It takes a little while for my legs to listen to me.

A harsh ringing in my ears already combines with a cacophony of sirens. Fire trucks, ambulances, police. I stagger toward the smoke, an urban zombie. Flames are eating the rind of the building. Its heart is a burned-out mess. The parking lot is wiped empty, the pavement cratered where the white van sat.

The realization gently nudges into my mind: my father could not have survived.

A heap of smoking gray rubble smolders where his office was. Nothing recognizable, just twisted rebar and concrete and ash. I don’t stop advancing when the surging heat starts to prick my face or when my throat goes raw and stinging from the smoke.

I stop when I see the flashing blues and reds.

Undernocircumstances, my father said. Tears well in my eyes as I survey the wreck. I blink them away, searching for some sign of life. The clouds of smoke throb with police lights, ring with sirens. The silhouette of a police officer drifts through the haze and comes into focus.

“Hey,” she calls.

I turn and stumble away. Ignore her shouts as I duck around a corner. Eyes leaking, I accelerate until I’m sprinting down the alley—running blind, breath rasping, away from the noise and turmoil and death.

STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA, by and through

Attorney General Sam Pondi, et al.:

Plaintiffs,

JOHN SIZEMORE

v.

Defendants,

TAMMY ROGERS, representing

ORDER GRANTING SUMMARY JUDGMENT

In this case, we define capacity to contract to exclude individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence.

As has long been established, those with diminished capacity (e.g., minors and people with mental disabilities) lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law. Similarly, we find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence possess an enhanced capacity to contract, which necessarily creates an unlevel playing field.

We saw evidence that these enhanced individuals may prey on those with inferior “natural” intelligence of the sort belonging to what we have known heretofore as the “average man.” In other words, individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence implicitly confer diminished capacity to others.

In an effort to remedy the growing disparity between natural and enhanced levels of intelligence, and in an effort to create a level playing field, we hereby find that individuals with artificially enhanced intelligence lack the capacity to contract as a matter of law.

As a result, we thus find that the contract entered into between John Sizemore and Tammy Rogers is considered null and void.

The toaster misses my face by about a foot, then explodes into shards of white plastic on the sidewalk. I blink at it once or twice before a wooden napkin ring clips me across the bridge of my nose.

I catch sight of a scrawny forearm lurking in the second-story window of my apartment. Charles, my landlord, is throwing my belongings out the window in neat little parabolas. He’s already packed and dragged out a haphazard pile of cardboard boxes that rest on the grass next to the sidewalk. A couch and a chair sit incongruously in the yard.

“Charles!” I say. “What the hell are you doing?”

He pokes his gaunt face out of the window and glares down at me, breathing hard. He swallows and his Adam’s apple bobs. Muttering, he flings a handful of silverware at me and ducks back inside.

The front door flies open as I reach for the handle. Charles, all hundred and twenty pounds of him, charges out. He slams the door shut, locks it.

The lock is bright as cut copper, new.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” says Charles in the clipped, broken accent of a lifelong Pittsburgher.

“What?”

“Back up. To the sidewalk. You’re trespassing.”

Charles advances, eyes narrowed. Confused, I put my hands out and step back. “Charles, I don’t know what’s going on. What happened, man?”

“Thought you were so smart. Well, who’s smart now? Score one for the Yinzers, asshole.”

Charles kicks a box, and what looks like my college textbooks spill out onto the wet lawn. I stoop down to push the books back into the damp cardboard box. A young guy walking up the sidewalk carefully inspects a pile of my kitchen stuff.

“Hey,” I say. “This isn’t a garage sale.”

The young guy doesn’t respond, looks past me and makes eye contact with Charles.

“That means take off,” I say.

Charles taps his temple. “Don’t have to listen to him,” he says.

No reaction. No sympathy or anger. The guy just stands there, watching me warily, the way you’d watch a crazy person at a bus stop.

It hits me that something fundamental has changed. Whatever empathy glues society together is somehow drying up, becoming cracked and brittle. This guy standing over my stuff—he’s looking at me and what he sees is person shaped, but I don’t think he’s seeing a person.

Charles is all pumped up. His face is flushed with blood and I can see a vein in his neck throbbing. His hands are shaking from adrenaline as he speaks. “Joe Vaughn’s been on the TV, warning us about you people for years. Taking our jobs and messing up the schools and blowing up buildings.”

“You can’t kick me out. There’s still five months on my lease.”

“Not no more. State law says you amps can’t go into contracts with normal people. Just like I can’t sign no contract with a retard, you can’t sign one with me. You’re too smart.”

“That law is being challenged, Charles. It’s not official.”

“Highest court in the country thinks it is. The Supreme goddamn Court of the United States of America says you ain’t protected. So I guess it is the law.”

The word “law” rings in my ears. Dominoes are falling. No contracts? Meaning no lease, no marriage, no job. No life.

A few more people have stopped to rubberneck. A couple. An older guy. Most are just curious. Others are scrutinizing my stuff, sizing it up.

Charles curls his hands into fists, lets them hang by his sides like rotten fruit. Through clenched teeth he says, “You gotta go now.”

I lean over and scrabble through the box, dig out an old duffel bag. “Give me a damn minute—”

Now a couple of people are just grabbing stuff. Others watch, blinking slowly. The thieves walk away without looking at me. The old guy carefully steps over my hand like it was a crack in the sidewalk, holding my lamp.

“I’m calling the goddamn cops,” says Charles.

I drop to my knees and start shoving things into the duffel bag. Clothes, shoes, a box of granola bars. Appliances are too heavy to carry. Laptop is gone. Forget the furniture.

As pedestrians gawk, silent people carry away the puzzle pieces of my life. They see through me, hear past me. The expressions in their eyes are unreadable. I wonder why this is. Do they pity me? Or are they afraid? Is it possible that they really feel nothing at all?

I hope this scene isn’t playing out all over the nation. People like me struggling to grab what they can. Whole families, even. Grasping at the leftover shards of their lives. If that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter what these vulture people around me are thinking or feeling. Whether I’m less than human or more than human—animal or god—it’s all the same.

I’m not a real citizen anymore. Rules no longer apply.

When my bag is full, I move on. Leave Charles on the sidewalk, staring at me with clenched fists and a tight grin. I push past the onlookers and get myself on down the road.

It’s all on little pieces of paper. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. The rules are there so that we can remember them and follow them. If the rules were obvious, we wouldn’t have to write them down.