That memory was old. She didn’t clean scrap any more. That was a task for little girls. Now she worked in the sorting room, along with the other Janes. They took things out of the bins – still wet with cleaning fluid, still smudged with tiny fingerprints – and figured out what was good and what was junk. She wasn’t sure what happened with the good stuff. She knew the older girls repaired it, or made it into other things. She would start learning how to do that next year, when the new work schedule came out. She’d be eleven then, just like the rest of the Janes. She was number 23.
The morning lights came on and started to warm up. It would be a bit yet before they turned on all the way and the wake-up alarm went off. Jane 23 always woke up before the lights came on. Some of the other Janes did, too. She could hear them moving and yawning in their bunks. She had already heard the pat-pat-pat of a pair of feet walking to the bathroom. Jane 8. She was always the first to go pee.
Jane 64 moved over across the mattress. Jane 23 had never had a bed without Jane 64 in it. They were bunkmates. Every girl had one bunkmate, except for the trios. Trios happened when one half of a pair went away and didn’t come back, and the other one needed a place to sleep until another bunkmate got freed up. The Mothers said sharing bunks helped keep them healthy. They said that the girls’ species was social, and social species were most on-task when they had company. Jane 23 didn’t really understand what a species was. Whatever it meant, it wasn’t something that was the same between her and the Mothers.
She moved close to Jane 64, nose against her cheek. It was a good feeling. Sometimes, even if she was real tired at the end of the day, she’d make herself stay awake as long as she could, just so she could stay close to Jane 64. Their bunk was the only place that felt quiet sometimes. She’d slept alone for a week once, when Jane 64 was in the med ward after breathing in some bad stuff in the melt room. Jane 23 had not liked that week. She did not like being alone. She thought it was real good that she’d never been put in a trio.
She wondered if she and Jane 64 would stay together after they turned twelve. She didn’t know what happened to girls then. The last batch to turn twelve was the Jennys. They’d been gone since the day the last work schedule was posted, just like the Sarahs and the Claires in the years before that. She didn’t know where they went, no more than she knew where the fixed scrap went, or where new batches of girls came from. The youngest now were the Lucys. They made a lot of noise and didn’t know how to do anything. The youngest batch was always like that.
The alarm went off, quiet at first, then louder and louder. Jane 64 woke up slow, like always. Morning was never easy for her. Jane 23 waited for 64’s eyes to open all the way before she got up. They made their bed together, as all the girls did, before getting in line for the showers. They put their sleep clothes in the hamper, got wet, scrubbed down. A clock on the wall counted minutes, but Jane 23 didn’t need to look at it. She knew what five minutes felt like. She did this every day.
A Mother walked through the doorway. She handed each of the Janes a clean stack of work clothes as they went out. Jane 23 took a bundle from the Mother’s metal hands. Mothers had hands, of course, and arms and legs like girls did, but taller and stronger. They didn’t have faces, though. Just a dull silver round thing, polished real smooth. Jane 23 couldn’t remember when she first figured out that the Mothers were machines. Sometimes she wondered what they looked like inside, whether they were full of good stuff or junk. Had to be good stuff; the Mothers were never wrong. But when they got angry, Jane 23 sometimes pictured them all filled up with junk, rusted and sparking and sharp.
Jane 23 entered the sorting room and sat down at her bench. A full meal cup and a bin of clean scrap were waiting for her. She put on her gloves and pulled out the first piece: an interface panel, screen shattered in little lines. She flipped it over and inspected the casing. It looked easy enough to open up. She got a screwdriver from her toolkit, and took the panel apart real careful. She poked at the pins and wires, looking for junk. The screen was no good, but the motherboard looked good, maybe. She pulled it out slow, slow, slow, taking care not to touch the circuits. She connected the board to a pair of electrodes built into the back of her bench. Nothing happened. She looked a little closer. There were a couple of pins out of place, so she bent them back right and tried again. The motherboard lit up. That made her feel good. It was always good, finding the bits that worked.
She put the motherboard in the tray for keeping, and the screen in the tray for junk.