Another cabinet stood against the far wall. She walked to it, finding several ancient glass items, tiny sculptures in abstract shapes. The objects originally held in plastic frames, with shattered glass at their bases, had long since rotted away. She scanned these frames, finding one pushed to the far back of the shelf that still had its glass intact. Inside was an image of a man, woman, and child, all smiling, the sun streaming down on them. In the background was an ocean of sapphire. The occupants of the image beamed like the sun, looking happier than she’d ever seen anyone.
She picked it up, staring at their faces. She’d never seen a photo of someone so obviously from outside the city. The fact that they were with a child was even stranger. The only people who had contact with children in her city, New Atlantic, were the caregivers, and they didn’t single out any one child like this. They were efficient, trained, able to raise a physically healthy child. But this was very strange. She set the photograph back on the shelf.
Leaving the room, she resumed her walk down the corridor. A set of stairs climbed up. She passed them and entered the last room on the left. She walked inside, finding a huge bed, bigger than any she’d ever seen. But it was mildewed and ruined, the covers black with mold and the mattress decayed, springs emerging through tears in the fabric.
The ceiling had held up well in this room. Cabinets lined one wall, and she opened them one by one. Most were empty, water-stained, and reeking of mold. But in one she found a strange device with a decaying hose attached to it. On the bottom of the device was a bristly brush mounted on a roller. A snaking black cord was wrapped up on its back. She had no idea what it was for.
She spotted a metal box high up on a shelf and pulled it down. Placing it gently on the floor, she lifted the two silver latches that held it closed. She gasped as she opened it. Inside lay more images like she’d seen in the other room, again reproduced on physical sheets. But these were still pristine. She flipped through them. The man, woman, and child from the photo in the other room were in most of them.
In some they were running and laughing outside, and in others, it was a posed image where they sat perfectly still, smiling out at the camera.
Other images baffled her. In one, the child sat behind a round, white object aflame with colorful sticks. He was grinning and wearing a cone-shaped hat. She didn’t know what to make of it.
In another photograph, the woman sat at a huge contraption with black-and-white hand levers and metal foot pedals. Perhaps it was some kind of primitive locomotion device? Again, she had no idea.
But one thing became clearer the more she looked at the photos: These three people had lived together in this place. The child had grown up here. From image to image he got older, bigger. They hugged and smiled. She wondered if they’d somehow kept their own child.
No one lived together where she came from. People were assigned a pod when they grew old enough to take care of themselves. If you were a citizen, you were given a head jack and set up in the kind of pod she cleaned out: luxurious, equipped with a network connection, no need to ever leave your living quarters. If you were a worker, they denied you a head jack. You got a tiny living space in the subbasement of a building. Who would be a worker or citizen was decided when people were infants. She didn’t know how they determined which one you ended up as, but there were far more citizens. People like her were rare.
Even rarer were the Menials, who had head jacks but weren’t connected to the network. There was something wrong with them. They shambled about their jobs, which usually involved pressing a button every few minutes or throwing a lever. They stared and never talked. Some had seizures, writhing on the floor, and were removed after that to some unknown place. They made her sad when she saw them, like a part of them was gone, and they could never get it back.
She looked back at the photo, at the happy adults embracing the child. It was alien to her.
If you were a citizen in New Atlantic, you could conceive one child. To do so, you trolled through profiles of other citizens online. If you found a person you liked, you sent a message. If the other person liked you back, the Automaton Controller came into your pod and got the necessary ingredients from both of you. Babies were raised in a central child-rearing area by workers called caregivers, then children were installed in their own pods when they reached a self-sufficient age. If you were their mother or father, you could watch your child age and progress via its online profile. She herself had never been online, though, so her parents, whoever they were, definitely hadn’t watched her grow up. When she was six, she was assigned her worker duties and installed in a cramped living pod.
She looked back at the photos. It did look like this kid had actually grown up with the same two people, who could well have been his parents. She tried to imagine what that would have been like. To know your own parents? To
