New Pal

Tim pulled his shirt up and wiped his face with it. The shirt was black, and the sweat left a shiny smear just under the Batman symbol. His mom would've yelled at him if she's seen it, but they never let parents in during recruitment.

Marius sat down against the wall. He was sweating, too. The basketball rolled into a corner and rested there, waiting. The boys had been playing one-on-one for an hour. They hadn't talked much; Marius was nervous and Tim knew to wait for the recruit to make the first move. 

"What are they? The invaders, I mean." Marius was still panting a little, but he got the question out. 

Tim was a little surprised. Normally the first question was "can I learn kung fu" or something like that. "They're aliens," he said. 

"I know that," said Marius. "But like, I saw one. When they hit that music show-"

"Bonaroo," muttered Tim. 

"Right. I saw video online, and the invaders were just people, and they were just pointed at other people and-"

"They ain't people," said Tim. This wasn't what he was good at. He was good at making using Time sound cool. He was good at the kung fu questions. Leah was better at invader questions. "They're...it's hard to explain."

Marius looked over at the cooler. "What's in that?"

"Water, drinks. No soda, though."

"I don't like soda anyway," said Marius. He got up and opened the cooler. Marius pulled a sports drink out; his mom didn't let him drink it, normally. Tim followed him and pulled out a bottle of water.

"OK," said Tim. "So, the invaders didn't come in ships, right?"

Marius nodded. "Right, because they'd have to move faster than the speed of light and you can't do that."

Tim shrugged. "I guess. Anyway, they got here as information. They got here as a signal. And some scientist guys in China put the signal together and, like, put it in a body."

"How?"

"I don't know." Tim flushed a little. He hated not knowing stuff when recruits asked. "But anyway, once they had bodies, the invaders started making their own bodies. Like, people can use 3D printers to make organs, right? Like if you need a new heart or liver or whatever? The invaders used that tech and made bodies for themselves. That's why most of them look like people, because it lets them walk around and no one knows."

Marius nodded. "OK. But my friend at school said he saw one that had, like, extra arms."

Tim scoffed. "Probably he's full of crap." Marius smirked. "But the invaders make new bodies. They just arrange the brain so it already knows things. They can do things with their brains that we can't do, they can make a brain that already knows something so it starts out adult and has all the skill it needs."

"But we can't do that?"

Tim finished off his water and pitched the bottle into a recycling bin. "No. We have to do something else. We can't build a working brain from nothing, there's too many little things we don't know how to do. We have to take a working brain and then change it." Tim picked up the ball out of the corner and tossed it over his shoulder. It fell through the hoop with a fwip. Tim didn't even turned around. 

Marius gaped a little. "Can I learn that?"

"I don't know what you can learn," said Tim. "But you can learn something cool."

Noodles, Please

Lucy reached for the glass of water. Her hand stopped about halfway there. Dammit. She felt her breath catch in her throat, and she tried to breathe deep so that she wouldn't cry again. She hated it when her son saw her cry.

Bam-Bam was in the kitchen making dinner. She still thought of him as "Bam-Bam," but he'd stopped letting her call him that. He wanted to go by "Abe", which Lucy hated. To her it sounded like an old man's name. It made her think of Abraham Lincoln. What didn't help was that her brother had started calling her son "Honest Abe," which Bam-Bam loved for some stupid reason.

She reached for the water, and her hand stopped. She told her hand what to do, trying to imagine nerves firing and electricity jumping through her muscles. Nothing. "Goddammit," she whispered, more to test to see if she could speak than anything.

Bam-Bam came out of the kitchen. He was wearing the apron his uncle had bought him for his birthday. His uncle was a chef, and Bam-Bam thought that was the most amazing thing. "How you feeling, Mama?"

"Good," she said.

"You need more water or anything?"

Lucy shook her head. "I'm OK."

Bam-Bam looked back into the kitchen to check the sauce; it was simmering, but he could leave it a minute. He walked across the apartment to the table and sat down with his mother. The chair was too high and his feet didn't touch the floor, but he didn't mind. "Mama, you haven't drank any. You sure you're doing good?"

Lucy took another deep breath. "Yeah, baby. I just...I'm tired. My muscles are doing the weird thing again."

Bam-Bam nodded carefully. "I could help you." The sentence was quiet, matter-of-fact, and heavy.

"Oh, baby." She took his hand. It was small, but already had scars and burns like her brother's. Perils of cooking. "Baby, I don't want you to do that. What if the Agency-"

"They told me I could use my discretion." Bam-Bam stood up. "They told me, if it's an emergency, like if the invaders are about to kill someone or take someone or hurt someone, and I can stop them if I go forward, then I'm allowed to."

Lucy nearly started to cry, but stifled it enough that it just sounded like a cough. "But baby, they already hurt me. You can't help me now, they hurt my brain, and sometimes it's just like this now."

Bam-Bam sat back down. He knew she was right. The damage was done, and it wasn't bad, but it was bad enough. Sometimes Mama can't talk. Sometimes she can't move. His friend Leah said it was like when you streamed a video and the connection was bad. Sometimes it got jumbled, sometimes it stopped altogether until the system picked up again. All you could do was wait it out.

"Hey," she said. "You know what you could do? You could finish making us dinner, because I'm real hungry."

He smiled. "Ok. You want noodles or rice? This sauce is good on either."

Non-Participatory

"No way."

She was the worst kind of parent. Absolutely my least favorite. She wasn't undereducated or slow or poor or rich; those parents all came with their own challenges, but there was always an approach that tended to work.

No, this lady was well-informed, and that was a lot harder to work with. Lots of times it involved telling them the truth, but I wasn't quite ready to do that, yet.

