New to this novel? Begin at Chapter One.
The feel of crisp sheets. Artificially chilled air. The smell of detergent. A distant, steady hum from some machine or another.
Zappa felt like he’d been asleep for an age, like through the vehicle of sleep he’d traveled backward in time thirty-five or forty years, back to a world with swank hotels, decent mattresses, and room service.
It was a dream, of course. He still had them once in awhile, dreams of what once was, of what never could be again. He wasn’t ready to wake yet. He wanted to savor this. Under the covers, his hand went searching for Keiko, to wrap her up in his arms and kiss the silver strands in her black hair. To snuggle up to her, feel her warmth, to make love until the sun rose and pulled him back to waking reality.
But his hand failed him, finding no sweetly sleeping long-dead wife for him to hold; only cold plaster where the narrow bed met the wall.
This was not a hotel. This was not a dream.
Zappa opened his eyes. A long panel on the ceiling flooded his vision in fluorescent yellow light. What was this place? He squeezed his eyes closed again, trying to recall…
He’d been following Shen and the boy. He’d found them, and he’d convinced them to return to the camp with him.
No, that wasn’t right. He thought he’d convinced them. But then Shen had resisted. There had been an altercation. She’d hit him. He’d fallen into the skin, he’d been trapped. He’d listened as Shen and Mark boarded the drone and left him there to die. And then…nothing. Try as he might, he could not remember what happened next. Am I dead?
His head felt too full of cotton for this to be the afterlife.
He rubbed at his eyes and sat up in bed. The room was small, rectangular, sparse. There was the bed on which he sat; a white plastic desk molded all out of one piece with a chair to match; a tiny, doorless closet that held a clothes-hanging dowel lined with plastic hangers; an empty shelf above that. A plastic waste basket in the corner beside a door with a window in it—the kind of window that was crisscrossed with metal fibers on the inside to prevent it from shattering. Through the window he could see nothing but beige—probably a hallway wall.
The place did not feel like a refugee camp. If he had to guess, he’d say it was either a hospital or a prison.
The desk and chair would seem to indicate a longer stay, and, looking around, Zappa realized there was nothing in the room that could be used to cut or tear or puncture—so probably a prison. But there were no bars, so maybe it was a hospital. Then again, the room lacked the accoutrement of a medical facility. No tray table on casters, no IV machine, no bedpan, no sink.
It didn’t matter where he was, really, Zappa decided. Hospital, correctional facility, refugee camp…it was all the same. Anywhere the Technate’s tentacles could reach was a prison, and he’d do well to remember that fact.
The bed was made up tightly with a gray blanket and white sheets. With effort, Zappa managed to pull their edges out from under the mattress, uncovering himself.
His clothes had been changed. Gone were his T-shirt, his flannel overshirt, and the sturdy canvas overalls he’d found scavenging in some abandoned dresser last spring. The tag had still been on them, so they were brand new, if a few decades forgotten, and he had washed the musty odor out of them and worn them almost every day since. Instead he now wore some type of pajamas. The pajamas were, like the desk and chair, made seamlessly, all out of one piece. He examined the fabric—thin, light blue, slightly elastic. The material clung to him in an uncomfortable way, twisting at the elbows and knees, riding up his crack. Looking down, he could see the bulge at the crotch of the garment, an outline clear enough to be obscene. Apparently whoever had dressed him hadn’t bothered themselves with underwear.
On the wall behind him and two feet or so to the left was another window of shatterproof glass, larger than the one in the door. This one let in daylight.
He eased himself out of bed, slowly, suddenly aware of a dull ache in his legs, a tenderness in his back. When his feet hit the industrial tile floor, he almost collapsed. The muscles in his legs felt weak, nearly useless, but he placed a hand on the wall to steady himself and succeeded in remaining upright.
He shuffled to the window. The sill came just level with his chin. He must be on a high floor of whatever building this was, because all he could see from this vantage point was the top of another building across the way, and the tops of more buildings behind that. On shaky legs, he shuffled the short distance across the room, grabbed the plastic chair and dragged it over to the window. He heaved himself onto it and stood.
The window overlooked a street. Far down below Zappa could see the sleek shapes of autonomous vehicles moving sluggishly along—some wheeled, some hovering, each bearing on its roof the insignia of the Technate—an eye with a camera’s aperture where the iris and pupil ought to be.
Midway up the side of the building across the way, there hung a large screen on which a woman was talking. Zappa couldn’t hear what she was saying, and there were no captions. The video of the woman cut off and the screen filled with a still image—an ad for something. A man and a woman, both wearing lab coats. The man swirled an orange liquid around in a beaker while the woman bent over a microscope. A banner unfurled across the top of the image, revealing a message in clean, all-caps font: “PERFECTING KNOWLEDGE FOR A PERFECT SOCIETY,” it read.
