by Rae Mariz
I could squeak out enough Italian to order gelato, but Ari learned Japanese so she could order sushi and video chat with an e-pal in Kyoto so she should be like the poster child of the Culture Shock program. Mikey knew a brand of East LA Spanish slang he picked up from watching too many Hollywood gang flicks. They were pretty much my only friends, so I survived on sushi, pizza, burritos, and hamburgers. I wondered if it was also the aim of the World Languages Department that the socially maladjusted go hungry.
I bit into the Japanese pastry Ari ordered for me. It was good but it wasn’t amazing.
All Ari wanted to do during our “together time” was talk about strategies on how to get branded. I scrolled through my intouch® messages, but there were only some sponsor messages and a call-to-arms from Tesla. She’d found out who lobbied for the ban on her product.
toy321: re: flipstream. message swarm PEDIAFIX. tell them goggles are for recreational use only. go! go! go!
I thumbed in a protest message to PediaFix®, and half-listened to Ari tell me about what Rocket had told her about the VIP Lounge.
“She makes it sound like the whole place is coated with pixie dust,” I said, sipping my tea.
“Yes, pixie dust and power.” She sighed dreamily. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “I wish my tracker was still working,” she said, flicking her notebook® screen as if that would help. “I don’t know if Aerwear has been back to my page. I posted images of my punk ballet slippers and everything—”
“Your tracker’s not working?”
“Yeah, I think admin found out about it and blocked it.”
I opened my notebook® to check, even though I swore to myself that I wouldn’t. The eyeball icon was gone.
“It worked last night,” I said more to myself than to Ari. “Do you think someone who was at the IAW yesterday told?”
“Who would tell?” Ari said, tearing off a piece of her pastry and popping it in her mouth.
Yeah. I didn’t know. I thought about the Illegal Arts Workshop, about the voice telling us how to subvert Network security.
“Have you ever heard of Zeronet?” I asked Ari.
“Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and trying to lick powdered sugar off her lips and fingertips.
“They visited my page last night.”
“Huh,” she said, obviously not interested.
“You know who else visited my page?” I dangled the scrap of gossip out to get her attention. “Jeremy Swift.”
“No way,” she said, frowning. “Let me see.”
“I can’t. The tracker’s down.”
Then her tone got sharp. “Well, that’s convenient.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ari laughed a fake and tinkly kind of laugh. “Seriously, Kid. If you want to start rumors about Jeremy being interested in you, there has to be at least some possibility of it being true.”
I looked at Ari. Looked at her glittery violet eyes, so different from the hazel ones I had looked into when we used to tell each other secrets and confessed our crushes. They weren’t the same eyes that cried for me when I was having problems at home. Not the same eyes that winked at me when we were pulling pranks on Mikey.
“I’m just trying to look out for you,” she said.
“Right,” I said quietly.
My intouch® hummed in my hand.
cwinterson: please come to my office for an important announcement @KID
“Anyway, I have to go.” I picked up my bag, getting ready to leave.
“What? Where are you going? We never get to hang out anymore,” she complained. I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was the one who kept blowing off band practice with me and Mikey to hang out with Rocket and the Craft-sters.
“Winterson wants to see me.” I quickly slammed back the last of my tea.
She looked irritated. “Fine, then. Next time you can order your own matcha manju.”
My eyes were watering. The tea had been way too hot.
I headed over to Winterson’s office, humiliated. I was pissed at Ari, mostly because she was probably right. Who was I trying to fool? Swift was just interested in my excess online hours, it was stupid to think it was anything else.
I slumped down in the chair across from Winterson and waited for the “big announcement.”
She stared at me quietly for a moment. “Katey,” she began, “earlier this week you asked me about suicide…”
“I’m not depressed, if that’s what you think,” I said quickly.
“No, no. After our talk I asked around a little in headquarters to see what was going on. The sponsors weren’t responsible for that stunt last week, in case you were still wondering.”
Nope. I wasn’t still wondering. That was stale news.
“But because of our conversation,” Winterson said, biting her pinky nail, “the sponsors got interested and began their own investigation to find more information.”
“No one was interested,” I said. “No one cared.”
“Well, that’s actually what I’m trying to tell you. You were interested in it.” Winterson rubbed her temples. “Let me back up. I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t my intention to bring more attention to this suicide phenomenon…or you.”
I wished she would get to the point already.
“They want to brand you, Katey.”
“What?”
“It’s in your record now that you are a trendspotter. The sponsors will be keeping a closer eye on you from now on.”
“What? I was just logged in to my record. I didn’t see anything in my record about being a trendspotter.”
“It won’t be made public user-side until you accept their terms and conditions. But it’s in there, Katey.”
I didn’t like the idea of information about me being in my record that I couldn’t see or edit. And I didn’t have anything to do with that suicide stunt. I was just an innocent bystander or something.
“But there were tons of kids in the Pit who saw it happen, how could I get credit for ‘spotting’ it?”
