by Joan He
The water isn’t hot, but it’s warmer than the sea. Sighing, I slide under. My hair lifts from my scalp, buoyed. My thoughts jellify, and in the clear, semisolid silence, I find a memory.
“We shouldn’t,” Kay says under her breath. We’re standing in a glass elevator, facing forward, sandwiched between six other people. Light—dark—light—it flickers over our faces as we sink through the ground of one neighborhood and into the sky of the next. At each level, we stop, the curved doors hiss open, and people trickle off.
After a certain point, no one gets on.
People don’t know what they’re missing. As for the ones still on the elevator, I bet they’re all in their heads, reading the news in their minds’ eye or messaging colleagues. What’s the point of traveling somewhere in person if your brain is elsewhere?
But I shouldn’t judge so harshly. I know Kay would be devastated without her Intraface. I turn to her now that the elevator is emptier. “You’ve got to see it, love.”
She’s still in her school uniform, hair bobbed and unstyled. Freckles spangle her cheeks. Her mind is a diamond—unbreakable, and dazzling from every angle. Unlike me, she doesn’t need sequins to shine. Doesn’t need people or places to entertain her.
And now I can tell, from the slight wrinkle of her nose, that she doesn’t need this adventure, either. “I’ve seen the stratum,” she says.
“No, the ocean,” I quickly correct, then add, “Up close. It makes a world of difference.”
I’m worried Kay will think the idea is vapid.
The elevator comes to a stop.
Kay sighs. “All right. Just this once.”
• • •
I come up gasping for air.
Water streams down my temples. I squeeze my eyes shut and hold on to the image of Kay’s face, her mouth set straight like her bangs, her eyes black like coffee. I’d forgotten that.
Forgotten she had black-brown eyes.
And the ocean. In the memory, it felt like it was a stone’s throw away. Maybe it was right outside our door. Or city, floating above the sea like it does in my dreams.
I might be closer to Kay than I think.
My jaw tightens, my determination renewed. Tonight, I’ll rest. I’ll regroup. But tomorrow at the crack of dawn, we resume. Whatever it takes—another boat, another year—I’m going to find my sister. I can’t fail until I give up.
Water sloshes off me as I rise from the tub. I dry off with one of M.M.’s threadbare towels, monogrammed like so many other items in the house, and put on a chunky sweater with just two moth holes in the right sleeve. My stomach growling, I start for the kitchen before remembering I probably shouldn’t risk my second-chance-life on a moldy biscuit.
“Sorry, U-me.” She follows me into the living room. I tuck up onto the lumpy gingham couch beside the window, the carpet beneath it repurposed as my throw blanket. “We’ll have to make do without dinner tonight,” I say, swaddling myself in the coarse fabric. “I know it’s your favorite meal to watch me eat.”
“Agree.”
There might still be a couple of taro plants out back. Will have to check on them tomorrow, when I have the energy to worry about starving.
I settle in as night falls, resting my head against the couch arm with the window for a headboard. The blanket reeks of feet. Gross, but it reminds me of people, and when I’m lulled to sleep, I dream of them. Their voices fill the house, their laughter ringing, and over all the noise comes a knock. I open the front door.
Kay stands on the porch.
The dream is more vivid than usual. It’s like my brain knows I need the pick-me-up, and I curse when I’m jerked out of it—by what, I’m not sure, until lightning blinds the room. Thunder follows, rattling the house. Shadows, as if shaken loose, unfurl back over the walls.
I sit up in the darkness and wipe the drool off my chin. Can’t sleep anymore—can’t risk sleepwalking out into a storm. It’s pummeling the roof and pouring down outside when I look. The sea seethes, swollen and reaching for us. But we won’t be touched. I send my grateful regards to whoever designed M.M.’s house as thunder booms and my hand trembles, planted on the window. I lift it, palm chilled, and rub at my handprint with a sweater sleeve.
Freeze.
