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

if you aren’t gentle.  She’s careful and calm—I’ve even seen her coo at a baby as she injected the solution into the IV line.  She just doesn’t seem to mind the way I do when it has to be done. She’s been a Baby Helper for a long time.  Maybe it gets easier after you do it for years.  But I don’t think it will.

Helper97 is a mystery to me.  I don’t know much about her.  We work a lot of shifts together and she’s never once missed one.  I wonder what she’s doing with her free time tonight, since there were too few babies to justify another Helper on shift.  I don’t know what section of the complex she lives in, though it must not be far from my section; all the lower designations live in roughly the same area.  We ride the same train home sometimes, but she never sits with me or offers to walk with me when we get off.  I don’t know her baby name, and I bet she never uses it even with her friends, if she has any.

One of the babies starts to cry—one of the boys, of course.

 "Shhhh, shush Jobee."  I press my lips on the soft spot on the top of the baby's head.  I named this one Jobee for no special reason—I just liked the sound of the word.  It's always struck me as odd that the lowly Baby Helpers are the ones who give the babies their baby names, but Helper97 straightened me out on that.

"We don't matter, but they matter even less," she said, nodding toward the babies.  They might still fail, so it doesn't matter what they're called.  If they make it through and get tracked, they get their designation, so our names go by the wayside, as far as they know.  Nobody knows we pass those names on, and nobody cares what they’re called while they’re still temps."

 She's right.  "Fail" is what they say when they mean die, and many of the babies do.  Even if they make it past the Pre Ward to tracking, some of them just don’t have what it takes.  I’ve seen a few leave here that I knew in my heart would fail.  They just didn’t seem to . . . care.  They didn’t really want to live.  When they’re like that, I know they go to tracking and fail, and that’s that for them.

“Not you though, right Jobee?”  I nuzzle the nape of Jobee’s neck and jounce him softly.  He calms down, and I put him back in his crib.  It’s almost time to make the final chart notes and then get ready for the next Helper.  There’s always something that needs to be done last minute—usually a diaper change or a crying baby that makes the shift change rushed, so I like to have really clear notes.  That way if I forget to mention something it’s there in the charts.  Tonight, Jobee’s the only baby who has really been awake much.  The other two have been sleeping most of my shift.  I need to make sure that Helper29 knows to keep them up some, so they don’t just fade away.

The door to the Pre Ward swings open.  I expect to see Helper29, but it’s not her.  It’s some older woman, being escorted by one of the Directors.  From the looks of her she’s Society.  No uniform.  The colors of her clothing are mixed and matched in some order that signifies something only to her, not something about her designation.  Or maybe that is what they signify: her designation as Society.  She looks around the room with a cold eye, taking me in that same way she takes in the steel examining tables and acrylic cribs.  Only when she sees the babies do her eyes warm.

“Oh!”  She makes a sound like a bird, moving toward the cribs.

“Madame, we need to wait.”  The Director seems cowed by her, and he’s not one of the nice ones; he doesn’t hesitate to raise his voice to Helpers.  I wonder who she is, to make him talk so nice.

  “Nonsense!”  She keeps moving toward the cribs.  I put my charts on the table and rise from my seat; the babies haven’t had all of their inoculations.  This woman is in street clothes; she isn’t even gloved up.  I can’t let her touch them.  I move to the front of the cribs without thinking it through, putting myself between them and her.

She glares at me, but doesn’t address me.  Instead, she turns to the Director, arching an eyebrow at him as if to ask why some mess hasn’t been cleaned up.

That’s when I see him.

He’s been there the whole time, but he’s standing behind the two of them, and right now he’s watching the woman with something in his eyes—pity?  When the Director doesn’t shove me out of her way, she starts to, and that’s when he moves.  In a moment he is at her side, holding her arm gently, restraining her from coming closer.

“Mother.”  He speaks very softly to her.  “The girl’s just doing her job.  She’s protecting them.  Let’s wait for Father to get here.”

Mother.  Father.

It’s a real live family unit, right here in my Ward.

Chapter Two

 That they're rich goes without saying.  All family units are rich; it costs a lot to live that way.  Luxury taxes are a killer, and most people can't afford even a simple companion animal tax.  Family units run forty percent of gross, at the least.  Pretty much only Society members can afford that.

I've never seen a family unit up close.  You see them on the ads sometimes, sipping the latest beverage or applying some fancy lotion to their smooth faces, but they don't walk around in the real world.  At least not my real world.  I wonder what it's like to call somebody mother, to know who your mother is, like this boy does.  I can see that he has her eyes; the shape is the same, though