by H. A. Swain
“Since there are extenuating circumstances,” Billingsley says, “her age, her mental state, et cetera, I can file a special missing persons report. And I’ll make sure it goes out to the officers on rounds inside the Complex and to the MediPlex so they’ll be on the lookout for her.”
“And we’ll make signs to post in Old Town,” Dorian says.
“Good idea,” Billingsley says. “Other than that…” She trails off, looking sad.
I nod and thank both of them effusively so none of us has to say aloud that there isn’t much else we can do now but wait.
ORPHEUS
“Prepare for self-navigation.” I awaken to the dinging AutoNav. I must have passed out from the Juse flooding my system. I have no idea how long I’ve been in the air or how far I’ve gone, but we must be far beyond the bounds of the City SkyPath. I had no plan, no destination in mind when I took off. I thought about flying to my father’s ranch, or going to the chalet up in the mountains. I could have headed south to his place on the beach. Or gone to the airport and left the country. But the truth is, if he wants to, he can track me down and bring me back for the ASA at any moment.
The Cicada shudders as the wheels come down and the wings retract. I take the steering wheel and hold on tight with sweaty hands as we touch down on a bumpy, ill-kept road, nothing like the smooth streets in the City, which are long gone. My headlights shine on trees and a road and a river that winds its way across the land like a stumbling drunk. My father once told me Corporation Xian Jai, some outfit out of China, had wanted to straighten the river to make construction of the warehouse and factory complexes out here easier.
“Why didn’t they?” I asked.
“They gave up,” he said. “If you want something big, you have to dream big to get it.”
Lights from warehouses peek through the giant willows growing along the riverbank. Up above, I think I see twinkling stars, then realize those are the tiny flashing lights of delivery drones taking off from warehouse roofs. I’ve heard each Complex has its own high-rise PODPlexes where all the workers live like ants, filing back and forth twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week, every week of the year, plucking and packing up crap from shelves for Plutes like me.
On the receiver, I hear the low rumble of a deejay’s altered voice. “Hello, my minions, how you doing on this misty moon-filled night? It’s DJ HiJax here with you along for the ride.” I’ve heard this guy before, but every time I come across him, his voice has been disguised at a different frequency. Sometimes he sounds slow and low like tonight, other times high and fast as if he’s a young girl, but always with the same name.
“We’re going way back when tonight,” he says. “To a time when music was a rallying cry. When Mr. Bob Marley and the Wailers told the people to ‘Get Up, Stand Up.’ Stand up for your rights, Bob Marley said, just like our friends at Project Calliope who are taking a stand against Chanson Industries. This is for Calliope Bontempi, taking back music for the people!”
“Oh jeez,” I say. Will I ever escape my father? Even out here, his lawsuits are all anyone can talk about.
I hit the scan button on the receiver to find another pirate station as I drive slowly with my windows down to let in the night air. It’s cooler than in the City and I can smell the muck and mud from the river. I haven’t been in nature, real nature, in months. I inhale deeply. The waves on my receiver crackle. I reach down to fine-tune it, hoping to locate another voice to keep me company on this lonely road.
The waves go fuzzy for a moment, then I catch the hint of another song. At first it’s faint, but then it comes in clearer. I don’t recognize the singer. I turn it up and listen carefully to the strange instrumentation. Sounds like an old-school electric guitar and bass and maybe even real drums, but it’s the singer’s voice that punches me in the gut. Except for the mixing, which makes her voice go muddy around the edges on the high notes, the sound is beautiful and raw. The kind of song that could steal my heart. I try to imagine what the singer must look like, how beautiful she must be to sound like this, but I can’t get a clear vision in my head because what I hear doesn’t match up with the pictures my mind supplies. She wouldn’t be painted and polished or surgically altered. Her voice and music are wholly unique and I can only imagine she must be, too.
“I am Nobody from Nowhere,” she sings.
I inhale sharply, trying to remember where I’ve seen that phrase before. On a package, I think, but I can’t remember exactly what or why it would have been there.
