Seneca Rebel (The Seneca Society Book 1)

by Rayya Deeb

  "Hi, honey! How's your trip going? I want to hear everything!"

  I was choked up but dug deep down to muster up the strength to say what I needed to say. To make my mom feel at ease no matter how far from reality my own comfort was.

  "I love you." It came out without even thinking about it.

  "Well, I love you. Killer is right here and he misses you, too. He hasn't left your bed since you've been gone. Only when I lured him out with a marrow bone from Romeo's Meat Market."

  I laughed, and was glad she couldn’t see the tears streaming down my face.

  "I miss you guys so much. This is a great place for me, though. They're doing such cool things, and I've decided that... I'd like to stay."

  "That's great, hon. I think something like this is just what you need. And they'll be lucky to have you."

  "Yeah."

  "Will you be coming home to pack? When should I plan on coming to visit?"

  Nothing about this felt right to me, but I knew it had to be done– for now.

  "That's the thing. They don't allow visitors... in the first few months... while we go through this big mental and physical cleansing process. But I think there is a parents' weekend after that."

  "Really? Well… okay… I guess we’ll plan for later, then. You let me know when, and I’ll come right away, okay?"

  "I miss you mom. So much. But I can't come home to pack if I want to stay here. They send government appointed messengers to retrieve the things I'll need."

  "Wow, this is really serious."

  "I know. I'm sorry we didn't get to say goodbye properly– or, not goodbye. You know what I mean."

  "Doro, it's okay. We'll be together again sooner than you think. Until then, I'll have Killer to keep me company. You just do what you need to do, and know that I'm proud of you."

  This was it. I was leaving my life behind. I truly believed that, despite what I had been told, my mom and I would be reunited one day. Hearing her voice confirmed that. I would never let her go that easily. Never.

  8

  THE SKIN UNDER my eyes was puffy and raw from crying all night. I know I'm like my dad and used to getting no sleep, but this was crazy. I was really feeling it now. I was dressed in blue from head to toe, descending on the gold-domed grass patch deep into Seneca, my new home.

  "Campbella!" I was too tired to turn around. I didn't have to because Reba was by my side in a flash. His hair was more disheveled than the last time I'd seen him, his shirt half tucked in. He had been waiting at the entry point. "I am so crazy happy to see you today. You have no idea. It's always a crapshoot; will the newbies be back or not? You know? And you are, and that is incredible!"

  "For who?" Even though I had made the choice, I was plagued with guilt.

  "Two years ago, I went through exactly what you’re going through, and trust me, it gets better. Even though we're a part of something so unbelievably phenomenal, that doesn't mean the other side of the sword doesn't affect us. We're still human. But you'll see. It'll get better."

  "Thanks, Reba." I really did appreciate this bubbly guy. Yet part of me wanted to resist his friendship, out of loyalty to Julie. I felt like I’d be replacing her. My inner circle was being dismantled and rebuilt.

  "I have to tell you, though, what you go through next isn’t for the faint of heart. So hang on tight, and if you need a friend..." Reba held up his wrist. His flexer was in the form of a retro stopwatch. I took mine from my back pocket and we pressed them together.

  "I gotta bounce now, chica, but how about lunch? I think we have it at the same time."

  "Yeah, we can do lunch."

  "Sweet!" And Reba was gone in the blink of an eye. I pulled up my locations map on my flexer. I pinpointed my first official session of my first real day as a citizen of Seneca: Mathematics in epidemiology. If I had to pick a least favorite session, this would be the one. I always hated discussing diseases but, hey, I get it, everyone hated it just the same and that's why they were so set on finding ways to eradicate it in this new society.

  I looked up from my entry point to determine which of four golden hallways I needed to take. In my direct line of vision, about forty-five yards down, there was a perfectly shaped head with a buzz cut. My eyes darted to the floor. There they were: blue combat boots. I looked up. His face. Two mysterious, different-colored eyes with a depth to them I so badly wanted to explore. I wanted for him to see me. He didn't. I looked down the hall I needed to take, but he was headed in the opposite direction. By the time I looked back to where he’d been, he was gone.

