Today, he feeds me slivers of meat, bits of apple, some potato.
“I won’t let them take you,” he says. “I’ve heard of a place …”
“There is no place,” I tell him.
“Not in here,” he says. “Out.”
This place is all I know. I’ve never even been in the corridors! Out? Out? Where?
My father had the means to use the DNA of Elliot V. Gray to begin a new life with those three hairs, but re-creating his father would require more courage and deceit and theft. He had the authority to create a model number and pass it into production. Elliot V. Gray had to seem like another experiment. Melville had to invent the idea of an extra formula uploaded into his operating system. He then had to use one of the three hairs to begin the process. He tinkered, yes, and hoped for the DNA to take root and bloom before his eyes.
It did!
A multiplication of cells. Viable. He gave it the coding number 72183. He’d thought that if I made it to a full-term existence he would name me Elliot V. Gray, but then, no. It would be too confusing to have two of us. And so he named me—in his unspoken heart—Huck, after a Classic of Human Literature, a boy with a friend on a raft, and sent number 72183 on to production.
From there, he would lose track of the process for a while. He’d have to rely on faith, which flitted like something feathery within his operating system.
After the right incubation period, he had to ask William, the only one with access to other branches of the Human Wing, for an update.
“Did number 72183 progress to full realization?” he asked him one evening in the housing unit. Melville was soldering together a metal box lined with cardboard and packing filler to a warming unit. When asked why, he simply told them that he felt a granule in his head, something that felt like a seed that could grow if given the right circumstances, and he was fairly sure that it was imagination. He needed to create this object for no other reason than this granule.
William, like the others, was already seated and plugged into his power source. He scanned the records in his operating system and said, “Affirmative.”
“He’s real!” Melville said, thinking of his father, Elliot V. Gray, alive again. And, at this point, Melville thought he was making someone who would take care of him. (Maybe this is what soon-to-be-a-father humans think too. I don’t know.) All I’m sure of is that Melville had little concept of raising children. The notion was foreign. He himself had never been raised. And so he said, “A baby!” with the slightest hint of confusion in his voice.
“Of course a baby. They all become babies,” Eudora said. “What else?”
“A walrus?” F. said. He often spoke fondly of some tension in his face that made him desire comedics.
But no, I wasn’t a walrus. I was a baby, and Melville would now have to steal me.
The others have been taken, one by one. And I ask through the grate, “Where are they? I miss them. I’m scared.”
“They are being interrogated.”
“Why didn’t they take you in to be interrogated?”
My father isn’t good at lying. “It’s unclear, but I believe they want me to hand you over myself. This would prove the greatest loyalty, they would gain a human for their stock, and they wouldn’t have to then dismantle me.”
“Dismantle you? But you re-created your creator. I am Elliot V. Gray. You have done something good that they’ll understand one day. You said that they will love me. You said that you’ll show me to them!” Sometimes my father gave little speeches about unveiling me to them. He thought we would both get medallions.
“I was suffering hope,” he says. “It crimps my throat.”
And now I feel my own throat crimping, but it’s not hope. There are many emotions all at once. “They can’t dismantle you. Not because of me!”
“I am not handing you over.” He runs his fingers down the grate—clickety, clickety, clickety. “I will not.”
It’s night. The robots must power up in full force, so the lighting systems begin to dim. “I’m taking you now,” he says, and his fingers begin to unscrew the bolts on the vent.
This is how I was stolen: At night during the power surge and the dimming of the lights, Melville slipped through the corridors to the Human Wing. He passed the small lab and walked on and on and on until he heard squalling. He followed the squalling until he came to a lab of incubated babies, all in clear glass containers with air holes—much like the glass cabinet where he had found Elliot V. Gray in the Archives, only each was much, much smaller.
There were no robots around. He could quickly tell that the incubators were self-sufficient. Some of the babies were being swaddled and rocked by the incubators. Bottle nipples were fixed to the edges of the incubators, much like those for lab rats, but lowered and raised to time feedings—or else, Melville thought, perhaps human infants would founder. There were faces of women that appeared on small screens on either side of the incubators. They smiled and batted their eyes. They gazed in a way that Melville recognized as lovingly.
He walked the rows and found number 72183. Me. Elliot V. Gray brought back from the dead. Once again, he found a latch with his fingers, pressed it, and a lid popped open.
He was astonished by my fleshiness, my rubbery texture, the strange etching of veins, the wetness of my mouth and eyes, my rising and falling ribs, and the odd pulsing atop my head. He wrapped me up snugly. And he whispered, “Daddy,” into the warm, humid air.
Corridors! I’ve heard of them all my life and now I see them with my own eyes! Yes, there is the dimming, dimming, and it’s harder for me to see than it is for my father who was created with night vision in place, but I can feel the wall against my hand, feel the strange flooring under my handmade shoes. I am almost as tall as my father’s shoulder now. He’s holding my hand tightly.
“What is ‘out’ like?” I whisper, as we pass door after door with their small rectangular windows. “Will it be like two friends on a raft going down a river?”
He stops and says, “I cannot go with you. You will go alone. Do you understand?”
