Contribute (Holo, #2)

by Kristy Acevedo

  Nolan can’t stop looking at Katherine. It takes him a few minutes to respond. “It can’t electrocute me?”

  “Not right now.”

  He nods and rolls over. Maybe it’s not the right time. His grandmother comes over and steps between us.

  “What is this about?” she asks.

  “Do you trust me?” Kendra asks, putting her hand on Nolan’s shoulder.

  He wipes his face. “Always.”

  “We’re all part of a group called the Umbra. We’re trying to get home to Earth.”

  He sits up and leans closer. “But Earth’s gone.”

  “Earth’s fine,” I say. “Your mother is fine.”

  “Don’t screw with me. That’s not even funny. You said you were the last one through. You said . . .”

  So he did remember me. “I know. I had to say that at the time. I didn’t have the Umbra’s protection. The BME would’ve stopped me.”

  Instantly, his energy changes. “Where’s my mom?”

  “On Earth. The Earth wasn’t destroyed. Kendra will explain everything to you, and then she’ll show you around the Umbra tonight. We’d like to recruit you to help us fight back.”

  He looks at his grandmother, then at Doctor A. Doctor A. nods in encouragement.

  “I’m in. All the way.”

  His grandmother takes a deep breath, turns to Doctor A. and says, “Can I join, too?”

  A weight disappears from behind my heart, and I breathe a little deeper. One more recruit to go.

  I leave Kendra and Doctor A. with Nolan to discuss further details. Katherine and I search for the woman and the baby to tell her that her husband is alive on Earth. The nanoholocom network still won’t let us search for people, but even if I could use it, I don’t know the woman’s name.

  “Can you tap into the communication system? Unblock it early?” I ask.

  “No. Don’t think I haven’t tried. It’s not blocked; it’s more like the program doesn’t exist on our bandwidths yet. We’ll have to ask people if they’ve seen her and the baby.”

  Great. Starting conversation with complete strangers is not my strength. “I haven’t seen her in awhile,” I admit. “She used to come to the Hub for some meals.”

  “And you would notice.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should. It was.”

  She’s like Benji if he had a personality.

  “Let’s start knocking on doors,” Katherine says. “This better be worth it, Mississippi.”

  When someone answers at each door, we ask if they’ve seen a woman and her baby around four months old. They send us to other locations. Katherine and I take the maglift to more and more LUs based on leads. A woman with fuchsia hair answers the next door, and behind her a man plays with a giggling baby. She sends us to another LU where a party is in full swing. An older woman with long, white-blond hair and gallons of makeup answers the door and invites us inside. People jam to music, some dancing, some singing karaoke, the lyrics holoprojected on a wall. Nanoholocoms glow and change color to add to the ambience.

  “Special occasion?” Katherine asks, impressed.

  “We just contributed,” she says. “See?” She points to her bandwidth, which emits a soft golden light around her wrist. “Time to celebrate our freedom.”

  I look around the room at the crowd of glowing bandwidths, a sign of acceptance. Of assimilation. Their happiness and ignorance makes me feel ill. “Already?”

  “Why wait?” the woman asks.

  Katherine shows no reaction and changes the subject, asking her about the woman and the baby. Based on her description, the woman nods.

  “I know who you’re talking about. I visited her a couple times, tried to get her to join us. Can’t help people who don’t want it, you know what I mean?”

  She gives us the LU room number. I leave the party uneasy and angry at their ignorance.

  “We need to tell them,” I say to Katherine.

  “That’s only one room of people. We need to save as many as possible. If the vances catch on before we are ready for them, we’re screwed.”

  That’s not how I do math. I focus on one person, one thing at a time. Easier to not get overwhelmed by all the possible problems. All the possible casualties.

  We travel to the next LU to look for the woman and the baby. More than ever I want to help her, let her know her husband is alive on Earth, and she can join us to fight for justice.

  No one answers the LU door no matter how long I knock.

  “Maybe she’s not here.” Katherine says. “She could be eating in the Hub.”

  “Have you seen her around lately? At any meals?” I ask.

