hand.
'No!' Her voice rose, panic stirring the patterns that surrounded her. ' Stop them!'
'I can't.'
'Don't tell me that! You run everything! You built me, you bastard, you tell me you love me. They only use me! Stop them!'
Stavros blinked against stinging afterimages. 'It's like a light-switch, it's physical; I can't stop them from here -'
There was a third image, to go with the other two. Jean Goravec, struggling as the leash, the noose, went around her throat. Jean Goravec, bubbles bursting from her mouth as something dark and so very, very real dragged her back to the bottom of the ocean and buried her there.
The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he'd slipped into the system after she'd been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled child-monster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she'd had five seconds before.
Enough intelligence for what came next.
*
The room had been designed to minimize the chance of injury. There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.
That was enough.
The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed's leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting-
'Jeannie-'
- while Jean braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pushed.
Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.
And Stavros could only sit and watch, simultaneously stunned and unsurprised by that sheer ferocity. Not bad for a bleeding little lump. Barely even an animal…
It had taken almost twenty seconds overall. Odd that neither parent had tried to stop it. Maybe it was the absolute unexpected shock of it. Maybe Kim and Andrew Goravec, taken so utterly aback, hadn't had time to think.
Then again, maybe they'd had all the time they'd needed.
Now Andrew Goravec stood dumbly near the centre of the room, blinking bloody runnels from his eyes. An obscene rainshadow persisted on the wall behind him, white and spotless; the rest of the surface was crimson. Kim Goravec screamed at the ceiling, a bloody marionette collapsed in her arms. Its strings - string, rather, for a single strand of fiberop carries much more than the required bandwidth - lay on the floor like a gory boomslang, gobbets of flesh and hair quivering at one end.
Jean was back off the leash, according to the panel. Literally now as well as metaphorically. She wasn't talking to Stavros, though. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was catatonic. He didn't know which to hope for.
But either way, Jean didn't live over there anymore. All she'd left behind were the echoes and aftermath of a bloody, imperfect death. Contamination, really; the scene of some domestic crime. Stavros cut the links to the room, neatly excising the Goravecs and their slaughterhouse from his life.
He'd send a memo. Some local Terracon lackey could handle the cleanup.
The word peace floated through his mind, but he had no place to put it. He focused on a portrait of Jean, taken when she'd been eight months old. She'd been smiling; a happy and toothless baby smile, still all innocence and wonder.
There's a way, that infant puppet seemed to say. We can do anything, and nobody has to know-
The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they'd wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn't get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell - even normal children commit suicide now and then.
Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren't fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean - the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone - she wasn't easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.
Jean had never got the hang of that particular part of the real world. Contract law. Economics. It was all too arcane and absurd even for her flexible definition of reality. But that was what was going to kill her now, assuming that the mind had survived the trauma of the body. The monster wouldn't keep a program running if it didn't have to.
Of course, once Jean was off the leash she lived considerably faster than the real world. And bureaucracies… well, glacial applied sometimes, when they were in a hurry.
Jean's mind reflected precise simulations of real-world chromosomes, codes none-the-less real for having been built from electrons instead of carbon. She had her own kind of telomeres, which frayed. She had her own kind of synapses, which would wear out. Jean had been built to replace a human child, after all. And human children, eventually, age. They become adults, and then comes a day when they die.
Jean would do all these things, faster than any.
Stavros filed an incident report. He made quite sure to include a pair of facts that contradicted each other, and to leave three mandatory fields unfilled. The report would come back in a week or two, accompanied by demands for clarification. Then he would do it all again.
Freed from her body, and with a healthy increase in her clock-cycle priority, Jean could live a hundred-fifty subjective years in a month or two of real time. And in that whole century and a half, she'd never have to experience another nightmare.
Stavros smiled. It was time to see just what this baby could do, with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.
He just hoped he'd be able to keep her tail-lights in view.
Two Dreams on Trains by Elizabeth Bear
From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins and owns a pair of Acme cowboy boots.
The needle wore a path of dye and scab round and round Patience's left ring finger; sweltering heat adhered her to the mold-scarred chair. The hurt didn't bother her. It was pain with a future. She glanced past the scarrist's bare scalp, through the grimy window, holding her eyes open around the prickle of tears.
Behind the rain, she could pick out the jeweled running lamps of a massive spacelighter sliding through clouds, coming in soft toward the waterlogged sprawl of a spaceport named for Lake Pontchartrain. On a clear night she could have seen its train of cargo capsules streaming in harness behind. Patience bit her lip and looked away: not down at the needle, but across at a wall shaggy with peeling paint.
Lake Pontchartrain was only a name now, a salt-clotted estuary of the rising Gulf. But it persisted-like the hot bright colors of bougainvillea grown in wooden washpails beside doors, like the Mardi Gras floats that now floated for real-in the memory of New Orleanians, as grand a legacy as anything the underwater city could claim. Patience's hand lay open on the wooden chair arm as if waiting for a gift. She didn't look down and she didn't close her eyes as
