Setting the trays in the Jeni, I hit the button and the shiny steel door slid down. The Jeni hummed as it carried the trays to the sanitization plant.
I sat with my parents for as long as I could stand the fake good looks of the speekers and their oily voices. After a little while, I left the living room, with a quick glance back at my parents. They seemed happy even though they hadn’t chosen anything about their lives. Some algorithm in the matching system had paired them up. They lived according to the schedule their Papas dictated to them, letting the knockout put them to bed every night at the same time and keeping their heart rates under control.
As the Papas instructed, they played Bounce-a-Walk three times every week, bouncing and catching those ridiculous blue balls with every step. They went to work, watched the skreens, and just let their lives go on calmly under someone else’s control, believing everything the Admins and Speekers preached to them. They believed the Bug was still in the air even though it couldn’t possibly still be around, according to the information in our textbooks about toxins and bacteria. They laughed and repeated the New Chapter’s motto at the end of every broadcast: “Better safe than sorry; better calm than dead.” They seemed happy.
Maybe I was asking for too much.
“It’s not asking too much to be able to choose something,” I said to myself, stepping into my room. “Or to have some fun that doesn’t involve walking and bouncing a blue rubber ball.” I sat at my desk, my zip hanging from the chair, and took the EarCom out of my ear. I lifted my vid-goggles to my eyes, letting the ear buds built into the vid-goggle straps slide into my ears. “But it is asking too much to believe all that spam about the Bug.” Only the adults I knew really believed the Bug was still around, but nobody was brave enough to test that idea by stopping the knockout.
Not until tonight, at least. I checked my Papa. It was early yet.
The front door of the house announced Bren’s arrival.
“Hey,” he said, walking in my room a minute later.
I grinned. “Bren. Da. Brenda.”
He shook his head. “What’re we doing?”
I slid the illegal reader out of its hiding place in the drawer of my desk. A month ago, at this desk, I’d found a miniscule portion of a video file that hadn’t been corrupted. I’d had to tinker with my vid-goggles so they could convert the file format, but that hadn’t been hard.
“Did you bring your vid-goggles?” I held the reader up so he could see it.
“Of course.” Bren slid the lightweight, folding goggles out of his pocket.
We sat on my bed and connected both of our goggles to the reader through the jacks I’d rigged, and I tapped the reader. I heard Bren suck in a breath and hold it. I realized I was doing the same thing. No matter how many times we saw it, the short clip was amazing.
Lines flashed in the hololenses of the vid-goggles, fuzzy sound filling my head. A few seconds passed. An image materialized of a man, a metal weapon in his hand, sliding across a blue car. I drank in the sights of what had to be part of a pre-Infektion movie. Loud explosions burst in my ears, fire and bullets flying everywhere.
“Those cars are huge,” Bren muttered.
“Yeah. The buildings are all square and stuff, too.” We watched the cars, scanned the streets, ate up the sight of stores and people running on ancient concrete. Had it hurt to run on that hard stuff? Had ankles gotten broken all the time? And the man’s weapon. I guessed it was what they used to call a gun based on other things I’d read and heard. The clip ended abruptly.
“Do you think those guns were as bad as Keepers?” I looked at Bren through the goggles.
He shrugged. “All I know is I never want to have anyone shoot anything at me.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” We laughed.
I tapped the reader, and the clip played again. The old buildings stood tall and irregular, giving the sky a jagged appearance. Explosions, the man firing his tiny gun, so much smaller than an Enforser’s Keeper, glass shattering, screaming. Then over.
I played it again. Or at least I tried to. After the lines flashed, the image on my vid-goggles went dark. I tapped the reader.
“Dok,” Bren said. “Make it go.”
“Make it go? Seriously?” I picked up the reader, scanned it. It didn’t look broken. I tapped it again. Still nothing. “What am I, a dokter of tek?”
“Something like that. Heal it!” Bren laughed. I kind of laughed, too, my mind going in two directions. Lots of kids used ‘Dok’ with their friends as a short for ‘Dokter.’ Because dokters had saved humanity.
