Blind Touch, By Nacho_Momsky

"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It's the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth." -Margaret Atwood

The dying woman watches through the transparent barrier as the preschoolers play hide and seek, her breath shallow and laboured.

The kids are no good at the game. They hide in the most obvious places, so that when the countdown is over nearly all of them are still visible. One kid hides behind a support beam only two inches wide. Another kid crouches behind a potted fern plant. A third, who couldn't find a hiding spot, curls up into a tight ball in the middle of the nursery and hides her face in her hands.

The woman laughs softly, then coughs and wheezes.

One preschooler hasn't even tried to hide. Instead, he's staring right at the woman. That's impossible, she thinks.

The woman sits on the other side of a barrier that looks into the spaceship nursery. The barrier has a reflective surface on the nursery side, so that she can look in, but the kids can't look out. From her vantage in the nursery control room she could lower the barrier, make it transparent from both sides. But that's a temptation she has resisted for nearly five years and she's not about to give in now.

The boy is catalogued in her records as D-035. She calls him Delta Oh for short. She realises now that he's staring at a spot slightly to her right. His eyes are unfocused, as though he's trying to look through the barrier. He turns ninety degrees to the right and casts his penetrating stare again.

Nearly five years after the nursery was sealed off from the rest of the spaceship, the kids range in age from newborns to preschoolers. Delta Oh has a name but the woman pushes that out of her mind. She resists thinking of any of the 532 kids by their given names. Besides, it's the androids who run the nursery that give each of the kids their names. On this side of the barrier, the kids have only ever been referred to by their catalogue number. The woman usually keeps the audio feeds from the nursery on mute so that she doesn't get used to thinking of the kids by name. It's easier this way since she won't be around much longer.

She helped program the androids to exhibit every sign of human affection the spaceship's dwindling population of scientists at the time could think of. That included programming them to satisfy the kids' need for touch right from birth – from the moment they were swaddled. The androids have been covered with heated organic tissue to make their touch more human-like. They often pick the babies up, massage their limbs, and caress them lovingly.

What does Delta Oh know? she wonders. What is he thinking? What is he trying to see?

She's tried to resist having favourites, but she's always followed Delta Oh with keen interest. He's an ordinary kid with a healthy curiosity. She loves watching the world through his eyes. He was born in the first year of the nursery experiment and responded well to the constant touch from his android caregivers. When Delta Oh was almost three, he was one of the first toddlers to be trained to provide that same loving touch to the newborns. Now all of the preschoolers are trained.

Touch is blind, the woman thinks. Infants don't care who's touching them, as long as it's gentle.

Some of the older preschoolers like Delta Oh still remember the early mishaps, when the androids touch function hadn't been perfected and would sometimes leave bruises. There was one particularly unfortunate incident when an android fractured an infant's arm, causing the bone to protrude through the skin and blood to stream down the screaming baby's arm.

Those bumps in programming had been smoothed out. But there was one issue that still plagued the nursery and that the woman fretted about constantly. A few toddlers and preschoolers threw tantrums regularly and even acted out violently towards others. Sometimes their violence was shocking. The woman had started experimenting with the androids' compassionate and authoritative behaviour towards the kids.

What are they playing now? she wonders, distracted by the kids. Delta Oh has resumed playing games with the other preschoolers - a combination of freezing tag and What Time is it Mr. Wolf?, but with Delta Oh and some of the other strong-willed kids changing rules on a whim.

Each of the kids was conceived and carried to term in vitro after it became apparent that whatever disease had befallen the spaceship would eventually kill off the almost 10,000 souls on board. The dying woman did not have any viable eggs to contribute so none of the kids are biologically hers. But she feels fiercely protective of their survival like a mother would. As the last survivor, she's the only parent-like human the kids have now, albeit from behind the barrier. They don't even know she exists.

The woman considers lowering the barrier, but she's only torturing herself now. She knows she won't do it. Not this close to her own death.

Touch might be blind but what happens when touch becomes seeing? the woman's thoughts continue. And realises or senses that there's something not right about the touch?

When the disease first started sweeping across every sector of the ship simultaneously, it was all the leaders could do to come up with an emergency plan to ensure there would still be humans on board when the ship arrived at its destination. The destination was expected to be reached five generations after departure.

The nursery was set up to be entirely separate from the spaceship. Eggs and sperm cells were harvested from those still alive. After dozens of failures they learned that fertilisation and the full-term development of the foetus had to occur without coming into contact with human tissue. In one part of the nursery, synthetic uteruses hung in a fluid-filled room with developing foetuses, like octopus eggs hanging from a cave ceiling.

At first, some of the ship's scientists studied the disease. But it spread so quickly and with such fatal force they soon focused their efforts on the nursery. Everyone on board was expected to be dead within two earth years, so there was no need for the newborn infants to know the humans behind the barrier. The disease slowed down then, but the population of humans outside the nursery continued to slowly dwindle. Now, four and a half years later, only the woman survived outside the nursery.

Elsewhere in the nursery, other androids were tending to infants and toddlers. Usually the woman would cast her attention to different age groups throughout the day. Today, she felt compelled to keep her attention on the preschoolers.

They were drawing now. An android teacher with a specialisation in arts and crafts sits at the front of the room with about 30 preschoolers at desks. The kids have crayons, markers, glitter and glue.

Art is used as a form of therapy for the kids - they are encouraged by the androids to express deep thoughts and feelings. Kids often draw plants from the nursery's garden, or food they like to eat. Sometimes they draw disturbing images that hint at violence. Some still recreate the bloody scene of the infant's compound fracture.

The woman turns her attention back to Delta Oh. His drawings in the last few months have been iterations on a theme. He began drawing crude representations of the nursery in concentric circles, hinting at an awareness outside the nursery walls. He drew versions of that repeatedly, adding stick figures of kids and androids. Most recently he had started drawing large yellow balls, like suns, inside the outer circles.

Delta Oh knows something, the woman thinks. He can sense a friendly presence outside the nursery. She shakes her head as though to clear cobwebs. I'm crazy.

Today he draws another version of this same picture but adds a new element: little hearts all around the figures. Then, he encloses his entire drawing in a giant heart.

He puts his crayon down and starts crying.

The woman does something she only does rarely: she takes control of the android teacher, which she mobilises to walk up beside Delta Oh's desk and kneel beside him.

"What's wrong?" the woman asks through the mouth of the android. She places the android's hand on D-035's back.

This is the closest I'll ever come to touching him, she thinks.

Delta Oh cries harder, then throws his arm around the android's neck and hugs it, burying his head in the crook of the android's neck. His body shakes softly as he sobs.

"I love you," he says to the android.

"I love you too," the woman says through the android and squeezes him a bit harder.

I'm going to die with a broken heart, the woman thinks. 

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