Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [93]
Karl Hedrickson was waiting for her.
“Look at the damn thing. It’s half bashed in.” He pointed at the debris-laden floor. “Looks like that big wrench hit it.”
Cassie sighed. “Let’s get the rear panel off.”
Their first view of the Molimon’s guts had Hedrickson shaking his head. “These mollys must’ve gone down first. Then I don’t know what else.”
“But after it fixed itself it figured out how to seal off the leak and stayed online long enough to get the job done.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Batteries?”
Hedrickson ran a quick check, made a face. “Dead as an imploded mouse.”
Chin pursued her lips. “Then the programming’s gone. I don’t mind that except it means we’ll never learn why it didn’t follow accepted procedure and commence preservation shutoff when the primary power went down.”
Hedrickson turned to the nearest monitor, plugged in a power cell, and brought the Molimon unit online. “Nothing here,” he told her after several minutes of inquiry. “No, wait a sec. There is a shutdown indicator. It knew it was going.” He frowned. “The message is in nonstandard format.”
Chin moved to join him. Lights were coming on all around them as repair crews began to restore station power to the hydroponics module.
“What do you mean, it’s ‘nonstandard’?”
Hedrickson ran a speculative finger along the top of the dead Molimon. His voice was flat. “Read it for yourself.”
Chin looked at the softly glowing monitor he was holding. She expected to see the words Shutdown procedure completed.
Instead she saw something else. Something that was, after all, only an indication of programming awareness. Nothing more. What it said was this.
LITTLE GIRLS ARE NOT REDUNDANT.
Panhandler
The stories I tell tend not to be controversial. That doesn’t mean I could not write a story about extreme sexual deviancy or serial murder or genocide or based on any one of a dozen other “dangerous” themes. In point of fact, I have written such stories. They are rejected with numbing regularity, like the one about the first humans to land on Mars. The crew is composed of multiple amputees afflicted with a variety of incurable terminal diseases, all of whom are eager volunteers for the one-way mission. Too much logic, I suppose, for the taste of editors charged with buying for the supposedly “daring” genre of science fiction.
Most of us have read about how really grim are the original versions of Grimm’s fairy tales. The bulk of traditional children’s stories, in fact, frequently contain mention of everything from bestiality to mass murder. The trend in retelling seems to favor sanitization over authenticity in order to protect fragile young minds. One exception is the TV show The Simpsons, whose writers are intelligent enough to recognize that they, too, were once young and that contrary to the pious protestations of those who see their sacred duty as supervising the maturation of children not their own, children can handle grim fairy stories without being bludgeoned into gibbering insanity by such tales’ perceived excesses. Or as Bart and Milhouse joyfully and innocently chant in one episode, “Car-toon vi-o-lence, car-toon vi-o-lence!”
Itchy and Scratchy are contemporaneously copyrighted, so I could not use them to illustrate my point. The utilization of another older and even more famous children’s trope, however, still unnerved the publishers of the anthology in which this story originally appeared. Names had to be changed to protect, if not the innocent, at least the perceived threat to the almighty corporate balance sheet.
The title of the story, by the way, is a triple pun…
Harbison pulled the rear flap of the overcoat’s thick, heavy collar up against his neatly trimmed hair-line so that it covered the fuzz and the bare skin on the back of his neck. With the passage of time the morning’s icy rain was turning to sleet as the incoming storm layered the city with a cold, damp mucus. In response to the glooming clouds, lights