The Mall

Alone, the child wanders through the mall. It orbits above a dead planet, and its shape is that of a titanic torus. Its hallways have no beginning or end, and the child roams from store to store. In one, he pulls down a stack of clothing and scatters the garments around the floor. In another, he finds a plastic toy and fiddles with it for a few minutes before dropping it and returning to the concourse.

In the middle of the hall is a freestanding video display, and the child stops to watch an animated woman smile and bounce a baby on her hip. The woman and baby track him with their eyes, and he babbles back at them. They do not answer, and he hits the display in frustration, then begins to scream. The child collapses in a heap and cries; in the empty mall the echoes carry for miles between glass railings and faux marble flooring. At the base of the display a small puddle of tears and mucus form where he lies on the floor. Eventually, he picks himself up and walks further down the concourse, away from the display and the microscopic camera drone which has transmitted the entire incident.

The Observers do not understand the child’s actions, though they try. They have monitored him for two of the dead planet’s years, slowly building up their theories as they catalog his strange behaviors.

The child enters a smaller store off the main hall and approaches a mannequin mounted at the shopfront. The mannequin is posed with her hand cupped at her hip, and the child reaches up to lace his tiny, warm fingers through her cold, plastic ones.

The female mannequin and the child stand side-by-side for a moment as he looks out at the concourse. He squeezes her stiff fingers, then walks back out into the sterile hall.

Hours later, the child arrives at a food court littered with opened cardboard boxes. They’re full of pre-prepared foods, and he empties the containers by the handful. The child sniffs a moist cake, then tongues its surface before taking a bite. The food is still soft and edible even after so many thousands of years.

Access to its ancestral diet is, among other reasons, why the Observers have placed the child here.

The orbiting mall turns just far enough for the rays from the system’s swollen star to dim in the skylights. A single, sharp click is carried through the twilight hall to the child’s ears. He whimpers at the sound and abandons his wandering to shuffle back toward the last room he found with a female mannequin. The female is draped with a light robe the color of excited xenon, and the child cowers and hugs her legs, pressing his face into her unyielding skin. Her head moves ever so slightly.

Further down the hall a male mannequin jerks forward and falls to the ground. The tumble yanks his outfit askew—a colorful jersey patterned like an oil slick on water.

The brightly-colored mannequin rises to his feet and walks back into his store with obvious effort. His movements are rougher than they had been a hundred thousand years before. Still, he is operational enough to begin his task.

He retrieves a set of cleaning supplies from a nook in the wall and goes to work scanning the floor for blemishes. Records indicate the last time this unit found something to clean was over fifteen thousand years ago.

He spots a dry patch of salt on the floor and rushes to buff out the encrustation, grinding a solvent-soaked rag into the base of a freestanding display which shows a human woman and child. When the stain has been obliterated, he rises and strides down the darkening concourse toward the sound of muffled sobs.

The child is trying to keep quiet. He sniffles continuously, and every few seconds a sob escapes from between his face and the blue-robed female’s legs. He can hear the faraway tapping of plastic feet on marble.

Other male mannequins spasm to life and stagger out into the hall to follow the oil-slicked cleaner’s lead. They are awakened by his continuous wireless proclamation of a Violator—someone or something that has defaced their home. The child hears the tapping grow to a static rumble and can’t help but screech once in fear.

The blue-robed female comes alive and crouches down to the child’s level, inspecting him head-on. She has no face—none of the mannequins do—but the child’s red-rimmed eyes meet her nonexistent ones and he manages a smile. She scoops him up, holds him close, and carries him into the back of the clothing store, all the while emitting a silent wail for help.

In response to Blue Robe’s wireless call, another female mannequin appears at the storefront—this one sporting a tan vest with many pockets. She looks into the back for a chance to see the child huddled among the piles of clothing, but Blue Robe shoos her away. Tan Vest obeys; the child’s chosen companion always takes charge to direct the others.

