The Unidentified
Page 20
“She didn’t violate Game policy,” I said, finally speaking up. “You had no reason to let her go.”
“You don’t know what Game policy allows,” Dr. Grant countered. “Operation procedures don’t concern—”
“Does it allow a competing company to do business on Game premises?” I interrupted. “Brenton Kant needed administration approval to get access on site. That’s a breach in your agreement with Network Inc. Aren’t they supposed to have exclusive rights to operate on the Game system?”
The expression on Dr. Grant’s face fell a little before he caught it again.
“Is that why Mikey’s Game has been on pause so long?” I continued. “You don’t want the authorities, media, or Network Inc. lawyers to find out that something you authorized led to an onsite riot and the assault of a student—”
“This isn’t how you want to play it, Ms. Dade,” Dr. Grant said menacingly. Mrs. Bond put a hand on his shoulder.
“Investigations into Michael Littleton’s case are just finishing up,” she said, unfazed by my accusations. “He’ll resume playing by Monday.”
“That’s it? I’m just supposed to ignore your error and not—”
“You can play nice or not play at all,” Mrs. Bond said.
“What do you mean?”
“What we mean”—Dr. Grant sat behind his desk—“is that you seem to be forgetting that the Game is a privilege,” he said.
“You should be grateful for the opportunities you’re afforded here,” she added. “We’re not your enemies.”
“But if you don’t start showing some team-player spirit around here…” Dr. Grant looked at me solemnly, like he was disappointed in me. Like he hated that I was making him say the words. “We’ll have no choice but to give you Game Over.”
Mrs. Bond looked at me from across the room, her arms folded across her chest. “Make good choices, Katey.”
39 FLASH MOB
It was Friday night and my mom wouldn’t let me leave the house.
“I told you. No,” she said. “You’re not going. You lost your sponsorship from both your sponsors—”
“Mom, trust me? That was a good thing,” I said, scratching behind Lump’s ears. Cayenne was already on her way here with Mikey.
I’d “lost” my sponsorship benefits only because I’d demanded to be released from my contract and have the rights to my content restored to me. The administrators wanted to blame the loss of credit and resources poured into the pariah virus scare on me, but I had potentially damaging information about their business practices that could trace the responsibility back to them. We were in an uneasy stalemate. But who knew if that would last after tonight.
“How could you sabotage your future like that, Kiddie?” She turned her back to me so I wouldn’t see her cry, but I heard it in her voice. “Is this Game Over?”
“Not yet,” I said. I didn’t even really understand why the administrators hadn’t ended my game already. Probably because they’d rather keep me playing. As long as I was in the Game, I’d have to play by their rules. But that’s what they thought. I knew too much now to go back to how it was.
My poor mom. She was still captivated by the easy life the sponsors were selling.
“Now you’re just going to end up like me,” she said softly.
I walked over to where she was storming around in the kitchen. I put my arms around her; she felt shorter than me. “Mom. I love you. There are worse people I could end up being like. I’ll be fine,” I said into her hair.
I heard Cayenne’s two timid honks from the driveway. Then what I assumed to be Mikey leaning on the horn.
“Let me go. Please?”
I left the house before she could answer.
They wanted team spirit. And I was going to give it to them.
On our way to not-After Hours in Cayenne’s car, I had that nervous feeling. That what if I threw a party and nobody came? anxiety, times one thousand.
But when we turned into the parking lot we saw that people had come, times one thousand.
The parking lot was illuminated with film-set lighting, Hollywood premiere-style spotlights cutting particle beams through the air for After Hours. But no one was going inside. A lot of people were wearing masks: surgical masks with question marks drawn on them, classy masquerade masks concealing their eyes but accentuating their smiles. One guy was wearing just a disposable plate with a •-• strapped over his face.
“I guess he took the ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t have anything to wear’ line in the invite literally,” Mikey said, putting his hand over my eyes. “Yikes.”
I laughed.
Tycho had remixed my “Last Laugh” track and was bumping it full volume through the amps.
Tesla was there with the other Save the Princess teammates passing out heartthrobs to the crowd. She had employed the entire DIY Depot department to get them done in time. We had included a message on each of the heartthrob straps. People curious and clever enough to decode it would find access to the UnID swarm cache. Elijah had already edited a new video clue hinting at the location of the next unlawful gathering.
Everyone had the lights strapped to their wrists, and judging by the frequency of flashing, they were excited to be there.
I eyeballed the growing force of police hovering at the edges of our scene. So far they were just standing there like an audience of plastic soldiers, watching us. The laughing crowds of underage kids reflected in their mirrored visors. Lexie was wearing a powder pink gas mask and showing the authorities authentic-looking permits from conflicting sponsors that she’d copied from her brother’s files. She left them to sort out the details and returned to the party.
I couldn’t believe how many people showed up. Had to be three times as many as After Hours and I figured there were probably kids from other schools here. People outside the system who didn’t have Game cards to get them in. I wondered if the Pit was empty now. If the sponsor reps were waiting at their booths with their free shit wondering where everyone was.
Cayenne ran over and gave me a huge hug. “Are you having fun?” she called over the music.
I looked over at Ari. Cayenne followed my gaze, then said, “Come on. You don’t have time for that. Help me pass these out.” She gave me a collection of heartthrobs and I entered the crowd to greet our guests.
In the jostle of people, I thought I saw a familiar face. Or not even a face. The parking lot lights reflected blankly off the smooth, flesh-colored mask, but was absorbed into the darkness of the eyeholes. He looked even more menacing than he had at the War Game riot. He stood on the fringes facing me. I could imagine his smirk hidden behind the expressionless plastic.
