65

Lila Easterlin

October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

It was stupid, but Lila found herself getting choked up watching the demolition of Disney World on her computer. Maybe it was because Disney World so perfectly represented the modern human world, with its combination of commercial crassness and creative audacity. She watched bulldozers flatten snack bars, wrecking balls topple Cinderella’s Castle and the monorail. Did the defenders really need to supersize Orlando in that direction, or were they trying to make a statement about how childish humans were? She took a big swig of coffee; she was hoping the caffeine would kill the pounding headache she had. She’d stayed up too late, drinking too much and popping too many pills.

It was stupid that the destruction of Disney World was bothering her. The real tragedy was the destruction of all those works of art at the Met, MoMA, the Louvre, on and on, to make room for defender artwork. They could have removed the human works of art instead of destroying them, but who was going to question defenders’ instructions?

Even with all of that space devoted to defender artwork, nothing of Erik’s was on public display. It gave Lila childish pleasure, yet she also felt sorry for him. That was the difference between how she and Kai felt about the defenders: They both hated them, but Lila also pitied them. Maybe if she’d been shot by a defender, and dealt with the pain Kai dealt with on a daily basis, she’d find it hard to pity them.

“Lila? You ready?” Minka stood in Lila’s defender-sized doorway.

“Sure.” She closed the feed on the demolition, grabbed her phone, and joined Minka in the hall. “Who’s doing the review?”

“Pierre.”

Lila groaned inwardly. Pierre was a walking neurosis. Lila wasn’t sure if defenders were capable of developing PTSD, but something had to account for how far from the defender norm Pierre was when it came to being tightly wound.

Pierre was waiting outside the delivery room (as they referred to it when no defenders were present). “How many?” he asked as they approached.

“Eight hundred,” Lila replied.

“Eight hundred exactly?”

“Eight hundred exactly.” Eight hundred more defenders, with their dead souls and sociopathic narcissism. With the advances in genetic engineering made between the end of the Luyten War and the beginning of the Defender Ascension (as the defenders had named it), Lila could have engineered them to be so much more stable, if they’d let her. But no. The new defenders couldn’t be in any way superior to the existing ones.

Lila and Minka followed Pierre down concrete stairs to the parade floor, where the new defenders were lined up, ready for review.

She should kill herself. Blow her brains out, or jump from a bridge. More of these monsters only added suffering to the world. If she wasn’t such a coward, if she didn’t love Kai and Errol so much, she would remove herself from the equation. They would get someone else to oversee production at this facility, but that rationalization was wearing thin for her. Lately she felt so disgusting most of the time. Most humans who learned what she did for a living shared her contempt for herself.

Other officers tended to strut around during a review, making it more a ceremonial show than a true inspection, but Pierre looked the new defenders up and down as if expecting some to be missing fingers, or major organs.

Lila waited by the door for more than an hour before Pierre finally nodded his approval. “Brothers,” he called, “welcome to the world.”

Lila and Minka stood aside as the new defenders paraded past, five at a time, up the stairs to join the hellish world they’d all created together.

Lila dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and headed for her room. She had twenty minutes to get ready to go with Erik to this thing, whatever it was.

“Lila?” Erik called from his room. “Is that you? Come here, please.”

“Coming.” She always felt uneasy, being alone in the house with Erik. It made her feel too much like his wife.

He was lying on the bed, wearing what looked like a giant pair of boxer shorts, his artificial legs on the bed beside him.

He looked less than imposing lying there, his stumped flesh-and-bone legs ending just below the knee, the last few inches of his legs deeply notched to accept the bionic appendages, his friction sores salved.

“Can you help me with these?”

“Sure.”

She clamped and locked his limbs into place as gently as she could, trying not to aggravate the open sores. The fit was never perfect, and friction was inevitable. The arms weren’t as bad.