He glanced back to see what Med had sensed wirelessly: agents arriving, the ones who’d been chasing his old master. A man and a huge, armored bot from the property police. He turned back just once before he fled, and thought he saw Med transform into an avenging angel. Only she was better than an angel. She was real, made of carbon alloy and flesh, not feathers and faith. She’d saved him. Possibly she’d even saved the world.
John breathed shallowly, trying to make himself as soundless as the room. Nobody could hear him. He was safe. It wasn’t like last time; the agents were long gone. He held his breath for five serene seconds before the Yummy Pan made an irritated noise and he knew he should start making dinner.
He was scooping protein-flecked porridge into a bowl when Med opened the door. She looked like a textbook example of the absent-minded professor, blond hair perfectly pinned back and lab coat perfectly rumpled.
“How nice that you’re eating tissue from extinct amphibians.” Med could identify almost anything by smell, though she rarely mentioned it around humans. It made them too self-conscious, especially when they realized her abilities extended to smelling where they had been—and sometimes even their emotional states.
Still, for all her robot superpowers, Med couldn’t really master the art of sarcasm. Partly that was because she wasn’t a very sarcastic person, and partly because John always did something silly to undermine her deadpan cool.
“I love fake frog.” He took an exaggeratedly large bite. “Mmmm, the taste of synthetic biology.” He posed with the spoon and bowl next to his face, like the preternaturally cheerful kid in the ads for Yummy Pan. For some reason, it never failed to make Med grin. Her goofy expression hovered briefly over his memory of that long-ago divine fury, and John had to pull himself back sharply from giving a name to what she made him feel.
August 4, 2145
The library’s Media Experience Lab was the result of some big grant the university got back in the 2120s, and it hadn’t been updated since. The signs were all done in those old animated fonts that switched back and forth between puffy rainbow letters and classical serif typefaces. Foam chairs, once luxuriously padded and tricked out with knobs for adjusting everything to ergonomic perfection, were mashed into submission, stuck in awkward positions that only worked for really tall people or really short ones who wanted to sit bolt upright. Somebody had made the streaming cubicles out of fake recycled materials, so you could watch twenty-first century immersives while surrounded by biofibers imitating plastic imitating wood. John thought the saddest part of the whole retro setup—but also possibly the most adorable—was the dusty Innerfire cube, installed when everybody thought full-body experience implants were right around the corner. In all his months coming here, he had never seen anyone go inside.
John slid into his favorite booth next to the back wall. He could watch everyone coming in while also keeping an eye on his monitor, currently streaming a century-old comedy anime called Ouran High School Host Club. He liked the story, about a girl named Haruhi pretending to be a boy, learning all the bizarre things boys do to make themselves seem more attractive. Haruhi was so charming in her suit and tie that all the girls requested “him” at the host club. She had no choice but to keep up the charade, because she was a poor scholarship student at an elite high school, and she owed the other hosts money. John swept a few of the episodes onto his mobile, stashing them to show Med later as yet another example of weird human culture.
After two quarters auditing classes, John was going to matriculate as a freshman. It still didn’t feel real. The city franchise got you more than he ever imagined he’d have, back when he was slaved to the factory. Free education, free medical, free net connection, and freedom to live and work anywhere in the Saskatoon metropolitan area. A new implant that broadcast his new identity: John Chen, normal free boy from an exurb called Lucky Lake. No indenture record. No record at all, other than a secure enclave bioprocessor that verified his identity to the city co-op.
Out of the blankness of his digital past he’d made an entire imaginary history for himself, in case anyone asked. Homeschooled, he would say. Mostly worked on agricultural bot repair, keeping the sensors, planters, and harvesters updated with the latest patches and hardware tweaks. At twenty-one, he was older than average for a student, but he fit the profile of a farm kid whose family needed a little extra time to raise the credits for his Saskatoon franchise.
So far, nobody had questioned this story. In fact, the most awkward moment he’d had was when Michael wondered about the brand that contained his slave name: Threezed, for the last two numbers in the sequence.
John should have gotten the scars smoothed out a long time ago. But he wasn’t ready to lose the familiar sting of seeing those numbers in the mirror when everything else was so different. Nothing had been normal for three years, after the factory sent the whole indenture class across the Pacific. Supposedly they had maintenance positions waiting for them on the Vancouver docks. The motors they’d been assembling back in the Nine Cities Delta were used in all kinds of industrial bots, so it made sense. But when they arrived, it turned out the contracts had fallen through in a way that only made sense to bureaucrats. John and his classmates were confiscated by the Free Trade Zone Port Authority, then confiscated again by Vancouver’s child welfare agency. In practice, this meant they spent a few months sleeping in familiar-looking dormitories where they tried to perfect their northern Free Trade Zone English accents.
For probably the fiftieth time, one of the hosts in Ouran High School Host Club was reminding Haruhi that she was low class. She’d brought instant coffee to their elite party, and the rich kids were physically repulsed. They’d never had anything but whole beans ground by indentured servants. John loved the exaggerated faces they made, their features growing bulbous and abstract as they squealed in dismay. Haruhi shrugged it off, but John thought the audience was supposed to understand that her feelings were hurt too.
A new librarian came in and sat behind the help desk. Her presence activated a sign overhead in that absurdly morphing font: “Yes, I’m an actual human! Ask me anything!” John imagined what Med would say to that. Just a little anti-bot sentiment, brought to you by some designer in the 2120s. Not the librarian’s fault. John noticed that she had two thick black braids and her eyes were slightly distorted by a pair of goggles made to look like twenty-first century glasses. Something about her looked familiar. Maybe she’d been in one of his classes?
He kept watching the stream in his cubicle until it was almost closing time.
“Do you want to check that out?” The librarian peeked over the top of his cubicle. “I have to start shutting the workstations down.” Then she glanced at him again. “Weren’t you in Social Media History with me?”
“Yeah. What did you think of that class?”
“I loved it. I’m actually doing a research project with that professor about anti-robot representations in the late twenty-first century. So much video from that time was basically anti-automation propaganda, designed to make humans fear bots. It’s so weird to look back on all this old media and see how it’s still affecting us now.”
“Like that sign.” He pointed over her desk.
“Exactly!” She grinned.
He liked the way she described struggles in the past as if they were still happening, unfolding at some layer of reality just beyond conscious perception. They started talking about what classes they’d be taking next term.
He was about to escalate into flirtation when a man raced into the library, out of breath. He ignored John and put a hand on the librarian’s arm. “Can you find me some videos of people playing games in the twentieth century? I really need them for tomorrow.”