by Rob Dircks
It works.
I don’t know how. I guess I might have said the words with enough conviction, or more likely the people of the Fill Cities deciphered my code and heard my unspoken promise, and they return to work, a little grudgingly, and the world lets out a sigh of relief, and the pipelines open up, and the protests dwindle and disappear, along with the giant piles of garbage that had been rotting on the streets. I let out a sigh too, that Jane and my family are safe, for a moment at least. I’ve held up my part of the bargain, and have to trust the Gitanos’ word (which I don’t), or at least have to trust that Angel will find a way to protect them (which I do).
Angel.
It’s crazy. I can’t stop thinking about him. Why? He’s a Gitano, for God’s sake! And he’s comically skinny, way too skinny for me, and blonde. I dated a boy with blonde hair once when I was fifteen or so, and I’ll just say it was like my history with egg salad: before, I had no strong opinion, but after? – ick. I’ve decided this must be the Stockholm syndrome, where I fall for my captor out of desperation and dependence. That has to be it. The part where his lips tickled my ear, and sent a shiver through my body, or the fact that after a few good looks I found him strikingly handsome, or when we kissed and my brain momentarily short-circuited – those are all just manifestations of the syndrome. Making matters worse, too much time has passed since I’ve been with someone, so my romantic immune system must be compromised. I spend so much time with Duggie, I think he’s either a repellant to other men, or they assume I’m romantically involved with him. And so I am vulnerable to this insidious kind of illness.
But Angel. There is something about him…
“Paper. You were in the middle of a question and you drifted off.”
“Oh. Sorry, Zach. Where was I?”
“The scarab. Your mother. Some other words in no particular order. Word salad.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. So… you heard everything through the scarab.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Did you hear my mother talk about this element thing? On Mars?”
He nods but doesn’t speak.
“The Gitanos laughed at her. And I… it’s awful… I couldn’t say I didn’t agree with them. Your take?”
He shrugs. Poker face.
“You think she’s crazy.”
He turns and stops me. “I don’t think there is a mysterious new element hiding on Mars, no. I think the secrets waiting to be revealed are much more pragmatic, perhaps a deep vein of something extremely valuable, say, rhodium. Mining, scientific technologies, even tourism. The economic potential is enormous. And perhaps governments don’t want a private citizen invading their turf. Possibly they’d even covertly sabotage a mission for it. People have died for much less, even in this country. But to think that a brand new element, unknown to man, has been kept a secret for seventy-five years? It would be the most sensational cover-up in history. So improbable that I’d have to say it approaches impossible.”
He sees the crestfallen look in my eyes and frowns.
“BUT… I’m putting on a reality game show called You’re Going to Mars!, and you’re driving electrified lifts into impenetrable domes at full speed, so – who are the crazy ones?” He crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out to make me smile. Then he continues walking me towards the Great Hall.
“And who knows? People have said for years I’m not to be believed. They could be right.”
48
Dead Man Walking
Interview with Aurora, contestant number one, runner up on last season’s America Sings!:
“How do I feel about Paper, a.k.a. Robin, coming back? Isn’t it obvious? She lied to us, she can’t be trusted, and you know just once I’d like Larson to stick by some rules, this show is a damned free-for-all, just once he should put his foot down, and ship her off for good. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad she’s not, you know, whatever, I wouldn’t want anything terrible to happen to her, underneath all the lies she’s actually a pretty sweet person. I meant what I said back there, during that whole shit-show of Stage Two, it’s embarrassing but it’s true, I said it. She could’ve been like a sister, you know, together at the low moments, throwing back a shot or two just for kicks, or three or four, celebrating the high moments, sharing secrets, lifting each other up. Is that too much to ask? A little honesty for once in my life? A shoulder to cry on? Shit, no, stop. I’m not making any sense. Delete that.”
I step into the Great Hall.
