Grinny

by Nicholas Fisk

  I had just enough strength left to reach into one of the bundles strapped to my waist and pull out a small, flat tin. Inside were some pieces of broken glass. I took one in a shaking hand and used it to slice through the lengths of electrical flex that bound my float into a cylindrical shape. Freed, it uncoiled limply into its original, flat form. The foam mattress inside was covered in layers of polythene sheeting, and looked to be in good order. I motioned for The Moth and Harete to lie on the bed roll, which they did, side by side. I sat down beside them on the saturated, lumpy ground, too weary to care about its manifest discomforts, and propped myself up against the pylon.

  We huddled together, all three of us soaking wet and bone-achingly cold. My brain bubbled with worries. How close behind us were they? Had our escape even been discovered yet? What had happened to . . . but I didn’t want to think about him.

  We slipped into an imitation of sleep.

  This was only the start of our attempted journey to the Other country. An excursion, certainly, but an escape? Or was this all a futile charade? The doubts and vinegary injustice of it all nagged at me as I dozed, as impossible to ignore as a mouthful of broken glass.

  And to think I’d once believed knowing The Moth was going to make my life easier.

  STRAY

  by Monica Hesse

  1

  First, the pool was cold. If it was below sixty-seven degrees, they weren’t supposed to swim. But the thermometer obviously said sixty-five, and the coach hadn’t done anything but assign a satanic warm-up. Then, Dan forgot he’d offered to drive Julian to school, so Julian was jogging the seven blocks from practice holding his backpack in front of himself like an hors d’oeuvres tray, trying not to crush the paper model inside. Capsaicin, it was called – the molecule that made peppers hot. On the fifth block, his mother called to say that his capsaicin molecule was sitting on the kitchen table. Julian opened his bag. Cheerios.

  “Is this going to be a bad day?” the new manager asked, tapping the screen with his fingernail. The control room was a still, gray dark. Two Monitors sat at their desks, a patchwork of scenes running across their computers. Talia clicked on the tiny square now marked with an oily fingerprint, enlarging it and noting the number in the bottom right-hand corner. Then she opened a browser and typed the number into Julianbase.

  Then she reminded herself that the new manager’s name rhymed with skeevy, which was helpful.

  “Day 6001 is a five-point-four, Mr. Greevey,” she said. “In Path, that means it’s classified as Mildly Downcast, but it’s within the normal range. It’s barely below average, which is six.”

  “I know it’s six.”

  He sounded testy. New sector managers always sounded testy. Talia wished his testiness was not currently manifested as a greasy whorl pattern on her screen. Talia bet he didn’t know it was six.

  “Of course. I’m just saying that we usually only register days that are Moderate-Severe Depressed or worse – anything less than a three.”

  “So you’re not going to call a Coping Technician?”

  He sounded accusatory. New sector managers always sounded accusatory. The Coping Technicians hated when new managers started even more than Talia did – the worrying, the whining, the stupid rules that the manager would later realize were stupid and try to blame on someone else. CTs had started referring to new managers as FMs. They said it stood for Floor Manager. It stood for Fecal Matter.

  The rumor was that this one got the job because he was somebody’s nephew. He was slightly less competent and more execrable than the one before.

  “No,” Talia said. “I don’t need to call a CT. Besides, Lona is the one in 6001. On her charts, she scores very high in resilience, which makes it easier for her to cope with anything Julian’s coping with.”

  Talia liked Lona. This wasn’t something you said out loud, not unless you wanted to spend a weekend in a remedial Monitor training seminar. It was unwise, the seminar would explain, to ‘like’ any of them, when they were all learning to become the same person. But Talia liked how, when Julian ran, sometimes Lona’s feet moved, too, little twitches like a dog having a dream, which made her long hair come untucked and fall down her arm. There was something endearing about this. Talia also felt a bond with Lona for other reasons, but those reasons were mixed with unease. Those reasons were better ignored.

  And then, because Talia could tell that Greevey was the kind of person who worried more when everything seemed fine than when something was wrong, she added: “But you might want to have one on reserve for later this week. Jynd is in 5724, and Julian’s grandfather dies in 5727. That’s always a hard day.”

  This pleased him. Greevey gave Talia an important nod. “I’ll arrange that.”

  When he left, Talia turned back to her screen. Day 6001 was familiar. She’d monitored it just a few weeks ago, and she actually kind of liked it. It was a five-point-four, but a funny five-point-four – the kind where the things that went wrong could have been accompanied by a pre-recorded laugh track, full of chuckles and polite groans. After Julian realized he’d left the molecule at home, his mother would offer to drive it to him, but there would be a misunderstanding about which entrance they were meeting at. Julian would go to the south entrance, and his mother would go to the west. Later, Julian would misread his sheet music in choir practice and start singing with the girls.

  Talia was convinced Julian would not have viewed this day as a five-point-four at all, but as an even six, or maybe six-point-two. The day’s cozy ridiculousness would have amused him, if not immediately, then a few days later, when he mulled it over in his private thoughts. No one had access to his real private thoughts, of course. But Julian’s ability to get over things like forgotten molecules was, after all, part of what had made Julian such a likable selection.

  For now, Julian was merely trotting into Mr. Orlando’s Chemistry class and explaining how his pepper model was missing.

  “Was it too hot to handle?” Mr. Orlando asked. Bless him, he thought his capsaicin pun was hilarious. The difference between Mr. Orlando and Ms. Shaw, the other Chemistry teacher, was that Mr. Orlando embraced his own dorkiness, which made everyone like him. He wore shortsleeved button-downs that never quite closed over his stomach; his belly button appeared as a triangle of pale flesh like the eye at the top of a pyramid on a dollar bill. He called his belly button ‘The Seeing Eye.’

