The Ones Who Look by Katharine Duckett

Author:Katharine Duckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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During dessert, Zoe’s phone beeped. She checked the message in the bathroom and heard her mother’s voice coming through her aural implants, as clear as Rocky and Atlan’s. “Why do you always punish me for being the one who survived, Zoe? Half your life it’s been this way. And now—well. You won’t have me to ignore for much longer. I got the test results this morning.”

Zoe listened, fancy French underwear pulled midway down her thighs, as her mother detailed symptoms and timelines, survival rates and regions of bodily invasion. When the message was over she didn’t delete it. She went back out to Henri and sat across from him, nodding at his story about a trip to Barcelona while Rocky told her to call her mother and Atlan said it was okay if she needed time and the last of the Glace Plombières melted into a puddle, spilling over the plate and dripping white globs onto the table.

Zoe’s mother had started going to a chiropractor, the chiropractor who would eventually send her to her a specialist, the specialist who would eventually tell her how long she had to live, around the time the Arlington branch of EE had gone to hell. The arbitration teams were collapsing. One girl had joined a cult. Another tracked down one of the people she’d been monitoring, a lawyer who spanked his children, and stabbed him to death. The only man in their department declared that EE was building a robot army and planning to take over the world, and that Boltzmann was himself an android.

It all happened at once, the disintegration, and Zoe had been the only one to keep her head. Silvia had remarked on it when Zoe arrived in Paris, scrolling through Zoe’s file on her tablet. “Very impressive. Especially in such a terrible time.” She glanced up, smiling. Zoe couldn’t take her eyes off the magenta lipstick stain on her front tooth. “You are very dedicated to the work.”

Zoe wasn’t sure if she deserved the praise. It hadn’t been particularly hard to get through Donna’s attempts to get Zoe to come to the compound in Kentucky with her, or Arjun’s ranting about how many small AI firms EE was buying and how it surely meant the singularity was coming. She’d still come into the office every day, still done the same work she always did. She was used to turning off her own doubts and feelings, used to letting Rocky and Atlan guide her through her days. They’d done it for her when her father died, in the weeks after the funeral, when Zoe couldn’t get out of bed, when all she wanted was to join him in Heaven. She’d thought about razors, and rope, and pills, but suicide was a surefire way to disqualify oneself from paradise unless a high-level arbiter determined that the death was a case of ethical euthanasia or extenuating circumstance. EE had learned the hard way that if they left that loophole open, too many people would walk right through the door.

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