“Right.”
“There were kids there, but not in my group. The LGBT crowd, I guess it was kinda toxic to people who wanted kids, that bullshit about ‘breeders’ that seems funny when you’re a kid but is shitty in hindsight. Imagine how Gretyl and Iceweasel would have felt if they’d had to hear us talking that way.”
Iceweasel had delivered two kids, both boys, without much drama, though Gretyl was a bundle of nerves through both labors and had to leave the room, both times. The boys were, what, six and eight? Five and eight? She was a shitty honorary aunt, though she loved both of them in an abstract, cautious way that kept its distance from their penumbra of boogers, spit, and destruction.
“It’s Stan’s birthday next week.”
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Keep track of everyone’s birthday?”
“I’m the house spirit. Comes with the job. Setting reminders, triggering them when any subject comes up, adding context around the corner. Everyone’s house does it.”
“But you’re not a bunch of code, you’re a person. It’s different when you’re conversing with someone and that person just happens to recall, perfectly, all the minutiae context brings up.”
“You could have that. Just get your eyes done.” She was almost totally night-blind now, had to magnify text to extra-huge to read it. Lots of people had the surgery, got displays implanted at the same time, all the tickers and augmented reality bullshit the goggleheads lived for, without the goggles. She hadn’t yet, because the tech got better fast. If she was going to let a laser-cutter near her eyeballs, she wanted to make sure it was for the first and last time and not have to go back next year for a crucial upgrade. She was holding off until her vision was unbearable. “For the record, ‘not code, a person’ is a philosophical point we could run for hours, though I’m tired of it.”
“Not my thing, either.” Though it was something she often thought about. “Talking to you isn’t like talking to someone who’s getting dribs fed to a HUD by some dumb algorithm. With you, it feels natural.”
“If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s natural, but thank you.”
She yawned, checked the time. “Four a.m. Shit. Well, the sleepies are finally arriving, I should get my head down and make them welcome.”
“You gotcha. Love you, Tam.”
“Love you, too.” She meant it, knew Limpopo meant it. She’d loved and been loved in every walkaway place, but this was the first house that loved her.
She snuggled up to Seth and put her arms around his paunch, kissed his back where the sparse gray hairs tickled her nose. Her hips ached. She closed her eyes, found her sleep.
She roused a bit when Seth got up a few hours later. She half-parsed the sounds of him putting on slippers and jim-jams and getting a hint about the closest free toilet, felt him come back in, sit on the bed, looking at her. She smiled a little. He murmured, “It’s okay, you sleep,” and squeezed her hand, leaned over slowly, and with a grunt, and kissed her on the forehead, then on the lips, stubble rasping her skin.
He rubbed her back and she groaned appreciatively, just for the joy of human contact on a drowsy morning.
“Gonna get breakfast,” he murmured. She turned her head and kissed his fingers.
“Kay.”
“Another bad night, huh?”
“Just sleepless. Not bad.”
“Sleep in. Doesn’t matter when you sleep.”
“Right.” She pulled the covers over her head.
Stories helped lull her to sleep. She cracked one eye, wiped a surface onto the headboard, and tapped a recording of an old Terry Pratchett novel, the one about the founding of the Discworld newspaper. She’d listened to it a thousand times and could listen to it a thousand times more, and let the reader carry her sleepwards.
She drifted on words and buttery sun that leaked around the edges of the windows’ polarization film, sometimes waking herself a little with her own soft snores, and then—
“Tam?”
She sat bolt upright. Seth’s voice did not often reach that panicked level. She was wide awake, looking at him, standing in their doorway, breathing hard, eyes wide, sparse hair sticking out at mad-professor angles. He held a forgotten piece of toast.
“Jesus, what is it?”
“Limpopo is on the phone.”
She blinked, confused.
“Seth?”
“The real Limpopo. Sorry, the living Limpopo. She’s alive, is what I’m saying. She’s alive. She’s on the phone.”
She brought her hands to her cheeks, a silly way to register surprise, but there you had it.
“Limpopo is alive?”
“She’s talking to Limpopo.” He noticed the toast in his hand, stared at it, put it down. She took it away and bit it. It was slathered in butter, brewer’s yeast, and tabasco—Seth’s Platonic ideal breakfast.
“Jesus.” She found her robe on the floor, put on slippers, finished Seth’s toast. “Come on.”
The biggest common room had five others in it already, looking stunned and excited, silently listening.
“They never let you write to anyone?” That was Limpopo’s voice—their Limpopo. The house spirit.
“Never. I wasn’t the only one. There are—there were?—a bunch of us in policy-segregation, no visitors, no messaging anyone outside. Held under other names.” That voice was Limpopo, too, but older, an old lady’s voice, the voice of a Limpopo that had lived—where?—for more than a decade.
“But now—”
“Now the inmates run the asylum.” She sounded giddy. “There were three days when it was really bad. Almost no guards showed up. The ones that did were too scared to do anything except huddle in their control rooms and bark at us over the speakers. Not even that on the third day.
“At midnight yesterday, click-clunk, all the doors opened. No guards. No admin staff. Nothing. Everyone was starving, of course. We found our way to the caf, once we figured out what was going on. Some of us ad-hocced a kitchen committee, got the fabbers running and fed everyone. Then someone called for volunteers to check out the clinics and started seeing to the sick best as they could. Lot of nurses in here and—sorry, I guess that doesn’t matter. No one here knows what happened out in default. When they used the comms room to call their lawyers, they said Corrections Canada had some kind of internal coup and no one there was talking to the outside world. They say it’s not the first ministry this happened to—apparently Veterans Affairs Canada did this last month? I don’t get a lot of high-quality news and analysis in jail—”
Tam started to make sense of what she was saying. She’d been in jail. The jails had ruptured. Ruptured was the word they were using for government institutions that fell apart, turned into walkaway-style co-ops that gave away office supplies and opened up the databases for anyone who wanted a crack. She’d heard of ruptured hospitals, police departments, public housing—but jails were a new one. A big one.