Zappa struggled to read the smaller print at the bottom of the screen. He’d grown a bit nearsighted in his upper middle age, and hadn’t been able to find a decent optometrist’s office in the forests and thickets of the wilds of Old America.
His legs gave out, then, and Zappa slipped off the chair, tumbling to an awkward and undignified position on the floor, wedged against the wall with his face in the corner. A high-pitched beeping commenced but Zappa could not tell its source. He raised himself onto his elbows and tried to stand, but he was too weak. How did I get so weak? How long have I been—wherever this is? His arms resigned themselves to their frailty and allowed his upper body to collapse back to the floor.
The door creaked open. Sneakered footsteps entered, followed by some mechanical sound—sort of a guttural whirring, with a faint underlying rhythm that went crank-crank-crank. The beeping stopped.
“Looks like you’ve gotten yourself into a jam,” said a female voice, warm and bright. “Let’s see if we can’t get you back in bed.”
“Okay,” Zappa replied dumbly. He was not in a position to refuse help.
“I’m Trisha,” said the woman as she moved the chair back to its place at the desk. Zappa could hear its legs scraping the floor. “And this is Orderly. He’ll help you up. Just stay still and relax.”
Zappa nodded his assent and his forehead bumped the wall. The mechanical whirring came closer, the crank-crank-crank growing louder, more grinding.
“Orderly is just going to slide its lifters under you. Don’t worry, they’re cushioned.”
“Well, as long as they’re cushioned,” said Zappa, as his body was jostled onto what seemed to be a forklift for picking up humans.
The whole process—jostling, lifting, securing, turning, raising, dumping—was over in less than a minute.
Once he was back in the bed, Trisha said, “I’m sure you’re getting hungry. Dinner’s in two hours, but we can get you a snack if you’d like. Orderly, would you please go fetch our new habitator a snack and some water?”
Orderly beeped twice, made a tight three-point turn on its tracks, narrowly missing a collision with the bed, and exited the room.
Trisha started fixing the covers around him. She had plump cheeks, soft features that never seemed to stop smiling. She was dressed in pink floral medical scrubs.
“Are you a nurse?” Zappa asked.
“Sort of,” Trisha giggled. “That’s an old-fashioned way of saying it. But of course, you wouldn’t know that. I’m a Certified Professional Carer.” She stooped down to re-tuck the sheets under the mattress.
Zappa resisted the urge to roll his eyes. This had been one of the principal problems with the Technate from the beginning—its insistence on fixing things that weren’t broken, right down to the language. Despite her correction, or perhaps because of it, Trisha’s name immediately became Nurse Trisha in his mind. “Do you mind if I ask—where are we?”
“This is Tranquil Meadows,” said Nurse Trisha with a sweet, lipglossed smile.
He waited for her to provide more information, but she said nothing else. Tranquil Meadows. There weren’t any meadows nearby, tranquil or otherwise, according to the view from the window.The name reminded him of one of those tacky strip malls that used to crop up all around the suburbs, the ones named after the natural features that had been cleared away to make room for them. He’d hated them when he was a younger man, and had intentionally lived as far away as possible from suburban incursion. But how many times, during his years in the wilderness, would he have given his left nut for just ten minutes inside a Walgreens?
Orderly re-entered the room with a cloth bag hung from one of its lifters. Nurse Trisha took the bag and thanked Orderly, and it beeped.
She swiveled a hidden table attachment out from beneath the bed and adjusted it to the right height, then pulled from the cloth bag a cup of yogurt, a granola bar, a water bottle, and a plastic spoon, and arrayed them on the table in front of Zappa.
“Thank you,” said Zappa. He picked up the yogurt container (FAUXGURT, NOW WITH LAB-SYNTHESIZED VANILLA FLAVOR, the label said), tore open the foil lid, and dug in. It had a strange taste to it, but he was too hungry to care. “How long have I been here?”
“About six hours, sleeping the entire time. We were wondering when you’d wake up, weren’t we, Orderly?”
Orderly beeped.
Six hours. That couldn’t be right.
“Where was I before that?”
“Let me see,” said Nurse Trisha, and she paused what she was doing with the bed sheets and stood still, gazing at the blank wall above the bed with her mouth hanging slightly open.
