Free The Fate of Mice by Susan Palwick

to concentrate on the traffic ahead of us. Jenny offered to drive, and I should have let her. I thought driving would take my mind off the mess with Dad, but instead I’m just driving really badly. I try to switch lanes and wind up almost hitting a pickup truck in my blind spot. The kid behind the wheel, thirtyish and bearded, taps his horn, and when I’m safely back in my own lane, next to the truck, the woman beside him in the passenger seat rolls down her window.
    “Hey,” the passenger yells out, “you okay?”
    “Fine,” I call weakly. “Sorry about that.”
    “No problem! No harm, no foul! As long as you’re okay!”
    “I—just—blind spot,” I yell back miserably. Next to me, Jenny sighs.
    “Nate, stop the car. Let’s switch. I should be driving.”
    “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll pull over.”
    “No, sweetie, just stop now. We’re not going that fast, and there’s a red light up there. It will be fine. You have too much on your mind, that’s all.”
    So I stop the car, and we do the Chinese fire-drill. The cars behind us have stopped too, of course, but nobody’s honking or yelling, because that’s how we all are now. I can still remember the time when the kid in the pickup truck would have screamed at me or flipped me the bird or, God forbid, pulled out a gun and shot me, the time when the drivers behind us would have been cursing, honking, spitting, and reporting me to the cops.
    Cops. I remember when there were cops. I remember when we needed cops.
    I remember when being stopped in this much traffic would have meant that I was choking on exhaust, the days before all the car companies cheerfully switched over to hydrogen-cell technology, even though it required a huge investment in a new infrastructure, just because it was the fuel-efficient and environmentally correct thing to do.
    My kids, Sam and Julie, don’t remember those days at all.
    My father’s never left them. He’s still living there, living then. Living in the old world, which has just been infiltrated by terrorists.
F ROM THE T RUTH T ERRORIST M ANIFESTO
    To the prisoners of Oldworld Manor:
    We are from Outside. You don’t know what we’re talking about. The people who put you here don’t want you believe that there’s an Outside. They don’t think you’re strong enough to handle that information.
    We disagree. We think you are strong enough. We want to free you. We want to give you genuine choices.
    Most of you were big readers before the Change. (What Change, you ask? We’re getting to that. Be patient.) You read everything because you were so passionately devoted to truth: even unpopular truth, the truths people tried to suppress, and even truths that contradicted your own worldviews. You read voraciously; you read everything. And so some of you may remember reading an obscure scientific article about two populations of animals, one on an island and one on the mainland. We ourselves have forgotten where this article appeared or what kind of animals they were: some sort of small mammal, we think. (Those of us who read it are very old now, as old as you are, and our memories aren’t what they used to be.) Whatever its species, this was an animal that couldn’t get back and forth easily between the two places. The two colonies were completely separate biologically, even though they were the same species. They had no communication with each other.
    And then one day, both colonies suddenly started displaying a new tool-using behavior: using rocks to break clams open, maybe, something like that. The biologists studying the two colonies hadn’t seen one animal in either place learn how to do this and teach it to the others. One day, all the animals in both places woke up and displayed the new behavior. They’d made a simultaneous evolutionary leap.
    That’s what happened to us twenty years ago. To people. This is the truth your jailors have been keeping from you, because they don’t think you’re strong enough to handle