by Sarah Zettel
Chena folded her arms across her chest and nodded. “Teal, you are impressive. You got them to tell you all this?”
“Some of it.” Teal leaned back against the branch and stretched her arms up until she snagged the limb over her head. “The rest of it I figured out on my own.” She hung there, stretched between branches, confident of her own ability to stay exactly where she wanted to be. “Remember I was trying to tell you about Dad? He told me to remember that machines always have a person behind them. If you can get to the person who’s in charge of the machine, you can get just about anything you want.”
Chena remembered him saying that, but she hadn’t thought about it before. Of course, about the only time she really thought about Dad was when she saw the sadness in Mom’s eyes or she made up a new story with Teal. Dad had become someone to be angry at or a distant figure in a game. For Chena, he had stopped being real a long time ago.
“But doesn’t A—” Chena caught herself just in time. “Doesn’t that thing suspect that you’re trying to get around it?”
Teal let go of the overhead branch. “I don’t think it does.” She wriggled back onto the sitting branch, brought her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them, remaining neatly balanced. “I don’t think it really understands why anyone would not want to live here with it looking after them all the time. I think it knows that some people do, but I don’t think it really understands that.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously. “Makes it easier to lie to.”
Chena straddled the branch next to Teal. “This is great,” she said, a grin spreading across her own face. “Do you know what this means? It means we can find out what’s really going on around here.”
“Really?” Teal smacked her forehead. “I should’ve thought of that!”
Chena waved the sarcasm away. “Okay, okay. You were right and I was wrong. Can we drop it?”
“Maybe sometime in the next millennium,” said Teal charitably. Then she dropped her voice to a mock whisper. “This place belongs to the spies, Chena. I’m sure of it.”
“Careful.” Chena waved her voice down, looking around as if expecting someone to appear suddenly, which she sort of was, but it felt so good to suddenly be playing the old game of Dad-and-spies, she was willing to risk it. “That might be one of the trigger words to get that thing’s attention.”
Teal nodded. “So, you going to play long now? It’ll make us both look good if you do.”
Chena swung her leg over the branch, leaping to her feet. “What do you know, little sister. I’ve seen the light and now intend to be a model hothouser.” She slapped her hand over her heart. “You have worked a miracle upon my soul.”
“Praise be!” Teal threw both hands in the air and rolled her eyes.
They both had laughed hysterically then, and impulsively Chena hugged Teal. She had begun planning her next move before they left the park, arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
Now Chena took the approved path to her classroom. She was in a catch-up class with half a dozen other station kids. When she had first tested, Abdei had expressed real horror at what she considered Chena’s substandard reading skills and complete absence of any kind of math, though she could get a computer to turn cartwheels for her. In truth, Chena was fairly embarrassed herself, when she saw the other kids could not only read so much faster, but could read different languages— but she would have died before she admitted it.
Now she eagerly joined the others in their seats, saying hello to everybody, including Teacher Abdei. Now that she was willing to learn what they had to teach, lesson time just flew by. Not that this was any old sit-in-your-seat-and-listen-to-the-teacher-drone-on class. Each seat had a full game rig, and days were mostly spent in interactive scenarios of some kind or another. The hothousers seemed to have an obsession with teaching their kids how to take things apart and put them back together again. They were constantly having to come up with codes and puzzles for each other to solve. Biology was very hot too. They spent hours climbing around gigantic models of each other’s DNA, and won prizes for how many differences they could spot and for identifying what those differences might mean.
Today, though, the lesson was ecology. Each of them was building a virtual ecosystem and they were competing to see who could get theirs to survive the longest. It all had to do with energy flow. You had to make sure the proper amount of energy got filtered up and down the system using both growth and decay. Actually, it was all an elaborate code. Once you knew what each part was supposed to do, the rest was easy.
Chena was ahead of her classmates. She actually had kept her little grassland going for twenty-five years, virtual time. It had birds and animals and beetles moving in and out of the waving stalks of grass, which she made sure were not watered too much. She had not, however, put in any ants.
Chena was kneeling in the middle of her computer-constructed meadow, wondering what she could add and thinking about a top predator, when Abadei wandered into the simulation.
“This is very good, Chena,” said Abdei, looking around her and appearing genuinely impressed. “You’re almost ready to start gardening.”
“Gardening?” Chena sat back on her heels. “You mean now that I can design energy flow, I get to start watering plants?” She bit her tongue. “I’m sorry, Teacher Abdei. I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
Abdei smiled benevolently down at her. Chena responded with her own smile. Sometimes she still wanted to smack anybody who looked at her with all that kind condescension, even now that she knew it was the best thing she could possibly see. It meant they believed her and that they trusted her.
“I know you didn’t, Chena. You have worked very hard.” Abdei squatted down next to Chena so they could look into each other’s eyes easily. “But gardening isn’t just watering plants, it’s creating balance in a real miniature ecosystem. You’d be surprised at how many things can go wrong when it’s not a system you’ve designed out of light and code.”
“I hadn’t looked at it that way,” said Chena honestly, getting to her feet and brushing the dust off her knees automatically, even though she knew this was only a game. “It’ll be great.” She let herself sound uncertain. It was time to put her plan into action.
