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1
The Girl
It’s Patch Tuesday, Okaasan’s weekly system update, and the legless Gardeners inch their wheelchairs forward with their minds. Must not use arms, they tell one another in Thought Talk. Soon they’ll find out who’ll get promoted and forfeit their arms for Okaasan, too. If they pass, it won’t be long before they purr the same must not use of their torsos, necks, lips, then tongues. Flies buzz around the blotted gauze that swaddles fresh stumps. It’s a hot day in Epcot, Florida, and the amputees sweat under the shadowed fingers of overgrown trees.
I turn up my black foam fit’s cooling system. The humidity here reminds me of Water City, but it’s been years since I’ve been. Travel there and between continents became restricted back in Patch v4.S.52, two years after Satori Day—the day that Akira Kimura broke into the minds of billions and took up permanent residence. The passage of time, now marked by patch designations—version number followed by size of update and year—has moved slowly for me over the last ten years, and the inability to travel to other places has not helped. My father thinks Okaasan’s got every continent on its own secret mission. I wonder what these missions on other continents are. Do the Gardeners function as they do here? Are they also commanded to participate in self-mutilation, provide never-ending sacrifices to a technological god? I hope not.
Here at Epcot, the mission is not secret. At least not to us. Okaasan is training the next generation of astronauts who will sling across Ame-no-ukihashi, the largest manmade structure Earth has ever seen. The launch loop is a buzzing tubular ramp that slopes across the Gulf of Mexico some fifty miles into the sky and shoots astronauts throughout the solar system. My father and I call it Dragonspine because it resembles the bones of a 1,200-mile-long serpent pulled from the depths of the ocean and hung like a trophy far above the clouds. The Gardeners prefer Okaasan’s designation: Ame-no-ukihashi or A496.
During the training phase, promotion is earned when one retains sanity after losing one body part. Once they prove themselves, they lose another. This goes on until their minds are completely separated from their bodies, marking them ready for deep space travel. The first class is somewhere up there, dipped deep in celestial ink. The second class has been stored at Corpus Akira, Texas. Of course, having no body makes deep space travel much easier. No longer hindered by flesh that requires food, water, and oxygen, they are reduced to iEs that can survive extreme temperatures and sustain high gravitational force equivalent.
Through the scope of my rail, I see the select Gardeners in front of the castle’s gate, the best of the best, reduced to skin and bone cripples. I shiver at the sight. Most are much older than me, and one rolls through the gape, her surgical gown so baggy that it slips down both shoulders, revealing the knobby tracks of her spine. Months ago, she probably filled the garment. Now, after the self-starvation and sleep deprivation vetting process, she’s absolutely skeletal. She is losing her body, not mind, I imagine Okaasan saying. The ancient clocks toll. The speakers crackle. “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” blares. One Gardener is having trouble pushing himself over the remnants of a decimated treasure chest. The man tips over and refuses the temptation to use his arms to pull himself back up. An alligator charges out of the brush and snatches him up. It’s always fascinated me how alligators run. How quickly their bowed legs scurry. How their bellies rise as if on hydraulics. It’s natural, cut off completely from technology. Not like me and my father. Definitely not like the Gardeners. The man and gator are gone now. Probably dragged off and stuffed under rocks at the swamps of Adventureland. I silently curse to myself. I could have saved him, but it seems to me, if anything, the alligator already did.
I turn and glance behind me. Rome had its Coliseum. England its Globe Theater. DownUnder its Opera House. Thailand its Ancient Siam. Here in the old United States, we have the geodesic dome of Old Epcot. Close to it, a giant sorcerer’s hat choked by vines. Downtown, the space flight simulation training ground. It’s where the ones who pass get their Magic Ticket. I find myself wondering what it would have been like to explore this ancient amusement park turned museum as a nineteen-year-old girl a hundred years ago. To feel young. Vibrant. Maybe even in love. These exotic sensations that I can only imagine. There are others out there like us, free and alone, but very few. We are all scattered. Lost. Most do their best to stay far from the gaze of Akira and her army of mindless Gardeners. My father and I are the only ones who attack it from the shadows, which isolates us even further.
Procedure. It’s my father. He’s communicating via Thought Talk. I ignore him.
Procedure, he says again.
