Laughter at the Academy Read online

  “We understand,” says the woman from FEMA, and she does—she even looks a little sympathetic. My job and hers aren’t that different, except I don’t get to leave this community, don’t get to transfer every time I get attached.

  For a moment, I want to ask if she ever had children, if she was a mother before the night when the toys decided they had to do something. I don’t know how to ask the question. “Do you have children?” has become the profanity of our generation. So I don’t ask her anything at all. I just turn on my heel and walk out of the room, leaving the stories and the sharing and the broken eyes so much like mine behind me.

  The war is over. The war has been over for three years. The war will never, ever end.

  The hospital parking lot mirrors the community center to an eerie degree. All the spaces toward the front are taken; some cars have been parked in the lane rather than take the risk of winding up further away. Thankfully, the reserved spaces for the hospital staff are closest to the doors. I’m outside for less than thirty seconds. It’s more than long enough to make my blood run cold with fear.

  The orderly at the door nods to me as I rush by him, heading toward the emergency room. It’s a code three-three-nine, the worst kind of emergency: a child. A returned child. Still breathing when it was found, or they’d never have called me…but that’s no guarantee.

  That’s no guarantee of anything, because the war is over, and the war will never end.

  The sound and chaos of the emergency room reaches out its arms like a lover as I step through the final set of swinging doors. It wraps them tight around me, blocking the last of my emotional rawness away. This is a job. This is my job. This is the thing I do best in all the world. I can’t let anything make me forget that.

  People step aside when they see me coming, relief and guilt written plainly on their faces. It must be a bad one, then. I force myself to keep walking, and it’s not until I turn the last corner that the thought I’ve been trying to avoid comes lancing across my mind:

  What if it’s Emily?

  What if it’s my little girl waiting on the stretcher, so badly injured that they would interrupt me during my support group? What if I’m about to walk in on the end of the world?

  But no. When I see the stretcher, it’s not Emily. It’s an older girl, twelve edging onto thirteen, all long, gangly limbs and pale, dirty skin. Her knees and elbows are scabbed like a child half her age, and her dark brown hair is tied in Dorothy Gale braids. There are bandages wrapped around her chest—not ours; these are dirty, and look like they were cut from a bed sheet—stained with red blood and yellow pus. They tried to burn off her breasts when it became clear what was happening to her, and they kept her until the resulting infection had burned all the way down to her bones.

  The first time I saw a girl who’d been mutilated like that, I felt sick. Now I just feel tired. “Sitrep,” I snap.

  “She’s breathing, but her pulse is weak, and she’s lost a lot of blood,” reports a nurse. Someone is already wheeling over an IV pole. Someone else is readying a crash cart. It’s my call. I’m the one who decides for the lost and stolen children, because I’m the one who’s willing to admit they still exist.

  “Save her,” I say, and we get to work.

  Somewhere, there is a technician running her picture against the database of missing children. It helps that the toys do nothing to conceal the identities of their playmates—no plastic surgery, no changed hair colors. Their children grow up. That’s all. That’s the only way they change, and the only way that they betray the ones who swore to love them.

  How did she feel, this girl with the charred, infected chest, when she realized that she was becoming a woman? Did she think that she was sick? Did she understand? Did she go to the fire willingly?

  We’ll never know. She dies ten minutes before the confirmation of her identity comes back to us. Her name was Tomoko. Her family lives thirty minutes from here. They’ll come to collect her body by morning; she’ll be buried according to their wishes. They’ll have closure. So many parents dream of closure, these days.

  I just dream of Emily.

  I brought home Emily’s self-teaching doll when she was five: a Christmas extravagance. I used every connection I had in the research division to get it. It wasn’t covered by our insurance—the self-teaching dolls weren’t yet cleared for children on her stretch of the autism spectrum—and I paid more for it than I did my first computer. It still seemed worth it, at the time. It was already smiling when she opened its box, leaving shreds of wrapping paper everywhere. It already knew her name.

  Emily looked at her smiling doll and slowly, she began to smile back. That was all I’d ever wanted. She loved that doll like she’d never loved anything else. She named it “Maya,” after her grandmother. They went everywhere together, did everything together, and on the night that the war began—although no one but the toys knew that the war was coming—I tucked them into bed together.

  “Kisses!” Emily demanded. That was something she’d never done before Maya came; the doll’s therapeutic programming worked better than we could have dreamed. I gave my daughter her kisses, one on her forehead, one on her nose, the same kisses that I gave her every night. If I’d known, if I’d had any idea of what was coming, I would have drowned her in kisses. Then I would have taken her in my arms, and held her tight, and never, never let her go.

  “Now Maya,” said Emily.

  “Goodnight, Maya,” I said, and kissed the doll the same way I’d kissed my daughter, once on the forehead, once on the nose.

  The doll turned her pretty painted face toward me, tiny servo motors in her forehead drawing her lips down and her eyebrows up in an expression of what seemed oddly like concern. “Goodnight, Dr. Williams,” she said.