Abdei looked concerned, like Chena had hoped she would, and straightened up. “Is something wrong?”
Chena sighed and dropped her gaze to the side. “No,” she said without looking up.
Abdei laid a hand on Chena’s shoulder. “Chena, we talked about this. If something is wrong, you should tell me.”
Sing along, children, thought Chena. Although Mom saw the supervisors Tam and Basante almost every day, they seemed content to leave Chena and Teal to the care of Abdei, and, of course, Aleph. Chena was certain that both of those mouths reported in regularly. But that was all right. She had the system worked out.
Chena worked to keep the smile off her face. “I’m just worried about a friend of mine, is all.”
Abdei cocked her head. “A friend? Somebody in class?”
Chena shook her head. “No.” She tilted her head back to look at her blue sky, as if she wanted to look anywhere but at Abdei. “It’s Sadia, my friend in the involuntary wing. I haven’t heard anything about her, and…”—she was proud of the tremble that crept into her voice—“I was just thinking how my sister convinced me to give the hothouse—’scuse me, the Alpha Complex—a real shot.” She finally met Abdei’s gaze. “Sadia hasn’t got anybody like that. Her brother’s a complete mutant. I haven’t seen her since that day I first got here, and I was just thinking that if she could see…” Chena stopped. She was coming perilously close to laying it on too thick. Abdei was like Aleph. She wasn’t stupid, but she didn’t really understand how anyone could not want to live the life she offered.
Abdei’s face grew grave. “Chena, I know this is hard. But people are only in involuntary when they have broken the law. Your friend has done something wrong. I don’t know what it was, but—”
“It wasn’t her!” Chena did not have to work to put the emotion into her voice. “It was her brother! She’s only in here because she wouldn’t say what he did.” Which was a lie, of course, and if she ever saw Shond again she’d apologize. “If I could just talk to her, I could explain what is really going on here. She hates hothousers. She thinks they steal body parts. If she just knew…” Chena knuckled her eyes as if to wipe away tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just being stupid. You’re right. She probably has done something. I just don’t know about it. I just…” She shook her head violently. “I’m just going to shut up now.”
Abdei was frowning. Chena bit her lip, on purpose. Abdei had been trying to break her of that habit almost the entire eight months she’d been in class. Such a gesture could indicate a serious relapse, showing just how upset she was.
“I don’t know, Chena,” said Abdei slowly. “It’s not the kind of thing that usually happens.”
“I know,” said Chena, dropping her gaze again. “Otherwise they wouldn’t separate us. It’s okay.” She shrugged. “You’re probably right anyway.”
Abdei’s frown deepened. “Let me see what I can do, Chena.”
Chena met Abdei’s gaze and let her eyes widen. She hoped she looked surprised, and not just sick. “You mean that? I mean”—she hesitated—“I don’t want you to get in trouble or anything.”
This time, Abdei smiled. “I won’t get in trouble for making a request, Chena. You work on your top predator. Let me see what I can make happen.” She patted Chena’s shoulder and walked out of the simulation.
“You’d be surprised what you can make happen with a little effort,” murmured Chena to herself. Humming quietly, she got to work designing her raptor bird.
Abdei did not come back for another two hours. Probably had to get together with the supervisors to do some kind of in-depth evaluation as to how this would affect her psyche, and how that would affect Mom’s stress levels. Chena found she could not concentrate on her raptor. Deciding she might as well aim for a complete set of kiss-up points, she instead began looking up DNA models for existing birds on Pandora and trying to figure out how she could modify them for her limited ecosystem. When Abdei did walk back into the simulation, Chena looked up and saw the smile on her teacher’s face. Her breath caught her throat. This was going to work. She was really going to get away with it.
Abdei nodded, as if she knew what Chena was thinking. “After class. Aleph will show you the way.”
“I know the way to the door,” said Chena, as if she felt she was asking way too big a favor and didn’t want to inconvenience anybody. “If Aleph could meet me there…”
“I can meet you there, Chena,” came Aleph’s voice. “I’ll see you after class.”
“Thanks, Aleph,” said Chena, smiling inside and out. “Thank you, Abdei.”
She tried to get back to work on her bird, but did not make any real progress the rest of the day. Too much of her mind was taken up trying to remember exactly what she had said and done to get to this point, trying to see if she had left anything out. Seeing Sadia was only part of the plan.
And this is where I get to find out how well I’ve worked on them all.
Eventually time did move on and school ended. Chena, released from class, hurried through the maze, deliberately keeping her eyes on her toes, counting lefts and rights so she could practice navigating without looking at the signs, just in case she needed to find the foyer door without them one day.
Today the signs stayed where they should be, and the foyer door opened under her hand without raising any protests, mechanical or human. Three months ago, Chena had gotten access to the foyer by convincing Abdei that she had fallen in love with living in the woods and she was having a problem making the transition back to living in an enclosed space. If she could just stand under the window dome and see outside, she thought she would feel much better. Abdei had swallowed the story and gotten Aleph to add her palm prints to the door’s access files.