A speck upon your screen
A non-automated worker that you’ve never seen
I’ve packed your purchased footholds
I’ll tie them with a bow
But I live a life that you’ll never know
By the end of the song, I’m singing along, “Nobody from Nowhere, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here! Nobody from Nowhere, I’ll scream until you hear.”
I don’t want the song to end. I want to hear it again. I want to delve back into the melody, listen to the lyrics again. I want to know the world she’s singing about. Become a part of it. That busy hive she describes and somehow makes it sound enticing. A place I’d rather be. Go to work, do your job, go home, repeat. No fighting, clawing, scratching your way to the top because there is no top. It’s flat. One level with everybody on it. No omnipresent drones tracking your every move. No constant pressure to do better, be better, beat your best friend who becomes your biggest competition overnight.
A good, clean, simple life as a Nobody sounds fine to me.
My reverie is interrupted by a shadow flickering on the road. I swerve. See a flash. My headlight catches something bright. Two eyes. A woman’s face. With Juse powering my arms, I overcorrect. The Cicada spins. I see her again in the middle of the road, one arm thrown up to protect her eyes from my headlights. She’s small and old. My foot is hard against the brake. I hear the tires screech as I yell, “No!” My car continues to spin. I see trees and moon and the old woman around and around outside of my window and then I start to slide, sideways and down. The traction of my wheels fail. The smell of the river overwhelms me. I feel the car slip, then hear my voice spill into the night. “I don’t want to die!” I scream as my car careens off the road.
CHORUS
A lone ’razzi drone, attached magnetically to the back of Orpheus Chanson’s car, lies broken into four pieces near a guardrail by the river. The thorax, with its tiny CPU and six articulated legs, has come loose and skittered across the road to land beneath a pile of dead leaves. Tomorrow, ants and pill bugs will march over its carcass, indistinguishable to them from an ordinary rock. The wings and tail have shattered on the road, leaving a shiny trail like mechanized snail slime glinting in the moon. Only the head has stayed intact, stuck to the fender since the Alibaba E-Gaming Arena back in the City.
The vibrations and noise from the crash have disturbed a real dragonfly that alights from its roost on a reed. It zips toward two glowing green lights like fireflies blinking in the night. They are not insects but the last blips of the drone’s compound camera eyes, failing to send images into the Buzz. The dragonfly whizzes away in search of a quiet place to sleep.
A boy emerges from beneath the car’s winglike door. He struggles to get out and assess the damage: to himself, to his vehicle, to the body on the road. He is shaken up, perhaps in shock. Still not sure how he’s not dead and praying that the old woman was a Juse-fueled figment.
He stumbles on shaky legs up to the road. The car’s headlamps, knocked askew, cast an eerie, cockeyed light onto the old woman, still in a crouch next to the fading yellow line. She shades her eyes with one bent arm and slowly gets to her feet, bewildered. She struggles to remember what brought her out here in the first place. Why is she so far from home? Where did she think she was going? Who is this young man emerging from the river?
“Linus?” she calls. “That you?”
“Are you okay?” the boy yells and runs toward her, relieved she’s not a he
ap of flesh and broken bones because he was sure he must have hit her. Then his legs give out and he’s sitting on the ground, head in hands, wondering the same things: Why is he here? Where did he think he was going? And who is this woman? Orpheus squints up at her and sees that she’s scratched and bruised, her pants are torn, and she has a faraway look in her eyes that makes him think she might be not be okay.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Well, now,” she says and seems to think this over.
“Do you live near here?”
“Um…” She looks around but nothing is familiar. She draws in a breath and shakes her head, completely at a loss.
“I’m just going to get my car out of the ditch,” he tells her and forces himself up on his feet. Then he laughs, the nervous twitter of a goldfinch. “Guess we’re both lucky to be alive.”
“Sure are,” Nonda says, her breath still ragged.
