HELPER12, Jack Blaine [reading in the dark .TXT] 📗

Digital Edition

Copyright 2011 by Jack Blaine

All Rights

Cover photograph

Jeffrey Bank

To my mom, for all the things she does—without her, this book would never have been written.  I love you, Mom.

And to Dolora, Kelly, Heidi, Christy, and Mikaela, for the proofreading, the lawn mowing, the pizza and the love.

Gavi mai!

HELPER12

by

jack blaine

Chapter One

I was originally tracked as a Breeder.  I still have the mark—that’s the only reason I know.  They tried to remove it, but whoever was on shift at the laser shop that day didn’t do a fabulous job.  Even though it was done when I was very young, you can still see a part of the B underneath the H they tattooed over it; the skin there is pale, taut scar tissue.  I don’t know what went wrong— whether they just found out my initial results were skewed or whether I didn’t do well on the next level of Breeder tests.  I just know that when I was still a toddler, they removed all my Breeder parts, and sent me to train as a Helper.  Baby Helper12, WQ Pre Ward, Complex 9C.  That’s my full title.  But they just call me Helper12.

I don’t mind being a Helper; not really.  It’s not terribly hard work, and at least when you’re a Helper you don’t have to do some of the things the others do.  If I was a Breeder, I’d have to go through nine months of pregnancy every other year; always on a special diet, someone always checking to see if I did my exercises or if I had enough iron in my blood.  And that would be my life, until I couldn’t bear their babies anymore.  Breeders don’t even get to see the babies; they take them while they’re still sewing up the incision.

I could have got a lot worse assignments.  I could have been a Leisure Doll, or a Laborer, or Donor.  None of those are too good.  If I’d shown enough promise, I could have been forced to be a Thinker.  I cannot imagine anything worse than that, really.  Sitting all day in a room with the rest of the Thinkers, examining problems from various angles.  I’ve heard that if you don’t come up with your quotient of solutions, you’re as bad off as a Donor is by the end.

I’m lucky.  I got a pretty sweet deal as a Helper.  The testing showed a strong maternal instinct and so I work at the Central Nursery for the Western Quadrant, in the Pre Ward, as a Baby Helper. I’m right back where I started from, eighteen years ago.  I can picture myself as one of the babies I clean and feed, crying and stretching my wrinkled hands toward some sky.  I can picture myself pushing toward the warmth, the voice, of whomever it was who picked me up back then, my Helper.

Pre Ward is for babies from one to six months old. It’s called Pre Ward because the babies are pre, well, pre-anything. They go from Delivery to us here in Pre Ward, and then on to tracking, where they get most of their testing done, to see what designation they’ll get.  Then a brief stint at Conditioning, where they have whatever procedures they need, like hysterectomies or vasectomies, or lobal injections or whatever.  Then on to Training, for varying lengths of time.  Thank the godz that Helpers don’t have to train long; for me it was only six months, though some, like Surgical Helpers, go longer.  Breeders have a six-month stint too, learning how to take proper care of their bodies in pregnancy.  For Laborers it all depends on what job they’ve pulled.  Thinkers, they never really get done with Training.

I enjoy the babies.  They don’t have any prejudices—they don’t care that I’m just a Baby Helper.  They don’t mind about my stained uniform tops (Supply won’t ever give us new ones; they claim we’ll just get more formula or shit stains on them) or the fact that I am usually coming off a twenty hour shift and I look it.  You should see the stares I get, even from some of the Domestic Helpers, on my ride to the dorms some mornings after my shift.  They act like taking care of babies is easy work.  I mean, who picked mint green for Baby Helpers anyway?  Seems to me that some dark color would have been better planning.  Black is taken by the Mourners, of course.  But mint green?  With all the puke and poop babies make?  Seems to me we should have got black.

I have two hours to go on my shift tonight.  We only have three babies in the wing.  That is not a lot of babies; the norm would be around twenty, with six Helpers on shift.  Tonight, it’s just me and the babies.  Two boys and one girl.  I don’t know why the numbers are so low lately.  Nobody says anything about it, which makes it even stranger.  But I try hard not to think about that sort of thing.  Thinking too hard about things you can’t change can make you go crazy.

So far, there are no colored tags on the cribs.  I look every time I start a shift, to see if any pre-tracking cuts have been made.  I don’t think there will be; all three of them are strong, and they seem to be appropriately reactive.  I’m glad, because the cuts are always hard for me.  Helper97 always tells me I need to toughen up, and I know she’s right, but I hate it when I come to work and there’s a red tag on one of my cribs. It’s hard not to get a little attached.

Helper97 is tough, that’s for sure.  She doesn’t blink when she has to cut one of hers.  Just gets the hypo and does what has to be done.  Not that she’s cruel or anything.  I mean, you don’t get tracked to be a Baby Helper