Bringing my nose to the glass, I squint through the smudge, and recoil at the next flash of lightning—not because of it, but because of what I’ve seen. It’s still there, even when the beach plunges back to black.
A body on the sand.
SOMETIMES KASEY FELT LIKE A stranger in her own skin. Holoing as much as she did could do that to a person. The full spectrum of bodily discomforts was available to all holographs. Kasey simply opted out. She derived no pleasure from getting pins and needles in her feet, or desiccating her eyes under the glare of conference room lighting, an effect she couldn’t escape even after toggling on the tear production setting in her biomonitor.
At least her mind was free to wander out of its flesh prison. Except today, it’d caged itself within an endless thought loop, consisting of two words:
INTRAFACE LOCATED
The signal had lasted for only a second before it was lost. The hope-induced high was just as fleeting. The geolocation coordinates corresponded with a residential unit. Private domain. Breaking in—virtually or physically—was a felony and one was plenty for Kasey. Besides, what were the chances of Celia sneaking back in under the nose of every eco-city cambot? Minuscule. Possible, yes, but improbable that the signal had come from Celia’s Intraface. More probable (and thereby possible) that a hacker or spambot was trying to prank Kasey. Or her search program had sent back a false positive. That was also possible. Probable?
Not if this was Kasey’s own program, coded by her own two hands.
But it wasn’t. She wasn’t allowed to code—or to touch anything related to science.
These were the P2C restrictions on her, monitored as strictly as her mood levels.
“And that’s a wrap.” An earsplitting clap returned Kasey to her body, half-asleep in its chair. She blinked and looked up at the woman at the head of the oval table.
Ekaterina Trukhin. Specifically, her holograph, semitransparent to Kasey; it was how her Intraface delineated those in holo when she herself was in the physical mode.
Ekaterina at 50% opacity was no less of a commanding presence, though, and her heels clicked against the floor as she made her rounds, the room configured to react to virtual stimuli. “It’s six p.m.,” she said to the seated mix of solid and transparent people, faces lit by the screens floating before them. “You know what that means.” She stopped beside Kasey and bore her weightless palms against the tabletop. “Scat.”
The holographs evaporated—screens followed by people. The rest of them pushed in chairs and gathered their briefcases. Everyone would be back tomorrow. The Planetary Protection Committee spurned inefficiency, and P2C officers wore too many hats to take weekends off. They ran the government within the eco-cities and served as their delegates outside of them. They were stewards of the planet above all, and in response to the mounting environmental crises (as well as pressure from the Worldwide Union, which oversaw both territory and eco-city polities), P2C officers had recently taken on one more role: as a judging committee for doomsday solutions. Thousands of submissions had flooded in from around the globe, now awaiting review. It was exactly the kind of grunt work Kasey didn’t mind being assigned to, requiring limited effort and investment. Policy wasn’t her passion. She wasn’t like senior officer Barry Tran, who took personal offense at every unworkable solution that crossed his path.
“Do they even teach reading comprehension in schools anymore?” he ranted, and Kasey remembered a time when Barry would’ve looked to her, a sixteen-year-old who spent her weekends at P2C headquarters, as the expert on all matters adolescent.
Thankfully, Barry knew better now and addressed his grievances to anyone willing to listen, which, more often than not, still made Kasey his audience of one.
&
nbsp; “What does it say here?” He swiped the competition guidelines to the front of his screen. “A solution for all! Is fifty percent of the pop the same as all? And this one!” Another swipe—this time a submission’s abstract. Looked like extraterrestrial migration. Kasey had rejected several of those herself. Whether the public accepted it or not, all missions to colonize Earth-like planets had failed.
“Have they no regard for the budget?” No, thought Kasey, recalling the proposal that they all travel back in time to a more habitable Earth. “Did the bots even screen?” Yes, but bots weren’t the ones depending on the final solution.
“Any luck with your batch, Kasey?” asked Ekaterina, ignoring Barry.