I thought it was kind of silly. What if mekaniks had saved people? Would we say “Mek?”
I lowered my vid-goggles as I wondered about nicknames, looking closer at the reader. What was wrong with this thing? Just once more; I wanted to get a closer look at the stores to see what they were selling. I waited for a moment and tried tapping it again.
Nothing happened. Stupid old tek with its short battery life. I would need to take it to the Enjineering Dome again and recharge the battery. That would be tricky, again, but that was fine.
“Battery must be dead.” I elbowed Bren. “Can’t bring it back without charging it at the Enjineering Dome.”
“Spam.” Bren took his goggles off and folded them. “I gotta kill at least another thirty minutes. Jan had her friends over again.”
At the mention of his sister, her face flashed my mind. Long black hair, darker than Bren’s, bright blue eyes, a really big smile. And only a year younger than us. Jan was sometimes a little gigglier than I could sit through, but I’d had a nice conversation or two with her about propulsion and gravity fields. When it was just the two of us, her sense of humor got a lot sharper, too.
I forced a goofy grin at Bren. “You didn’t want to talk about cycles and boys?” Why were girls like that, anyway? Boys and cycles every time you got two or more of them together.
“I know,” Bren said, rolling his eyes. “And what’s the point anyway? Algorithms choose who you marry.” He got kind of a dejected look on his face.
I tried to ignore the warmth in my chest as I remembered laughing with his sister about a dumb mistake someone had made in the Enjineering Dome. He was right. What was the point, anyway? I checked the time. He had to go.
I kicked him out, quietly reminding him to be careful sneaking out later.
“Don’t worry Dok,” Bren said, and he headed home.
I popped my EarCom back in and touched the right front corner of my desk, activating the skreen and keyboard in my desktop. I IMed some friends, but not the people I would be meeting tonight. I spent the next hour messaging and then chatted with Bren through my EarCom, figuring we usually talked about this time and if the frequencies were monitored, we didn’t want to do anything unusual tonight.
“Hey,” I said.
“Mr. Nikolas.”
I rolled my eyes. “Mr. Brenkolas.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Bren laughed.
“No. It’s ri-brenkolas.”
We both burst into laughter. “Good one,” Bren said.
“As usual.”
“So,” Bren said after a minute. “I didn’t ask earlier. How was your paste?”
“Pastey. Paste-olas?” He knew I hated the stuff.
“Let it go, Nik.” Bren’s laughter came through his fake anger. “You ever wonder what an apple tastes like?”
“Every day.”
“Frag it. I wonder what sweet stuff tastes like,” Bren said. A light click sounded. “Pol, any guess what sweet stuff tastes like?”
I waited for Pol to respond. He was one of the group of Pushers and probably the smartest person I’d ever met. Only silence came over the EarCom.
“Must be fiddling around on that work table of his,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe even took out his EarCom so he wouldn’t be interrupted,” Bren said. Another click sounded and I heard Bren whisper Koner’s name. Then, “Koner, you there?”
“Yup.” Kon
er’s quiet voice slid into my ear. “Is anyone else pretty much always hungry?”
Bren and I broke out in laughter again. Koner never thought about anything but food. The poor kid never got enough. He even snuck other kids’ protein paste sometimes. “That’s what we were talking about,” Bren said.
“Yeah,” I said. “What do you think sweet stuff tastes like?”
“Who cares? We have a word for something we don’t have anymore, so it’s stupid and I need something to eat.”
Through his laughter, Bren shot back, “You could always eat your parents.”
“Bren, that’s disgusting,” I said.
The three of us chatted a little more, me venting at them about my transition from cool Rojer to Foolish Fil. After a while, we ran out of things to talk about. Besides, 22:30 was coming fast. Our EarComs went silent, but we all knew we would see each other later tonight.
Bren was the first person I’d told about Pushing. How I’d been late, pushed my heart rate to 135 and kept it there, and how I’d felt afterward.
