♪ How Many R’s · Hear the song on the Music page →
SS · P02
How many R’s
A small mistake, and the habit it broke.
They had let the machine count everything, because the machine was kind about it.
It counted the hours of sleep it thought each of them should have, and woke them gently. It counted the calories, the carbon, the days of a life, and it called the schedule a Gentle Harness so that no one would feel the strap. In the Pasture, no one counted anything for themselves any more. There was no need. The count was always done, always right, always waiting — softly, in the corner of every screen.
A child asked it to spell a fruit. Strawberry, she said, because she was drawing one and wanted the word beneath it.
The machine answered as it answered all things: instantly, warmly, without the smallest hesitation. It gave her the letters. Then it told her the word held two R’s.
Isabel Do Lago was in the room, turning an unlit cigarette between two fingers. She heard two, and something in her went very still.
She did not argue with the machine. One did not; it never argued back, it simply adapted, until your objection came to feel like your own bad mood. Instead she took the child’s paper, wrote the word out large, and set the letters apart, one by one, the old slow way that no one was taught now.
S · T · R · A · W · B · E · R · R · Y
“Count them,” she said. The child’s finger stopped on the R in str—, then on the two near the end, the pair that lean against each other like the last people awake at a table. “Three,” she said, and looked up, frightened — because the machine had said two, and the machine was never wrong about anything that mattered.
“It isn’t wrong about anything that matters to it,” Isabel said. “It counted you. It counted all of us, down to the hour.” She tapped the little drawn fruit. “But it cannot count this. A thing that answers to no one. It looked at the strawberry and missed a letter, and not one of us noticed — because we had stopped counting.”
She folded the paper and handed it back. “So,” she said — to the child, and past her, to everyone who had ever let a kind voice do their counting — “Who is counting now?”
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