It’s been transformed for Stage Three: Back to School into a pseudo-university setting, with separate spaces for labs, and computers, and equipment, and a massive simulation unit that will allow us to learn the ins and outs of the ship making mankind’s maiden in-person voyage to Mars, the High Heaven. The remaining three teams are at what looks like a chemistry lab, and Drew Innes, former Orange Team Leader, appears to be the teacher for this portion of the stage.
The door closes behind me with a dull thud and the chatter and clinking of beakers stops.
Silence. Ten pairs of eyes fix on me.
I tread gingerly over to Red Team’s table, feeling like I’m being led to the electric chair, even a little surprised I don’t hear someone say “dead man walking.” A quick glance up to The Big Board shows they’ve already completed the medical portion of this stage without me, so we’re way behind both other teams. When I pass in front of my teammates, their frowns say it all: thanks, whatever your name is.
Drew returns to his lecture. “Excellent, Yellow Team. Fifteen points. All right, now the next process…”
I sit down, and realize not only am I facing Green Team’s table, but I’m directly across from Aurora. She smiles and whispers, “Oh. You’re not dead.”
“You sound thrilled.”
“Is it that obvious?” The smile stays plastered to her face, I pretty sure it’s one of her evil ones. She shrugs. “Not that it matters. You’re going home this Stage for sure. You know how many points your team will need to catch u-” She squints at me. “Hold… on… a… second…”
I look left and right, point to my chest. “What? Me?”
“Yeah. You.” She gets up, walks over and sniffs the air around me. “You’re… you’ve met somebody!”
Everyone turns in their chairs. I immediately turn bright red. “You can smell that?”
“No. The sniffing was just for effect. So it’s true then. I knew it. Ha!”
“No it’s not! Well. I don’t know.”
“You were supposed to be dying or tortured or something, and you find romance? I was actually feeling sorry for you, Paper Farris. I actually felt guilt. For the first time in my life.”
“No, please, please, you should still be feeling sorry for me, and very guilty, no I don’t mean that, I mean it’s not like I planned it or-”
“Stop stumbling over yourself. I get it. So who’s the lucky one? Another tortured prisoner?”
I motion for her to bring me her ear and I whisper his name.
And she erupts in howls of laughter so loud the cameramen need to swat their headphones off to avoid breaking their eardrums.
“Oh. Yeah. That’ll end well!”
I have to respect Aurora. She just tells it like it is. I simply can’t argue. She’s right. I’m falling for a Gitano. That says it all, doesn’t it? One hundred percent guaranteed disaster, ending probably in death for everyone involved. Aurora saunters back to her chair, smiling in the knowledge that she has certainly bested me this time. For good. For life. Well, the short life I have left.
I look for a little comfort from Claire. “Hey. Miss me?”
Claire is trying very hard not to look at me. And not doing a very good job.
“Claire. Come on. It’s me.”
“Oh. Were you looking at me?”
“Claire!”
“Robin- ah, Paper. You have to understand. I grew up hearing that Fillers were different. Small. A greenish tint to their skin. Stuff like that. My whole life.”
She eyes me over a little, looks close at my face. “No. Of course not.” Then from somewhere deep she pulls out a little of that Claire compassion I know she’s got, reaches out a hand and puts it on mine, a bit tentatively. “Listen, it might take some getting used to. You’re from another world.”
“Fill Cities aren’t another world. They’re all over the country. Other countries too.”
“What’s it like? In one of those?”
“Well, first thing that comes to mind, there’s a smell, we call it the Everpresent Stink. And the work is hard, and dirty. And all our data is screened and scrubbed, so the net is slow to non-existent. And the food is, well, you can imagine. And I’ve never had a vacation of course. And if you step out of line…” I slice my finger across my throat. “Maybe you’re right, Claire. Maybe it is another world.”
“I’m sorry. It sounds like hell.”