  A baby’s cry echoes behind the door. I knock louder, and the baby’s cry increases in intensity.

  “Maybe she’s asleep,” Katherine says.

  “Ma’am?” I knock even harder until my knuckles turn raw. “I’d like to talk to you about your husband. The man with the owl tattoo on his neck? I have information.”

  If anything were going to make her answer, it would be that. Nothing. Something doesn’t feel right.

  “Give me a sec,” Katherine says. She messes with the nanoholocoms in the side panel. “I have to disable to BME in the corridor first before I can try to unlock the door. Keep lookout.”

  I am not the person to keep lookout. Like asking a guppy to watch for sharks. I swear my knees actually knock into each other from my legs trembling. I thought that was only reserved for cartoon characters.

  Katherine’s illicit movements echo down the curved hallway as I glance left and then right and then left again.

  “Can you go faster?” I ask.

  “If you don’t talk to me,” she says.

  My eyes move left, right. Left, right. Left, right. My temples hurt.

  A noise. Maglift doors opening.

  “Katherine,” I whisper loudly.

  She turns her back to the panel and leans on it to block her progress. A group exits the maglift and travels past. They are too busy chatting and laughing to notice our movements. As they walk, the golden glow from their bandwidths swings by their sides against their vibrant uniforms. I always thought fighting for freedom meant fighting for happiness. Why am I fighting so hard against something that’s making people so happy? It must be nice to go through life without a worry. I spin my clear bandwidth on my wrist.

  Katherine continues working. After a few more minutes, she says, “Bingo.”

  The door opens.

  The woman’s body dangles above us from a rope, her body wrapped in a BME bubble in mid-air. Her baby cries from a clear, oval bassinet. I cover my face with shaking hands and run out of the room and I don’t stop until I’m in my LU.

  It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. I should’ve told her the truth when I had the chance.

  CHAPTER 10

  DAY 6: 630 HOURS TO DECIDE

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Katherine explains to me that the mother tried to hang herself and the BME stopped her in mid-air. Guess suicide is against the rules in Solbiluna-8. They need our brains functioning for their contribution program after all.

  Doctor A. tries to reassure me that it’s the vances’ fault this happened. Their lie made the woman believe her husband was dead, took her baby away for medical treatment without consent, made her desperate with grief. Nolan’s grandmother has volunteered to watch the infant indefinitely.

  I swallow my last pill.

  All night I lie awake in my bed not moving. She almost died and that baby would’ve had no one. I wonder who will tell that baby what happened to its mother when it grows up. I wonder if it will hate me. I can hear the baby screaming for its parents in the darkness, surrounded by nothing but holographic technology.

  Alone. No one hears that kind of pain.

  As the sun rises outside my LU window wall, the red river in the distance welcomes me. If I drown in it, would the water paint my insides scarlet, marking my guilt and shame like a reverse bapti
sm?

  I try to convince myself that the woman is alive and the baby is alive and that everything will be okay. But the guilt wraps itself around my soul and squeezes like a snake devouring its prey. I remember being so desperate to find an end to pain that I contemplated swallowing my life away. It’s a place I never want to revisit, yet it’s always there, and a part of me hates it, a part of me is afraid of it ‘cause I know how it tricks your mind into believing that oblivion and escape is better than life itself.

  I stay in bed and wait to feel safe again.

  The sleep-filled day turns into a sleepless night and into another day. Someone knocks on my LU door, and the nanoholocom screen lights up on my wrist. I ignore it. They’ll leave eventually. The door makes a strange sound, like technology scratching a chalkboard, and it opens without my permission. As soon as I see Benji in my doorway, my muscles seize with expectation. Benji takes no prisoners. He never lets me wallow. Wallowing is a human’s right.

  I double tap my bandwidth. SIDEKICK appears next to me, and before it can greet me, I scream, “Security breach. He’s going to kill me.” It’s not true, I just want Benji out of my LU. Leave me to drown in the guilt river that I deserve. Let the BME deal with him.