I already checked my six, no security drones spotted me. I say. I don’t like this.
I’m pulling the trigger, he says.
I take my black felt cattleman hat off, place it beside me, and brush my bangs off my face. What I want to say to my father is shut up. I want to tell him that I know what I’m doing more than he does, that I won’t come looking for him if he goes off killing himself again. Every time he’s died—too many to count—his data has been uploaded into a new HuSC hidden somewhere on the continent, and only I can locate these new versions of him by following the trails of magenta that connect us. Akira probably made and hid these back-up HuSCs when she figured he’d remain on her side even after Satori Day. I’m tired of looking for death. I’m tired of the GPS tracking systems in our heads that bind the two of us in eye-popping streams of magenta. For him, the guideline between us is faint. For me, it’s migraine strong. Instead of chasing death, I’d like to find a bit of life. We should find other .03 percenters, the ones whose minds weren’t colonized by Akira on Satori Day, and create a town or even a city that we can build together. But my father believes doing so will place a bullseye on us. “We’re fighting her,” he says, whenever I bring it up. “We need to lay low.” He has become the sniper again, the sneaky lone shooter, and I have become his spotter.
I don’t want to be his spotter. I want to find the others. And I’m not talking about Shave Time’s lunatics. I’m talking about the nomads, the traveling surgeons, treasure hunters, and DJs in covered wagons who periodically come to our property only to be shooed away by Father. Ever since my mother passed from Leachate sickness, usually all that my father wants to do is be alone, get drunk, howl at the missing scar in the sky, and hurt Okaasan in any small way he can. Epcot is his largest operation to date. He feels anxious that Akira sped up her space program in the last months. He wants to slow it down and see if she and the Gardeners will react to a large offensive.
The giant Epcot orb erupts in flames. That’s my cue. Per Akira’s emergency protocol, the med bots evacuate from the castle gates like glassine sky lanterns, and I open fire.
The med bots have not been programmed to feel curiosity, confusion, or fear. They just know to evacuate and line up when there’s a crisis. It’s a firing squad, really. I shoot and shoot and shoot. Thermochromic polymers explode and crackle against the pink, grass-bearded cobbled streets. The recruits act as if it’s a test. They refuse to move. To cover their eyes with their hands. Must not use arms. The tentacled security drones begin to flutter from the tiny windows in the blue-capped towers. I shoot those as well. They break apart like clay skeets.
After the coast is clear, I put my hat back on, shake the dirt off my duster, and walk beside the line of cripples toward the castle gates. I give them a wide berth. I place my mask over my mouth and nose as I enter. The Gardeners smell like meat rotting in the heat. The line continues and veers left, snaking through Liberty Square like an infinite, headless thing. I gaze at the carousel. Yellow light beams from my eye, and I activate the ancient merry-go-round museum piece. The plastic horses creak from stillness and spin in a musical gallop. No one turns to look. I shoot light from my eye at the riverboat and turn that on, too. The paddle wheel begins to churn the muddy water, and the boat lurches forward. Still, the Gardeners don’t react. Are they people? They were. Now, I just don’t know. My father believes that Akira has permanently stripped them of all their humanity. Shave Time Money sees them as a threat and wants to kill them all. That is wrong. Show them. In my head, I’m practically begging the Gardeners to react to the stimuli. They don’t. But I know that everything, Shave Time, my father, this place’s very existence is wrong.
I shouldn’t have come, I think to myself. But she called me. She can tell me more.
I follow the queue of amputees to Haunted Mansion. I raise my rail once more and check behind me before entering. My father has reduced the Epcot orb to charmed smoke cobras.
Haunted Mansion is where the armless and legless are stored. Prone, naked, strapped to gurneys, living on saline. There’s little attention paid to infection or gangrene. The body must eventually die anyway. I pass one Gardener whose hip and lower abdomen is scaled with black, rotting flesh. Another convulses with fever. Maggots squirm from torn stitches on her shoulder. I clench my jaw and turn away. The smell is revolting. Not only does the mind begin to separate from the body, but it also becomes disgusted by it.
