Read Online Spares by Michael Marshall Smith - Free Book Online Page A

picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, in the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third, Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who’d lost a swath of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: They’d never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careened away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they’d stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room—its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.
    I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as nothing, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They’d gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn’t use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.
    I wasn’t qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn’t make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I’d ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.
    “What are you doing?”
    I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always thinkthat it’s what happens when you’re awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn’t. When you’re asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different from them except I didn’t live in the tunnels.
    That’s what I told myself, anyway. But I didn’t think I could have left the Farm then, couldn’t have faced going back outside again. Don’t ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
    “I want to help them,” I said. Both droids watched me impassively.
    “How?” Ratchet asked. Behind me, Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.
    “Let them walk around. Teach them.”
    Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “Why do you fucking think?” I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn’t, I tried to find one myself. “They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.”
    “No, they haven’t, Jack.” Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a petri dish that had suddenly started juggling knives. “The spares only exist to fulfill their function.”
    “Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.” I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn’t really up to a metaphysicaldiscussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That’s the problem with Rapt. You don’t get much time off.
    “Do they?” asked the droid, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re proposing, against the express instructions