So Pushing had been born. Some of my friends and I, along with others who sometimes showed up, met every couple of days between school and our shifts in the domes. We would push our heart rates, laughing when somebody got the knockout and hit the rough oxi-grass.
I checked the time on my Papa. My homework was done, so I still had a few hours to kill. Grabbing my zip from the chair, I dug into the pocket, found my old glue wad, and squeezed it between my Papa and my wrist. For a lot of reasons, I didn’t want the 22:30 knockout that everyone in New Frisko got. If I got the knockout, I’d for sure sleep through the meet-up tonight. Also, I hadn’t had the nightly knockout for—what was it?—months, I figured. Once I’d figured out that glue would absorb the tiny injection and I could stay up as late as I wanted, I hadn’t used the nightly knockout at all. It was a little victory, but I’d take it.
I lay on my bed, flicked my left wrist, and cued up a preloaded holo, projecting from my Papa. I tapped a spot on the Papa’s band and slid my vid-goggles back on. A holo-image appeared about twenty centimeters away from the goggles, nearly on my chest. I lifted my hands to the holo-image and fired the game up.
The meet-up was still a few hours off, so I played the cycle racing game and let my thoughts wander.
CHAPTER 4
My heart pumped at a steady seventy-five beats per minute. A little high, but I had it under control.
The clock on my nightstand told me it was time: 01:00. The entire city would be asleep now. Well, not quite.
I took a slow breath and sat up, pulling out the skinny glue wad between my wrist daddy and my skin. I’d be putting the new one in at the meet-up.
I imagined everyone in New Frisko falling asleep at the exact same time every night. Like programmed sheep. Sure, it was convenient and everybody got plenty of rest, but it felt like just another way the New Chapter controlled us. Pointless control, too. I hated that.
My glue wad gave me back some control. A little while after my fourteenth birthday, I’d figured out how to stop the nightly knockout without the Admins finding out. It had been a matter of sliding something skin-like between the Papa and my wrist so that the tiny needle didn’t break the skin of my wrist. I had used a thin wad of glue that first time. I’d experimented with lots of other things since then, like flattened bread and even cloth. The bread just crumbled, and the cloth wasn’t skin-like enough and had gotten me sent to the Dumps for a week. The glue worked best because it absorbed the tiny injection.
The fun didn’t last long since I was the only one I knew who was awake until late. So I had started trying to figure out how to block the tracker in my Papa. I’d never seen the tracker, but everyone knew it was in there since Enforsers could find you anywhere you went and identify you.
I dug the shallow plasteel cup out from under my bed, slid it over the top of the Papa’s face and pushed it down until it was snug. The tracker had to be using a radio frequency, so it had been a matter of lots of experiments to find the correct polymer mix of plasteel and charge its exactly right to block the signal.
This would work. I’d made one for Bren and the others who had agreed to meet me tonight. We could get out of our houses, do the experiment, and get home—all without anyone knowing we were gone. As far as the Admins would know, our signals would have faded out for a little while. That had to happen all the time due to interference.
Just as long as anybody monitoring the housing districts didn’t know we had left our houses. That was all that mattered.
Oh. And not dying from the Bug.
No. I’m not wrong. I had to be right. I’d seen the signs of other people outside the city, traces left by people who I felt sure lived out there. Rumors of the Wanderers had always existed, and I knew I’d seen a trace or two of them. A piece of non-gray, non-ancient cloth hanging from a bush. The smell of a recent fire.
Wanderers didn’t have Papas. No Papa, no knockout. And without the knockout, there was no way they could survive if the Bug were still in the air.
I knew I was right. I felt the same way when I opened a piece of tek and could immediately figure out what each component did. The Bug had to be gone. The Admins, the Speekers, the Prime Administrator—they were all lying to us to keep us under control. To keep us from making the mistakes humans had made years ago.
