by H. A. Swain
“Ribald?” Basil asks, eyebrows up.
His mother chews on the inside of her cheek, a habit I’ve seen in Basil when he’s nervous. “My friend.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“How am I supposed to know?” his mother explodes. “In the joint again, I reckon. Man couldn’t stay out of trouble inside a bag.” She looks at me. “Where you from? What’s wrong with your leg?” She looks at Basil. “And your arm? You get beat up or something?”
“We met at a meeting,” I tell her. “And we had a little motorcycle accident on the way here.”
“A meeting, huh? So you’re all political like this one? Fighting the big fight?” She punches at the air with one gangly arm. “Going to bring down the system? It’s not enough that I lost one son for the cause?” She spits the last word then laughs bitterly. “You’re both idiots! Gonna wind up in jail or worse. Just like your old man!” she shouts at Basil. “Can’t hold down a job. Gotta rabble-rouse and make everybody around you miserable! You saw what happened to your poor brother, trying to be just like your father! And for what? For what?” She smacks the cushion. “You keep this up and you’ll be just like him. A loser.”
Basil stands stiff, staring over her head as she berates him. I step forward on my good leg and say, “He’s not…” but Basil grabs hold of my wrist and shakes his head.
“Not worth it,” he whispers.
I breathe deeply and swallow all the words I’d like to use to defend Basil.
She rolls her head against the back of the couch. “My head is killing me. You got anything?”
“You know I don’t,” he says.
She narrows her eyes at him like she’s about to explode again, but then her face clears and she laughs. “Guess that proves you’re my boy. You never give me nothing.”
He ignores her dig and kicks at an empty bottle. “You had any nourishment lately?”
She shrugs. “Probably.”
“Got any more?” he asks, cautiously.
She scowls at him. “Get your own.”
My breath catches in my throat, but Basil seems unfazed by her unkindness.
“Why?” he asks with a chuckle. “So you can sell it like you used to?”
“Don’t you start on that again,” she says with a fresh kudzar dangling from the side of her mouth. “If your father had…”
“Let’s not do this,” he tells her, holding up his good hand. “We’ll be here a couple days, then we’ll be out of your way.” He glances at me and jerks his head toward the door. I follow him out of the room.
“I’ll have to check with Ribald,” she calls after us. “He’s the one who pays the bills around here.”
Basil stops and stiffens, then looks over his shoulder at her. “Is it money you want?”
His mother picks flakes of dried kudzu from her tongue. “Ever since your father got arrested again, it’s been tough to make ends meet.”
“Fine,” he says and marches back. He hands her several bills from his pocket. “That should cover it. Make sure no one knows we’re here.”
She sucks on the kudzar, squinting one eye against a curlicue of smoke. “You in trouble?”
He pulls out one more bill and dangles it in front of her then says, emphatically, “No.”
She snatches it from him. “Nice to have you home, son.”
* * *
Basil takes me through a warren of dreary disorganized rooms to the other end of the house. Through the back door, I see more disintegrating sculptures and junk littering the dirt. Beyond that is the dry riverbed. Around us, three-legged chairs, mattress springs, crooked lamps, and all kinds of artifacts from another time are piled high. Tangles of clothing cascade from the open drawers of tall metal cabinets. There are at least three washing machines and a dozen ancient gutted computers stacked up in a corner.
“What do they do with all of this stuff?” I ask.
“Mostly nothing.” He runs his finger through the dust on an old piano that reminds me of my second-grade network photo when I was missing most of my teeth. “My dad fancies himself an artist, but in reality, he’s just a hoarder, and the only thing he makes is trouble.”
“I can picture you when you were little,” I say with a half laugh at the thought of a cute curly-haired kid digging through all this junk. “I bet you created all the things you couldn’t buy.”
“The noble savage,” he sneers.
“You should be an engineer!” I tell him.
He scowls at me. “God, you really are clueless, aren’t you?”