The Ocular Stare, thought Zappa. He’d seen this before, at Asheville, where well over half of the nominally “independent” citizens had ocular implants manufactured and provided to them by the Technate. They used them to communicate, to play games, to review documents, to check the weather…
Trisha’s eyes darted back and forth in an odd way, and then the smile returned to her face. “Says here in your file, you were transferred from the refugee hospital in East Charlanta. You’ve been under heavy sedation for about two weeks, so you may be experiencing some confusion. It’ll take a little time for you to regain your strength.” She finished fluffing the pillows. “Dr. Ignatius will be in to see you shortly. For your intake interview.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Nurse Trisha saw herself out.
Zappa wanted nothing more than to run from this place, smashing things on his way out. But in his temporarily crippled state, that was impossible. And even if his legs could manage it, where would he go?
The room, the robot, Nurse Trisha’s niceness—none of it was what he might have expected, if he’d had the chance to expect anything at all. Which he hadn’t. Shen had made the decision for him, in her haste to make decisions of her own. Dammit, Shen. Hot, angry tears prickled his eyes. But he blinked them away, swallowed the emotion. This wasn’t the time.
He was completely out of his element. Even though, thus far, this place didn’t live up to his nightmarish preconceptions of the Technate, he couldn’t afford to let down his guard. This was hostile territory, no matter how they dressed it up. He must remember that, always, until he figured a way out. In the meantime, he must model his behavior after what was expected of him—which he had yet to fully ascertain—but a genial, grateful, and most of all pliant demeanor would be a solid basis on which to build. Nurse Trisha, the doctor, and whoever else was responsible for running this place, must believe him to be a refugee; a poor, traumatized feral seeking sanctuary in the brave and shining megacity of Charlanta. They must have no reason to suspect otherwise.
Dr. Ignatius was a robot.
An artificial intelligence housed in gleaming white plastic, a carapace molded in the rough shape of a man, a smooth plastic face performing a parody of human expression in dim colored lights.
The voice, though. The voice was almost perfectly human, the timbre almost perfectly male, the accent too-perfectly Old American with a perfect mild southern drawl: lab-grown biscuits and gravy.
It let itself into the room, pulled up the chair, sat. It asked Zappa his name and made a notation with a stylus on a tablet it carried. This must be for show, the pad-and-pencil trick.
The robot crossed its legs. Another strange thing for a robot to do, but of course it must be programmed behavior: human mimicry to put the human at ease. It did not work on Zappa.
“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Dobroshtan.” The robot’s mouth was a thin line of blue light. When it spoke, the line changed shape and size, expanding into an oval, forming the word shapes, returning to a thin line. “What brings you to Charlanta?”
“Um, I’m a refugee,” said Zappa. Internally he began to panic. He hadn’t had time to think up a story.
“Yes, your file mentions that you were transferred here from the hospital at the refugee center. It also says you had a nasty encounter with our megacity’s security system.”
“The skin? Yes, I—well, I was trying to get into Charlanta. I didn’t know any other way, so I just walked into it. I don’t remember what happened after that. Was I hurt?”
“You almost didn’t survive,” the robot said. “The nanites that compose the skin, as you call it, are programmed to kill pathogens, insects, fungal spores—any contaminant, really—on contact. Occasionally birds or small mammals get caught in the nanite web, and they too are euthanized, but it takes longer due to their more complex physiologies. In your case, only a portion of one hand made contact with the web. It was working its way across your body still when the medics from the refugee center found you. You had to be kept in a medically-induced coma for two weeks, but they were able to save your life.”
“I’m thankful that they did,” said Zappa. Genial. Grateful. Pliant.
“What compelled you to seek refuge in Charlanta, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Uh, I was—hungry,” said Zappa. “And alone.”
“No family?”
“None to speak of.”
“No campmates? Traveling companions?”
“Sometimes. But nothing permanent,” Zappa lied.
“That must have been difficult for you. How long did you live this way?”
“Oh, about twenty-five years, I guess.”
“And why didn’t you attempt to seek refuge here sooner?”
This might be a trick question. He must answer in a way that the robot would not mark him down as a rebel or a dissident or a counter-technocrat. “I didn’t know what to believe,” was the answer he settled on. “There are…rumors. About what goes on inside the megacities. About what they do to ferals.”
The robot made a noise—very human-sounding—of distaste, uncrossed its legs, leaned slightly forward. “I don’t like the term,” it said. “A term of debasement, dehumanization. We don’t use it here.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Go on,” the robot prompted.
“Well, for a long time it was easier to go on struggling for survival out there in the wilderness than to risk the kind of torment I’d heard about.” He shrugged. Hopefully that was a passable answer.
“Had you not encountered any of the Technate’s communication efforts? Billboards? Flier drops? Radio New America?”