  The urge to follow him was magnetic. I moved without even thinking. I made it to where I’d last seen him standing. There were no doors in sight. Maybe one had opened up for him in the wall, like I had seen happen the day before. He could be anywhere. I needed to get to session, set to begin in two minutes. I definitely didn't want to start things off on the wrong foot by being late.

  As I headed back in the other direction, McKayla Gordon, Jennifer Wallingsford's sour friend, appeared.

  "Hi, McKayla." I figured if I was here to stay, it was probably best to play nice. No need to have enemies right off the bat in a brand new place. Neutrality was my goal.

  "Not feeling suicidal today are you, Nirvana?" She smirked and eyed me as a doorway opened up in the golden wall for her.

  "Not today, but thanks for your concern."

  I watched her saunter past me, through the instant door and into her session. I glimpsed inside the room and was about to walk away when something caught my eye. McKayla sat in front of him. Blue Combat Boots was in her session. He looked up and saw me staring at him from outside the room. And just like that, the door glazed over in the mirrored gold and I was staring back at myself. Or a version of myself that was acting like a silly little girl with a silly little crush. A girl I didn't know. I snapped out of it. With one minute to get to session, I booked it back down the hall and made it to my seat with seconds to spare.

  9

  RATHER THAN JOINING the other girls of the dorm for our morning ride into Seneca, Ellen picked me up in a flighter with a driver and a special guard. These two were always with her. They were in the front. She was in the back. I wasn't sure where we were headed. But I was getting used to that.

  She handed me a coffee. "Do you like mochas?" It was my first real whiff of coffee since the last time I’d been inside Café Firenze four mornings before. (Had it really only been four days ago that all this had begun?) I swiped the cup from Ellen's hand, took the lid off and slurped up the still unmelted whipped cream atop the silky, chocolate-infused espresso milk. One whiff of the rich aroma made my heart ache, made me miss my mom more than I ever knew I could. It was even more painful than missing my dad, I think, because I had chosen to do it.

  "You made the right choice, Doro."

  I took a sip– it hurt so good. "That's what I hear... I hope so."

  "I made the same choice three years ago, when I accepted Congressman Wallingsford's invitation to join Seneca's Youth Initiation Division."

  Ellen was touching her necklace, her eyes chock full of sorrow. I felt an energy emanating from her that resonated with me. An understanding between us. She removed her necklace. It was a Yin Yang in silver and gold, with two diamonds as the dots, each encircled in the metal of the opposite side. Her hand started to shake. She opened it. It was a locket, and inside was a tiny picture of her and a little boy. He must have been around eight or nine. "It was the hardest thing I'd ever done. The hardest thing I'll ever do. Not a day goes by that I don't think about him, or a night when he isn't present in my dreams."

  It was her son. I didn't have to ask. "What's his name?"

  "Connor. I call him Con Con. He'll never understand why I never came home."

  We sat in silence for the rest of the ride. I wasn’t the only one who’d made a big sacrifice.

  The flighter traveled deeper and deeper into lush greenery, away from civilization. It was quite possibly the most scenic trip I'd taken in my en
tire life. I saw virtually no signs of human life other than train tracks and a dozen or more freight trucks as we flighted down 81 South. The Smart Road was populated with automated vehicles. That was where the majority of the traffic was, if you'd even call it traffic, which you wouldn't. Besides the highway, the Smart Road and a flighter here and there, we were just like a brush sweeping across nature's paint palette, collecting all its richness in our bristles. My lungs opened up to the thick, moist air, my eyes as wide as an owl's in the dark of night. Except it was twilight, and the sky was still a deep sea blue, only just beginning its slow fade to black.

  We reached a mountainous area of Southern Virginia and the flighter landed in a secluded nook, next to a lake. The water was still and inviting. As the seasons changed, the robust green that filled the branches here was speckled ever so lightly with maroon and orange.

  "This is Claytor Lake."

  "It's beautiful."

