forward, his head hanging low but his gaze never left Kara54’s eyes.

  “I needed to introduce myself,” he said finally.

  Mrs. Worthy shooed him back into the side room and shut the door behind him. She then turned to Kara54. Mrs. Worthy’s shoulders stiffened, her gaze cold, and she tugged on her ponytail. Based on her emotional state readings, she was not entirely happy with Kara54, even though the robot-girl didn’t know why.

  “I’ll show you to your room,” Mrs. Worthy said. Thankfully, she didn’t move toward the stairs because Kara54 could feel her knees turning to jelly. Instead, they walked straight to the door through which Lila Jo had been first taken.

  Aromas of freshly baked cookies and pasta steeped in red sauce invaded Kara54’s sensors with a quick shot and crackle. Even though she was a robot, she still had taste receptors in case a child had a bad memory of eating some sort of terrible food, and she could eat even if it did little for her being as a whole.

  Mrs. Worthy waved Kara54 impatiently along to what appeared to be a mudroom porch. There was a small closet off to the side and Mrs. Worthy opened the door.

  “This will be your storage area,” Mrs. Worthy said.

  Kara54 blinked, alarm traveling up her arms. The closet had been hastily brushed and rearranged to fit what appeared to be a small cot and lamp. There was a bedside table made of gnawed wood. The suitcase with Kara54’s jumpsuits sat on the floor. This was nothing like the rows of bunks in the adaption center, nor was it like the room her handler had constructed for her. And the way the Mrs. Worthy said storage area made Kara54 feel less than human even though she’d been modeled in their image.

  Mrs. Worthy looked uncomfortable and picked at dry skin on her arm. “We just, we didn’t know what to expect with your arrival. I hope this will do for now. We’ll figure out something soon. I’ll call you for supper,” Mrs. Worthy said, waiting until Kara54 took her seat on the lumpy bed.

  Kara54 wrapped her arms around herself as Mrs. Worthy shut the door and left her in the sickly glow of the lamp.

  What has my life come to, she wondered there in the almost darkness. This was meant to be her family now, the people who murmured and shuffled just outside her door. In a way, Mrs. Worthy was like the stepmother from that tale about Cinderella. But maybe, as she gazed at the door, it wouldn’t turn out that way. Many people heard about adaption bots and never even thought they could be human. Kara54 looked down at her dark skin, tracing the self-healing pores. Though part machine, didn’t she count as someone?

  …………………………

  As Kara54 dozed, nightmares of endless staircases filled her dreams and she fell down what felt like a hundred. Being the storage membrane for Lila Jo was going to be far more difficult than she originally thought. She awoke, sweating, to the call of Mrs. Worthy.

  The circular table had been set with a place for Kara54. Timothy and Lila Jo had already taken their seats, and Mrs. Worthy had arranged the table so that Kara54’s seat was directly between Mr. Worthy and Lila Jo.

  Mr. Worthy looked up from his newspaper, his eyes narrowing in on Kara54. He was a tallish, thin man with pale skin and jet-black hair.

  “How do you do?” he said stiffly, rolling one of his shoulders back. He wore a standard working suit with silver reflectors on the collar and down the sleeves. He probably worked on software of some kind by the way he hunched over his meal, Kara54 thought.

  “I’m all right,” Kara54 said, no more than a whisper.

  He grunted and Mrs. Worthy cut in. “She helped Lila Jo this morning right when she came in, didn’t she, dear? Poor child took a tumble down the stairs, and Kara54 was there just in time.”

  Kara54 noticed the shift from ‘it’ to ‘she.’ Timothy sat, strapped to his chair, his eyes absorbing the scene before him with a thoughtful intensity that Kara54 found slightly startling.

  Lila Jo shrugged. Strange looking noodles in an orange-red soup, probably from a decompressor bag, sat on her plate. She moved them around with her fork before looking up. “I don’t remember much about it.”

  “See?” Mrs. Worthy said, turning to Mr. Worthy. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  He grunted and half-shrugged. Kara54 analyzed the makeup of his nervous system, saw a strange spike in his agitation levels. Did he not like her? They’d adapted her just for this reason, hadn’t they? She couldn’t help but stare at him as everyone began to eat. After that, no one really spoke during the remainder of dinner.

