by Joan He
“Because it’s alive.”
“We’re alive.”
“Are we?” Celia mused. Kasey pointed out they were breathing, to which Celia retorted, “Reprocessed air.” Kasey would have said clean. “Our veins, shot full of chemicals.” All nutrients were chemicals. “Minds, imprisoned.” Freed from the material world.
“When I look at the sea,” Celia continued, “I can almost hear it saying my name. It’s comforting.” Unsettling was the word that came to Kasey’s mind, and Celia laughed at her expression. “You’ll see what I mean.”
“I don’t think so,” said Kasey slowly. “This will not be a repeated activity.”
Celia only grinned.
The next day, to combat the heat, Celia bought ice pops from the observation deck concession stand. The ice pops made Kasey sticky and sweaty, the sucrose concentrate melting all over her hands and dyeing Celia’s mouth a gratuitous Red 40. That didn’t discourage her sister from eating three, or from coming back the next day and the next, until the inevitable happened:
Celia suggested they go to the sea itself.
The day was overcast, but clouds couldn’t dissuade Celia. Via duct, she led them down to a boat rental set up in the waters beneath the eco-city. The existence of such an establishment amazed Kasey. Who’d bother coming here when around-the-world cruises could be enjoyed from the comfort of a stasis pod? Kasey’s demographic, apparently. Puffy-faced teens high on organics, not one lash batting when Celia cut the line to rent a boat with HUBERT painted on its side.
Hubert came with the antiskins, goggle-masks, and P2Capproved toximeters required for all extra-city activities—gear they could have skipped if they’d holo-ed, Kasey thought as she zipped up her antiskin, trying not to think about the number of bodies that’d inhabited it before hers. She secured the goggle-mask over her face. It was huge, rivaling the goggles she’d worn back when she still had chem lab. Celia giggled, her own goggle-mask dangling around her neck.
The boat rental owner looked like she wanted to be here as much as Kasey. “Map’s under the stern,” she said when Celia asked for recommended attractions, before shouting, “Hey! Two to a boat!” to five teens trying to fit into one.
“All aboard,” said Celia, hopping into Hubert while Kasey fished through a jumble of biodegradable floats in the compartment under the stern to retrieve the map. It was laminated in some contraband plasti-material, and unfolded to a whole lot of gridded blue, the only bit of land, labeled 660, a speck about twenty kilometers out northwest. “Where to?”
“Nowhere,” said Kasey, holding open the map.
“Nowhere it is,” said Celia. Kasey sighed. But later, she revised her opinion: sailing wasn’t half bad. It was quiet. Peaceful. Celia cut the motor when they reached a calm patch of sea, and Kasey was just starting to relax when her sister began peeling off her antiskin.
“What are you doing?” Alarmed, Kasey watched as Celia stripped down to her clothes, then to the bathing suit underneath.
“Swimming, silly.”
“We still need to get back.” Leaving was easy; returning to the eco-cities was harder. They’d have to drop their antiskins into the appropriate hazard chutes and be decontaminated themselves, and if, for whatever reason, they didn’t gain clearance . . .
“We could face eviction,” Kasey finished, the word acrid in her mouth.
Celia’s gaze deepened. “You’re safe with me, Kay.”
“Both of us,” Kasey said. Misspoke. Celia never feared for herself and almost immediately, the seriousness evaporated from her sister’s eyes. She leaned in and pinched Kasey’s nose.
“With our ranks? We’re invincible.”
Kasey was silent. Meridian would’ve called Celia out for her entitlement. But wasn’t that what rank was? A measure of what people were entitled to redeem after banking in good planetary stewardship? They were already being taxed for other people’s mistakes, restricted to living in “e-cities,” as Celia called them, because others had made the outside territories unsafe. What was wrong with reaping a perk or two?
Kasey wasn’t sure. Right or wrong—contrary to what people wanted to believe—was often subjective. Self-interested. Only numbers didn’t lie, and numbers were what Kasey turned to as she stuck a P2C-issued toximeter into the seawater.
The contamination readings came in: safe for skin contact within a 1km radius.