"Mrs. Green, I can't guarantee your son's safety." I took a sip of water. "I can't guarantee anyone's. That's the whole problem." I swiveled my computer screen around. It was open to an article in the Globe. The headline read 124, 32 ABDUCTED DEAD IN LATEST ATTACK. "This is what's happening."

She didn't move. She didn't nod. She didn't respond. Damn it.

"It's actually worse that this," I said, lowering my voice. "These are the visible attacks, the ones that happen when they feel secure enough to go loud. The worst ones, there aren't any headlines about those, because the numbers are more like 'zero dead, hundreds abducted.'"

This time she nodded. Her pursed lips softened, the wall cracked a little. Good. She still didn't say anything, though.

"We've had a lot of successes with this program, but we can't publicize it. For one thing, due to the nature of the tech involved, the more people who know it exists, the more variables we have to account for in the calculations. If that gets out of control, we honestly don't know what happens." I shuddered. It wasn't an act. Dr. Al-Oakdi had run those numbers our first day, and his left eye hadn't stopped twitching since.

"And this is all supposed to make me feel better about giving you my 8-year-old son, so you can take his brain and-"

I didn't let her finish. It was rude, I know. "No, no, no. We're not doing anything with his brain, nothing his brain can't already do. We're going to train him in using his brain. And it only works because he's so young."

She dropped her eyes. I don't pray, but I found myself thinking please don't make me tell her the truth. Not because I didn't think it would work, but because the more people who knew the truth, the more likely it was that someone who screw that truth up.

"Well," she said. "What if he's an analyst? Like, what if he learns something he can do here? You need people with those skills, right?" Damn. Very smart.

"Sure," I said. "And we can ask that of him. But you have to remember - it's his head. Ultimately, there is literally no way we can force him to learn communications tech, or the invaders' language, or computer sims, or targeting systems, or any number of things he could do from here rather than out in the field." I took another drink. It gets dry in here; biohazard protocols and all. "But if he wants to learn sniping, or lockpicking, or driving, or stealth, or anything else than an 8-year-old boy might find cool...then that's what he'll learned." What he will have learned, as Dr. Ramirez would say, but I'm not as much of a stickler for the grammar. "We had one kid - Mei - who went forward and learned to make candy. Like, she's amazing at it." I nodded at the dish of hard candies on my desk. "Those have lavender and lemon in them, they're fantastic. But it's not much of a help against the invaders."

Mrs. Green is quiet for a minute. "What if I give Marius the choice?"

"You mean, explain it to him and ask if he wants to do it? Sure, that's fine. I'd just suggest we let one of our recruits explain it."

"Why?"

Because the kids make it sound awesome, I thought. "Kids relate to other kids better, and the kids who have actually gone through it can explain it in experiential terms. I can't do that, all I can do is explain it in theory, and then it seems too abstract."

She nods. "OK. I'll bring him in tomorrow, if that's all right."

"That's fine. I'll make sure someone's free to talk to him. There's a playroom we use for this kind of thing. No video games, just space to run around, some toys, basketball hoop, that kind of thing."

"He likes superheroes," she whispers. She's tearing up. I don't blame her, but I need her son. His scores on the NPAT were 87th percentile, highest I've seen in weeks.

"OK. I'll get Tim up here, he's Marius' age and I've never seen him without a Batman t-shirt." Except when he's in uniform.

Mrs. Green leaves. She doesn't know the truth, which is just as well. I breathe, and pop one of Mei's candies in my mouth.

They really are fantastic.

No Problem

Tina tapped on the door.

"What are you doing?" Rey hissed. His accent got stronger when he was scared. Tina thought it was cute, but she figured she'd tell him later. Maybe.

"I want to see if anyone's in there." She tapped again.

"But if they hear us-"

"They won't." Leah shook her head, braids slapping against her cheeks. "Their auditory system don't work like ours. Ours works by transduction of sound into electrochemical impulses, but theirs-"

The other two nine-year-olds stared at her.

"They don't hear like we do. They kinda hear with smell. That's why the bug spray."

Rey and Tina nodded, but they didn't really get it. Leah was going to be an ear-doctor after the War, but that meant she had to have gone to medical school, and that meant there wasn't as much Time in her head.

Tina tapped again. Rey still wasn't sure what she was doing. Maybe after the War she would have learned how to hear if someone was in a room by tapping a door, but Rey thought maybe that was BS. She seemed pretty sure, though. She nodded back at Rey. "No one there. Open it."

Rey pulled a slim, black case from his pocket and started pulling out lockpicks, but then he saw the keyhole. It wasn't a keyhole. It was a trap. It had an electronic lock, rigged to look like a mechanical. He knew how it worked, more or less, but...

"I can't pick this," he said. "I didn't...won't...learn how."

Tina checked her watch. "We're almost out of time, Rey-Rey."

Only his mom still called him 'Rey-Rey.' He wondered if that would still be true when he learned to pick locks. He wondered if his mom lived through the War. Checking on people in the future was super Against the Rules, but everyone did it sometimes.

"OK," he said. "Just watch out for me." He closed his eyes.

...the color of the wire doesn't matter...

...always know what the wire leads to...

...grounding...

...back before the War we used to...

...remember how Mom was...

His eyes snapped open. Tina was squeezing his hand. "Rey. Reynaldo." 

"Sí. Yo puedo hacerlo."

"Huh?" Tina saw tears in his eyes. He saw something. He looked at the Future.

Leah stiffened. "Hey. I hear something."

Rey ran his hand down the wall, then pulled a heavy steel pick from his pocket. "Here," he said, and started digging out the wires.