  "Isn't it? All this is the result of a dam built on the oldest river in North America. It's an ancient gift that, fortunately, man has not yet destroyed. The dam once provided this region with much of its hydroelectric power. Southern Gate Electric, a utilities company owned by Congressman Wallingsford's brother, Billy, bought the dam five years ago and Seneca had it converted to power a large portion of the Northwestern Seneca hemisphere. This small area provides us with a substantial source of power that allows us to do the things we do. It's also used to cool our super computers. Right now, we’re standing directly above the greatest computing center in the world as well as one of Seneca's premier medical hubs."

  I looked around, trying to pinpoint any sign of this. Nothing. In fact, everything I saw was natural and gorgeous— the antithesis of the artificial world of computers. "You would never know."

  "And for the most part, no one does."

  The mysterious men in blue shadowed us. About a hundred yards down, near the forest's edge, I saw a circle of grass with a gold ring. The entrance.

  "Come on, let me show you."

  Our little posse met two more men in blue at the entrance, trading places with our original escorts who turned back to the flighter. We stepped onto the encircled grass patch. The gold dome appeared and then, quickly, we descended. I was kind of surprised that taking this advanced elevator down inside the earth was beginning to feel normal.

  "Doro, this is where you’ll be spending a lot of time once you go through your pre-requisite session work at S.E.R.C."

  When the gold dissolved, the forest's sweet serenity was replaced by walls of computer monitors, all pumping out droves of data. This place was like my bedroom on insane mega steroids. An open workspace. People everywhere, young and old, of every ethnicity, working together or apart on intricate spreadsheets of equations and data. The buzz of machinery and voices blended symphonically. The smell of technology, what an aphrodisiac! Everyone looked enthusiastic about the work they were focussed on. This was an absolute wonderland to a tech junkie like me.

  I started along a five-foot-wide gold path that ran through the middle of the open space. One group in blue caught my eye. They were all my age and were working with people of various ages, from a three-year-old girl to a man of about sixty. I skidded to a stop. One of those people was Blue Combat Boots. Everything around me faded to a blur, then pulled focus on him. Blue Combat Boots was working with the sixty-something man, taking stats from sensors on the man's body as he walked on a treadmill.

  "Doro? You coming?"

  "Yes... what's going on over there?"

  "That's a regenerative medicine residency for advanced S.E.R.C. scholars."

  "So what, like physical therapy?"

  "Like growing limbs for patients that were either born without them, or lost them in situations like land mine explosions or car accidents. Even people who had their lungs removed from cancer can have brand new lungs that work better than the ones they were born with."

  This was absolutely amazing. These patients were moving their arms and legs as if they’d always had healthy ones. Scientists had been trying to perfect this advancement in the Aboves for decades. Here in Seneca, it was so normal that not only doctors were analyzing patients’ progress, but people my age were, too. And one of those people was Blue Combat Boots. This guy wasn't anything like the ones I went to school with back in LA. Oh no, he most certainly was not. I stood there watching him as he and the older man shared a joke.

  "There will be plenty of time for you to explore all of this, but today we have a different agenda."

  I looked at Ellen Malone with the wonder of a kid on Christmas morning. If only I could stay in this spot for just a few moments more. But she didn't return my "this is going to be fun" look, and so I followed her, looking back until I was beyond where I could see him anymore.

  "There's an awful disease endemic to Seneca that comes from an abundant fauna in the Southeastern Hemisphere. Necrolla Carne. It's an organism that slowly eats away at the human body, causing a long, drawn-out death. It's something you never, ever want to witness."

  "Um, that is repulsive. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it." Ellen was amused as I scratched furiously at my arms. Talk of disease always made me feel the symptoms. Just like my dad. He was always washing his hands thoroughly, all the way up to his elbows.

  "Fortunately, our medical research and development team has developed a vaccine that immunizes us from it.”

  "A shot? I'm getting a shot today?"

  "It's not too bad."

  "It's the worst. I hate shots. I hate needles. I might pass out."

  Ellen laughed. I did, too, but out of nervousness, not amusement. Soon we entered a medical wing that made every doctor's office I’d ever visited back home look like an exhibit in a history museum. Ellen explained that I wouldn't see a doctor unless a problem arose, and that was only three to five percent of the time. Instead, a lot of my experience would be automated or handled by technicians.

