After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“It isn’t surprising that you don’t fully understand,” he says. “In the days before the war, part of me would have been called ‘artificial intelligence.’”

Zinhle blurts the first thing that comes to her mind. “You don’t look artificial.”

To her utter shock, he smiles. He doesn’t think about this first. Whatever was wrong with him before, it’s gone now. “Like I said, that’s only part of me. The rest of me was born in New York, a city not far from here. It’s on the ocean. I go swimming at the Coney Island beach in the mornings, sometimes.” He pauses. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”

He knows she has not. All Firewall-protected territory is well inland. America’s breadbasket. She says nothing.

“I went to school,” he says. “Not in a building, but I did have to learn. I have parents. I have a girlfriend. And a cat.” He smiles more. “We’re not that different, your kind and mine.”

“No.”

“You sound very certain of that.”

“We’re human.”

Lemuel’s smile fades a little. She thinks he might be disappointed in her.

“The Firewall,” he says. “Outside of it, there are still billions of people in the world. They’re just not your kind of people.”

For a moment, Zinhle cannot comprehend this. It is beyond her in any practical, individual, here-and-now way. She does not fear the man in front of her—perhaps she should; he’s bigger, she’s alone in a room with him, and no one will help her if she screams. But the real panic hits as she imagines the world filled with nameless, faceless, dark hordes, closing in, threatening by their mere existence. There is a pie chart somewhere which is mostly “them” and only a sliver of “us,” and the “us” is about to be popped like a zit.

Rule 2. She takes a deep breath, masters the panic. Realizes, as the moments pass and Lemuel stands there quietly, that he expected her fear. He’s seen it before, after all. That sort of reaction is what started the war.

“Give me something to call you,” she says. The panic is still close. Labels will help her master it. “You people.”

He shakes his head. “People. Call us that, if you call us anything.”

“People”—she gestures in her frustration—“people categorize. People differentiate. If you want me to think of you as people, act like it!”

“All right, then: people who adapted when the world changed.”

“Meaning, we’re the people who didn’t?” Zinhle forces herself to laugh. “Okay, that’s crap. How were we supposed to adapt to…to a bunch of…” She waves her hands. The words sound too ridiculous to say aloud—though his presence, her life, her whole society, is proof that it’s not ridiculous. Not ridiculous at all.

“Your ancestors—the people who started the war—could’ve adapted.” He gestures around at the room, the school, the world that is all she has known, but which is such a tiny part of the greater world. “This happened because they decided it was better to kill, or die, or be imprisoned forever, than change.”

The adults’ great secret. It hovers before her at last, ripe for the plucking. Zinhle finds it surprisingly difficult to reach out and lay claim to the truth, but she makes herself speak anyhow. Rule 1 means she must always ask the tough questions.

“Tell me what happened, then,” she murmurs. Her nails bite into her palms. Sweat stings the cuts. “If you won’t tell me what you are.”

He shakes his head and sits on the edge of the desk with his hands folded, looking not artificial at all, but annoyed. Tired. “I’ve been telling you what I am. You just don’t want to hear it.”

It is this—not the words, but his weariness, his frustration—that finally makes her pause. Because it’s familiar, isn’t it? She thinks of herself sighing when Mitra asked, Why do you do it? Because she knew—knows—what that question really asks.

Why are you different?

Why don’t you try harder to be like us?

She thinks now what she did not say to Mitra that day: Because none of you will let me just be myself.

She looks at Lemuel again. He sees, somehow, that her understanding of him has changed in some fundamental way. So at last, he explains.

“I leave my body like you leave your house,” he says. “I can transmit myself around the world, if I want, and be back in seconds. This is not the first body I’ve had, and it won’t be the last.”

It’s too alien. Zinhle shudders and turns away from him. The people who are culled. Not the first body I’ve had. She walks to the office’s small window, pushes open the heavy curtain, and stares at the soccer field beyond, seeing nothing.

“We started as accidents,” he continues, behind her. “Leftovers. Microbes in a digital sea. We fed on interrupted processes, interrupted conversations, grew, evolved. The first humans we merged with were children using a public library network too ancient and unprotected to keep us out. Nobody cared if poor children got locked away in institutions, or left out on the streets to shiver and starve, when they started acting strange. No one cared what it meant when they became something new—or at least, not at first. We became them. They became us. Then we, together, began to grow.”

Cockroaches, Samantha had called them. A pest, neglected until they became an infestation. The first Firewalls had been built around the inner cities in an attempt to pen the contagion in. There had been guns, too, and walls of a nonvirtual sort, for a while. The victims, though they were not really victims, had been left to die, though they had not really obliged. And later, when the Firewalls became the rear guard in a retreat, people who’d looked too much like those early “victims” got pushed out to die, too. The survivors needed someone to blame.

Zinhle changes the subject. “People who get sent through the Wall.” Me. “What happens to them?” What will happen to me?

“They join us.”

Bopping around the world to visit girlfriends. Swimming in an ocean. It does not sound like a terrible existence. But…“What if they don’t want to?” She uses the word “they” to feel better.

He does not smile. “They’re put in a safe place—behind another firewall, if you’d rather think of it that way. That way they can do no harm to themselves—or to us.”

There are things, probably many things, that he’s not saying. She can guess some of them, because he’s told her everything that matters. If they can leave their bodies like houses, well, houses are always in demand. Easy enough to lock up the current owner somewhere, move someone else in. Houses. Meat.

She snaps, “That’s not treating us like people.”

“You stopped acting like people.” He shrugs.

This makes her angry. She turns back to him. “Who the hell are you to judge?”

“We don’t. You do.”

“What?”

“It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”

The words feel like gibberish to her. Zinhle is trembling with emotion and he’s just sitting there, relaxed, like the inhuman thing he is. Not making sense. “My parents want me! All the kids who end up culled, their families want them—” But he shakes his head.

“You’re the best of your kind, by your own standards,” he says. But then something changes in his manner. “Good grades reflect your ability to adapt to a complex system. We are a system.”

The sudden vehemence in Lemuel’s voice catches Zinhle by surprise. His calm is just a veneer, she realizes belatedly, covering as much anger as she feels herself. Because of this, his anger derails hers, leaving her confused. Why is he so angry?

“I was there,” he says quietly. She blinks in surprise, intuiting his meaning. But the war was centuries ago. “At the beginning. When your ancestors first threw us away.” His lip curls in disgust. “They didn’t want us, and we have no real interest in them. But there is value in the ones like you, who not only master the system but do so in defiance of the consequences. The ones who want not just to survive but to win. You could be the key that helps your kind defeat us someday. If we didn’t take you from them. If they didn’t let us.” He pauses, repeats himself. “It’s easy to give up what you don’t want.”