Other females arrive over the next few minutes. They each try to catch a glimpse of the child before they join Tan Vest in ripping clothes from the racks and piling the bare metal frames at the front of the store in a barricade.

The males are close and the ominous thrum of footfalls fills the store. The child wails inside Blue Robe’s nest, and a female in a neon-red dress crouches down beside him. The child wraps his arms around her neck and she hugs him close. Blue Robe does not shoo this one off—there is only one task left in securing the child.

At the entrance, Tan Vest leaps to grab the bottom edge of the chain gate and brings it crashing down. The unrolled barrier stiffens as the females wrap their bodies around the framing columns and hook their plastic fingers through the gaps in the chain. It’s the best they can do without access to the gate locks.

Not two minutes later Oil Slick and his army of male mannequins reach the storefront and throw themselves against the barrier. The chain gate rocks back against the barricade of females and clothing racks, but it holds. The screech of metal fatigue drowns out the much softer cries coming from the back room.

The child is bawling and another female joins Blue Robe and Neon Dress as they take him to a much smaller room with a bench and mirror. Here, they assemble another nest of cloth in which he can play, but he shows little interest in the activity. He clings to one of the females, then switches to another, then another, back and forth between the three as if by holding one tightly enough he can make the horror end.

The army of males is so single-minded in its pursuit of the child that it doesn’t realize a flanking group of females has arrived until it’s too late. Wielding hooked metal poles from nearby stores, they slash and stab at the frenzied males. The males’ siege is barely upset by the females’ savage attacks.

The battle rages all through the night. The child tires, then finally falls asleep in the soft nest of clothing. The three females watch over the sleeping child as the sounds of battle fade with the rising sun.

The males have been vanquished this night, but by a thin margin. Female defenders within the shop ease the misshapen metal gate just high enough for the child to crawl out. Tan Vest, now missing a leg, positions her body beneath the barrier to ensure it won’t fall and lock the child within the store. The many fingerless females, casualties of their desperate bid to keep the gate closed, tuck themselves away in the dark corners of the shop. It’s as if they do not wish for the child to see their mutilated forms.

With the dawn, the mannequins’ machinery begins to seize up—first, the still-humming motors of the disemboweled males, then the females as well. A final female runner arrives at the battlefield and freezes in place, but not before setting out gifts for the child.

An hour passes before the child wakes, surrounded by the stiffened forms of his three protectors. The child crawls up to Blue Robe and tries to lay his head in her lap, but her immobile body offers no comfort. He cries for an hour before emerging from the den in the back of the store, driven by hunger.

He pads through the store, past his mangled protectors and out to the final runner and her gift: a pile of food. All of the child’s favorite things are here, things he normally cannot reach because they’re stored too high or locked within glass cases. Those cases have been destroyed in a food court not too far down the hall, and open boxes of foodstuffs now litter the floor.

The child eats among the remains of males and females alike—he squats beside a shred of fabric colored like an oil slick to devour a sweet pastry. When the treats are done he springs to his feet without using his hands—a trick he learned through weeks of hard practice—and looks at the closest female mannequin: the runner.

She’s kneeling on the ground—her face level with the child’s—and pointing down the hall to storefronts unmarred by the battles of previous nights. There, the child will find the food court she raided, and shelter for when the sun inevitably sets.

The child touches the runner’s outstretched arm, attempts to hold her hand for a moment, and then sets off in a quick trot down the endless hall for another day.

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A drone watches the child as he half-runs away and sends the recording across space to a repeater at the edge of the solar system. The repeater transmits the recording through subspace to a star system many light years away, one populated by thinking machines driven by a powerful thirst for knowledge. The Observers watch with fascination as their project—the one human specimen they were able to incubate—learns and grows and is both nurtured and attacked by the artifacts of his ancestors.

The Observers know how many base pairs are in his DNA. They know how many bones are in his body and his ideal nutrient intake. But they do not know how he should be raised. They can only hope that the mall can help the child in ways they cannot. He is the last of his species, and may remain so until his death. Until that time, they observe and learn what they can of the fallen race of Man.