“See?” said Celia, then jumped in before Kasey could get a word in edgewise. “The water’s great! Come on.”
Kasey, quite content where she was, tossed a float over the side for Celia. “Stay close.” She didn’t trust the waves to be as gentle as they appeared.
“Yes, Mom.” Celia splashed Kasey. Kasey wiped the droplets off her goggles. “Join me. It’ll be easier for you to save me from the sea monsters.”
“Sea monsters don’t exist.” But neither did something called willpower around Celia, and eventually, Kasey followed Celia into the ocean. She could barely feel the water through her antiskin.
“This is how life should be,” Celia said as the sun broke through the clouds.
The rays appeared gray through Kasey’s goggles, the lens so scratched they’d gone cloudy. “Should be like what?”
“Like how it was before. No one living in a casket or in the shadow of the stratum above them. Just sun and sky.” Too much sun and sky is lethal, Kasey wanted to say, but Celia went on. “It’s like what Ester used to say to Mom. We need to remember what makes us us.”
Emotions. Spontaneity. Self-awareness. Empathy. Kasey recited the Cole Humanness traits and Celia shook her head. “It’s something more immeasurable.” She floated onto her back, eyes squinting against the sun. “You know this thing called SPF? People used to cover themselves with it, for protection, and sure, it wasn’t great if you forgot, but no one let it stop them from going outside. I wish we lived in that time. I hate knowing our home is trying to kill us.”
Our home protects us. But Kasey knew Celia was referring to the world beyond the eco-cities, even if she struggled to grasp why. Celia was a star in their stratified society. She had no reason to look to the poisoned outside. It was Kasey who didn’t belong—here or anywhere.
“It’s just the way things are,” she said to Celia.
“It doesn’t have to be. You could change them for the better.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Confidence, Kay. You’ll save the world someday.”
“The world doesn’t need saving.” Not by Kasey, who barely understood the people inhabiting it.
“Trust me,” said Celia. “It will.”
• • •
They’d ended up checking out the island. Even gone back. Just never into the water—not when Kasey had been there to stop it. The sea was an unregulated territory, a fluctuating variable. The toximeter had cleared a portion of it as safe that day, but who knew if it would stay that way?
It hadn’t. Each time Celia had swum in secret, she’d poisoned herself. It said so in her biomonitor report.
The blood charts: elevated levels of microcinogens most commonly found in deep-sea waste pipes.
The diagnosis: advanced organ failure and malignant cranial nerve sheath tumors.
The prognosis: one month to live without intervention.
And finally, a mandatory hospel summons, issued when ailments surpassed the biomonitor’s capabilities. Celia had paid her in-person visit two weeks before disappearing at sea. The Mizuharas’ designated family doctor had signed off on it.
Like everything else, Kasey hadn’t known.
Her body cooled. Her blood pressure stabilized. Her mind overrode her heart. It’d never actually let her fall and break. Homeostasis had to be maintained. It was rational to let go of the irreversible. One month to live without intervention was the prognosis.
Celia had been at sea for three.
In one piece, Kasey descended from the ceiling. Actinium, too. He went to the fuel-bar and picked up a mug, the tea gone c
old. Kasey faced him, the silence between them different now, devastated, vast, a wasteland of skulls.
The crunch sounding like the cracking of bones.
Kasey blinked, not trusting her sleep-deprived eyes. Actinium didn’t blink; he simply watched as his blood dribbled onto the countertop, the flow quickening as he squeezed the mug—or what was left of it, glass shards driven deeper into his fist.
Have you lost it? Celia would shout; Kasey swore she heard her sister’s voice. She’d seize Actinium’s wrist and pry the broken glass from his grip. But Celia wasn’t here. Celia was dead, and maybe that’s why he’d broken it, Kasey thought, as if analyzing some case study around the P2C conference table, before the smell hit her. Iron.
Blood. More than she’d ever seen.
