Ninth Grade
(age fourteen)
One day, Kelli didn’t come to school. This was rare, but not unheard of; even nerds like Kelli got sick sometimes.
Am found herself wandering aimlessly, unsure if she wanted to go hang out with Elaine or not.
It hadn’t been long since that talk with Kelli about polyamory and now everything was awkward.
Elaine hadn’t known, of course, that Am was having any such thoughts.
Maybe Elaine wouldn’t have liked her and Kelli back anyway.
But the whole mess of the three of them had filled Am’s stomach with angry bugs.
What if she hung out with Elaine too much and Kelli got angry?
What if she put a hand on Elaine’s shoulder or something and Kelli got the wrong impression?
Or what if Elaine got the wrong impression and made a move, and it all fell apart?
It had occurred to her, since that conversation with Kelli, that none of the three of them actually knew what they were doing.
Bruno had always talked about how that was the problem with the language model; it hadn’t lived a life.
It knew how to use the word “flower,” but it had never smelled one—or eaten a meal, run down a sidewalk, scraped its ankle, fallen in love.
Am and Kelli and Elaine were all trying their best, but all they had, besides each other, was just those books, full of words for things they’d never felt or seen.
To the people who’d written them, those words had been full of life and soul and importance; but to Am and her friends, maybe the real meaning was invisible.
Maybe they were as wrong about everything as the robot was. How were they supposed to know?
Elaine caught up with her while she was pacing near the end of the yard, hands in her pockets, chewing her lip.
“Hey,” said Elaine.
“Hey,” said Am, looking at the ground. She definitely did not want to blush or stammer the way girls did when they liked somebody. No way.
“Can we talk?” said Elaine. “Now that Kelli’s not listening. About this whole dyke thing.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Am, full of dread.
“It never gets better, does it?” said Elaine, dropping her voice.
“I’ve read those books. But in the books queer people either have shitty lives because everyone hates them, or they live someplace that, you know, isn’t here.
Here, even when you grow up, it’s still some big secret, right?
You still can’t talk about it anywhere that matters. ”
Am frowned down at the ground. She’d been thinking about this too, and she had yet to come to any firm conclusions.
“I think,” she said, giving it her best try, “that it always sort of sucks, you know? Kelli says she’s going to grow up and change things and I don’t know how likely that actually is.
But we’re also always humans. In the books, sometimes it was even worse than here.
Sometimes it wasn’t legal to be like us even in private, but no matter how bad it was, people still found ways of sneaking around and doing what they wanted.
Like the gay bars. I bet there are even gay bars on Callisto, somewhere. ”
Elaine snorted. A lock of her long hair blew outward as she did. It was oddly endearing. Am did not want to be endeared.
“Yeah,” she said, “and I bet they’re all run by a language model just like everything else. I bet you go in, and order your gay little drink, and ask to talk to some cute girl, and all you get is a robot who says platitudes about the power of friendship.”
Am gave her a strange look. Elaine returned it, and then lowered her voice further.
“Look,” she said. “Also. About Kelli.”
“Yeah?” said Am, dreading this part even more.
“Has she ever talked to you about what it was like? With the robot?”
That was not what Am had expected Elaine to ask. She blinked at her. “I mean, I was there.”
“Yeah. I just—I keep expecting therapy to help, but maybe that’s dumb.
Maybe it’s like Kelli used to be with the robot, asking it for help and getting bullshit.
She’s so smart in, like, class, or for making up stories; I didn’t used to get how she was dumb enough to believe what the robot said.
But maybe I’ve been doing the same thing. ”
Am looked at Elaine more carefully. She knew Elaine had been getting pulled out of class for therapy twice a week.
She also knew that kids from Basic Housing, no matter the severity of their illness, didn’t get therapy from an actual human.
They got put into a comfy little room and given a workstation where they talked about their troubles to a version of the language model, fine-tuned to give sympathetic tips about mental self-care.
And also fine-tuned to censor anything inappropriate for a minor, which was basically everything in Elaine’s entire life.
“I try to prompt it,” Elaine continued, “the way you used to do, but it never works. I try to tell it what’s actually on my mind—not you and Kelli, because I’m not stupid enough to rat other dykes out to whoever reads these chats.
But like how it was with Oscar for instance.
And it just goes into this officious little speech, like, Elaine, these topics are inappropriate for minors.
Would you like suggestions for a more age-appropriate activity to improve your mood? ”
“Bleah,” said Am, sticking her tongue out.
Elaine barely even noticed. She was on a roll now.
“I tell it how bad I’m feeling, and it says, Elaine, I am sorry you are feeling so bad.
I care about you. Things will get better.
As if it actually cares or feels sorry when it’s literally just computer words on a screen.
And then it gives me the same fucking list of self-care activities that it already showed me ten times.
And—and things won’t actually get better, right? I know they won’t. Not for us.”
“Elaine. . . .” said Am.
“I read the books,” Elaine insisted. “Even the ones about the really bad old days, in the first colonies, when ten percent of people had jobs and the other ninety just got thrown out the airlock or starved. They don’t do that anymore.
They don’t outright kill us. But they still don’t want us to be actual people.
They’d rather have us be a bunch of robots, sitting in our concrete boxes, watching their media and clicking Like on the news and being good.
They don’t want us to have minds or be alive. ”
Her voice had cracked, her lip had trembled, which never happened with Elaine.
Am thought that the past few months had been helping.
She’d watched Elaine throw herself into the games Am and Kelli played, and she thought that was helping.
But there was another part of Elaine, deep down, a wound that the games never quite seemed to touch.
Am had a bad, creepy feeling that maybe nothing ever would.
On impulse—knowing she shouldn’t; knowing Kelli would be furious if she saw—Am reached out and drew Elaine into a tight hug. Hugs were okay, right? Hugs were okay, even if Am’s body felt extremely strange, pulling Elaine close like that. Hugs were something people did when they were just friends.
“You’re our friend,” she said. “Okay? And you don’t have to be good.
I can’t just snap my fingers and make Inspiration stop sucking.
I can’t wave my hands and make this into one of the places where dykes can march around and get married and stuff.
But I can be your friend and so can Kelli.
If the therapy computer is stupid to talk to then you can talk to us instead.
And if you want to be bad then we’ll all be bad. Together. Okay? We’ve got you.”
But Elaine shrugged her irritably away.
“Sure,” she said, “for a minute. Until I fuck things up again, or Kelli gets mad at me, and you two decide it’d be better to be just the two of you again.
Nothing’s ever actually going to get better.
You might say it is, and the fucking language model might say it is, but I know when you’re wrong and I’m right. ”
She turned to go. And maybe, if things had been even a tiny little bit different, Am would have stopped her.
If she wasn’t so stung, for that one illogical moment, because that hug had meant so much and felt so daring and been summarily rejected.
If she wasn’t so on edge from that talk with Kelli, and so worried that she’d fuck everything up.
If she wasn’t so used to Elaine’s moods, which brewed and stewed despite what anyone said, but then bounced back later.
If she hadn’t believed, with the na?vete of a fourteen-year-old, that there was always time for both sides to cool off and try again later.
But things weren’t different in any of those ways. Things were the way that they were. So all Am did was frown, uncertain and dismayed, as Elaine stomped away.