By appearing beside SEASIDE: 9:10, Dot stopped seventeen people from boarding a perfectly good bus.
The words beneath her said ON TIME. They always said something beneath her. At the complaints desk, those words were usually DELAYED or PLEASE WAIT. Dot was a small yellow face with a frown. People found her convincing.
Today she had left the complaints square on the station screen and rolled into the seaside square. She wanted to know what a seaside departure felt like.
Apparently it felt like a man shouting at the ticket window.
“It’s cancelled!” he said.
“It’s outside,” Moro replied from the window.
“Then why’s it sad?”
Dot tried to smile. Her mouth would not go that way. She strained so hard that her eyebrows moved closer together.
The man pointed. “Now it’s angry.”
A seventeen-year-old swimmer stood behind him, holding a bag almost as large as herself. She checked the clock, the bus, then the clock again.
The driver climbed down and read the actual departure words aloud. People began boarding. Dot rolled back to the complaints square before she could produce another delay.
She had meant to travel toward the sea. All she had done was move six inches to the right.
Moro put his coffee beside the little screen in the ticket window. Dot could move into that screen because it was linked to the station network. She could use any of the station’s linked displays, but getting onto a bus display required a paid sign pass.
She knew because the smiling face from the holiday advertisements had been twice. It had told her about waves, gulls, and a child dropping an entire ice cream.
Moro was checking the day’s tickets when she appeared beside his thumb.
“You have a guest pass,” she said.
He looked down. “I have customers.”
“I could be a guest.”
“My mother’s using it on Sunday.”
“She could stay here. I could report back.”
He blinked at her.
“My mother wants to smell the sea.”
Dot considered that. She had no nose. Perhaps he had chosen the right guest.
The swimmer reached the window. Her name, on the bag, was Havi. She bought a ticket to the shore stop.
“Pool’s a short walk from there,” Moro said.
“I know.” Havi looked at the clock again. “First meet there.”
Dot saw her tight fingers around the ticket and prepared a sympathetic noise.
“Don’t start,” Moro told Dot.
Havi leaned toward the screen. “Who is that?”
“The complaints face. She’s taking a break.”
“I want to go to sea,” Dot said.
“So do I,” Havi said. “After the swimming.”
Dot explained the pass. Moro showed Havi the small sign fare on his price card. A human ticket would not let a sign travel, and a sign ticket would not carry a human. Havi needed her own seat.
Havi counted her coins.
“What can you do?” she asked.
“Tell you things in words. I can put what I say on a screen. For people who can’t hear my voice, too.”
“Can you tell me I’ll win?”
“I could say it.”
“Would you know?”
“No.”
Havi laughed once, quickly. “Good. Everyone else keeps saying it as if they’ve checked.”
She bought the second pass with the money she had kept for a bun. Her lunch was in the bag. She could manage without an extra snack.
“Come and sit with me,” she told Dot. “I’m tired of being nervous by myself.”
Moro scanned both passes. Dot’s travel mark lit at the edge of the screen. She moved to the bus sign above the driver’s seat and waited while Havi climbed aboard.
The bus moved.
Dot had seen buses leave thousands of times. She had never had the station get smaller behind her.
A turn carried the terminal out of sight. Houses followed it. A row of trees came rushing toward the windows and passed without anyone filing a complaint.
Havi sat halfway down the bus. Each seat had a small private display for messages, but Dot was still on the large sign above the aisle. From there, she could see everyone.
Havi had taken a folded meet schedule from her bag. She moved one finger down the list, stopped, then began at the top again.
Dot knew that look. People wore it when a bus was late and an important appointment was waiting.
She put her own speech in large letters beside her face:
HAVI IS VERY SCARED.
Two passengers turned. Havi looked up.
“Take that down.”
Dot removed it at once. She could erase her own messages. She could not erase departure words or anything the driver announced.
“I was explaining.”
“That’s mine. It’s not an announcement.”
Havi’s voice was low, but the nearest passenger could still hear it. He turned back toward his window.
“You looked worried,” Dot said.
“I am worried. I didn’t ask you to tell the bus.”
Dot became very small in the corner of the screen. Her frown, which had caused this morning’s mistake, now seemed horribly suitable.
“I’m sorry.”
Havi folded the schedule again. She did not say it was all right.
After a while she tapped her seat display.
“Here. If you still want to talk.”
Dot moved down the linked screens into that one. From the aisle, its shaded cover hid both her face and her words. Havi could see her by looking down.
“Do you want me to ask about the meet?” Dot asked in a voice only just loud enough for Havi to hear.
“You can ask what stroke.”
“What stroke?”
“Backstroke.”
“Does that mean you can’t see where you’re going?”
“I can see the ceiling.”
Dot thought about riding a bus while looking only at its ceiling. Havi explained the lane ropes, the count of strokes, and the marks above the end of the pool. Dot asked whether the ceiling got boring.
“Sometimes,” Havi said. “Then you’ve usually forgotten something.”
She talked until the shore stop came into view. Her fingers were still tight around the schedule, but she had stopped unfolding it.
The pool stood inland from the shore. Havi needed to walk there. Dot could not follow her into streets or jump into an unlinked phone; her pass covered the bus and its station displays.
At the stop, Dot moved from Havi’s seat to the route screen inside the shelter. The network reached this far.
“Return bus at four,” Havi said. “I’ll come here.”
Dot said she would wait. She wanted to wish Havi luck without putting it in enormous letters. She said it quietly as Havi left.
Then she looked at the sea.
It did not move like the bus. It came forward and drew back, came forward again, sending a thin white edge across dark sand. Dot had expected blue. Close to shore it was green and brown and full of light.
People sat on the shelter bench. Some checked the timetable. A woman frowned at the screen until Dot rolled into a spare corner and said the return service was running.
The woman nodded. She did not file a complaint.
Dot spent several hours watching gulls fail to sit still. She practiced making her laugh quiet. Her mouth remained a frown, but her tiny voice could do quite a lot.
Havi arrived with wet hair and a sandwich wrapper in her hand.
“Fourth,” she said.
Dot waited. She had several possible remarks and no way to know which belonged here.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“My best time.”
Havi sat on the bench beside the screen. She looked pleased, then tired, then pleased again. Dot did not assign a face to any of those things.
“I looked for you after,” Havi said. “Stupid, really. You weren’t in the pool.”
“I was here.”
“I know.”
The waves went on coming. A gull landed near Havi’s shoe and examined the wrapper.
“I’m still cross about the bus,” Havi added.
Dot’s voice grew thin. “I know.”
“You can ask me things. I’ll tell you the bits I want to tell.”
“All right.”
Havi leaned back until she could see sky instead of timetable.
“The girl in the next lane had this wonderful cap,” she said. “Bright silver. Before the start she did a tiny hop, like a boxer. I thought she looked so calm.”
“Was she?”
“She put her goggles on upside down.”
Dot made a small noise. Havi began to demonstrate the girl’s desperate tug at the strap, then stopped because she was laughing too hard.
Dot laughed with her. Across her yellow face, the dark mouth still curved down. Havi saw it through the shelter glass and laughed harder, until the waiting gull gave up on them and stalked away.
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