Yes, she could say. Telling the truth was thankless and tiring and very Kasey, who couldn’t rewire her brain to give the people what they wanted. “No.”
“Why not?” Meridian had whined earlier over their call, when Kasey had also said no to submitting their own solution—theirs, insofar as Kasey had conceived it while still on the school science team with Meridian. “Please, Kasey? College apps are due next week and it’d be great if I could list this. Just imagine: coauthor of proposal under P2C consideration. Legit, am I right?”
Kasey, feeling sleepy and itchy but not one bit legit in her school blazer (the other option was sleepwear), left that judgment call up to Meridian. “It’s not ready.”
“It was the winning idea!”
“At an eighth-grade competition. It’s not ready for the world.” Never would be. It was missing its final piece, which Kasey couldn’t complete without breaking the very law that’d taken science from her.
Still, she hated denying Meridian. Ask Kasey to throw another party or to dye her hair red, and she’d have gone along. There were few things in this world she was protective about. What to do? SILVERTONGUE suggested changing the topic. To what? Intraface located, her mind volunteered. No. Out of the question. Again: private domain. Long gone were the days when strangers could visit you for tasks as mundane as delivering food. Every job below a three on the Coles Humanness Scale was automated, eliminating resource waste as well as anything Kasey could reasonably impersonate.
She couldn’t go. She couldn’t. She—
“How would you go about accessing someone’s unit?”
“Excuse me?” asked Meridian.
“Someone’s unit,” Kasey repeated.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time, but, uh . . . why?”
To change the topic. To make Meridian forget about submitting their solution.
Not, most definitely, because Kasey needed any suggestions.
“Hypothetical,” she said, and if she hadn’t picked up on Meridian’s irritation before, now she (well, SILVERTONGUE) did.
“I don’t know,” said Meridian. “Don’t you have, what, official privileges or something?”
Then Meridian had ended the call, leaving Kasey to ponder. Privileges. It was one way of looking at her court-ordered P2C service. The work was painless, granted, and the adults were nice enough, but even they were human, and as two chatted about their teething babies while packing up, Kasey yet again found herself on the fringe of a setting selected for her by someone else. She’d much rather look forward to college, a major in biochem or physics, a career at an innotech firm.
But regret, like guilt, was an unproductive emotion.
“See you tomorrow, Kasey,” said Ekaterina. “Go home, Barry.”
A grunt.
“See you,” Kasey said to Ekaterina, and then, perhaps feeling ever so slightly guilty for not submitting their solution, complete or not: “Do you think we’ll need a decision soon?”
Tremors had been detected off the coast of Territory 4, but pundits had also been predicting the “biggest megaquake yet” for three years running.
“Might happen in our lifetimes, might not,” said Ekaterina. “Best to be prepared. Right, David?”
Sirs greeted Kasey’s dad as he exited his private office. He nodded noncommittally in reply, refilling his mug at the water dispenser before shuffling back.
Kasey followed him, coming to stand under the polyglass doorway as David retook his seat at his desk.
When her mom was still alive, he used to sit in the same exact form, right shoulder hitched higher than the left, glasses fallen low, only it’d be at the foot of his bed, in pajamas instead of a suit, and he’d be hunched over blueprints instead of legislation that, if Kasey had to make an educated guess, concerned HOME. As Genevie’s last initiative, the Human Oasis and Mobility Equality act would have allowed cohorts of territory citizens to immigrate to the eco-cities even if they were unqualified by rank. Ironically, working on HOME often kept David from home, something Celia had resented their dad for. Kasey was more neutral. After Genevie’s death, she accepted that loss changed people. It’d subtracted something from her dad, but was that bad? To be normal? It was worse to be unchanged. Unimpacted. To be fully aware, as Kasey was right now, that she should feel more strongly about her dad’s absence but all she could muster was some half-baked annoyance at having to speak up to be noticed.
“How does one obtain a search warrant?”
