“I want to help them,” I said. Both droids watched me impassively.
“How?” Ratchet asked. Behind me, Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.
“Let them walk around. Teach them.”
Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why do you fucking think?” I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn’t, I tried to find one myself. “They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.”
“No, they haven’t, Jack.” Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a petri dish that had suddenly started juggling knives. “The spares only exist to fulfill their function.”
“Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.” I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn’t really up to a metaphysical discussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That’s the problem with Rapt. You don’t get much time off.
“Do they?” asked the droid, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re proposing, against the express instructions of Safety Net, to allow spares out of the tunnels. To attempt to teach them to read. To give them a pointless scrap of life.”
“Yes,” I said, with weak defiance, sensing how stupid and idealistic I sounded. The strange thing was that it wasn’t like me. I had my idealism kicked out of me many years ago, round about the time I learned about skinFix. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said I didn’t give a shit, that I didn’t really care about the spares or anything else. I didn’t know why I was doing this.
“You’ll need help,” the droid said.
It took a while for this to sink in. “From you?”
“There is a price,” Ratchet said, and then the bad news came. “You come off your drug.”
“Fuck off,” I said, and strode unsteadily out of the room.
Half an hour later Ratchet came and found me. I was slumped at the end of the long corridor, as far away as possible from any life-forms, either carbon- or silicon-based. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, my long muscles twitching in true Rapt-withdrawal style, and I was losing it. Cold so bitter it felt like liquid fire was spreading up my back, and I was starting to hallucinate. I looked blearily up at the droid when he appeared, and then turned away again. He wasn’t interesting to me. Certainly not as interesting as the inch-high men who were trying to climb onto my leg. Some of them looked like people I had known in the war, people I knew were dead. I was convinced they were trying to warn me of something, but their speech was so high-pitched I couldn’t hear it. I was trying to turn myself into a dog so I’d have a better chance.
You know how it is with these things.
The droid didn’t leave, and after a moment his extensible tray slid toward me, bearing a syringe. I stared at him, my eyes hot and bright.
“The dose you take would kill four normal people,” he said. “Immediately, within seconds of injection. You need this today, or you’re going to die. But tomorrow you have less.”
“Ratchet,” I mumbled, “you don’t understand.”
“I do. I know why you are here. But you will kill yourself in weeks like this, and I want you to remain alive.”
“Why?”
“To teach them.”
In the end I don’t know which of us won—whether I’d convinced Ratchet with my initial inarticulate outburst, or he blackmailed me into colluding in some bizarre impossible idea that had seeped into my mind while it teetered on the edge of slipping forever beneath deep water. Maybe Ratchet was Jesus all along, and I was just his fucked-up John the Baptist.
Either way, I kicked Rapt over the next eight months, and life within the Farm began to change.
The phone rang in Howie’s office, and he reached across to pick it up. The first part had taken an hour to tell, and Suej had fallen asleep, lying crumpled in the chair. As Howie listened to whoever was on the line I stood up, took off my coat, and laid it over her. She stirred distantly, a long way away, and then settled down again. Her eyelids were flickering, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. I hoped it was something good.
Howie put the phone down. “That was Dath,” he said. “No one below thirty knows shit.”
“What about Paulie? Nothing from him?”
“He’s out in the Portal.” Howie shrugged. “He’ll call if he gets anything.”
He sat, and waited, and I told him the rest.
The first thing I did was introduce some new wiring into the Farm complex, setting up a subsidiary alarm system. Then, with Ratchet’s help, I disabled the automatic relays which would trip if the tunnel doors were left open for longer than five minutes. As the relays would flash lights on panels in both Roanoke General and the SafetyNet headquarters, they had to be cut out before step one of the plan could be put in place. We couldn’t just destroy them, because that would set off a different alarm.
When we were convinced that it was safe, we opened the doors. From then on they were left that way all the time, unless the alarm went off. I let the spares pretty much come and go as they pleased in the facility, distressing though that sometimes was it was never a relaxing experience to look under the table and find a naked man with no eyes or a girl with no legs lying underneath.
I didn’t make any other changes for a few days, waiting to see if freedom of movement caused any of them distress. It didn’t appear to. The spares Ratchet and I were especially targeting soon seemed to prefer being outside the tunnels, though they usually went back there to sleep. The others reacted in a variety of ways: from occasional accidental excursions into the main facility, to never leaving at all.
Then I started the classes. I could never have done what I did, or even a fraction of it, without Ratchet. I got through a year of college, but I studied history. I didn’t tangle with child psychology, language acquisition, or any kind of teaching practice. I was starting with kids in their teens, none of whom had received any human interaction in their lives. It ought to have been impossible to overcome that, and I think that had I been on my own it would have been pitifully little, far too late.
But Ratchet was more than the cleaning drone I’d largely ignored until the night of the overdose. For a start, he did something to the medic droid. It was a company machine, designed and built to do what SafetyNet wanted. Yet at no point in the following five years did it ever show any sign of turning us in, or complain about having to chase the spares all over the compound in order to monitor and feed them.
Second, and most importantly, it was Ratchet who did the teaching. Sure, I was the one who sat with the spares and hauled them upright, held their heads still so they could see the letters I waved in front of them and hear the words I repeated, over and over, in their ears. And yes, it was me who stood behind them, arms looped up under theirs forcing them to learn how to use their limbs properly. Their muscles were ludicrously underdeveloped, despite all the magic in the medic droid’s food preparations. The day-in, day-out hauling around of the spares was probably the only thing which kept my own body from wilting into oblivion.
I did these things, and talked to them nonstop, and held them when they were unhappy, though such contact comes far from easily to me. But it was Ratchet who did the real work. He insisted I be the front man, on the grounds that the spares needed human nurturing, and I worked hard years of watchfulness and manufactured warmth. I tried to guess at the things they would need, and as they finally started to hold rudimentary conversations I did what I could to ensure that their intelligence gained some hold, and some independence. But without Ratchet’s apparent understanding of the ways in which a dormant human brain could be hot-wired into life, none of it would have passed step one. He planned the lessons, and I carried them out.