I suck in my breath. This is a gasp. I’ve been told during my aunts’ and uncles’ summations of the Classics of Human Literature that people gasp. Sometimes their hearts thud—sometimes for love and sometimes for fear. My heart was thudding. “I understand,” I tell him, but I don’t.
He takes me to a flight of stairs marked Emergency! Emergency Only! His metal heels clang against each metal step.
I say, “Will it be an adventure at sea? Will there be wolves? Will there be a tornado? And will I come home again?”
“I do not know how it will be.”
“You always know how it will be.”
“Not this time.”
And then I smell the rot. I know where we’re headed. The stocks.
“Not the stocks! You said …”
“Not the stocks,” he says. “Through them. Out.”
He comes to a door. A robot stands guard, heavily armed. My father says, “This is Elliot V. Gray.”
The guard is a 117. He must be. It’s clear he’s expected us but is still a little surprised we actually showed up. He looks at my father and at me and seems to be feeling something. He opens the door and says nothing.
There is a hall, close walls, the sound of water dripping, dripping far off. There are cells on either side. Humans are pressed in close. Arms, legs, skin, and teeth. Humans, like me. Eyes like mine, hungry and wet and quick. They reach out. They mutter. They terrify me—with their smells and their pawing and their need and their contorted faces and their unwieldy movements.
One calls, “Boy! Boy!”
And I say, “Yes! Yes, I am.” And for the first time, I am human. I’m one of them. I’m a boy. I’m not an invention. I’m real.
Melville roused the rest of the five when he got back to the housing unit. He was holding a human infant. They were startled. They said, “Melville, where did this child come from?”
He said, ?
??I made him and I stole him. He is good!”
They stared at him, unable to speak.
“Do you understand what I’ve done?” he asked them.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” Eudora said, flapping her arms angrily.
“Wait,” William said, always thinking. “Is this baby number 72183? Is that why you asked about its viability?”
Melville nodded and started to explain, but F. cut him off.
“A baby!” F. said, coming up close to my being. “A human baby!”
Woolf said, “I’ve never really fully understood what we were making in those petri dishes!” He picked up my ankle and showed the others my foot. “What precision! Look at the tiny little lines!”
“Why does its head pulse like that?” James said, suspiciously.
“Because it’s truly alive,” Melville told them. “And the baby is ours in more ways than one.”
“What do you mean?” William said.
“It is our honor and privilege, it is our duty and responsibility to raise this child because this child was made in the image of our creator. This child was made with the DNA of Elliot V. Gray, inventor of models 114–121. This is our father! And our child! In one! And we will call him Huck.”
I’ve been told this story a thousand times. And this is the part I like most: they gathered close, one by one, with solemn adulation, and quiet but abiding joy.
We come to the end of the hall, which veers to the left. There is a sign that reads Laundry and we follow its arrow.
And there at the end of the hall, before two double doors, is a human who is not in a cell. He looks at me, shocked. He says, “My God, really? How, Melville, how? He’s grown. How did you do it?”
I know how. Day by day, my aunties and uncles and Melville cared for me, preening me. They taught me walking and talking. And I taught them, day by day, how human emotions work in real time. My surprise, joy, anger, insolence, the depth of my sadness; the way, after a time, I felt caged and wronged. “Humans are animals,” Melville tried to explain to them. “They need air and light and other humans.” But he couldn’t give this to me.
Instead he built a chamber and I would lie down inside and he would program it, as best he could, to mimic the settings in the Classics of Human Literature—night skies pierced by a castle spire, dark forests, the Mississippi River, the prow of a ship in the middle of the sea.
He couldn’t create other humans, though he tried. And so William made me little bots to have as friends; he was good at this. F. gave me papers and inks because humans need to create. Eudora told me to act out the Classics of Human Literature because she’s heard that humans learn by reenacting. Woolf gave me a box covered with taut strings to strum because humans need music. She taught me to sing. And James, well, James warned me of the dangers of the world. He wanted me to know fear.
And I do, James. I know fear well. I feel it now.
“I cannot tell you how it was done, not now,” my father says. “Can you get him out?”
The man nods. He says, “This way.”
And there are big white machines in rows and giant tubs and sheets strung on lines, billowing like ship sails, and gusts of steam. Other humans are working, working. Curled backbones like rows of bulbous knots. (Is that what my backbone looks like?) And moist faces. And muscled arms. Coughing, coughing. They steal glances, but know not to look for too long.
I grip my father’s hand, passing piles of the clothes that I have worn all my life—stolen from this place?
When we get to the far end of the room, the man says, “I’m Ed.” He shakes my hand.
“I’m Huck,” I say.
He glances at Melville, then back to me. “Huck?” he says, his eyebrows raised the way I know I raise my own eyebrows sometimes. He’s surprised.
My father nods.
“Okay then,” Ed says. And he pulls out one of the big white machines, yanking it back and forth and back and forth. Behind it, there’s a hole in a wall that leads to a dirt tube.
“A tunnel,” Melville says. “You’ll climb through it until you are out.”
“But you haven’t told me what’s out there yet,” I say.
Ed says, “You’ll know when you get there.”