  I followed the footpath map to the med-unit, which had been transmitted to my flexer upon entry. I marveled at the white touch screen with blue typeface that covered the entire length of the wall. It was an automated system that managed the devices within each med-unit and was overseen by a few med-techs in powder blue lab coats. My flexer notified me that I had reached my med-unit, so I stopped and went inside as the golden door opened.

  My instructions were relayed to me by an automated narration in a calming female voice: "Take a seat." "Roll up your sleeve." "Open your mouth."

  Even though I was a little nervous, I laid back in a robotic chair that did all the work a nurse or doctor always had done in the past, and surprised myself by thinking that I trusted this machine more than I would an actual doctor. My physical statistical data was transmitted from the chair back to the computer for analysis and report, and the machine said, "You are healthy, Dorothy."

  If this technology already existed, why couldn’t it happen up in the Aboves? No sooner had I begun to ponder that than a voice instructed me to expose my left shoulder for that dreadful shot.

  10

  I WOKE UP in a haze and a cold sweat. I was literally drenched, back in my bed back at the ambassadors' house. Ellen Malone must have brought me back while I was out cold. Things were a little blurry, but after a moment, I regained focus and grabbed for the glass of water at my bedside. I downed it. That vaccine was no joke. Luckily it was preparing my body to fight this disgusting Necrolla Carne disease. No way was I going to take the chance of getting some retched flesh-eating organism.

  I was thankful for the comforts of the ambassador’s house right now. It was Friday, my last day there, my last days living in the Aboves. Over the weekend I would be set up in my new habitat in Seneca. It was surreal, to say the least, to know that I was moving to a location below the surface of the Earth. Permanently.

  It was no sweat off anyone's back that I wasn't making it to that Friday’s sessions. I guessed this vaccination was something every citizen of Seneca went through, and my reaction was
no different than anybody else's.

  There was a light tap at my door and Jennifer Wallingsford poked her head in. It was the middle of the day and the mansion had been so quiet that I thought I was alone.

  "Hi there." Her face bloomed in sympathetic recognition, "Oh, the Necrolla Carne vaccine. Isn't it the worst?"

  "I just feel like death, but other than that, no big deal."

  "Seriously. Well, it's worth it for a day of feeling like death over a permanent real death."

  "No kidding."

  "I have the day off to pack for my family vacation to Cape Cod. Do you want me to get you anything before I go?"

  "No thanks, no appetite."

  Jennifer was in sweats but still managed to look extremely put together. Like she was in a catalogue for high-end varsity athletic gear. It stung me in the gut when she said she'd be with her family. It not only made me jealous, but I felt cheated too. How come she could be with her family, but I'd been forcibly separated from my mom– especially while I was still dealing with losing my dad? My stomach was crippled with queasiness, not just from the shot, but also from the thought of not seeing my mom again.

  A deep voice called up from downstairs. "J. Wall?!"

  "I'm upstairs," she hollered back down. "My twin brother. Time to go."

  Her twin brother: G.W. Wallingsford. From what I had always heard, the Wallingsfords were related to the first president of our country, George Washington. And so the first initial of his name was for George after the most famous George of all, and the middle initial, W, was for William, his uncle. G.W. had been in the news a lot because he had gotten busted at a party in Georgetown with a bunch of Mojo'd-out teenagers. The whole thing was pushed under the rug faster than a BoomJet as G.W. suddenly started speaking out on behalf of the anti-Mojo movement. He’d become their poster-child.

  The Mojo Stick was a nano technology that rendered all other recreational drugs obsolete. Now you could just inject a micro-computerized version of your drug trip of choice straight into your bloodstream. There were cocktails of every variety, you name it. Anything from a light buzz to being completely out of it. Since there was no chance of overdose, people who wouldn’t normally try drugs, did. I had never tried it, and never would because there was no way I was sticking a needle into myself for fun. The government was trying to block Mojo Sticks because even though you wouldn’t die from using them, they were turning people into drugged-out zombies. There was an absurd demand for these things. A multi-trillion-dollar industry had grown up overnight.