Winterson sighed heavily. “You were the first one to talk about it. To show interest. To search for it. The flow of interest is what the sponsors follow. They already had your notebook® registered as the first video view.”
I thought about the anonymous private message: They’ve got their eyes on you now.
“We’ve contacted your mom,” Winterson began. “You’ll be meeting with the administrators and interested sponsors’ brand representatives today after closing time.”
15 THE FEELING OF FALLING
“Kid?”
I turned to see Jeremy waiting outside Winterson’s office.
“Hey, what are you doing here?”
“What are you doing right now?” he said.
“I don’t know.” I was supposed to meet Mikey in the DIY Depot. He was going to battle in the Robot Combat Arena today.
“Oh. I thought maybe you’d want to do that thing we talked about yesterday. In Chez Chess.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Favors for favors?” he said smiling. “I thought we could do an hours trade. I saw that you’ve been stuck in Math Attack. You want to play?”
I’ll admit I was flattered that Swift wanted to spend time with me, but I wished he’d chosen a mission a little more romantic than math.
“Yeah, OK,” I said pulling out my intouch®. I left Mikey a message that I was delayed, but I’d be there before Cripple entered the ring.
We swiped in to the Math Attack prep room, where kids were reviewing for their next level—doing meditation exercises and straight-up hyperventilating. I took a deep breath and walked with him to a free table.
“I got some Study Aides® off of Archive. Can I see your notebook®?”
Yes, the date had gotten off to a truly romantic start. Ari was so right. I took a seat beside him and slid my notebook® over to him.
I peeked nervously into the Math Attack area while he in
stalled the Study Aides®. It was a bit like the Arcade up on fifth—where the SimKids plan cities, raise families and destroy military targets—but down here there was a lot more anxiety. Kids stared into video monitors, typing in their calculations, cringing when they pressed Send, like a bomb was about to go off.
The install finished and Jeremy looked away from the screen and at me.
“Do you want something?” He said, leaning in closer.
I kind of wanted his lips on my neck, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead I said, “What?”
He nodded toward the wall display of Liquid Crack® and Focus® drug samples.
“No, thanks. I’m OK.”
He looked disappointed. “Well, would you mind if I swiped with your card? They’re free,” he said quickly, seeing the hesitation on my face. “I just maxed out my sample allotment on my card, that’s all.”
“Oh. Sure,” I said, sliding my card over to him.
He went to the display and got a two-pill sample packet. “You sure you don’t want?”
I shook my head.
He shrugged and took both of them. I watched his neck as he swallowed them dry.
He smiled at me. “Ready to do this?”
Jeremy positioned my notebook® in between us and I watched his lips move as he pointed to equations, trying to help me work out a strategy to defeat the end stage and pass the level. He hunched over the screen, frowning and intense.
He looked up at me. “You getting all of this?”
“I guess.”
“Come on. Think of it like a puzzle, or code. You just need to figure out the right pieces to make it work.”
He moved his chair closer to mine, leaned in close with the Study Aide®. Even though this didn’t exactly help me concentrate on math, my senses focused to take in the whole experience of being near him. A kind of contact high, or something. I could feel his arm resting on the back of my chair. His shirt smelled like cotton and cinnamon, and something else. Like welded metal or outer space. With him sitting beside me, I was hyperaware of everything. And when I stared at the problems in front of us, I could understand what he was showing me.
I found the puzzle piece that fit.
“You ready?”
I nodded and swiped my ID at the VR grapher, the redesigned flight simulator that ran the Functions Graphing program I needed to pass to get to the next level. I climbed into the cockpit and strapped in, the harness tight across my shoulders. I looked at the dark screen, gripped the controls in my sweaty hands, and breathed out. It felt like I had been holding my breath for the past forty minutes.
I waited for Jeremy to shut the door so the program would start. He ran his hand nervously through his hair, looked around quickly, then jumped into the capsule, pulling the door shut behind him.
“What are you doing!?”
“Coming along for the ride.” He laughed. His laugh sounded like rain clouds clearing.
The countdown had begun. 10…9…
“But you don’t have a belt!”
“Come on, you can’t expect me to spend the morning studying Quadratic Functions, and not get to ride?” he said, trying to maneuver in the cramped capsule.
His knee jabbed into my thigh.
“Oops, sorry,” he said.
6…5…4…
I started laughing, a little maniacally. This wasn’t how I imagined playing the final stage.
“You can do this, easy,” he said, bracing his arm against the ceiling and looking at the screen.
“Here we go!” I practically shouted as the capsule started vibrating.
3…2…1…
The first equation appeared on the screen and the timer started counting down. I had to do fifteen equations in twenty minutes.
I did the work, finding the vertex and plugging in various values of x to find y. I plotted the coordinates. Hit Submit.
The capsule tilted back and, together with the screen graphic, gave the illusion of acceleration along a gently curving parabola, first down, then back up.
“Whee,” he said flatly.