I stumble backward as if his words shoved me. “What? I just meant you’d be good at it. You’re really brilliant. The smell scanner, the transponder, the bicycle cart, that windmill pump…”
“Don’t you get it yet? I’m not like you,” he says with a cold glare. “But I suppose from your perch up there on the ladder to success, you can’t see down this far.”
I blink away my surprise. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He stomps his foot. “ICMs, the right Virtu-Schools, internships, and family connections are all part of a big machine churning out the status quo and protecting the exalted few who’ll never let someone like me elbow my way in. I can’t be an engineer no matter how brilliant I am because there is no ladder for me to climb, but you got halfway to the top just by being born!”
I try to get a word in so he’ll know that for the first time in my life I understand how unfair the world is, but Basil bulldozes right over me.
“When One World gobbled up the entire nutrition market then one by one snatched every other enterprise and bought off all the politicians, they killed any chance that someone like me could ever make it out of this mess. The best I can hope for is a menial job fixing what’s broken in a system that couldn’t care less whether I live or die. A loser! Just like my dad.”
“You’re not a loser,” I argue, but I’m angry at him for screaming at me, so I add, “And don’t get mad at me about the system. I didn’t make it, but at least…”
“You profit from it!” he snaps. “What was I thinking, getting involved with a privy!”
“Why are you screaming at me?” I shout at him. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Then go back home!” he shouts.
His words sting. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do,” he says calmly and clearly.
I search his face, trying to find that boy who filled me with so much emotion that I grabbed his hand and ran away, but he looks at me blankly with unfamiliar icy blue eyes as if he doesn’t know me.
“Basil…” I take a step toward him, but he turns, throws open a door, and stomps up a sagging staircase to the second floor. “Fine!” I yell after him, wondering if I every really knew him before this moment. “Maybe I will go back!”
“Fine!” he yells down at me. “Then go.”
I stand among the wreckage of this house, crutches chafing the underside of my arms, wishing I could storm out rather than limp away. I can’t believe I let him drag me all the way out here to treat me like this!
I hop on one leg to a decrepit love seat half hidden among the shadows and plop down exhausted. Stuffing spills out of the cushions like guts from an open wound. I’m tired. I’m dirty. And my leg hurts. At the moment I want nothing more than a bath, a drink of water, and some clean clothes. Then maybe I could think straight.
From another part of the house, I hear Basil’s mom shuffling around, muttering to herself. My mom might be self-absorbed and difficult to deal with, but at least she feeds me. And no matter how angry I’ve been with her, I know that she loves me. My parents would pay my restitution if I had to go to jail, not charge me to stay a night or two in my own home. And they would never speak to me the way she spoke to Basil. I had no idea a parent could be so awful to her child. If I weren’t so pissed off at Basil right now, I might feel sorry for him, but he had no reason to be mean to me, especially when I’ve thrown everything away to be with him.
Obviously
I can’t stay here. I glare at the stairway, wondering how he could flip on me the minute that we’re safe. Grandma told me Basil isn’t the boy I thought he was. I should have listened while I had the chance.
I see another door beside the stairs. It’s half open, revealing a sink, a tub, and an old-fashioned big-bowled urinal. It occurs to me that I could clean myself up, “borrow” some clothes from the piles lying around, and be on my way. The thought of accepting this whole ordeal as a mistake makes my chest hurt, but the thought of staying here with Basil so suddenly hostile makes me feel worse. So I haul myself up and rake through the shirts and skirts and pants in the metal drawers. Most of the clothing is threadbare or totally the wrong size, but with enough digging, I find some things that might work. Then I hobble to the bathing room, shut the door, and start to clean up.
While I’m washing and changing, I hear the front door open then feel the house shake when it slams shut. Overhead, I hear Basil run across the floor and barrel down the creaking stairs. The front door slams again. I hear shouting as Basil and his mother argue, then a car starts and roars away. The house becomes very still.