  “725 Walnut,” Benji announces. My holobed evaporates, and my body hits the floor with a hard plop. SIDEKICK disappears, and my room has gone dark, the only light from the sun through the wall length window.

  “Really?!” I sit forward and run my hand over my elbow, the same elbow that has a small scar from my first run in with a hologram on Earth. It’s almost non-existent after all my time in the PSF.

  “Shut up and listen.” He crouches near me. “You can’t crumble.”

  I scoot away from him. “A woman tried to kill herself. I should’ve given her hope. Told her the truth from the beginning. We’re taking too long. Some people are sad and desperate and need to hear the truth. Some people are happy and starting to contribute and need to hear the truth.”

  “Alex, you gave us the information we needed to increase our efforts and fight to get home. If you stay in hiding, it will look like you lied. It will look like I trusted you when I shouldn’t have. People are asking questions. You can’t stay in this room. Do it for Mom and Dad.”

  Mom and Dad. I need to remember what the vances did to us. I stand up to leave, to do what’s right. My mind chooses that moment to visualize my parents dead, hanging from the ceiling in our living room back on Earth.

  I crawl into a ball on the empty floor of my LU and rock back and forth to get the image out of my head. I try to imagine my happy place, hammock on an island with a book to read. The image only lasts a moment before the ropes of the hammock morph into ropes around my parents’ necks.

  “Alex?” Benji touches my shoulder.

  I look up at him. “They’re dead.”

  “No, the woman and her baby are okay.”

  “Mom and Dad,” I whisper. “I bet they’re dead.” I rock back and forth to slow the deep, unsettled energy soaring through my system.

  He crouches next to me. “You can’t think like that.”

  I hold my head in my hands. “I can’t stop it.”

  “Where’re your pills?” He asks and glances around the room.

  “Gone,” I manage to say. “I took the last one.”

  “Shit. Do that breathing thing you’re supposed to do.”

  “I am!” I yell.

  “Good,” he replies. “I can tell it’s really working for you.”

  “Shut up. You don’t get it.” I breathe in deeply, hold it, and let it out.

  Benji sits on the floor with me. “It’s okay to be afraid. I’m afraid. I don’t know how we’re gonna pull this off, but listen to me. We’re gonna pull this off. We’re not gonna let them win. We’re going home.”

  Silence passes between us as I tap my fingers on one thigh, then the other, back and forth, following with my eyes to focus on movement instead of emotion.

  Benji puts a hand on my knee. “I need you to stay focused so I can stay focused. Stay angry. Anger will keep you fired up. You have more empathy than most people. Hold onto that. Your protectiveness for people. Feel injustice for them. Fight for them. And let them fight for you. It’s how I cope. So much easier to fight for others instead of for ourselves. Singular pain is too personal; the pain of a multitude is powerful.”

  I let his confidence seep into me, like wings to fight the wind.

  Benji hugs his knees, creasing his navy blue uniform. “I worry about Mom and Dad. Mostly at night. Hey, you remember when Dad and Mom dressed like werewolves and made me piss my pants?”

  “Yes!” I crack up. “Then you hid under the porch and wouldn’t come out, so Dad turned the hose on you. It was hilarious.”

  “Good times.”

  “Remember when we went to Florida to visit Penelope, and you said there was a baby alligator in the toilet?” I laugh more. “I was afraid to go to the bathroom for days.”

  He chuckles. “I didn’t think you’d take me seriously. So gullible.”

  “Shut up,” I push his legs with my legs, and he flops over. The room echoes with our laughter. “What the heck did you do to my LU?”

  “Disabled the nanoholocoms using a secret skeleton code.” He puts out a hand and helps me off the floor.

  “Your secret disabling code is our address?”

  “Why not?” He pulls on his uniform and brushes his pants.

  “I don’t know. It’s just not cool.”

  “Things don’t have to be cool to work.”

  “Does the code work anywhere?”

  “Nope. Only works in LUs in response to my voice. Short range. Fastest way to temporarily secure spaces in an emergency.”

  “Can I have my holofurniture back?”