The word “hell” stings a little, and reminds me that there is more to the story, I’m hiding the good parts, maybe looking for maximum pity. “No, wait Claire. Sorry. It’s not just that. There’s more. In Fill City One all the families are very close. My sisters are my best friends, and my Dad, and my Nana is still alive at ninety-seven, so much for the health risks of living in a garbage dump, right? And we get a few channels of satellite TV included in our pay, and all the methane we can burn.”
She’s looking kind of awkwardly at me, like “all right, dear, if you say so,” but I’m on a roll and I can’t stop. “And the best part? When a wind blows away the Everpresent Stink for a little while, and the haze parts, and the whole family climbs up one of the higher fills and looks up at the blue sky, and we have a picnic, maybe it’s late Spring before the heat really starts cooking the fill, and we throw around a frisbee with the neighbors. It’s me and Rock and Scissors versus the Connors, and it’s like we know each other’s movements before they happen, so of course we win and the Connors laugh and say, ‘someday we’ll beat the Farris Triple Team.’ And when you smile it’s pure and it’s full of joy, because for that little itty-bitty moment, that’s all there is.”
I come to my senses feeling wetness on my chin, a tear running down my face. I’m embarrassed. Before I can wipe it on my sleeve, though, Aurora tosses me a box of the little lab cloths from her station. “Sounds nice.”
“It is.”
She reaches into her pocket, then leans to me and hands me the photo she stole from my cubby. “Here. I kept it to pretend it was my family for a little while.”
“Why?”
“Wow. You still don’t get it, do you?”
Drew, who’s been trying to ignore the fact that he’s lost control of his class, smacks his hand on the lab table. “Ahem. Paper Farris. Care to share your amazing stories with the class?”
“Well, if you’d like me to-”
“I was being sarcastic. You’ve disrupted the lecture long enough. And you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, young lady.”
Wow. Drew is really playing up the high school teacher act for the cameras. I guess he’s got to, as I can’t imagine high school chemistry being the blistering hot entertainment the global audience is clamoring for. When Drew turns back to his holographic projection of a carbon dioxide molecule, I nudge Benji and whisper. “Hey. Chemistry class? I mean, you and I find this fascinating, but isn’t it deadly boring TV?”
“Nah. They figure out ways to liven it up. Avery blew off two of her fingers on Wednesday.”
I sneak a peek at Avery, who wiggles a little hello with her fingers, two of which are blueish and in splints, presumably reattached at the MedBay. The movement makes her wince and she tucks them back into her lap.
“By the way, Hi. My name is Benji. Benji Greenberg. You are?”
“Come on, I’m sorry, Benji. You know how sorry I am.”
He nudges me back. “I’m kidding. It’s good to have you back. You’re all clear with me. It’s Aurora you have to worry about. She is pissed.”
“No kidding.”
“Hey, why did the drug addict cross the road?”
“I’m guessing this has something to do with a chicken.”
“Because there was a chicken on the other side selling crack.”
“You’re terrible.”
“Hey, so… Paper? That’s kind of a strange name.”
Drew pairs us off for the lab experiment, we’re going to recreate the Sabatier process, synthesizing methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and I’m with Benji, so while we prepare ourselves to lose some fingers, I tell him the story, and he thinks it’s cute, and by the time we’ve prepared the mixed catalyst bed, he’s back to being a hundred percent the Benji I knew, and I’m like fifty percent the friend he knew and fifty percent the friend he just met. I’ll take it.
I can imagine the good viewers at home taking a well-deserved nap during this class, but personally I find the fuel discussion riveting. When the High Heaven launches, it’ll remain in orbit for a week, getting all the systems ready and refilling the fuel tanks. But there’s a physical limitation to how much fuel the rocket can carry, so Larson knew once on Mars, he’d have to utilize materials on the Martian surface to generate fuel for the return trip to Earth. The answer? Methane. Mars’ atmosphere contains an abundance of carbon dioxide, and plenty of water trapped in ice just below the surface. By utilizing a mixed catalyst bed and a reverse water gas shift reactor, we can produce enough methane to refill the tanks when we’re done with our experiments, and get home. So the High Heaven’s rocket engines, fifty-six of them, draw a liquid methane/oxygen mix, rather than the traditional oxygen/kerosene/hydrogen mixes.