She started to approach Actinium like one might a wild beast. She couldn’t fathom what he was thinking, could imagine his mind’s eye—an eruption of biomonitor alerts—but not his mind. Are you okay? a better person would have asked, but instead, Kasey wanted to know how? How could glass yield to flesh? How could pain beget more pain? How could he be this calm?
How could she?
If they plotted their reactions, which one of them would be further from the mean?
As she struggled to compute, Actinium released the mug. The shards fell onto the countertop; the crimson puddle looked awfully like red ice pop melt. With his good hand, he opened the unit’s door. “Come.” His voice betrayed nothing. “It should be here.”
Kasey, not sure what was happening anymore, came.
Down the stairs they went. GRAPHYC was busy this morning. Sedated clientele filled the operating rooms. None of them noticed the boy, bleeding, or the girl following him. They exited the body shop and ascended to street level. The alleyway bobbed into view—as did the copterbot parked in the middle of it, painted white and green.
Hospel colors.
Like lightning, it struck Kasey. Why Actinium had done what he’d done. Hospels, unlike GRAPHYC, admitted people based on need. Now they had a need—a biomonitor validated reason, a chance to confront the doctor who’d discharged Celia—and it was no thanks to Kasey.
A funny pressure mounted in her throat. Swallowing it, she climbed into a copterbot she should have summoned with her own blood. Actinium joined her, prompting the bot to chime INVALID: USER UNRANKED. A timely reminder. Out in the public domain, with both their IDs on auto-display overhead, it was impossible to ignore that [ACTINIUM, rank: 0] was a hacked account. Kasey was sitting thigh to thigh with a stranger.
But that was the thing about Celia. She brought people together despite their differences. And how different they were, Kasey thought, too shaken by Actinium’s actions, calculated or not, to appreciate the way he reprogrammed the copterbot to register Kasey’s ID even though it wasn’t Kasey’s emergency.
MIZUHARA, KASEY, intoned the copterbot as they lifted off the ground. HOME LOCATION, CONFIRMED. YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO THE HOSPEL ON STRATUM-10.
The unit complexes diminished beneath them, hedge-maze-like as they rose to the undersky of the overhead stratum. An aperture opened—in that stratum and every subsequent one. The copterbot shot through the eco-city like a bullet. Celia would’ve loved the thrill—had before the crash that claimed their mom and the Coles’ lives. Kasey, less traumatized but also less accident prone, hadn’t seen the appeal then and couldn’t see it now. The ache in her throat spread, gripping her chest. She was out of the copterbot the second it landed, already walking toward the hospel before remembering Actinium.
“Go,” he said when she turned back to him in painfully obvious afterthought.
“Your hand—”
“Needs to be seen in Emergency.” He tilted his head to the side entrance labeled URGENT. “We can reconvene outside.”
Fine by Kasey. Moral support didn’t stitch wounds. He’d live without her. But was it too reptilian of her to accept his plan on the spot? She should at least pretend to care, to ask him—
“I’ll be fine.” Actinium cleared his throat, looking away as Kasey stared. “If that helps.”
Yes, it did. She nodded at Actinium, and strode on. The automatic polyglass doors parted for her. The hospel lobby, with its parquet floors and hanging ferns, was styled much like the Coles’ own unit. They were its founders, in case one couldn’t tell from the wall banner commemorating the upcoming anniversary of their passing, or the sign-in bots stationed along the lobby perimeter. Designed in compliance with the Ester Act, the bots were clunky, their faces featureless and therefore impossible to confuse with any of the human nurses, who attracted incoming patients with their smiles. Not Kasey. She approached the bots first, only to learn that walk-in-appointment scheduling required personalized communication beyond the bots’ authorization levels, forcing her to turn to the reception desk, where three human nurses sat. The air above their heads was unranked. Kasey’s rank was gone too, when she checked. Puzzling—her Intraface labeled the lobby as public domain—until Kasey saw the brass plaque atop the reception desk.
PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY IS A HUMAN RIGHT YOUR PRIVACY MATTERS TO US
Patient confidentiality, for all intents and purposes, had killed Celia. Anger flared, hot in Kasey’s throat. It must’ve scorched her voice when she requested to see Dr. Goldstein, because the smile dimmed from the middle nurse’s face. “Reason for visiting?”