  “Only if you come to the meeting after breakfast.”

  “So I either get to live in an empty LU or come to the meeting? That’s blackmail.”

  He grins. I want to kick him in his smug teeth.

  I GRAB MY journal and go down to the Hub for breakfast. The ritual Earth mourning ceremony has begun, so I blend in and wait. It creeps me out to watch people stand around a glowing hologram of our planet, lowering their heads in sadness and respect. More bandwidths gleam like warm sunlight on their wrists. A golden shackle that they see as freedom. I almost run forward and tell them the truth, but that would ruin the Umbra’s plan. What if the BME suddenly zaps all the Umbra dead in this LU community? Can they do that? No other communities would have our information. The truth would die with us.

  Breakfast at the platform consists of blackened mush on a flat yellow bread. Looks like it could be black hummus on pita bread. Tastes like sweet, overripe bananas and burnt peanut butter on cardboard. Worst meal yet. Your appetite changes when your enemy is the one serving the food. There’s a line at the fountain to get the thick substance to stay down.

  The dinochicken is back in the same tree, yapping the same tune. A gust of wind blows by and the leaves on the tree lift and fall, flipping from dark red to purple, and back again. Every time I see that tree with that bird in it, I have a weird sense of déjà vu. With more people around, it tends to squawk more often, like a curmudgeon agitated by our human presence. To get away from the noise, I walk around the perimeter of the LU community, as far as we are allowed to travel until they lift the ban. If they lift the travel ban. I can’t entertain that thought. I will see Dominick and Rita again. Soon. The outer walkway where SIDEKICK brought me when I arrived is off limits. Instead, there’s a locked glass gate that blocks the entrance to the LU. We are hamsters in a glass wheel.

  Through the gate I admire the scenery of Solbiluna-8. The longer I stay here, the less foreign the dark, sharp mountains, red rivers, and technology become. I’ve even grown to like the glow of two moons and moving stars above us at night.

  I write in my journal to remember who I am.

  The Umbra meeting is held at a different LU, and inside it’s the biggest one yet. Nol
an and his grandmother attend. The dark rings under his eyes are gone, and he’s more animated as he talks to Kendra. At least I helped him in time. Like Benji said. Focus my anger and empathy on small acts of kindness.

  Doctor A. waves me over to him near the front of the room.

  “Something’s going on,” he says. “From what I gather, there’s dissension with how to move forward. We’re going to vote.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Beruk wants to plan an attack now. Tell everyone in the community, escape the LU, and mutiny. Benji wants to find evidence, gather info, and wait to tell other communities. Jackson has decided to take a vote.”

  Katherine comes to sit with us. “Mississippi, we missed you.”

  “Benji talked to me.” I pick at my fingernail and peel off the tip. “And he shut down my LU nanoholocoms to force me to come.”

  “Yeah, your brother is something else.”

  “You mean a jerk?” I say, smirking.

  She pulls her long hair back into a loose ponytail. “I mean a leader.”

  “There’s a fine line between the two,” Doctor A. says, “and often, unfortunately, they can go hand in hand.”

  Doctor A. might just be one of my favorite people.

  Katherine shakes her head in disagreement. “He handles Beruk, and that’s saying something.”

  “What’s with that guy?” I ask.

  “He’s been pissed ever since he got here and they erased his tattoo collection. He had one for every year since he was eighteen. What’s he, like, forty-five?”

  “Who erased his tattoos?” Doctor A. asks.

  “The PSF. Guess it restores and repairs your skin when it disinfects. Left him extra bitter.”

  Makes sense. It stripped away my nail polish. Tattoos are something else, though. Like stripping away art.

  “He’s ready to start a war.” Katherine says.

  “Over tattoos?” I ask.

  “Whatever gets ‘em here. We need his security knowledge. I heard he owned a private body guard service. Elite stuff. Benji’s been doing a good job convincing people to keep quiet until we find evidence. I don’t think we’re ready. We’re still doing small scale hacks on the nanoholocoms. Nothing that could handle a massive attack. We don’t even have real weapons that work yet.”