It takes all of Orpheus’s strength to budge his car. He grunts and groans, curses, and falls. His knee knocks the mechanized drone head onto the ground where it bounces down the embankment and plops with the smallest splash into the river, then sinks, down down down to a resting place on the murky riverbed with keys and coins and other things dropped among the weeds. Finally, slowly, the car emerges onto the road. Orpheus walks around it once as the dragonfly, still searching for a sleeping spot, circles him. The passenger-side door is smashed pretty good. The back tire looks a little wonky. He hears a buzzing in his ear. Feels a tiny whirl on his cheek. He swats at the air, sending the dragonfly away.
It zips to Nonda. Lands on her shoulder. “Oh, hello,” she says and blows, but the dragonfly says put. When Zimri was little, Nonda told her dragonflies would sew up her mouth if they caught her singing, but Zimri was far too smart for such nonsense.
“I have a granddaughter!” Nonda says.
“Okay,” says Orpheus, focused on his glowing palm. “Do you know her name or her number so we can reach her?”
Nonda thinks but can’t pull the info from her murky mind. She sighs and shakes her head.
“Look,” he says and shows her the screen on his hand. “There’s a MediPlex nearby. They’ll be able to help you, okay?”
She nods, so he leads her gently by the arm toward his strange winged car and loads her inside.
As they rattle off down the road, the dragonfly swoops out over the open water. Tomorrow, mating season begins.
VERSE THREE
ZIMRI
The next day at work, my times are terrible and I keep missing products because I’m so preoccupied with Nonda’s disappearance. At every little noise last night, I startled awake, calling for her, sure she was finally coming through the door. Now muddling my way through work, I feel like I’ve fallen back inside the dream—endlessly searching the labyrinth of warehouse shelves for my grandmother—that swallowed me whenever I drifted off last night. I’d find her in a metal bin, curled up with some measuring spoons. I’d see her strapped to the overhead conveyor belt on her way to the packing area. I’d watch a delivery drone pluck her off the roof to carry her to another family in the City. Each time I woke up, I would promise to give up music in exchange for Nonda’s safety, but whatever higher power I was trying to implore ignored my pleas, because Nonda never came home.
After two hours of mistakes, Jude finds me in sector K.
“Zimri!” he barks from his little electric car, idling in the aisle.
“I can explain…” I quickly say.
“Explain what?” He slumps over the steering wheel as if he’s carrying the weight of the entire warehouse on his shoulders.
“Why I’m so bad today. It’s just that—”
He frowns at me then shakes his head like I’ve hurt his feelings. “Give me a little credit, would you? I saw the screens this morning. I know about your grandmother.”
I lunge toward him. “Is she okay?”
“Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know. Get in.” He jerks his head toward the passenger seat.
I walk slowly around the side of the cart, keeping my eyes on him like he’s a coyolf that’s wandered into the warehouse—skittish and unpredictable. “Medgers again?” I ask.
“No, nothing like that. I need a favor from you.”
I stop, relieved there isn’t bad news about Nonda, and Medgers isn’t harassing me today, but also dumbfounded. “A favor? Now? But…”
“Just get in, would you?”
As soon as I’m seated, Jude makes a sharp turn into the main corridor, past the forklift operators ferrying bins with fresh products to the shelves, then rolls to a stop in front of the main office. He turns toward me. His face softens a bit, which makes him look older and sad. He slings one arm over the back of the seat and puts the other on my thigh, just above my knee. I stiffen and stare down at the hand on my leg. His fingers are pudgy and short, thick like sausages. The nail beds are ragged.
“Zimri, we could make a really good team, you know that, right?”
I don’t like his clammy touch. I don’t like how close he is to me, but I know better than to pull away. “I don’t follow,” I tell him.
“A guy showed up today.”
“A guy?”
Jude looks over each shoulder. All around us the warehouse continues to hum with people rushing in and out of aisles and baskets zipping overhead. “Sometimes Corp X sends in someone to see from the inside how warehouses are doing.”
“You mean like a spy?”