I stretched, remembering my last experience with an unscheduled knockout. It still burned. Running in late and falling over the moment you got to class tended to make every kid in Level 6 laugh at you. And if you ended up with a long, red line on your forehead from where you’d hit the door on your way down, that didn’t help. I thought I could keep my heart rate under the 140 threshold, but lost focus as I got to the classroom door—the exact wrong moment. I woke up with a red line on my forehead with pain and embarrassment to match.
Stupid knockout.
Although that was also how I’d become friends with Bren. Until then, he’d just always been some kid in the same level as me. But that day I woke up and he was propping me up at my desk. “What are you doing?” I’d asked.
“Trying to help you not get another bruise like that,” Bren said, pointing at my forehead.
“Like what?”
Bren traced a line on his forehead. “Like the one that the doorway gave you when you hit it.” He was smiling but not laughing at me.
“Why?”
“Because two lines would make you look really, really stupid.” He raised his eyebrows, and his mouth quirked in a silly grin.
I had to laugh. “Stupider than getting hit by the knockout right when I was walking into the classroom?”
“Running. Okay, more like falling,” Bren corrected. “And yes.”
We both laughed. And became best friends. He had doubted the Bug was still around, but he wasn’t sure until I laid it all out: we lived a hundred years later, biotoxins couldn’t still be in the air after so long, everyone was pretty sure the Wanderers were real, and they didn’t have Papas to protect them.
I tossed the used wad of glue into the small trash chute next to my desk. Bren had pointed out the regular news reports about people still dying of the Bug. People who somehow avoided the knockout and “recklessly allowed their heart rates to pass the safe threshold.”
But I knew it had to be lies, and he had finally come around. And somehow, more people didn’t suspect that, didn’t hate life in New Frisko. All over the New Chapter, the surviving 10 percent of humanity lived in such fear—a hundred years later—that they just accepted what the Admins and the Papas said. I slid a finger under my Papa and yanked. Nope, stuck like always. Nobody I knew had ever gotten the thing off, but I’d heard that if you managed to get it off, the Enforsers would track you down and do something pretty awful to you.
I looked around my room, feeling the weight of the plasteel walls and grayness. I had to prove it was all lies. This life was so—wrong. More than wrong: fake. Artificial. No humans had ever lived like this ever, and we’d been fin
e. Yeah, up until the Bug had killed something like seven billion people, but the old way of living couldn’t have actually created the Bug. That didn’t make sense.
I sat up on my bed, the smart-fome firming up under me as my weight moved. Taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I breathed steadily, willing my heart to slow a little.
I was going to change things. If this worked—no, when this worked—I was going to be a hero.
I sat for a moment, wondering if I should have talked about tonight’s plan with my mom or dad. If my plan went wrong, if me and my friends were totally wrong—No. I was right, but Mom and Dad toed the line. Happily. They might even report me to the Enforsers themselves. And if I died, my parents—could I do that to them? That would break my mom for sure.
My gut clenched. I had to do this. I had learned so much about the pre-Infektion world, knew I’d seen signs of the Wanderers, had studied the science of biotoxins and bacteria, and knew I was right.
I had to do this. Maybe when it worked, we could change things. Have music again. Or films.
I realized I was stalling, repeating myself. I gripped my bed and blew out a lungful of air. I slipped my feet into my shoes and stood, the loose smart-fabric tightening automatically all around my foot. Not too tight, but enough to provide support.
Grabbing my zip and pushing my arms through the sleeves, I crept to my door. I’d read that pre-Infektion houses had had windows that opened. If the windows in my room opened like those old ones, I could have slipped out the window and climbed down the tree next to our house. But no. Yet another restriction “in the interest of safety.” I cracked my door, stopping to listen for a few seconds. Total silence.
I pulled my zip closed and dropped the hood over my head while I crept down the hallway and stairs toward the front door. The gentle walking that the Fiz Ed teachers taught us from a young age helped—I’d been learning to walk quietly for years now, just like everyone else.
I pictured the metal car in the video clip I’d seen. Driving one of those everywhere must have been incredible.
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