Then he turned around. Jeremy Swift had tapped him on the shoulder and two members of the riot-check authorities were taking him into custody.
“Oh, did Swift find someone not on the guest list?” Mikey said as if he didn’t have anything to do with it.
Tycho had just started playing the “Background Checks” track. It sounded incredible to hear the tiny unnoticed parts of our everyday get amplified into full recognition. Hear it pulsing loud in the cool night.
Everyone was dancing.
“They’re going to cut the power,” Mikey said, holding my arm.
He pointed to the riot police sent here to break up our “illegal” gathering as the administrators promised.
“Then let’s dance while we can,” I said to him, and we joined the crowd.
This part of the track worked the low-level hum of the electricity wires behind the Game into an intricate bassline. A loop of the World Languages garble and dishes crashing in Culture Shock arranged with the idiosyncratic keystrokes and mouse clicks in the Arcade kept a crazy rhythm behind one exquisite, never-repeating birdsong melody trilling high above all of that.
Just when the song was ending, when all the background rhythms were fading back to let the starling sing its aria in the spotlight, the lights cut out.
Silen
ce. All around us, the logo lights of the Game blinked out and disappeared. The parking lot got so dark not even the asphalt sparkled. Even the buzz of electricity in the wires overhead, that most people didn’t even hear before, made themselves conspicuous by their silence. The quiet was intense.
I stopped holding my breath.
“What happened?” Cayenne whispered, not wanting to destroy the magical silence.
Tiny lights flashed erratically around us. For a second I thought it was the light of stars. That somehow with all the lights out, we could see them twinkling on Earth. But it was the heartthrobs.
“We routed the power from the Game generators,” Mikey told her, catching my eye. “They had to shut that off to shut this down.” The light from his heartthrob lit his face, though not as bright as his smile did. “Oops.”
The strobe-blinking of the tiny diodes made people’s faces stop-motion in the darkness. The way darkness. I was still shocked at how quiet everyone was.
They were all huddled tight together, sitting down, looking up. The lights that had left the buildings around us were still echoed in the starry sky. We could see them now in the perfect silence. We had turned off the Game. Even if it was only temporary, for this one moment they didn’t have the power. We did.
I was about to go track down the other Unidentified to whisper-discuss our next move. But Mikey stopped me, the lazy pulsing of his heartbeat lighting up his face. “Put yours on,” he said, and slipped a heartthrob around my wrist. He looked down at it, waiting expectantly for it to come to life. He was still holding my hand. “Watch, we can make them beat the same,” he said.
I stood with Mikey and watched the lights flash. They weren’t synched at all. I moved to pull it off again, but Mikey said, “Wait.”
He moved closer so we stood together, forehead to forehead. Hiding the light from the people who were checking out the sky.
“Watch.”
My heartbeat was always just a little after his, but I watched. And we were together. And he waited.
And then, blink…blink…blink…
The tiny lights matched up and were flashing together. I laughed and stared, amazed. Our hearts were beating at the same time, Mikey’s and mine.
And together they started to beat faster.
Mikey tilted his head just a little and kissed me lightly. He kind of missed my lips, his just barely brushing the corner of my mouth. But the place his mouth touched mine tingled with heartbeat electricity.
I smiled, embarrassed, and pulled the thing off my wrist. I still felt the pounding inside, though. The shocks and jolts.
I looked around at the faces looking up, faintly lit by random heartbeats now and then. The authorities sprang into action. Raising their batons, they began to beat a predictable rhythm onto their plastic shields and moved in to break us up.
Everyone sat so calmly, so silently in the dark shadows, not taking their eyes off the sky.
“Look at that,” Mikey said softly, squeezing my hand.
I looked up.
Shit, there were a lot of stars.
GAME OVER
We are the Unidentified. Or maybe we’re not. Maybe you’ll never know who we are.
In one night, unauthorized parking-lot parties took place outside 243 Game sites nationwide. The Unidentified didn’t do that, the people who participated did that. Some of the gatherings were busted up by law enforcement citing the underage gathering prohibition, but others kept going until the sky lightened and the parking lot lamps blinked out.
It doesn’t matter if everyone is watching. Or if no one is. We are going to keep making noise. With the hope of one day beating the Game.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Maya Rock for the push and Alessandra Balzer for the pull; they are the forces responsible for making all these ideas book shaped and I’m going to owe those ladies forever. High-fives to the Musers for their nonstop support during the never-ending writing process, especially Brianna Privett at Utopian.net, Suzanne Young, and Ryan Gebhart. Thank you, Jeff Katz, for recommending that I read the YA book that led me to want to write them—I know you were just doing your job, but this is all your fault. I need to thank the friends who offered to read the early versions of this, and my apologies to those who actually did. And to all the anonymous artist-vandals and my secret partners in crime, thank you for the endless inspiration and for refusing to play the Game.
Copyright
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
The Unidentified
Copyright © 2010 by Rae Mariz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-01278-4
www.harperteen.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mariz, Rae.
The Unidentified / Rae Mariz.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In a futuristic alternative school set in a shopping mall where video game–playing students are observed and used by corporate sponsors for market research, Katey “Kid” Dade struggles to figure out where she fits in, and whether she even wants to.
[1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Corporate sponsorship—Fiction. 3. Alternative schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M33913Un 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009054254
CIP
AC
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