“Shh,” he hisses. “Mole is a better word. They try to keep it under the radar, so no one gets wise, but I’ve got a pretty good eye for this kind of a thing. There’s something about this guy. He isn’t from around here. He’s…” Jude mulls this over and chooses his word carefully. “Different. Not like us.”
“What’s that have to do with me?” I ask and lean away.
But Jude grips my leg tighter. “This warehouse isn’t efficient enough and unless we turn things around, Corp X might do something drastic.”
“A.N.T.s?”
He nods. “Our warehouse is one of the last holdouts, you know. It was one of the first to be built but because it’s so old, it would cost them a boatload of money to retrofit it for full automation with those creepy little robo insects they use. Then again, unless we turn things around, I’m afraid they’ll think it’s worth the cost.” Jude scoots closer. I can smell his eggy breath and feel the sweat coming off his skin. “I want you to train the mole. Keep him on a short leash. Only let him see the good stuff. And report back to me on any funny business.”
“Funny business?” I ask.
“You know. If he’s poking his nose in where it doesn’t belong or asking too many questions.”
“Jude, this is not what I need right now,” I start to say.
“Hey,” he snaps. “I’m doing you a favor here!”
“How is this a favor to me?”
His eyes lock on mine. “I’m trying to help you and everybody else keep their jobs.”
“But with my grandmother missing…”
“You still gotta work,” he says, and I sigh because I know he’s right. What good will I do my Nonda if I don’t have a job? “So, you going to help me or what?”
“Yes,” I say wearily. “I’ll do it.”
Reluctantly, I follow him through the office door, preoccupied with how I’m going to tell Brie every single detail of that weird conversation Jude and I just had. Mostly I’m furious that he’s laying the future of the warehouse on my shoulders. So when he says, “Zimri, meet Aimery, your new trainee,” I barely glance up.
The person on the beat-up sofa stands and sticks out his hand as if we’re fancy people in a movie. “Very nice to meet you,” he says in a voice as smooth as the river on a calm day. “Jude speaks so highly of you.”
I almost laugh as we shake. Who talks like that? But then I look at him and color rides into my cheeks because I’m stupefied by the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. He can’t be much older than I am but he looks
nothing like the Plebes from the complex. His skin is buffed a beautiful warm brown, like a bronzed statue of a human. His face is flawless, no angry acne on his cheeks, no pockmarks on his chin or bad teeth crowding his mouth. His nose is prominent but straight, his eyes are bright, and his teeth are perfectly white and aligned like little soldiers behind his full lips. He’s so beautiful that I can barely take my eyes off him, even though I’m mortified to stare.
I make myself look away and whisper, “Thank you,” then I clear my throat and say, “Nice to meet you, too?” but it comes out like a question.
“What a beautiful name you have,” he says. “And fitting, too.”
“What?” Flustered, I drop his hand as if it scalded my palm. Did he call me beautiful? Either he’s full of crap or a liar because no one who looks like that could ever think the same of me.
To my surprise, he blushes. “Oh, uh, sorry, I meant that to be way less creepy,” he says, which makes me laugh. Then he shoves his hands inside his pockets. I notice that his pants are way too nice to be from Black Friday. The fabric is thick and soft, subtly striped, and I can see why Jude is jumping to conclusions that he could be from Corp X.
“It’s just that your name, Zimri, it means ‘song’ in Hebrew, right?” he asks. “And you were humming when you came in, and…”
“No, I wasn’t,” I snap, more embarrassed than before.
Jude snorts. “Sure you were. You always hum or sing or make rhythms with your mouth.”
“I do?” I shrink into myself, feeling exposed, as if my clothing has become see-through.
“You’re like a walking receiver. It gets annoying!” Jude smirks at Aimery as if he’ll surely agree, but Aimery leans away from him and frowns.
“It wasn’t annoying at all,” says Aimery. “It was … beautiful, like your name.”
I guffaw, stupid and loud. It’s such a ridiculous thing to say that I can only assume he’s trying to get under Jude’s skin. I eye him. He winks. I press my lips together so I don’t encourage him. “So then, what’s Aimery mean?” I ask.