David’s stylus didn’t stop moving across his desk. “You’ll need to talk to Barry.”
“We’ve talked.” Technically. Her dad was the faster route, and fast, Kasey knew, was what she needed before her brain shut down this whole operation.
Seconds later, a search warrant app appeared in Kasey’s Intraface. She selected it. A digital rendering of the P2C officer badge materialized before her chest.
Other dads went to their kids’ swim meets and remembered their birthdays, but Kasey didn’t value swim meets and birthdays and liked her dad as is, especially in this moment.
“I trust you to use it responsibly,” said David. His stylus stilled and finally, he glanced up.
How they communicated: without words. One silent look was their mutual acknowledgment of the incident that’d corrupted Kasey’s life and nearly evicted her from the eco-city. She was only here due to David’s intervention. He’d acted when it mattered most. Kasey respected that. Even related to her dad. David was no longer an architect. Kasey was no longer a scientist. Life went on, subpar for the course.
“I’ll try,” said Kasey, which was enough to satisfy David.
He looked back to his work. “Go in holo.”
“I can’t.”
Another dad might have asked why. It wasn’t like the weekly maximum, set by the Coles to preserve the “endangered spirit of humanity” in their tech-reliant worlds, was low.
“Then take the REM,” said David, and Kasey commended her dad for being so solution-oriented.
Minutes later, she was on the duct to stratum-22, the REM immobilizer holstered at her side.
She’d been down-stratum before. Gone even lower than S-22 with Celia, who’d insisted lower stratums were more real, when technically, all stratums were equally real, built from the same raw materials, stacked to form one city lifted by antigravity and protected by one filtration shield. Any visible differences stemmed from how the stratums managed their residents. Upper stratum dwellers were encouraged to max out their holo quotas to lessen the burden on infrastructure, while lower stratums embraced . . . a different lifestyle, one that ingested Kasey the second she stepped out of the duct.
Heat. Stink. Clamor. Groaning pipes and rattling generators, trashbots and busbots working overtime to support the humans out and about, coughing, sneezing, and secreting other humanoid sounds as they traversed the corridors between unit complexes. Their ranks, displayed overhead in accordance with P2C’s accountability laws, were the only virtual things to them. Everything else was in the flesh, like Kasey herself. Aside from her single-digit 2 floating overhead among a sea of 1000s, 10,000s, 50,000s, she fit right in. She’d rather not. Without Celia, this place was worse than she recalled. She breathed through her mouth to nullify the odor, and set her visuals to monochrome. A black-and-white world seemed less real and
, consequently, less overwhelming.
The heat was the one thing she couldn’t adjust, and sweat drenched Kasey by the time she arrived at her destination: GRAPHYC, a body shop that performed physical alterations deemed nonessential by medical hospels. Unable to imagine much demand when appearances could be modified in holo, Kasey relaxed as she went down the steps recessed between two ground-level stoops. Her rank blipped away as she pushed through the door and entered the private domain. Finally, a breather from her species.
This was her first mistake: assuming she understood other people.
Compared to the outside, GRAPHYC was positively arctic. Goose bumps sprouted on Kasey’s skin. Her teeth chattered. Or maybe it was the machines, buzzing into her eardrums. The lights overhead were harsh. Industrial. The space—as windowless as a basement but large—was sectioned off into cubes. In one, an employee was plucking out teeth down an assembly line of unconscious clientele. Kasey stared, head ducking when Tooth Tweezer looked up. She hurried along, witnessing a number of other questionable things before she found what she was looking for:
An idle employee around her size.
You could never too be careful outside of holo, though, and Kasey’s hand drifted to the REM as she closed in on the tattooist with spiky orange hair and golden temple studs. “P2C officer, here to conduct an authorized search of Unit Five.”
“Be with you in a nano,” said the tattooist, in the middle of cleaning his machine—machine slipping when Kasey flashed her e-badge. She flinched at the clatter—then at his shout. “Jinx!” he called.