“My sister.”
The nurse waited, then sighed when Kasey didn’t elaborate. “Confirm your ID by looking at the red dot please,” she said, swiping a holograph across the reception desk.
Kasey did as she was told, transmitting her rank, name, and residence via retina ID. The system approved her. Her Intraface downloaded Dr. Goldstein’s soonest appointment slot and suite number. She was good to go.
“Wait,” said the nurse, then reviewed Kasey’s info as well. Seemed to defeat the purpose of a secure retina feed, but Kasey kept that thought to herself. Maybe this was the extra attention people craved, so she said nothing. Did nothing as the nurse paused, mid-review.
And tapped the nurse to her left.
It all happened in a matter of seconds. The micro-conversation (It’s her—Who?—Kasey Mizuhara) conducted in a whisper, barely audible to the human ear, but human ears weren’t what Kasey was worried about.
Like clockwork, the first reporter holo-ed in, alerted by the geolocation alert on Kasey’s spoken full name. A dozen others followed, the public domain lobby a field day while Kasey, stuck in the flesh, couldn’t log out. The elevator bank, labeled as private domain by her Intraface, was her only escape. She made for it, cutting through the semitransparent horde.
“Kasey! Kasey!” Thankfully they couldn’t touch her—but then a question grabbed Kasey by the throat. “How are you feeling now that they’ve found the boat?”
She didn’t stop moving—didn’t change her outputted speed or expression.
The press excelled at extrapolating.
“KASEY MIZUHARA, LAST TO LEARN SISTER’S FATE,” one enunciated as others blinked at her, snapping pictures with their Intrafaces, still snapping—just from a distance—when Kasey reached the elevator bank. She punched the UP button. The elevator arrived. In the privacy of its enclosure, she opened her Intraface. Fifty-five new messages, mostly from Meridian. None from David; didn’t mean anything.
Kasey launched her daily news app. The headline glowed across multiple feeds.
BOAT WASHED ASHORE LANDMASS-660, BODY REMAINS MISSING
She waited to feel something, but felt nothing and realized this:
The boat did not matter.
The boat was inanimate.
The body did not matter. Found or missing, it’d be inanimate by now too, all because of the doctor in Suite 412.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Goldstein said after Kasey barged in, half an hour earlier than her appointment but he’d been seeing no one else. “A shame, what happened to your sister.”
“Why didn’t you treat her?” Kasey demanded.
“A
h.” Dr. Goldstein seemed to visibly shift gears, confusing Kasey. She’d thought they were on the same page. “I’m afraid Celia didn’t authorize disclosure to family members.”
And Kasey was afraid she didn’t care. “The Coles cured all cancers,” she blurted, then stared at Dr. Goldstein, daring him to ask her how she knew.
“Not the new ones,” Dr. Goldstein finally said. And then because Kasey must have appeared on the verge of hacking into the medical records herself, he went the extra kilometer. “Let me show you something.”
They took the elevator all the way down to G3, the floor pitch-black before the motion-sensing lights flickered on, illuminating a room filled with stasis pods.
“All medical grade,” Dr. Goldstein said as Kasey ventured in.
She knew without him saying so. She’d used them in her final science team competition, which was how she also knew what Dr. Goldstein would say next.
“What Celia had . . . it’s rare. But what disease haven’t we conquered? In fifty years, we might be able to transplant brains. In a century, we may reverse aging. All we need is time. And this”—Dr. Goldstein patted a stasis pod—“gives us just that. Time.”
Foreboding settled in Kasey’s belly. “How many years did you tell her?”
“Now, you must understand, there’s no exact—”
“How many?”
“A forecasted eighty, should the rate of innovation continue as is.”
Eighty. The number passed through Kasey like a shock wave, immobilizing her.
Dr. Goldstein took it upon himself to fill her silence. “She came at a terminal stage.” He assumed Kasey was in denial about the disease’s severity. “Hid the decline well, I’ll say.” He assumed she felt guilt for failing to detect it herself.