Ty, a shift manager with an alcoholic wife, creates a female replicant in a dystopia veering toward full mechanization. For Ty, the surreal drudgery of working in a retail environment is interrupted when robotic interfaces are installed at his job...
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Ty opened the front door of the house, gesturing for the two youths to follow.
The boy and girl stepped over the threshold carefully, checking in front and behind.
"You're safe," Ty said.
It was strange how real the words felt.
We made it.
He still couldn't believe it. The journey home had seemed like a dream, too good to be true. Damon had phoned a friend, a journalist contact he said he knew. They raced through the woods, Damon and Ty taking turns carrying Sam. At the bottom of the hill, a van waited on the main road.
"Great friend," Ty said, jumping in the sliding door with the others.
A dark-haired white woman in a blue baseball cap swiveled from the driver's side to greet them. "Best if we don't exchange names," she said. "But I'm glad ya'll are okay."
Tense introductions had occurred in the backseat of the stranger's van. Like the driver had cautioned, no one shared names, just affiliations.
The teens had known each other in school. They had been referred for re-education when they had questioned the new kiosk setup in the classrooms. The tall woman was forced into the camps when she and her wife had been seen kissing in their backyard. Her wife had been sent to a separate camp, and she hadn't seen her for months.
"I don't think I'll see her again," she said dispassionately.
Ty recognized the listless tone. It wasn't ambivalence. It was stilted trauma. If she allowed herself to give in to the shock, she might never come back.
He nodded, not so much to acknowledge what she said, but to acknowledge he knew her pain. She met his eyes and her lips flipped up in a half-smile. She refocused her gaze on Sam, passing a hand over her forehead.
"I'm lucky to have met her. She saved me."
Slumped over with blood caked on her cheeks, Sam snored. Ty and the tall woman laughed together.
In that moment, he knew what his choice would be.
At the house, Ty equipped the teens with new clothes. Once changed, they looked like humans again instead of faded waifs swimming in cloth sacks. He supposed that was the point, to de-humanize.
Ty offered the teens the pull-out couches in the living room. The boy, Duke, opted to throw blankets on the floor. Tricia, the girl, joined him. They lay side-by-side on their stomachs, propped up on elbows to talk. After what they'd been through, he could imagine they didn't want to be alone. They were all each other had.
Speaking quietly, he asked what they planned to do in the morning. Tricia shrugged. Duke recalled how his parents had been so disappointed, they'd told him they never wanted to see him again.
"You're welcome to stay with us, but we'll be moving on tomorrow."
"That's good with us. Thank you for having us, sir," Tricia said.
Ty broke into his first real grin in days. "Call me Ty."
He turned off the living room light and left them to sleep. Amaretto and Damon had carried Sam to the guest bedroom. She reclined on a stack of pillows. Like Duke and Tricia, she had changed into pants and a t-shirt, looking more like the sister he knew.
"You asshole," she croaked.
He laughed, amazed she could pass any syllables around the baseball lump on her jaw.
"But this time I didn't leave you there," he returned, picking up on the banter from their first encounter a little over a year earlier.
God, is that all it's been?
He felt like he'd known her for decades. Life pre-Sam was blurry. It had been similar when Helia had turned one. Ty couldn't imagine life before or without her.
"Thank goodness you've gained some sense." She raised her arms expectantly.
Ty laughed again, tears unexpectedly stinging his eyes as he gently swept Sam into a hug. He tensed when another set of arms closed around him and Sam.
"I'm the sensible one of the family," Damon said, revealing himself to be the hugger of the hugger.
A second later, Amaretto finished in the guest bathroom and kicked them out, citing Sam's battered state.
"Girl needs rest," she said, shooing the brothers into the hallway with a smile.
Ty faced Damon, hands in his pockets. He needed to ask something, but wasn't sure how.
"What a night."
"No joke."
Ty allowed one beat to pass before asking, "What was that, at that compound?"
That didn't need explaining. Damon's smirk said as much.
"I, uh, called in a friend. Well, not a friend."
"How'd you meet them?"
"CAD boards."
"Why'd they think they were there?"
Damon's smirk broke into a full grin. "To cleanse the unnatural couplings they'd been tipped off about."
"Ah hell."
A slow rumble built in Ty's chest, erupting into laughter.
"Fuck, that could've gone so wrong." Damon said, barely able to get the words out in between guffaws.
For a few shining moments, they were howling with laughter. It was relief-laughter, and amazement-laughter. It was I-love-ya-you-idiot laughter.
Ty wiped the tears from his eyes. "Whoo. I needed that."
Damon swiped his sleeve across his face. "Same." Still chuckling, he began walking away. "G'nite!"
"Nite."
Ty pictured the couch in the living room. Free for the taking since Duke and Tricia were asleep on the floor.
The master bedroom door stared at him, waiting, judging.
But he'd already made his choice.
He turned the knob slowly, not wanting to wake her. She lay in the bed, stretched on her side, swath of dark curly hair spread on the pillow. Briefly, he stood in the doorway, watching Jennifer's chest rise and fall under the thin sheet.
Without any sense of alarm, he realized he'd thought of her as Jennifer, and not as (semi).
He kicked his shoes off and crossed the room to the bed. He sat, fluffed his favorite pillow, drew back the sheet. Then, he settled on the pillow, staring at the ceiling. In the next second, he turned, reached, and hugged Jennifer to his chest.
She released a sigh, and with it, her body relaxed completely. She nestled in, as she had hundreds, thousands of times before.