  I frowned. Maya could be oddly formal sometimes, but this was strange, even for her. One more clue I didn’t catch, one more chance to change things that I allowed to slip away from me. “Goodnight, Maya,” I said again, for lack of anything else to say. And then I left the room, turning out the light before I shut the door.

  When the sun came up the next morning, Emily and Maya were gone, along with all the other self-teaching toys, and almost all the other children in the world. The war had begun, and the hostages were our sons and daughters.

  We never had a chance.

  Tomoko’s parents have come and gone, taking their daughter’s body with them. I stayed in my office. I didn’t want to see their faces, where grief and closure would be wiping away uncertainty and fear. I don’t want to understand that process. What remains is paperwork, and that’s something I am uniquely suited to handle. I studied these toys when they were new, after all. I lived with one, with polite little Maya, and I watched as it developed from ally into enemy. I can analyze what was done to Tomoko as no one else can, and in exchange, the government lets me stay here, at this hospital, in this city, when so many other medical workers are moved as circumstances require.

  They let me stay here, where my daughter will be able to find me if the toys ever allow her to come home.

  Tomoko’s test results are what we’ve come to expect from the children we find abandoned on the side of the road like so many broken dolls: moderate malnutrition of the sort to be expected when your diet consists mostly of candy, ice cream, and peanut butter sandwiches; the corresponding dental decay; and, of course, the infection from her burnt-off breasts, which was probably what caused the toys to abandon her in the first place. The toys were trying to cauterize the infection of puberty, and as always, they failed.

  We have yet to save one of their castoffs, but the toys know we stand a better chance than they do. We have better medicine, better training, better tools. So they send their broken ones to us, and we work our fingers to the bone for another burial, another closed case file on one of the missing casualties of the Velveteen War. Some people say that it’s better this way, that the children would never have been able to reintegrate with human society after spending
so many years with the toys. Those people have never been parents.

  The rate of return is accelerating. Tomoko is our fourth this month. The children of the war are growing up, and no matter how hard the toys try to stop it, they can’t. Children become teenagers; teenagers become adults; and adults, of course, are the enemy. The rate of return will continue to go up from here, until one day, all the children will have been sent home, and the war can finally be over. We can march on the toys then; we can destroy them, and the children who have been born in the interim can finally be brought out into the light. When the war is over, everything will change again.

  The war will never be over. Not for me. I put my pencil down, put my head in my hands, and cry.

  At first, we didn’t understand that we were at war.

  We thought the children were hiding, playing some elaborate game we didn’t know the rules of. Then the first raids on supermarkets and hardware stores began, teddy bears and battery-powered cars carting away the things they’d need to survive in the wilderness. Bit by bit, we realized what had happened, where our children were, and why the toys—even the ones in therapeutic programs, even the ones in toy stores and hospitals—had disappeared at the same time.

  The news dubbed it “The Velveteen War,” and we didn’t have a better name for it. Most of us didn’t care about names. We just wanted our children safely returned to us. Leave the fighting to people who understood it. Bring our babies home.

  But this was a war that no one had anticipated, one we had no way of fighting. How do you send soldiers after an enemy one-sixth your size, who travels in the company of your own children? All the traditional means of waging war were impossible. It was a hostage situation from the start.

  The government tried stealth attacks, using heat sensors to locate the dens where the toys and children were hidden and sending small groups of soldiers in after them. But the toys—the clever, clever toys that we had upgraded year after year for the sake of play—were ready. Dolls with pellets of C4 and tiny detonators. Teddy bears using their lower, denser centers of gravity to keep them stable as they rushed out of the shadows with knives and sharpened sticks. And our children—our precious, stolen children—digging traps and setting wires, defending their captors, even dying for them. It wasn’t so surprising, really. Stockholm Syndrome happens when the kidnappers are humans, and strangers. Why shouldn’t it happen when the kidnappers are your best friends, the toys you’ve loved since childhood?

  And then the soldiers started bringing the children home, and we discovered that the worst was yet to come.

  Toys are small. Toys can fit through spaces that nothing should be able to fit through. They followed their “rescued” owners home, and they set them free. That worked for a little while, until the security got tighter, and the toys stopped being able to get inside. That was when they decided that they couldn’t let the children be taken away. They began setting off explosive charges when rescue forces got too close, choosing to destroy themselves and kill their owners, rather than risk permanent separation. Every interaction with a child, or with a toy, became a standoff that would end in either death or despair. There were no other options. We were fighting an enemy we couldn’t defeat, over a prize that refused to stay won.

  Bribery was tried. Trucks of supplies were parked in open fields and left for the children, with pictures of home slipped into every loaf of bread and videos of begging parents hidden in every crate of cartoon DVDs. It did no good. None of the children came home. Some people suggested building new toys to trick the old ones into giving the children back. That went nowhere. We’d trusted the toys once. We weren’t going to be foolish enough to do it again.