Two security drones ahead. These I don’t shoot. They protect the disembodied in Haunted Mansion from the gators, so I use my right eye to temporarily disable the drones. Why doesn’t Akira Kimura encrypt her bots to protect them from me? Probably because the damage I can do to her is insignificant. I’m no threat to the larger system. Why haven’t I abandoned my father and his futile missions to harm Akira? Why haven’t I claimed my own life? I know the answer, so I don’t even know why I ask the question. It’s because he won’t survive without me. I try not to think about it, focus on the present, and scan each vacant, lantern-jawed face with my lighted, built-in iE, the false eye that endows me with technological gifts. I read temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate. Like the GPS link up with my father that appears in magentas, I’m connected to Ascalon Lee by streams of color when she’s near. She isn’t here, but I smell the traces of her yellows, so she’s close. I pass through Haunted Mansion and exit, relieved to leave the reek of starvation and ghost limbs.
My final destination in the park is the replica of Savior’s Eye, the only new amusement added a half-century ago to this museum. This is where the astronauts in the final stages of their transformation are supposedly reposited. I climb the winding walkway to the great dome. The statue of Akira Kimura—her head tilted up, laser beams streaking from her eyes—fronts the fake telescope, which has held up surprisingly well. I hope the coaster that spirals down to the dome’s center has, too. I take one last look at the lasers that flicker slits into the sky, then I enter the mega amusement park telescope. A distant boom. The ceiling above me creaks and jostles dirt. My father, the terrorist bomber, has just reduced Downtown to broken mouse ears and Cinderella rubble.
I sling the rail over my shoulder, climb in a cart, and activate the coaster. It hisses and jolts forward. I can’t believe this rickety thing used to be considered a thrill ride. It’s a tedious journey to the bottom, where at the end, the coaster will smash into a holographic version of The Killing Rock, the asteroid that Akira falsely claimed was headed to Earth and that she insisted she destroyed. When the coaster hits, it will reduce the holo to showers of luminescence. Its antiquated, but when the museum curators decided to add this amusement park ride, they wanted it to match the rest of the park. However, when I get to the bottom, there is no light show. I put myself in sports mode, feel the instant surge of electricity, and leap twenty feet from the cart to the pedestal that used to project The Killing Rock. I look down and tear off the hatch under my feet, then climb down. The Gardeners would not volunteer for this. The ones here are being chosen. Then they are being commanded. I was chosen and commanded once, years ago when I was a child. I involuntarily shot and killed my father’s best friend, Akeem Buhari. I involuntarily infiltrated Sugar Spire with Ascalon Lee and we took Old Man Caldwell, too. After I’d been finally freed, I’d woken to find that I loathed the thing I’d once loved the most, the ocean. I only had a vague recollection, presented in nightmarish flashes, of what I’d done when Ascalon Lee had me under her control. Now, half a life later, I still feel something residual in me. A piece of her. How much of me is really me? How much is my mother or my father? How much is the one who spoke to me all my childhood, Ascalon Lee?
I tighten my hands around the metal rungs. My father is wrong. The Gardeners can be freed. I was freed. We just don’t know how to do it. She can figure it out, though. Ascalon Lee must know.
When I get to the bottom, it’s dark, so I light up the storeroom with my iE. I downshift from sports mode back to eco mode, and the rush of electricity that runs through my body recedes. I look up and, suddenly, it’s as if I’m standing in the middle of an ancient, dried-up well. Instead of bricks, heads in jars stacked one atop another surround me.
“How many?” I ask my iE.
My iE projects the number 348 in front of me.
It feels like more.
Three hundred forty-eight heads in various stages of decomposition. Their eyes all shut. Nanobots so small that they can only be detected because of the faint flicker they emit under the right eyelid of each face. The slow melt: pots of cranium stew reduced until only a single, overhauled cybernetic eye containing their iE remains. Are they alive? This is the penultimate step for them—before the eye is plucked from the skull and transferred to the eastern base of A496 in Texas to await interstellar travel to parts unknown.
When we were flying to Epcot, I told my father, “Just let her and her zonbis do it. Let her go into deep space. If she does, maybe she won’t come back and the distance will sever connections. Maybe that’s what will free her Gardeners, the ones that stay behind.”
“No,” he said. “She’s running away from her own mess. She needs to stay on Earth and fix it.”
Akira Kimura run? My father is projecting. He’s the runner. I roll my eyes and obey.
