Surplus
A Story of Passing
In the Towers, a human is an expense and a machine is an asset. Wren has spent five years as the asset.
Science fiction novelette · about 13,000 words · nine pencil drawings
She keeps her heart at forty-four.
Wren is thirty-one. Her heart beats forty-four times a minute because she has trained it to. Her skin is sealed under a film cast from a dead household unit, and her name is a number taken from its tag. If the Annex's Inversion test ever catches her, she will be in the Maintenance bay by morning.
Then Meridian Tower puts her in a nursery with a nine-year-old girl who notices everything.
Calla Voss-Adeyemi keeps a green notebook and a candle she stole from a dinner party. Her father sits on the city council, and the plans he is making for the Lower Wards are written on a map in his study. Wren has been taught to feel nothing. Calla is about to teach her what that cost.
For readers of Klara and the Sun, Never Let Me Go, and the quieter side of Blade Runner.
The examiner's room was kept cold on purpose. A frightened body shivers differently from a cold one, and the scanners knew the difference.
Wren sat with both hands flat on the steel table, palms down, fingers slightly spread, 4.2 centimeters apart. She had measured that once against the hand of a decommissioned domestic unit in a scrapyard in the Lower Wards. It was the unit's resting posture. Nobody had told her it was a posture. She'd had to steal it, and the rest of her designation off the same unit's tag. Only the first word was hers.
This was her twelfth audit at the Annex, and the first one that counted. She had spent five years in the municipal service pool, scrubbing transit stations at night beside units that never looked at her, and now a Tower house had put in for her. A placement. The Auditor across the table could end it with a single flag.
"Unit designation," said the Auditor. It was tall and matte gray, with a face like a closed door.
"Wren-Seven-Alcott-Nine." Eleven hundred milliseconds. The old units always paused a little over a second, as if their names had to be fetched from somewhere. Humans answered in under four hundred. A body gives its name away before the mind can stop it.
"Begin Inversion protocol. You will be asked a series of questions. Respond accurately. Do not elaborate."
Do not elaborate. It was the cruelest instruction in the test and the easiest to follow, because elaboration was how people gave themselves up. The um, the well, the I think. A human wanted to be understood, and wanting showed.
Wren wanted nothing. She had practiced that too.
The story continues in the book. Read it on Kindle.
Nine drawings from inside the Towers
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I write quiet science fiction at a slow pace. You will hear from me when a story is ready, and you can leave at any time.
An AI wrote with me, and I say so.
I wrote Surplus in conversation with an AI model, Claude, made by Anthropic. The AI drafted text that I directed, rewrote, and approved, and the illustrations were produced with AI image tools.
I am telling you because you should know what you are reading. A story about someone pretending to be something she is not seems like a bad place to hide how it was made.