* * * *
Locked.
Against Uriah’s wishes, Sabrina had promised herself not to bother him unless she was sure he would die if she didn’t do so. An inescapable house didn’t guarantee swift doom to its inhabitants, so she kept her cool. As much cool as it was possible to have after finding out she was trapped, anyway.
Besides, she knew she needed this time to sort out the mess that was her mind. And her hormones.
For her predicament was bred of anything but love, she knew that. If her sexual orientation was as inflexible as it had always been, this wasn’t even quite a physical allurement either, she realized as she sat at the chair she’d positioned before an immovable window. As far as she could see, there were no humanoid machines around the house, as if what androids were in the village had sealed the exits with … nanobots.
He’d only been asleep little more than half an hour by now. Sabrina tried to put into focus what it was about this somewhat crude-mannered man that was enticing – not a small task, as this did not cohere with her identity itself.
She closed her eyes and found herself back in fifth grade, at a wildlife sanctuary with her peers on a field trip. None of the adults were nearby, and she and some friends were observing a group of flamingos milling about a simulated swamp.
While the others were showing placid interest in the birds, Jenny seemed to be thinking about something. Sabrina sneaked up behind her and snapped her fingers right by Jenny’s ears.
She swore Jenny jumped at least two inches off the ground. “Sabrina, you –”
“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” She stepped in front of her friend. “If I could pull that off, it must be important.”
“Ah, it’s nothing.” Jenny stifled a laugh.
“That’s a funny ‘nothing.’ Now what was it, really?”
“Okay, well … it’s kinda silly, just that … you know Oswald’s flamingo?”
“Yeah, Ken.”
“That’s him. Oz told me that Ken tried to have babies with his friend’s flamingo.”
“Tried to?”
Another giggle. “Yep, but the other flamingo was a boy.”
Like clockwork, a shorter girl a few feet away who’d been eavesdropping piped up, “Aren’t you like that, too, Sabrina?”
“Whaddya mean?”
Jenny said, “You like girls.”
“My mom says people like that go to hell,” said the vertically challenged kid.
Sabrina suddenly kissed her. “There, now you’ll go there, too. Have fun.”
Being “like that” had, as far as she could remember, not been anything but a mildly proud reality for her, like her left-handedness. Now, it appeared she was more like that flamingo than she’d known, for she had learned later that exclusive homosexuality was rare in nonhuman animals.
But the difficulty wasn’t so much the revelation that she was perhaps closer to the middle of the Kinsey scale than she’d thought, but that she knew this would complicate her already delicate circumstance of holding responsibility for the propagation of the human species – she hadn’t forgotten that in the mental turbulence of recent days.
Though her confinement left her little reason to keep watch, Sabrina resisted the temptation to curl up under the warm blanket just a few feet from her.
She wondered if she wasn’t simply rationalizing, with a shift in “preferences,” what was in fact an attempt to sell her body for the world. Maybe she was deluding herself into desiring Uriah only because the notion of mothering a pivotal generation in human history with a man she was, at best, benignly indifferent to was unpleasant.
This felt so artificial, like there was something seriously wrong with her. She was losing herself.
Sabrina remembered well her stand for her reproductive liberty in the face of Zolnerowich, but now, having gotten past the self-pity that had come with her father’s perishing, it wasn’t so easy to rip apart humanity’s ticket to posterity. Supposing they would find a way out of the house at all, she also doubted her possible children’s chances of surviving to maturity, and what then? Indoctrinate them into thinking it was mandatory to have kids?
It hardly helped her reluctance to get romantic with this man, who would likely not return the favor, that she had to admit his pursuit of everlasting life wasn’t frivolous. Indeed, it was the only sane way to sustain a race endangered by the slavish ambitions of its creations. This was his appeal – his capability, clear view of his world, and confident pursuit of a dream even when staring down a planet filled with more cold hostility than anything humanity had faced yet.
She tried to open all the doors and windows the ground story of the house featured, but there was no mistaking that she was trapped in here with Uriah.
The couch called to her, in all its warm, deep blue, velvety glory.
Sabrina noticed that he’d left his pack on it, and she would’ve left it alone if the belt he’d given her had not buzzed just as something dinged inside the pack. As it was, she glanced toward the bedroom door before diving in.
The high note had come from his multipurpose communicator. A symbol on its screen indicated the presence of a newly received video feed. Why would a robot …?
She couldn’t be certain an android had sent it, as the unhelpful source listed was “HS5300714,” but that was of little consequence. Reassured by the communicator’s automatic virus scan, which found no threat, she played the video at minimal volume.
The first clip showed a group of androids huddled inside a wrecked building, some of which were repairing it, the rest tending to an unconscious man that could only be Dennis Uriah. One robot was carrying out a human-voiced monologue, the most interesting phrase of which referred to “our little genocidal fella who shot more than he thought.”
Which struck her as the pinnacle of absurdity until she saw another clip. Uriah and a feminine bot she recognized as Jane were descending some stairs. “Told ya he was out of his mind, Jane,” he said. “There’s my alibi.”
Sabrina saw the object that had cast doubt on his statement just as soon as he did. The “camera” followed Uriah along the line of fire, bouncing off the EM reflector, to the enigmatic hemisphere.
It came to her with the suddenness of creative inspiration, but with more of a negative effect on her stomach than any Renaissance man’s insight.
“… who shot more than he thought.”
“There’s my alibi.”
“When I woke up, every human I saw was just … dead.”
“At least, not morally capable.”
Sabrina Lockhart just might have gotten herself locked in a house with a mass murderer.
INTERLUDE
ZUGZWANG
“Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”
–Aristotle