Make-Believe

 Author's Note: This short story is part of my dystopian anthology series called "Panicdemic." You can find another story from the anthology on this post. 

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Her mommy and daddy loved her. That’s why they had decided to keep her safe. She was lucky, luckier than anyone else in the world, than anyone she saw on TV or News, than almost anyone she talked to online or on her phone. She was safe.

That’s what they told her, what they had been teaching her since she could remember. At first, she learned this through the glass windows and from the large, Michelin man suits that called themselves her parents. Now that she was a big girl, she had her own phone and laptop, so she could log on and see her mommy and daddy’s faces for the first time. The suits did not allow for that, and it had been hard to make out their faces through the hazy blue lights from the purifiers near the windows.

Mommy had explained to her that out there in the world there was something called “germs.” These things could get into your body, make you sick, and even shorten your life. They had killed billions of people throughout history, though not all at once. They were easily spread through the air or by touching another person who was ill or something an ill person had touched, and sometimes people didn’t even know they were sick, so they would spread the disease without meaning to.

Daddy wanted to make sure she never dealt with these nefarious things, so when he found out Mommy was going to have a baby, he built her a special room complete with the latest purification systems, filtrations, and comforts. After the Airborne Illness Emergency Relief Bill of 2030, which made new laws that required isolating anyone with symptoms of an illness and that even those without symptoms cover their faces with cloths at all times, had been revised in 2043, people had begun to build isolation chambers in their homes for their sick loved ones. Some families couldn’t afford it, and they had to isolate their sicked loved ones in special buildings far away from them. Other families could only build one room, because the room had to be built just right, and that cost a lot of money. Still other families could build whole suites of rooms for their loved ones!

“But as far as I know, honey, nobody has built an isolation suite for someone who is healthy! That’s only for you, dear! You are so lucky!” Daddy had said.

So she was lucky, especially because she hadn’t been placed in the room until she was nine days old. Mommy had cried the whole nine days, she said, afraid that her baby would catch a disease before the room was ready. She had come early, and the room wasn’t finished yet. Daddy had paid an extra million or so to speed up the construction of the room as soon as Mommy went into labor, but it still had taken time because of the extra and special air filtration and plumbing that had to go in to keep everything as pure and sanitary as possible.

Mommy had chosen how to decorate the rooms. Soft pinks and greens because they knew her baby was a girl even before she was born. There were some hypoallergenic toys, soft blankets, and other amenities. She even had her own bathroom and something called a “kitchen,” though she wasn’t allowed to go in there yet because she wasn’t old enough. “One day, when you’re bigger, I will find you some apps and shows to teach you how to use the kitchen,” Mommy had said through their digital meeting. “Right now, I’m keeping the door locked to keep you safe. Everything we do is to keep you safe.”

Mostly, she stayed in the main room where her bed, toys, and television were. She was a big girl now and knew how to log into her laptop and connect her laptop to her tv so she could have digital meetings with Grandma, who was Mommy’s mommy, and Grandpa, who was Mommy’s daddy. She found these concepts confusing, though the people were always nice when they talked to her.

When she had been really little, before she could feed herself or put her own clothes on, Mommy and Daddy had come into the suite dressed in big suits every so often to bring her food or help her with her clothes. They only came three times a day in her earliest memories because it took them so long to go through the process of getting into the suit and purifying themselves. “We might have accidentally carried in a germ with us!” Daddy said, and the way he said it let her know how very scary that possibility was.

Mommy said she actually stayed in the room with her the first year of her life because little babies needed to eat so often and have their diapers changed, but Mommy knew that having two people in a room could be dangerous because germs need only two people to spread! Besides, Mommy had not been happy in isolation. “It’s good for you,” Mommy had explained. “You have never known anything different. But for Mommy, the room seemed small and lonely.”

“What is lonely?” she had asked, but Mommy had not explained.

The laptop buzzed at her, and she typed in her password, which was her name. She could spell her name now, and she was very proud of that! She hadn’t even been to school yet, but her mommy had taught her early so that she could log in. She knew all of the letters on the keyboard, and she recited them to herself as she looked for one of the letters. “Q, W, E, R, T, Y…” She could also count to 100 because the numbers up on the top of the keyboard apparently arranged themselves in lots of rows so that the didn’t go from 1 to 0, but continued at 11, 12, 13. She found that concept funny, too.