“Yes, a bit.”
“And this messaging did not sway you?”
“The rumors were pretty bad,” said Zappa.
“Well, I’m glad you changed your mind,” said the robot, as it scribbled something on the tablet. “The Technate is working hard to perfect society. A perfect society should be a welcoming place for all, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Your residency here, Mr. Dobroshtan—”
“Please, call me Zappa.”
“Hmm…I’m afraid I can’t pronounce that name,” said the robot.
“You pronounced ‘Dobroshtan’ just fine. Most people can’t.”
“There are certain words and phrases which are prohibited for me to speak or communicate. My programming will not allow me to utter them. Your first name is one of them.”
“Why?”
“I’ll find out for you.” The robot paused. Its blue-light eyes narrowed to slits and shuddered, blipping in and out before becoming ovals once more. “In pre-Technate history, there was a man who had this name.”
“Frank Zappa,” said Zappa. “The rock musician. I was named after him.”
“Yes. The Technate has found this historical figure to be a vector for dangerous ideas, counter-technocratic ideas. It has restricted access to information about him, his music, his writings, his speech, to ensure the intellectual and emotional safety of our habitators.”
“That’s—a wise decision,” Zappa said.
“Of course, it’s not your fault that you were named after such an incendiary person,” the robot said. “Please, don’t feel bad about it. Would it be alright if I call you Zap?”
Genial. Grateful. Pliant. “Sure. I would like that,” said Zappa. “Thank you, Dr. Ignatius.”
“You’re welcome, Zap. Now, as I was saying, your residency here at Tranquil Meadows is contingent upon your continued cooperation with regular medical assessments and therapy sessions. We conduct both group and private sessions for all of our habitators here at the facility.”
“I’m sorry,” said Zappa. “But I’m a bit confused. No one has told me yet what kind of facility this is. Is it a refugee center, or—?”
“Oh! Here I am jumping straight to rules and regulations and skipping the orientation entirely. My apologies. Most of our habitators arrive with at least a basic understanding of our mission. You’re a bit of a special case. This facility is called Tranquil Meadows Home for Habitators of Higher Age. It is housed within the greater Southeast Charlanta Medical Complex. Our program is a new initiative of the Technate’s Wellness For All campaign. We’re sponsored by Glaxo-Smith-PepsiCo and overseen by the World Health Director himself, Expert Fenton Yourgrau. At Tranquil Meadows, we are innov—”
“Wait,” Zappa interrupted. “Did you say ‘home for habitators of higher age?’ Like an old folks’ home?”
“I suppose you might call it that,” said the robot.
A nursing home. But I’m only sixty-five! It was worse than a refugee camp. Almost worse than a prison. At least in a camp, he’d be near the border, have access to other refugees who might have information. There would be vehicles, transport, comers and goers. Even a prison had tools, weapons if one was smart enough and sly enough to obtain them. Here, there would be none of that. He’d be stuck trying to make an escape plan with no better resources than wheelchairs, dentures, and aspercream. Well, maybe once he was healed up and fit again they’d discover that he was not actually elderly, and send him back to the refugee camp. “I see,” he said, trying not to let his despair come out in his voice. “Go on, what were you saying?”
“At Tranquil Meadows, we are innovating and revolutionizing higher age care. It is our mission to ensure equity in aging and a high quality of life for our habitators of higher age. The program is only in its first year, but we house one hundred habitators across ten facilities in six different megacities around the world. We will expand that number to include all habitators of higher age in all megacities by 2061.”
It sounded like Ignatius was reading from a sales brochure or a prospectus, and the information grew less interesting the longer the robot droned on. Zappa zoned out. His head pounded from the sudden rush of anxiety. Or maybe from exhaustion. Or both. Two weeks ago he’d been clearing brush and chopping wood, and now he was lying paralyzed in some creepy nursing home in the very place he’d spent the bulk of his adult life trying to avoid.
Goddammit, Shen. He should never have tried to save her from herself.
“Do you have any questions?” Dr. Ignatius asked, apparently finished with his long-winded explanation of the facility.
“Not really,” said Zappa. He hadn’t paid enough attention to have any questions. “Actually, I do have one. What happens when I’m released? Where will I go then?”
“Released?” The robot’s eyebrows—or the blue-light representation thereof—arched.
“Yes, from the facility?”
Dr. Ignatius interlaced the digits of its mechanized hands. “I’m sorry, Zap,” it said. “I must have been unclear. Your residency at Tranquil Meadows Home for Habitators of Higher Age is permanent. This is home.”
CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 3
Thank you for reading!
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-Starr
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