I realize then that Basil isn’t going to come back inside and apologize to me like I’ve been hoping. He’s left with his mother and I’m alone. Despite my bravado about walking away, suddenly my predicament feels much more dire. I have no money, no friends, nobody to turn to for help out here. Worst of all, Basil’s mother, that awful hateful woman, is probably right. The puny little protest by the Dynasaurs and Analogs and their sympathizers won’t put a dent in the gigantic machine running society. Basil’s right, too. I’m nothing but a privy who finally figured out the world sucks and thought she could change it. Tears creep into my eyes. This time, I’m too worn-out to stop them.
I pull a sky blue Cottynelle shirt over my head then hike up black Velvelore pants over my inflatable brace and cinch them with a belt so they won’t fall down. I slip on Yaz’s shoes and grab my pouch from the pile where I’ve discarded Yaz’s orange dress, the tattered silver leggings, and filthy green sweater. Inside the pouch I can feel my cloaked Gizmo. My family must be worried sick. If they know even a fraction of what goes on in the Outer Loop, they’re probably freaking out. I could head back to the clinic and call home. That way Basil and his mother wouldn’t be involved. No matter how disappointed I am, I don’t want him to go to prison because of me. It will probably take less than an hour for my parents to find me, which seems totally unfair compared to how far I’ve had to go to get here. Not just in miles since I left my house, but in how much I’ve learned about the tightly circumscribed life One World has created for privies like me.
I grab my crutches and head for the back door. Outside, in the bitter air, I round the corner of the house but stop and press myself against the wall when I see Basil sitting in the dead tree by the windmill pump. My heart pounds. Part of me wants to go to him and ask again if he really meant what he said, but then I think about his eyes, how he looked at me with such hatred. He made it very clear that getting involved with me was a mistake. What hurts the most is that in my heart I don’t feel the same.
I know I have to leave, but I don’t want him to see me on the road, so I turn and head toward the riverbed that leads to the town. All this for nothing, I think as I hobble past crumbling sculptures. What a waste.
* * *
Even though the clinic isn’t that far away, it takes me nearly half an hour to get back on my stupid crutches. I’m so tired and pissed off that I’m almost happy to walk through the double doors and claim a small corner of the floor in the overcrowded waiting room, where hordes of people stare blankly at the screen playing thirty-second clips from the most popular PRCs. I turn to face the wall and uncloak my Gizmo so nobody will see it. From the way Garvy and Basil’s mom talked, you’d think everyone around here is waiting to rob me. I hesitate before I turn it on. I assume my dad will know the minute my locator connects to the network, so it’s no use trying to call Yaz or Grandma Apple first. Better that I call home and ask my parents to come get me so they don’t send security agents screaming my way. I rack my brain for any other alternative, but without money or someone to help me, I have no choice except to give in.
It takes several seconds for Astrid to wake up and orient herself. I turn her volume down as low as it will go, but the big screen is so loud that I doubt anyone would hear her anyway. “Ignore, ignore, ignore,” I command as she flashes through dozens of messages from the past day and a half, most of them unimportant—assignments from school, topix for my next ICM, a barrage of vids from my family after Basil and I disappeared, a text from Yaz with the subject line “Don’t Believe It!” then another text pops up that catches me by surprise.
It’s from AnonyGal directly to my Gizmo. I check the time and see it arrived late last night. I stare at the screen, puzzling through how this could be without really taking in the content of the message. How does she know who I am? I’ve always used private networks and have never revealed my true identity on the Dynasaur chats, but she has directly messaged Thalia Apple. My heart races. If she knows who I am, then who else knows HectorProtector is me? I concentrate on what she’s sent, and then I’m really flabbergasted.
Use this link to crack your Gizmo OS.
My shaking finger hovers over the link she’s sent, half fearing I’ll open malware, but I have little left to lose, so I take the chance and click. It only takes a few seconds for the program to install and open a back door to all my Gizmo settings. I gasp. She did it. AnonyGal, whoever she is, cracked the code. Quickly, I shut off my locator and press the Gizmo to my chest. Now I have options other than calling my parents.
