Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [23]
That’s what I told myself, anyway. But I didn’t think I could have left the Farm then, couldn’t have faced going back outside again. Don’t ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“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