I graphed two more functions, and we rode their paths like a carnival ride. The adrenaline of the time pressure and Jeremy close beside me added to the thrill that I was getting them right.
Then I saw the fourth function.
“Oh Google,” I swore. “Look at the leading coefficient! It’s negative!” I glanced quickly at Jeremy. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“It’ll be way steep, too,” he said, staring at the screen, calculating it in his head. Then he looked around the capsule trying to position himself better. “Just solve it like the other ones.”
“OK,” I said, plotting the coordinates. “Ready?”
The parabola was opened upside down and we were about to climb and then plunge down the side of it. I hesitated before hitting Submit.
“Do it!” he said.
The whole capsule tilted violently backward as we moved up the path. Jeremy slid up out of the seat and bumped his head on the ceiling. When we got to the vertex and plunged over the edge, my breath caught in my throat. It felt like we were falling face-first off the side of a cliff.
Then we leveled out for the next function.
“Good game,” Jeremy said, rubbing the back of his head. His dark, messy hair was getting even messier. “Hurry! Watch your time!”
I went on to the next function, then the next. I knew what I had to do now and could actually get them done pretty fast. Probably because every time I hit Submit and the animation-ride sequence started up, Jeremy took my hand from the controllers and we yelled our lungs out as we plunged down each function’s course. I would do anything for more moments like those, even math endgames.
When the last function had been graphed, the capsule settled to a halt. My scores scrolled by on the screen. I got only one wrong, and that was Jeremy’s fault because he had been shifting around and hit the Submit button before I was ready. My time bonus was surprisingly high too.
At last, the words every girl wants to see after rocketing around in a capsule with a cute boy: LEVEL COMPLETE.
Jeremy moved closer, if that was possible, and said quietly to me. “Good game. Now, um, if you don’t mind opening the door, I’d like to unfold myself.”
I unstrapped my safety belt and opened the door, peeking around Math Attack to make sure there weren’t any supervisors roaming around. We didn’t want my level score to be invalidated because there were too many pilots in the cockpit. Someone might’ve thought we were cheating.
“That was click,” Jeremy said, stretching. “So fun.”
It wasn’t impossible to cheat in the Game. Theoretically, you could just hand your ID to a particularly smart and morally ambiguous friend and watch your points add up. But if you did that you’d miss out on this feeling of passing a level. It was an endorphin rush I wouldn’t want to trade away. After hours or days or weeks of frustration and perseverance and insanity, somehow doing it. Getting another step closer to beating the Game.
I checked my intouch®. I’d missed a lot of updates from Mikey while I was rocketing around with Swift.
mikes: is polishing the world’s next robotic prize-fighting champ!
mikes: is sending our hero into the ring!
Oh no. I was missing the beginning of the battle.
“Good game,” Jeremy said when we had logged out of Math Attack.
“You said that already,” I said, still glowing with my accomplishment.
“I meant about getting branded.”
I sobered up quick. “That hasn’t been made public yet.”
He laughed. “Oh, right.” He took my hand in his. “It’s just that Protecht Securities is my sponsor too, so I kind of knew they were interested in you.”
I was quiet, thinking about it. So Protecht Securities wanted to brand me?
“I thought it made sense,” he said, shrugging. “If we were both branded by the same company. You know, together?”
He squeezed my
hand a little bit. In my other hand, Mikey was demanding my attention.
mikes: is suffering a devastating loss.
mikes: why aren’t you here? @KID
16 LAST LAUGH
Mikey was at his workspace in DIY Depot. He was kind of just staring off into space when I walked in.
“Oh no! Is that Cripple?” There was a box of mangled metal parts on Mikey’s work table.
“Yeah,” Mikey said, bowing his head in respect. “He fought a good fight. Where were you?”
“Sorry I missed it,” I said, evading the question. I glanced at the beloved’s mechanical remains, now barely recognizable as scrap metal. “What’re you going to do now?”
“Fix him up again. The little guy is powered by pure fight.”
That wasn’t technically true, Cripple had battery packs, but Mikey was definitely driven by something I didn’t fully understand. “Mikey. Hey, Mikey?” I said.
He looked up from his circuit board.
“Way to be my best friend.”
He grinned. “Aww…high five!”
We reached up to five each other, but missed. I knocked over a small box filled with screws. They rained out on the floor.
“We are so hopeless,” I laughed, looking at the mess.
“Defeat makes me hungry,” Mikey said, pushing Cripple’s cardboard casket away. “Let’s get food.”
We went to the Vending Machine down the hall, looking to make a selection from the tastiest-looking coin-op.
“The problem with the Vending Machine,” Mikey said, examining the elaborate Rube Goldberg-like chain-reaction machines that the Tinkers and Gearheads designed for their sponsors, “is that after all the marbles roll through their chutes and trigger all the music box mechanisms or whatever…like, after the hamster wheel powers the conveyor belt and drops your purchase in your hand, all the magic is gone. It’s just corporate candy and the only thing left to do is eat it. Boring.”