Unnatural, Page 2

  * * * *

  Uriah woke up worrying what Pat would think of his absence that night. They had basically stuck together up until then, taking as much comfort in their mutual lack of solvency as the human psyche can paradoxically take. Now more than ever, she was likely terrified of not knowing her boyfriend’s whereabouts, in this societal web of anti-Organic aggressors. She may not like it, but it’s still all for her.

  It was a crisp morning in Aberdeen Park. Birds sang, bugs buzzed, and a squirrel darted around the trees. Yet there was a certain silence in the air, a strange lack of the morning rush and pedestrian activity that gave Uriah reason for perplexity.

  He liked it.

  A stretch and a yawn, and he was up off Turing Memorial Bench. A mild stroll brought him over to the streets, where he stopped short. Lo, dozens of cars, some lined up neatly as if stopping at a red light, others rammed into each other like dominoes, or into buildings or poles. Some of the vehicles were still on, depleting in limbo a negligible amount of hydrogen fuel. Many had shut off at the command of an intelligent autopilot.

  Every single one had at least one dead human inside.

  Now, Dennis Uriah was no fool. He knew when he was experiencing reality, thank you very much, and he was hardly prone to hallucinations. And what an ideal reality this was! Gone were the days of parasitic suburbanites’ wasting his oxygen with their political and religious drivel, of their ravaging Earth’s beauty and life with their crimes, of their absurd social standards and shallow customs, of their splurging valuable resources needed by folks like him and Pat.

  Pat! Uriah had to tell her about this, so that they could live the life they had longed for since the end of the golden days. He maneuvered about the traffic down Franklin Parkway, coming to another halt, this one of genuine demoralization, at a silver Nissan.

  The woman who had loved him most intimately for the past four years sat still and breathless in the driver’s seat.

  Contortions of anxiety on her face made it abundantly clear why she was on the road. She must have stolen her parents’ car, perhaps on her way to stop Uriah from doing something he would regret.

  How long had she been dead, he wondered? No stench of your average death, and her imperfectly perfect skin showed no severe wounds or pallid transformation. She was a statue. Even if he hadn’t doubted that a coroner was anywhere nearby, he suspected such a professional’s services would be useless here.

  It was as if a bomb had silently detonated and drained the life out of all these people’s cells. Softened as his heart was after losing Pat, it wouldn’t let his eyes rest more than a flicker on the sight of children in those automobiles. Children, for God’s sake!

  Brought to a standstill as Aberdeen’s humans were, the machines persisted as much as the other living beings did. Automated Mag-Lev trains zipped by, and the traffic signals gave Schopenhauer’s proverbial lecture to no one.

  Uriah heard footsteps coming from the adjacent video store. Dammit. He crept nearer and peered in through the transparent door.

  “You’re gonna kill us all, aren’t you, Dimitri?” said a trembling feminine voice. Whose owner was only round as a character, as he found by the glow of the TV from which the voice had emerged.

  He retroactively justified the stupidity of pursuing his threat by telling himself he had known there was no threat at all. Dandy. With his mind already on the most helpless creatures of Earth, Uriah jogged over to the Finlon Humane Society.

  If anything tormented his mind’s ear as he ran more than Livingston’s death fall, it was the howl of an unforgettable mutt named Andy. Thirteen years ago, twelve-year-old Uriah had made a habit of taking walks around his neighborhood. He had considered the exercise and opportunity to absorb nature worth the risk of harassment. Those not superficially polite enough to merely block their windows, after glaring outside with mistrust, would occasionally holler, “Stay away from our property, you filthy Org!”

  Thankfully, such taunts were only a slowly growing prejudice at the time, so the words hardly unnerved him as much as Andy’s hostility. One day, during the moving in of Andy’s caretaking family, Uriah turned right at the gazebo just as always, when the bark of a light brown entity tearing into the front yard from the back sent him veering into the street.

  The dog pursued him across the sidewalk, and by the time he reached the opposite house, it had clamped its jaw around his lower left leg.

  “Andy!”

  Twisting his head around, Uriah could see his attacker rush toward a blond-haired boy of about his age, stomping down the doorsteps. “Whassamatter with you?” he said to the dog at his feet with thinly veiled rage, which elicited a barely audible whimper from the creature. “Just ‘cause he’s an Org doesn’t mean ya oughta snap his fluffin’ leg off!”

  Uriah winced for more reasons than one as he rose. The boy opened the front door, letting Andy fly in about as quickly as he had chased Uriah, and looked up. “Sorry ‘bout that. Haven’t got our electric fence up yet, and the little bugger’s a bit territorial. Come on in. We were just havin’ dinner.”

  “I don’t need your charity. I’m not poor, and if I take one step in there your bastard of a dog’s gonna have me for dinner.” Uriah faced away from the kid and took a step before he heard him insist:

  “No, really, you need that bite taken care of! And Andy’s goin’ downstairs, ya won’t see a hair of him.”

  He pursed his lips for a moment, then approached the house of the boy who, he saw more clearly now, was wearing a shirt with a small Libertas logo to the right. Uriah resisted rolling his eyes, thinking, Because your slur didn’t advertise enough your sense of supremacy over those of us using the bodies we were born with.

  “My name’s Perry, by the way,” he said as rummaged through his first aid cabinet, which Uriah imagined his family either was embarrassed to have but kept as a courtesy to Organic visitors, or reserved in their kitchen because Perry was the only bigot in the household. “Mom and Dad are out, but I can handle this. Jist take a seat on the couch.”

  “Thanks. Dennis,” Uriah grunted. Then came the howl, a noise of pure longing. “Uh, Perry, I …”

  “Oh, that’s jist Andy gettin’ what he asked for.” He chuckled, of all things. “Kinda hilarious when he’ll bend over backwards for his kibbles, to tell ya the truth.”

  Uriah froze before he could lie on the sofa. He felt like he was going to lose his lunch twice over. “I’ll – you know what, I’ll go care for my own injury, thanks.”

  Limping his way out, he heard Perry say hoarsely, “You ungrateful Orgs are all the same! Don’tcha know hospitality when ya see it?”

  He had not visited that house ever since.

  Having at last arrived at the Finlon Humane Society, or FHS, Uriah decided he could no more leave these animals untended after that than a reader of Greek mythology could trust wings made of wax. He might have gone to Andy’s rescue if it were not likely the poor thing had already died after all these years.

  Observing the building’s interior right from entrance gave him the impression that androids provided much of the animal care. Machines easily handled waste disposal, and other devices could distribute the proper food and water portions to the dogs, cats, birds – even some cows, pigs, and chickens, according to a map of the facility.

  Some, but not all, of the features of FHS that provided for the animals’ proper cognitive development had robotic supervisors. Uriah found a room full of playthings with which a cat could nurture its hunting instincts without biological victims. A particularly fluffy white feline pounced on a mechanical mouse, which scuttled away faster after escaping. An agile yet undesirable dog played catch with a robot called a Homunculus, according to the door.

  Evidently canines made better friends to androids than to humans, if Perry was representative.

  Still, it became clear to Uriah that these animals needed human patronage, something they couldn’t receive from th
e workers who were in the same apparently comatose state as everyone outside. He looked through each feeding room. Most of them included meal distribution devices – one needed only to place the source of food inside a sanitized trough – but several species had diets too specific to work with this system, and a few had malfunctioning robots. The number of animals and food needed to sustain them was daunting. No way could he haul bags of that stuff by himself, even just from the store shelves to a car.

  I need some robot slaves.