Sometimes Chena felt a little guilty about using Abdei the way she did. Sometimes it seemed as if all Abdei really wanted was for Chena to be happy. But then she looked at Mom’s swelling stomach and remembered exactly what Abdei was a part of.
As usual, a scattering of hothousers hurried back and forth across the foyer, busy with their own errands. If they noticed Chena at all, they nodded to her or raised a hand. She had become a familiar sight, just part of the furniture, like the terrarium in the foyer’s center. They assumed since she was there, she was allowed to be there.
The foyer held five doors. Four led to different wings of the complex, one led to the outside. She deliberately had not specified which door she would meet Aleph at. For three months she had wandered around the foyer, each time getting a little closer to one of the doors before Aleph came on-line to warn her away. Now she could touch the surface of each, except the one to the outside.
Although she was in a hurry to see Sadia, Chena made herself stop close to the outside door. She did not want the subsystem to feel a break in that particular pattern, which she had worked so hard to establish. If Aleph queried its subsystem and found anything funny there, it would have been for nothing. Of course, Mom was going to walk them right out of there when her… job was done, but you never knew. The hothousers had all kinds of ways to screw things up for you. Chena might just need to find out how to make that door open. To do that, she needed to be able to touch it.
Chena walked casually up to the outside door, as if she thought she might startle it. When she was thirty centimeters away, she stopped and leaned on the window rail. If anyone, or anything, was watching, they would see her staring wistfully at a cormorant sailing over the marsh. It wasn’t actually a cormorant, which was a bird on Old Earth, but it looked a lot like one and so had been given the old name. They had compared the DNA of each in class, what? About two months ago.
Somewhere, that marsh dried out, turning into forest, and then to grassland, and then to dunes. Somewhere in those dunes waited Stem and Farin. She wondered if he remembered her, and then chided herself for doubting it. Of course he remembered her, and when Mom got them out of here, they’d all go back to Stem, and Farin would be so happy to see her, he would throw his arms around her and scoop her up and spin her around until they were both laughing and dizzy.
After a couple of minutes, Chena turned away and walked toward the yellow door that was the entrance to the involuntary wing. She stood there. Nothing happened. Obviously, Aleph was not paying attention to her yet.
Chena smiled. So far, so good. She was tempted to stand there quietly, just to see how long it took Aleph to come looking for her, but she decided against it. That was an experiment for another day.
“Aleph?” she said.
“There you are, Chena,” said Aleph. “I was waiting for you.”
Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t, thought Chena. Are you developed enough to have pride to save? I hope not, because that means you noticed something is wrong. The thought made her tense up, and she almost forgot to answer the AI.
“Will you let me in, please?” she asked brightly. “They haven’t taught us teleporting yet.”
The door swished open and the directional arrow appeared at her feet, leading Chena into the straight yellow hallway. Nothing had changed. She might have walked down it yesterday instead of eight months ago. The same black and white people paced up and down the corridor on their way to… whatever. They didn’t even talk to each other. Any doors and windows there might have been remained invisible. For a minute Chena thought Aleph was going to pull one over on her, like it had before.
This time, though, the arrow at her feet took her around a corner, and Aleph cleared a real door for her.
A lounge waited on the other side, with comfortable-looking chairs and low round tables. The walls were set in a marsh pattern, complete with silent wading birds and rippling water. Sadia sat by the far wall. They had dressed her in a loose long-sleeved yellow dress. She had yello
w bands on her wrists and thick socks on her feet, but no shoes.
“Sadia!” Chena rushed forward and grabbed her hand, saluting as she did. Sadia smiled back at her and returned the salute, but the smile didn’t make it all the way into her tired eyes.
She’s just afraid of being watched, Chena told herself. Can’t blame her.
“It’s really good to see you.” Chena pulled up a chair so they were knee to knee.
Sadia smiled with warmth, but without any enthusiasm. “Yeah, it was nice of them to let you in.”
Chena felt her own smile spread, mischievous and knowing. “Well, ‘let’ is what my mom calls a relative term.”
Sadia started, shrinking back from Chena. “You mean this isn’t okay?”
Chena frowned. “Of course it’s okay. I’m here, aren’t I?” What’s the matter with you?
Sadia subsided, her body relaxing and deflating under the sunny dress. “Yeah, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
Chena blinked and glanced away until she was certain she could look at Sadia without staring. This was not right. What had they done to her in here? Maybe she had just come to believe there was no way out. That was probably it. Chena pushed her sleeve back from her comptroller. Obviously, this was no time for small talk. She had to show Sadia that there really was something they could do.
“So…” Chena searched for a neutral topic while she hunched herself over her comptroller and pressed the display key to light up the message she had coded in previously. I’ve found a way around Aleph, it said. She handed the comptroller carefully over to Sadia, laying it right into her palm and pushing Sadia’s hand into her lap so that her body remained a shield between herself and Aleph.
Sadia looked down at the message, read it, and looked back up at Chena. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve got a handle on how things work around here.” Chena cupped her hand around the comptroller and took it back. “It’s actually pretty easy if you just go along with it.” She tried to catch Sadia’s gaze to see if Sadia was following any of this. But Sadia just looked blankly back at her, as if Chena spoke a foreign language.