At this window, no one answered right away. But he heard the vibrations of a voice from the front of the apartment, so he lingered by the window for an extra few moments just in case. Finally a woman appeared, lines cutting deep around her eyes and around her mouth. She pinched her nose as she approached the fridge and answered someone Seb couldn’t hear. “Honey,” she said. “Mr. Sanchez said Choochoo wasn’t at school either. I don’t know what else to tell—”
She saw the blue rabbit hovering in the window, and her mouth fell open.
“Choochoo?” A little boy stood in the kitchen doorway, sunlight and wonder sparkling in his eyes. “Mama! He flew home?” Clouds slid over some of that delight. “He’s hurt.”
“I could fix him.” Seb’s voice sounded rusty in his own ears; the echo the microphone picked up from the transmitter sounded even worse. He must sound like a madman, an invisible friend speaking out of a toy-toting drone. The silence stretching out from the microphone hurt his ears worse than his voice had; he pressed on. “If you’d like. It’s no trouble. I could have him back to you later this afternoon.”
“Sweetheart . . .” the woman said. But whatever had prompted her reservations fled her. Her arm dropped to her side.
“Yes, please.” The boy nodded, bouncing his tight black curls. “And thank you.”
The drone moved out of the window, looped around the building, and slipped carefully in through Seb’s waiting window. He reached out for the rabbit before he let the drone land, and cradled it against his chest with both hands until its trembling stilled.
When the next month’s pension check arrived in his account, Seb made more orders. Another drone, a basic tripod bot on three wheels, more cameras, and microphones. More hookups. Each one plugged in felt like an eye long closed, reopening. Like a part of himself gone dark and newly awoken. He still hurt: the ghost of his storage compartments, the empty echo of his engines. But the hurt had compressed, taking up less of his attention. Taking up less of him.
There was a young couple with a new baby on the floor below him. He sent the tripod bot down the elevator and let it explain, in Seb’s rusty voice, to the bleary-eyed mother why it had come.
“You’re the one who fixed Choochoo,” she said, and Seb made the tripod bot nod. The woman sat down on the couch, too exhausted or shocked to object, while his robot prepared a bottle and rocked the baby gently, in the warm padded cradle Seb had built into its torso. The mother—Seb did not know her name and did not have the robot ask—fell asleep within two minutes of taking a seat. The robot used its manipulator arm to drape her with a blanket and retreated to the corner to rock the baby until it fell asleep. Then it lowered the child into a waiting bassinet and retreated silently out the door. Seb wondered if the woman would think it was all a strange dream when she woke in the morning.
The mother to whose child Seb had returned Choochoo had two older boys as well, school-age, and at her invitation, Seb would send down a smaller drone to occupy them while she prepared dinner or finished the work she brought home night after night. The middle child enjoyed riddles, the eldest conquered all the math puzzles Seb set before him, and the youngest, Choochoo in arms, liked Seb’s stories the best.
The elderly man in the corner apartment on the first floor probably should have been moved to assisted living by now. But he didn’t want to go, and Seb sent a pair of small, agile bots down twice a week to clean the kitchen and bathroom, and to assemble a full fridge’s worth of microwaveable meals from the man’s grocery deliveries.
The three twenty-somethings at the opposite corner of Seb’s floor shared a two-bedroom, but not cleaning duties or equal shares of the rent. Seb sent a small bot down to mediate the dispute until all three parties came away not happy but satisfied.
A few people slipped notes under his door, asking for distance and privacy. Seb complied, and ordered more components, which he delivered to those apartments. Blockers, blinders, to program swaths of darkness into his input. No visuals or sound, black spots on his brain. That was all right; the interiors of the fuel pods had been points unknown too, and no camera or microphone could have survived the intensity of the ConstDrive engines either. Constellations of need, bright beautiful points of light, danced in his brain. The splotches of darkness only made those lights more important, more urgent. There was still pain, but it was a dull ache, a limb compressed oddly into a new and strange shape, not severed entirely. Growing pains, not war wounds.
A full-time hobby. Seb placed more orders online, not for parts this time but for sleep-diversion stims.
Seb sat awake in a dark apartment. Dreams receded and hid in the shadowed corners of his new life.
Toilets to clean. Kitchen fan motors to repair. Babies to rock, children to teach, songs to learn and sing and share. Conversations beamed wirelessly from his apartment to this one or that: a safe, sterile distance. Too busy to think. Too busy to dream. He cruised through doctor appointments on autopilot. Sometimes, he forgot to take his medication. The extras built up, a pyramid of white and pastel tablets, beside the kiosk. A miniature tomb in which to store his unwanted sleep. No call for sleep now, none at all, not with tongues of electric fire singing through the neurodes up and down his spine.
Hallways to rewire. Dinner to make. Rent negotiations to conduct. Tears to dry. Couches to lift. Lives, so many of them, to reach out for, to collect, to hold close and warm and safe.
A molehill of pills that grew into a mountain.
Seb—
—dreamed of falling.
Needles of light prickled his eyes. His eyelids clung together, as if they pulled 5Gs apiece. He didn’t want to wake up.
He didn’t want to sleep.
From the next room, voices. In the cupboard, dishware scraped together, and the fridge door closed with a soft sucking sound. Seb rolled onto his elbow and felt a shock of pain as his empty neurodes came up out of the warm, clinging bedcovers. No wings, no engines. No nanny drones or helper bots. He folded in on himself and gasped for air, for connection. For a reason.
“He’s awake,” a man said from the doorway. A familiar voice. The music teacher who lived on Seb’s floor. “Let me move you, Dr. Freeman.”
Seb didn’t want to be moved, but the teacher wasn’t talking to him. He came into Seb’s room toting the telemed kiosk, and deposited it on the bureau. The doctor’s pale, serious face peeped down at Seb from the screen.
“Sebastian,” she said. Her voice dragged in Seb’s ears. “How did all this happen?”
It had started with the drone. “I wanted to fly again,” Seb croaked, but that wasn’t true—it sounded true, but the echoes rang hollow. It wasn’t the flying, there was no kind of doing at all that could have changed anything. It wasn’t about doing: it was about being, being more than, being bigger. Being a starship again, albeit one ever anchored to the earth. He tried to explain it in a way the doctor would understand, and when that felt too far to reach, he tried to explain it in a way that he could. The music teacher shifted in the doorway, as if he didn’t know whether to give Seb his space or lend him support. Before long, a woman with a baby strapped to her chest appeared behind him. Seb didn’t care: the words spilled out of him like sewage from a broken sanitation pipe. He spoke about having people to care for, having a purpose. Being needed. Being a part of something—being something that others could be part of.