Just as I’m getting ready to ping Yaz to ask if she could find a transport to come get me, I hear “Thalia Apple” and bolt upright, sucking in a deep breath. I turn slowly to see who’s recognized me, but no one is looking my way. Then I see my photo, pre-Fiyo, on the big screen. Relieved, I sigh. Just another newsfeed about the missing privy girl, I suppose. Out of curiosity, I pay attention, wondering if they’re saying anything new.
My photo is replaced by a reporter, standing in a sea of people outside the prison. “We go now to footage of Ahimsa DuBoise at a press conference earlier this afternoon,” the reporter says.
Ahimsa stands proudly behind a podium in front of One World headquarters. My parents are nowhere to be seen. “This morning,” Ahimsa says, “One World security was able to confirm the identity of the hacker HectorProtector, who has incited civil unrest over the detainment of resistance leader Ana Gignot.”
“Oh no,” I whisper, my voice gone. The room spins. My head feels as if it’s detaching from my body.
“Thalia Apple, the daughter of our most respected One World executives, who’ve worked tirelessly for the improvement of our society through foodless nutrition and network communication, is a leader in the underground hacking group calling for protests over the legal detainment of Ms. Gignon,” she says.
A leader? Hardly. I bend over and put my head between my knees, trying to stop myself from hyperventilating.
The reporter comes back. “Despite earlier assumptions that Ms. Apple had been kidnapped, it appears she willingly joined forces with the Analog resistance leader seen here.” I snap upright to see the same blurry photo of Basil they’ve been using since we went missing. “The two have brought together followers of Ana Gignot known as the Analogs with an underground anticorporate hacking group known as the Dynasaurs and have been terrorizing the area since she disappeared from a rehabilitation center in the Inner Loop two nights ago. We have obtained exclusive footage and spoken to victims of their crime spree.”
Crime spree?
They cut to security footage of Basil and me pushing through the chaos of the EA then to an enhanced shot of Basil releasing the blackberry branch into the bald guard’s chest. Then the guard, standing in front of the EA. The camera zooms in on his banged-up face as the reporter explains, “Mr. Lauder received multiple lacerations and
a broken rib while pursuing the assailants.”
“They were violent,” he says. “These aren’t just a couple of innocent kids out for a joyride, but a couple anticorporate terrorists set on crumbling our social stability.”
Terrorists? The word makes my mouth go dry.
Next, the reporter talks over footage of the girl I’ve never seen walking slowly around a smashed-up red car, shaking her head and crying. “The assailants impersonated Ali Sauconiss in order to steal her Smaurto and escape from the West Loop EntertainArena after assaulting Mr. Lauder.”
That’s not even true, I think. We didn’t steal it, just took a ride in it after it had already been wrecked.
The next time I look up, the reporter is saying, “Ms. Apple and her cohort kidnapped this student.” Yaz’s face fills the screen. She looks tired and scared. The reporter goes on to say, “They eluded captors by heading to an Outer Loop Spalon.”
“She was my best friend,” Yaz explains. “But she’s a hacker. She does it for fun. She can break into anything.” Her language is clipped and choppy. She moves erratically, twitching as if she can’t sit still in her chair. “She cracked my Gizmo’s operating system. And communicates secretly with other resisters. They used some kind of device to get through the tolls so they couldn’t be traced. It was terrifying. I never knew she was capable of this kind of thing. Who knows what they’ll do next.”
I sit, dumbfounded. What have they done to Yaz to make her turn on me like that?
Then the scene switches to footage of security agents milling outside Fiyo’s house. “It is believed the wayward youths forced this unlicensed Spalon worker to alter their appearance in order to evade authorities,” the reporter says.
Fiyo comes on, looking shaken, inside her treatment room. “They wanted me to make them look completely different so no one would recognize them.” Someone asks her a question from off camera that I can’t hear. She shakes her head and scoffs, “No, they didn’t pay me.”