7 Days of SciFi: 1, Adept

1)  Adept

I first started seeing them out of the corner of my eye last year.  On the subway, tucked between the sleepers and the bums, staring blankly and occasionally moving their hands.  Near the banks, or the coffee shops, a look of permanently plastered expectation bound to their faces.  I tried not to look at them.  I tried to ignore them.  I assume it was the same for others, the same strange feeling that if we did accidentally catch their eye, we'd look away.  Quickly.  Even though there was nothing to look at.  It wasn't an eye.  It was plastic and glass.  It wasn't a person, or a face.  Just plastic.

They were installed amongst the unwashed masses by some company, some kind of viral advertising gimmick.  The world was getting more crowded, they said.  People are becoming so sensitive!  Like angry sardines in a tin, they said.  Accidents will happen.  A lot.  And frequently!  They said with a white, chipper smile.  May as well get used to the idea of, well, plastic.

The mannequins became a fixture in the corner of my eye and I didn't connect the dots until the last day I was stuck in traffic while still baring two arms.  The airplane cut through the clouds like a graceful diver in all her Olympic glory.  They told me later that I was a victim of circumstance, in the wrong place at the wrong time and all that.  But really there should be a single, decisive word for someone who is squished roughly into a pulp by the cruel thumb of fate for no reason except to prove some company's viral marketing campaign valid.

The plane was off-course, out of gas, hijacked, and piloted by a drunk guy who was asleep, all at the same time.  Or something.  Either way the pilot thought to land on a highway, having seen it in a movie.  But, little did the air-faring drunkard know, that I and millions of other commuters hadn't moved past sixty miles per hour in four years.  The mannequin marketers were right about that, too.  It was crowded.

So the plane warbled and whined, landing gear deployed.  I saw it framed like a picture on mom's kitchen wall in my rear-view window, sailing towards a clearly free landing strip: a four-lane bridge over a ten-lane highway.  The rear wheels slammed down at the base of the bridge, riding cars like skateboards towards where I was.  The wings, tougher than they looked, sliced with a scream through the bridge's chain-link fences.  I guess it was those fences that slowed the disastrously fated craft.  It managed to stop its demolition derby right before my car.  

Ah, right.  That's another thing they call me.

Lucky.

The interior of my vehicle was turned into a washing machine full of shrapnel.  I remember it weirdly.  I remember it was bright.  Warm.

Quiet.

When I awoke last week in a hospital, they called me that word again.  Lucky.  I noticed that one of the plastic people was in my room.  It caught me off guard at first, being surrounded by real people: my mom, the doctor, a couple nurses.  It was just sitting in the corner of the room smiling blankly at something sickly-sweet.  It took a double-take to make me realize that it wasn't a person.  It seemed content as a peach to be sitting there, missing exactly one arm.

It was that moment when you realize someone's told a joke in the crude humor category, and it's taken you ten minutes to get it.  The campaign.  Accidents.  I peeled back the covers on my bad with larval revulsion, seeing the vacancy just below the elbow.  I swear I'd still felt it there until I focused my attention on the subject.  The plastic people, also now in clear view.  Smiling portable limb donors, waiting for inevitable accidents.

I get it now.