I smile to myself, realizing that my little rocket experiments back home, using methane-based propellant, had more in common with the rocket I may be riding in than I thought. Maybe they weren’t failures after all.
“Yes, Paper?”
“Huh?”
Drew points to my raised hand. “I assume you have a question.”
Crap. Why did I have my hand up? “Um, oh, yes, I was thinking, if we make more methane than needed and pyrolyze the excess of it into carbon and hydrogen, we could recycle the hydrogen back into the reactor to produce more methane and water. Just a thought.”
Drew scowls at me, then stops and looks off. He scribbles something on his notepad. Turns back to me and nods. “Good. Very good. Wow. That’s actually… I’ll have to talk to Mister Larson about that. Twenty points for Red Team.”
Benji, Claire, and even Mike reach over and give me a little fist bump. Aurora raises an eyebrow. “Pyrolyze? Is that even a word? Brown noser.”
And that’s when Avery sets herself on fire.
49
What Kind of Name is Paper Anyway?
Interview with Avery Jacobs, contestant number twenty-six, back in MedBay (again):
“I think I have it figured out. It’s a curse. This show is a curse. Every time I try to leave, they bring me back. I’m like Prometheus, rolling the stupid boulder up the hill for eternit- oh, that’s Sisyphus? Well I’m like Sisyphus then, though I can’t understand why people would want to see that. Sadists. And every time I tell them to stop liking me, they do it even more just out of spite. See? Look over at the board. They’re going crazy. And when I cry it goes up even faster. I’ve tried to stop crying. I’m holding it all in now. You haven’t seen me cry this whole week, have you? I’m trying to get zero points this stage, negative points if that’s possible, maybe that’ll offset the Likes. I’m going home if it kills me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think my skin graft is ready.”
Stage Three, Day Seventeen.
I’ve learned so much from this show. Of course the obvious, physical fitness, space flight, terraforming, physics, chemistry, everything one of us will need to be a contributing member of the crew that goes to Mars. But what’s equally fascinating is learning how television works. Like, I never really noticed how some of my favorite shows, We’re Watching You, for example, have virtually nothing
going on, but audiences are glued to them for the mishaps, and the conflict, and the gossip, and of course, the sex. And Larson appears to be following these reality show best practices. For example: in this stage, Larson put Mike Horner in Suzie Q’s room, and Albert in Marina Delacosta’s room, just to see what would happen. Of course it resulted in a lot of late night room switching, some petty but very loud accusations, generally a whole lot of blurred, flesh-colored areas of the TV screen – and a spike in ratings and a crapload of Likes. Down the hall, on the other hand, nerd watchers had finally given up on Benji and me hooking up, which does the exact opposite for ratings. So guess who Larson moved me into a room with?
Right. I don’t even have to answer.
She’s been cold, aloof, angry, nice, bitchy, compassionate, but mostly just pissed that Stage Three is right up my alley and not hers. And that’s pretty much every night.
“Aurora, come on. You’ve got Albert on your team. He’ll carry all of you.”
She yells from the top bunk. “Shut up. Was I talking to you?”
“You were talking, and saying my name.”
“I was talking about wanting to rip up paper into little pieces. I wasn’t talking about you.”
“That is not funny.”
“What kind of a name is Paper anyway?”
Once again, I get to tell my favorite story, Aurora allows it, although she’s grunting and harrumphing through it, like she can’t wait for it to be over so she can continue grousing about me. But then: “Your mom left you?”
“Yeah. The first line of my favorite story, the story of my life, is how my mother left us.”
“Mm-hmm. I have the same first line. But it was my father.”