And I’m not sure what to say. I turn to my father. “They won’t dismantle you for this, will they?”
But he’ll never be good at lying. He looks at his hands. They tremble with anger. He puts one hand on his chest cavity and one on my heart. His metal is damp from the humid air, and I swear I can feel the drumming of his heart now. His ribs cinch with fear. He starts to speak, but his voice is cut off—longing in his throat. He tries to clear it with a cough. But finally, he can only manage a rough whisper. He says, “They will probably dismantle me, but you gave me life. And you will live on, my son, so therefore I will too.”
And this is true. Without me, Elliot V. Gray, my father would never have been invented, and without him I would never have existed. There is no difference between father and son and son and father. Right now, I feel the pain and clenching and drumming of love and fear and longing coursing through my entire body—the ache of it coming to a knot in my chest. I say, “I love you.”
And he says, “I love you, too, Huck.” And then he says, “Go on.”
But Ed turns to him and says, “What if you went with him, Melville?”
“But I can’t survive out there. I’m not meant to—” He stops speaking and shakes his head.
“You won’t survive in here either. Go quickly,” Ed says. “Just go.”
I climb into the hole first, and then I hear Melville’s aged, creaking parts as he climbs in after me—Melville, my father, my dear son—and we’re about to be born into a different world. This is not The End.
Together we start crawling toward light.
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
SLEEPOVER
Alastair Reynolds is the author of the Revelation Space series, which includes the novels Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and The Prefect. Other novels include Century Rain, Terminal World, Pushing Ice, and House of Suns. His latest novels are On the Steel Breeze, the second in the Poseidon’s Children trilogy, and Doctor Who: Harvest of Time.
They brought Gaunt out of hibernation on a blustery day in early spring. He came to consciousness in a steel-framed bed in a gray-walled room that had the economical look of something assembled in a hurry from prefabricated parts. Two people were standing at the foot of the bed, looking only moderately interested in his plight. One of them was a man, cradling a bowl of something and spooning quantities of it into his mouth, as if he were eating his breakfast on the run. He had cropped white hair and the leathery complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outside. Next to him was a woman with longer hair, graying rather than white, and with much darker skin. Like the man, she was wiry of build and dressed in crumpled gray overalls, with a heavy equipment belt dangling from her hips.
“You in one piece, Gaunt?” she asked, while her companion spooned in another mouthful of his breakfast. “You compos mentis?”
Gaunt squinted against the brightness of the room’s lighting, momentarily adrift from his memories.
“Where am I?’ ” he asked. His voice came out raw, as if he had been in a loud bar the night before.
“In a room, being woken up,” the woman said. “You remember going under, right?”
He grasped for memories, something specific to hold on to. Green-gowned doctors in a clean surgical theater, his hand signing the last of the release forms before they plumbed him into the machines. The drugs flooding his system, the utter absence of sadness or longing as he bid farewell to the old world, with all its vague disappointments.
“I think so.”
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“Gaunt.” He had to wait a moment for the rest of it to come. “Marcus Gaunt.”
“Good,” he said, smearing a hand across his lips. “That’s a positive sign.” br />
“I’m Clausen,” the woman said. “This is Da Silva. We’re your wake-up team. You remember Sleepover?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Think hard, Gaunt,” she said. “It won’t cost us anything to put you back under if you don’t think you’re going to work out for us.”
Something in Clausen’s tone convinced him to work hard at retrieving the memory. “The company,” he said. “Sleepover was the company. The one that put me under. The one that put everyone under.”
“Brain cells haven’t mushed on us,” Da Silva said.
Clausen nodded, but showed nothing in the way of jubilation in his having got the answer right. It was more that he’d spared the two of them a minor chore, that was all. “I like the way he says ‘everyone.’ Like it was universal.”
“Wasn’t it?” Da Silva asked.
“Not for him. Gaunt was one of the first under. Didn’t you read his file?”
Da Silva grimaced. “Sorry. Got sidetracked.”
“He was one of the first two hundred thousand,” Clausen said. “The ultimate exclusive club. What did you call yourselves, Gaunt?”
“The Few,” he said. “It was an accurate description. What else were we going to call ourselves?”
“Lucky sons of bitches,” Clausen said.
“Do you remember the year you went under?” Da Silva asked. “You were one of the early ones, it must’ve been sometime near the middle of the century.”
“Twenty fifty-eight. I can tell you the exact month and day if you wish. Maybe not the time of day.”
“You remember why you went under, of course,” Clausen said.
“Because I could,” Gaunt said. “Because anyone in my position would have done the same. The world was getting better, it was coming out of the trough. But it wasn’t there yet. And the doctors kept telling us that the immortality breakthrough was just around the corner, year after year. Always just out of reach. Just hang in there, they said. But we were all getting older. Then the doctors said that while they couldn’t give us eternal life just yet, they could give us the means to skip over the years until it happened.” Gaunt forced himself to sit up in the bed, strength returning to his limbs even as he grew angrier at the sense that he was not being treated with sufficient deference, that—worse—he was being judged. “There was nothing evil in what we did. We didn’t hurt anyone or take anything away from anyone else. We just used the means at our disposal to access what was coming to us anyway.”