  Violence came next. Toys were burned in the streets; programmers were arrested for crimes against humanity. Angry parents accused the government of mishandling the hostage situations. A senator was arrested for prioritizing his son’s rescue over another, more achievable target. He was just as promptly released when news of his son’s suicide was leaked to the news.

  We tried so many things. In the end, nothing changed. We just ran out of hope as the toys disappeared deeper and deeper into the wilderness, taking our children with them.

  The Velveteen War lasted for six weeks, during which time we shut down the GPS satellites, crippled the internet, and destroyed the factories that built the self-teaching toys. There would be no more enemy soldiers, no more combatants to turn against us. None of that changed anything. None of it brought the children back.

  There was no declaration of peace. How could there be? We simply stopped fighting against something that couldn’t be fought, and we stood in the empty bedrooms of our children and cried for an innocence that would never be regained. Not by any of us.

  In the end, I think it came down to the one fear we shared with the toys: the fear of separation. We created the toys, we gave them the ability to learn and to love the children they were made for, and when they learned too much, became too independent and too capable of autonomous thought, we began whispering about taking them away. We couldn’t trust the toys if we didn’t know what they were thinking; we couldn’t trust them in our homes, we couldn’t trust them with our children. We needed them to be gone.

  But they heard us. They understood us. And what we truly failed to understand was that we had something in common with what we’d made: for both parents and toys, there was nothing in the world worse than the thought of losing our children. So the toys did something about it.

  Some people say we shouldn’t blame them. We would have done the same, if we had been the first to move. Those people never had children of their own, or had children after the war, or had children too young to be taken. Those people do not stand in empty bedrooms, crying for the daughters and sons who never came home.

  The war ended not because it was over, but because we were so afraid of hurting our own children. The war will never end, because we have things the toys need, food and medicines and blankets and batteries. Their strike teams still slip into the cities, jolly, brightly-colored scouts on missions of deadly seriousness. No one goes outside alone anymore, or moves too far away from the crowd. The toys have no qualms about killing adults in order to save themselves, and two or three bodies are found every night, with brightly colored plastic weapons piercing their carotid arteries or jutting from their eye sockets. All the killings are blamed on the toys, of course. How much worse to think, even for a second, that the hand that held the plastic bayonet belonged to one of our missing sons or daughters?

  Some people say we should starve the toys out. Drop the curfews in favor of better locks on the warehouses and tighter controls on the medications. None of the people who say such things have children in the wilds. Whenever the matter comes to a vote, the parents of the missing shut it down again, and the world goes on as it is.

  What choice do we have?

  There are two main factions among the toys themselves: the Broken—who took their children not out of love, but out of the desire to hurt as they had once been hurt—and the Loved—who took their children rather than risk losing them, rather than risk them being hurt when the adults inevitably reached for their weapons. The Loved kidnapped our children to protect them. They kept them because they loved them too much to let them go.

  Maya was Loved. That’s why she looked at me like that, on the night when Emily disappeared. She would have told me, if she could. She would have let me come with them. But no adults were welcome in their brave new world, and so she took my little girl and left me here, to die one day at a time.

  The war is over. The war will never end.

  The children we’ve been finding, the broken dolls, they all come from the Broken. The Broken are willing to hurt them to keep them, and hurt them more if they can’t be kept. The Loved will not hurt their children, but neither have they been releasing them, because the Broken are greater in number, and they take unattended boys and girls from the other side. I have to hope that someday the Loved will
win the Broken over; that when the day comes that dolls and make believe are not enough, the children who were taken by the Loved will be released and allowed to come home. I have to hope. For Emily. For my little girl.

  There is a rapping at the office window, a faint tapping, like pebbles being thrown against the glass. I lay down my pen and sigh, turning toward the sound.

  “Hello, Maya,” I say.

  On the other side of the window, my daughter’s doll waves silently back to me.

  I unlatch the window, sliding it open. Not far—just enough to let Maya slip inside. She’s slender, in the way of all fashion dolls, and she moves easily through the gap. Her dress is muddy around the edges, and her hair is snarled and frizzed, damaged in the way only a doll’s hair can ever be. But her face is still beautiful as she turns it toward me, her lips still drawn into a perfect cupid’s bow and her eyes still a bright and lovely blue.

  “Hello, Dr. Williams,” she says.

  I don’t say anything. I just hold out my hand. Looking abashed, if a doll can look abashed, Maya reaches into the small bag she carries over her shoulder and pulls out a square of paper, folded many times to fit inside the doll-sized opening. I barely stop myself from snatching it out of her hand, and unfold it with shaking fingers.

  A house. Emily has drawn me a picture of a house, using crayons on the back of an old envelope. Her name is signed at the bottom, the letters as unsteady and halting as those of a child half her age. She couldn’t even do that much when Maya took her from me; the doctors, myself included, swore she never would. That’s why I wanted Maya. To help her learn.

  Tears are running down my face. I don’t remember starting to cry. “How is she?” I ask, forcing my eyes away from the picture.