  Kara54 chewed each strand mechanically, catching Lila Jo or Timothy looking at her every few seconds. The family all looked so strangely similar to one another it gave Kara54 a weird floppy feeling in her stomach. She looked nothing like any of them, being a few shades darker with her strange blue eyes. She swallowed. The food tasted of nearly nothing but, maybe, if she acted like them, they’d think she was more like them and would decide to keep her.

  The family spoke about odds and ends like Timothy studying for some random test that would determine whether he should study math or reading more and Lila Jo’s automatically erupting volcano she’d designed herself. Mrs. and Mr. Worthy talked about things Kara54 couldn’t entirely understand and, since they spoke mostly to one another, Kara54 figured she wasn’t supposed to understand.

  As Mr. Worthy cleared the dishes, Lila Jo jumped from her seat and grabbed hold of her mother’s arm. “Can Kara54 sleep in my room tonight?”

  The atmosphere in the room went cold. Kara54 could see the mother’s thin lips pressing together tightly.

  “Fine,” Mr. Worthy said, without hesitation. “That’s fine.”

  “Harold,” Mrs. Worthy hissed but he shook his head.

  “Let her do what she wants. You said yourself that her current room isn’t fitting for a child like her.”

  Lila Jo smiled triumphantly and grasped Kara54’s hand. Up and up, she tugged Kara54 to the next floor. Kara54 was sure that her heart was going to stop beating at she mounted each stair. Lila Jo’s pain played over and over again across her nerves, flashes of each step wrecking her vision. Dizziness nearly overcame her but suddenly, they crested the top of the stairs and made for Lila Jo’s room.

  “You all right?” Lila Jo asked, eyebrows furrowed. “You look a bit pale.”

  Kara54 ignored the nausea in her stomach and shook her head. The girl kept a hand firmly around Kara54’s wrist and pulled her through a bedroom door. Kara54 inhaled sharply, the sight receptors on her irises enlarging.

  Electrodes of some form filled the walls with rotating hallucinatory colors: cotton candy pinks and robin’s egg blues. Her bed was a circular contraption dotted with purple pillows and lavender sheets. Lila Jo didn’t have dolls like the girls in TV shows Kara54 had seen. Instead she had piles of electric blocks, fused together to make hovercrafts and spaceships in miniature. The volcano they’d spoken about at dinner sat in the corner of a bright violet desk, lava overflowing from the top in an electric projection.

  “Play with me,” Lila Jo commanded. And so, Kara54 settled beside her on the synthetic fibers of Lila Jo’s multi-colored carpet. Playing with Lila Jo felt like work at an assembly line. Kara54 handed Lila Jo tools as she called for them and watched, fascinated, as the child worked.

  “What are you making?” Kara54 asked. Sh
e wasn’t sure if she was allowed to ask questions but Lila Jo seemed to have brought her into the secret club that her room embodied.

  “Block melder,” Lila Jo ordered, hand out, not making eye contact with Kara54. Kara54 passed the small tube to her and watched as the plastic tip lit up. It heated the blocks, melding the model together.

  “I’m making SpaceHub 31,” Lila Jo said simply.

  “Why?” Kara54 asked. Lila Jo had called this play but it looked like work or training.

  “Because I’m going to be a space pioneer when I grow up, and in order to get to the place where they let you up into the sky, you have to create your own ship.”

  Lila Jo turned her dark gaze on Kara54, the light fleeing the tip of her block melder. “I wasn’t afraid back there, you know,” Lila Jo said.

  “With the stairs?” Kara54 asked. The memories she’d absorbed from Lila Jo itched under her layer of skin, settled in her joints. The fear Kara54 had taken from Lila Jo felt real enough. But how would Lila Jo even remember the fear at all if Kara54 had truly absorbed all her feelings?

  “Maybe I was afraid while it was happening. I can’t remember that part. It just feels blank, like a movie without sound,” Lila Jo said as if reading her mind. “It’s not like I haven’t fallen before. They’re just worried it’ll stop me from doing this.” Lila Jo waved at the half-complete rocket before them. “Mom worries a lot.”

  “You can say that again.” A voice issued from the doorway and both Lila Jo and Kara54 looked up. Timothy hovered just within the doorframe, his chair inches off the ground.

  “No one invited you,” Lila Jo said, cutting her eyes in his direction.

  Timothy ignored her and entered, coming to rest just beside the model. “Are you really making another one?”