She found a lot of things funny, especially the things she saw on the television. Sometimes she saw children like her playing outside. The sky was big, and she wasn’t sure what it would feel like to not be protected by the walls of her rooms. “Unsafe,” Mommy said when she had asked. “It feels very unsafe, very scary.”

Having found all the letters she needed to spell her name, she found herself in an online meeting with her Mommy now. That’s what the buzzing had been about. “Hi, baby!” Mommy said. “How’s my darling today?”

“Good. I am learning new words!” she pushed the button to share her screen with Mommy and showed her the app that was teaching her to spell words that started with cr, br, and gr.

“That’s great, baby!” Mommy said. “I will put some more app credits on your account, and you can buy some new books to read! Soon you won’t even need the virtual reader to tell you what the words are. You’re so smart!”

She basked in her mommy’s praise. She wasn’t exactly sure what “smart” was, but she knew it was a good thing. “Now, baby,” said Mommy, “Remember what we talked about. I won’t be able to log in to talk to you for a little while. 14 sleeps or so is how long it will be. Mommy and Daddy have to go somewhere.”

“Ok,” she said. Mommy had been telling her about this for about nine months or so, so she wasn’t surprised that she wouldn’t be seeing them for a while. She was a little scared because she had always seen them every day. Even when they had stopped coming into her room in the suits now that she could dress herself and clean up her own messes and the food she needed could be passed through the safe lock on the door, she had always had digital meetings with them. Still, Mommy and Daddy said what was going to happen and it happened, and it never occurred to her to ask why they couldn’t even log on to talk to her from wherever they were going.

“We love you, baby!” Mommy said, logging off. She kept playing her game for a while, then had the virtual voice read her a book, then she watched three episodes of TV. Mommy and Daddy didn’t usually want her to watch that much TV at once, but she thought she might get away with it since they weren’t “here” right now. Of course, she didn’t sit still the whole time. During the second episode she played tea party with her dolls, and her lunch was delivered during the third episode. It didn’t occur to her to ask who brought it, and she didn’t talk to whoever was on the other side of the safe lock.

After lunch she read another book.

She discovered that the TV would automatically play the next episode of a show on day three, and by the fourth day, the shows ran constantly since there was no one to stop her and no one contacted her to tell her that she couldn’t have it on. Her food was still delivered three times a day, but she had no digital calls, and no one stood at the windows even to wave. She found she liked the sound of the television in the background. For some reason, it was soothing.

She never turned the TV off, not even when she was sleeping. Her laptop and phone never buzzed at her, though she would log in to play her games or do her reading occasionally. She stopped playing with her dolls and hypoallergenic stuffed animals around day six, and on day seven she stopped counting the days.

Her digital assistant, Alexander, would buzz and remind her to do things like brush her teeth and take her bath, and her food was delivered three times a day. She cried sometimes, now, because she wished her laptop or phone would buzz and someone would talk to her, but it never did. She didn’t know how to make the phone talk to someone herself. Her mommy had never taught her.

Increasingly, she spent time in front of the television. She looked at the people who were laughing and playing together and imagined she was one of them, imagined that she was unsafe like they were. It looked like fun. But I am lucky; I am safe, she reminded herself, though something inside of her told her she wasn’t.

“Time for bed!” Alexander chirped helpfully, and she walked backwards toward the bed that was up against the wall, keeping her eyes glued to the television and the faces of the people on there. She touched her own nose, saw that the people on the television had eyes like she did. If she were watching older shows, they even had mouths like hers, but those shows were from ancient history, long before the Rona virus had come about. Someone had once told her that a Rona was one of the most deadly and dangerous airborne viruses of them all, but she couldn’t remember who. Actually, that didn’t make sense. People didn’t talk to her. People. Was she a people? What were people?

People weren’t real. They were just stories. Make-believe. Like when she pretended her dolls were really drinking tea. People. They only existed on the shows and online…