“That’s unfortunate…” I say, I don’t really like what I am hearing. It is rather unexpected.
“I mean let me tell you about my first two… the vegetable, she just sat there and stared out the window for the entire time I was there. I just had to shove a pill down her throat and make sure that she drank her nutritional shakes and that was it…”
“Sounds like a pretty easy job,” I say. I dislike the way she is talking about her case, but I bite my tongue.
“Now the other girl, a fucking Manic, she was a handful. Let’s say that I dreaded those days. She would not leave me alone for a single moment. She was always either upset, or trying to get me to sleep with her. I guess they figured if they paired her up with another girl that she’d back off a bit, but I had to literally beat her away at times. I mean, seriously, it is a good thing that the Calm makes them infertile while they are on it—could you imagine what kinds of kids those nut jobs would have?”
“Calm makes them unable to reproduce?”
“Yeah,” Michelle says as she scoffs. “You didn’t know that? It was a big deal when it first came out. A lot of human rights groups, or what was left of them at the time, were talking about how immoral it was. But, yeah, in males it decreases their sex drive and makes them unable to reproduce. In the females it makes them completely infertile. Just as long as Calm is in their system, you never have to worry about having messed up kids running around. It’s important, after all, that we normals regain control of the population.”
“So you never became friendly with any of your cases?” I ask, very disappointed.
“I wouldn’t have lasted six years if I did. You can’t be in this business and make friends with the Unstables. You ever hear about that guy back in the 90’s… he tried to integrate himself in with grizzly bears. Believed that he was their friends and could become one of them—you know how that ended?”
“They killed him.”
“They tore him apart. It is an important thing to learn. Sure they’ll accept you, and you’ll think that they are almost human—but in the end you have to remember what you’re dealing with are basically grizzly bears and if you get to complacent around them… then you will get torn apart. If there is one thing you take from this conversation as a newbie, it’s that you can never trust them.”
“I’ll remember that…” I say. I do not like any of this conversation. I begin to severely doubt my capacity to really be a Sitter. I have already made friends with my cases in my first week. I can’t just turn that part of myself off and turn into… Michelle. To me she seems more monstrous to me than they do, and that thought begins to concern me even more about myself and my future. “Have you ever had one go Aggro on you?”
“Go eggroll,” Michelle says as she laughs. “That’s a bit of Sitter humor. Yeah. My fifth case was an Amnesiac. She worked on crossword puzzles all the time, so I didn’t really need to do much. She cooked, mostly cleaned up after herself. Anyway, yeah she was your typical Amnesiac—and one day she’s doing a puzzle and she just breaks her pen… just snaps it into pieces. I see her face growing red. That’s when I knew to get the hell out of there. I fumbled with my phone and got that stupid safety off and hit the button for the hunters… they were there in about five minutes. I was hiding up on a nearby hill and I watched them put her down. Took about 4 shots… she just charged at them.”
“That sounds terrible,” I say as I shake my head.
“It happens, honestly,” Michelle says as she nods. “You have your cell on you?”
“Yeah, I say as I hand it over.
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pocket knife and breaks a piece of plastic off of the side of the device. She then fidgets with it for a moment before handing it back to me. “There, now you can flip it open, and don’t worry… it won’t go off accidentally. But it saves you a few seconds, but it counts.”
“Thanks…” I say as I return the phone to my pocket. To be honest, I hadn’t even given it a proper look over since receiving it. I know it has a bright red light on the top that lets you know help is on the way, and how to use to as a cell, but I never game much thought to the emergency button on the side. “I hope I never have to use it… So say in a year they come up with a cure, what happens then. What do you do?”
“While I’m sure that a Sitter’s job will be a lot easier… and they’ll still need a good number of them. I’ll probably become a therapist through C-Shapes. It’s kind of funny, we have this huge issue with the virus, that we’ve forgotten there’s still about three million people out there suffering from everything from post traumatic stress disorder, to general anxiety disorder—I suppose we’ll go back to caring about those people rather than just having them suck it up because right now the country is messed up. I suppose, the Hunters will be offered jobs repairing the infrastructure, I mean we have broken roads, and crumbling bridges… although I’m sure they’ll be upset that they don’t get paid to merely drink beer and shoot people for a living. What about you? What are your plans if the cure works?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I suppose if I am not needed anymore as a Sitter I could help rebuild somehow.”
“I’m sure C-Shapes will take care of you either way. I mean someone has to still take care of all the Unstables, it’s not like the cure isn’t going to magically make them better—they just won’t go Aggro anymore. World’s largest corporation, after all… they pretty much run the country if you think about it.”
“I have a friend who has theories on that,” I say, realizing that if she knew I was talking about one of my cases she’d probably lose her shit.
“Anyway, that’s a year from now and who knows if it’ll even work… Just worry about now and worry about getting by. That’s how I feel about it.”
“Have you ever felt bad about having to hurt an Unstables feelings?” I ask, although I’m pretty sure I already know the answer. At that moment my mind begins to wander back to Cherie, and how disappointed she would be if she really knew how her life worked.
“You can’t think like that, remember… you’re dealing with grizzly bears—they just look human. If you have to hurt them in order to keep them in order… that’s what you have to do,” Michelle answers as she folds her arms and cocks her head to one side. “Otherwise you won’t make it. Think of it as a soldier, or a police officer—when they have to fire their guns to kill someone, they can’t feel bad about it. Otherwise they would have no career.”
“I understand,” I say, although I dislike the analogy. As I mentioned before I dislike violence of any kind.
“You’ve seen the video, where the guy goes all eggroll on the lab techs…”
“I’ve seen it.”
“You don’t forget that video,” Michelle says as she nods and then points to her head. “You always keep that video up here—every time you are around one of them.”
“It’s pretty hard to forget,” I say as it flashes in my mind at the mere mention of it. I can still hear the noises, the screams—fresh in my mind as though I had watched it only yesterday.
“The food is probably cold now,” Michelle says as she looks down to the plate that she has barely touched. “I think the chef tonight sucks… usually the food is a lot better than this.”
“I’ve never been a fan of lobster,” I say as I look down to my own plate. “Or really chicken that is still attached to the bone.”
“Is that like a vegetarian thing?”
“No, I just don’t really like my food to look like it did when it was still alive,” I say as I shrug.