  “Maybe you are too hot to handle,” Julian said, and everyone laughed. This was the type of thing you couldn’t get away with in Ms. Shaw’s class.

  “Go.” Mr. Orlando rolled his eyes. “Go get your capsaicin. Come back ready to talk about ion bonding.”

  Julian obediently loped toward the school’s south entrance, pausing to glance at his reflection in a hallway trophy case. It was a good year for Julian’s looks. He was tall-ish but not too tall. He was handsome-ish, but not overly handsome. He had long limbs, doe-brown eyes. Right now his hair was still damp, darker than its normal color. When it dried, it would be nearly the same shade as his skin, giving the impression that if he stood in front of a beige wall, he could blend in.

  Julian didn’t look at himself frequently, meaning that those in Path were not often confronted with a mirror image of a face that was not technically theirs. There was discussion, once, about whether Path should be modified so that Pathers saw their own faces when Julian looked in the mirror. It hadn’t gone anywhere. Budget issues, probably.

  The red light above Talia’s computer screen began to flash, simultaneously emitting an atonal whistle. Noon. Time for midday rounds. Talia could see the entire Path bay from where she was, but just barely. From the control room, the evenly spaced pods looked like blobby, boulder-sized masses. On floor level, a neat path of footlights, the kind they had in movie theaters, lit an efficient walkway for the Monitors to follow. It was peaceful down in the bay. Once it had been the gymnasium part of a posh health club. The control room had been the welcome desk. The Calisthenics room had been the weight
room. The showers had been the showers. Some things don’t change.

  There would have been basketball nets then, in the bay. It would have smelled like sweat and shoe leather. Now it smelled dry and electronic, and the only sound was a low whooshing, which was the sound of two hundred machines running. It sounded like breathing. Here in the bay, the boulders came to life.

  In the beginning, when Talia first started her job, they used regular dental chairs, tilted back into reclining position. The vinyl stuck to skin, though. Created too many bed sores. Now the chairs were coated with microfiber.

  The patrolling was Talia’s favorite part of her job – walking around her assigned Pathers, noting anyone who was growing faster than expected and needed to be fitted with a new pod. She rarely had to touch anyone. That was mostly a CT job – stroking the shoulder of a Pather who was having a particularly traumatic day. The pods could replicate most sensory experiences, but sometimes Pathers responded better to actual human touch. CTs used to be called Touchers before they unionized and decided the title didn’t fully enough represent their skill sets. Not that Talia blamed them. Who would want to be a professional Toucher? The Monitors tried to remember to use the new title, with limited success.

  To her right, a big redheaded Pather named Grni was somewhere in the 6300s. Julian was filling out college applications, his father plotting a road trip down to a university in St. Louis. To Talia’s left, a smaller Pather named Dwnd must be in the mid 2000s. Julian had decided the swing set was a pirate ship and was annoyed his mom didn’t remember to say ‘Ahoy.’ The sound from that pod was tinny; Talia made a note to have it checked. Further down, a young Pather, barely over 365, wearing his miniature visioneers and supported by a special headrest, played a singsongy game of Pattycake with Julian’s parents while a Coping Technician changed his diaper. The diaper was a problem, but no one had been able to design a better stopgap solution for before young Pathers could go on the bathroom break schedule. Someone would think of something. Path was only eighteen. It was getting better all the time.

  Finally Talia came to Lona. Julian was done with Chemistry, running lightly to English. Lona’s feet twitched in time. One foot bounced off of her chair and dangled to the side. Julian’s loping wasn’t effective; he went up and down as much as he went forward. He wasn’t a great runner, Talia thought, but Lona might have been.

  Which was a useless thing to think. There had never really been a Lona without Julian.

  She lifted Lona’s foot back onto her chair. She might have called a Toucher if it was anyone else, but Lona intrigued her ever since what had happened eleven years ago, and, if she was really being honest with herself, Lona scared her.

  Talia finished her rounds and walked back up to the control room. The pods became boulders again. Peaceful boulders, neat rows, safe order, dim light.

  “Lona was running again,” she said to the second Monitor, a younger woman with cropped hair who sat in the other desk. Lona’s twitchy feet were famous in the control room. “Also, I think Dwnd’s sound needs to be checked.”

  “It’s the new speakers. Supposed to be better, but last week I had to send out two Pathers for eardrum exams. One was the day after Julian lit off all those firecrackers in 4200s, so maybe that was supposed to happen?”

  A current debate among Path overseers: if Julian got sick, did that mean the Pather in that day should also be sick? Some argued yes – Pathers were supposed to have a full range of human experiences through Julian, and experiences included damaged eardrums. Others said the Pathers were put in Path to give them better lives than they ever would have had Off Path. How much was pain necessary to the ideal human experience?

  “What do you think of the new guy?” Talia asked.

  “Kind of an idiot. He made me call a Coping Technician for a stubbed toe today. As if he was actually worried about the toe and not his ass.”

  “How did that go?”

  “The Toucher can kiss my ass. Did you hear they were all asking for Christmas off? What did they think this job—”

  Before she could complete her sentence, a piercing sound rang through the cavernous bay – a horrible, hideous scream. It was much louder than any sound Talia’s computer could make, and louder even than Julian’s yells when he broke his left tibia in 4428 after a failed wheelie off the bicycle ramp. It was a sound that could not have been learned by any Pather through any experience in the Julian Path.

  But it was a Pather who was making that terrified sound.

  The other Monitor’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she tried to isolate the origin of the scream.

  “It’s Ernd, in Quadrant 4,” she panicked. “I don’t know what … It doesn’t make any … Ernd is Off Path.”

  There were emergency procedures for this. They were just pretend emergency procedures, though. No one ever expected to have to use them. No one went Off Path without permission, without the soothing mechanisms and dozens of meetings that went into preparing for such an event. Pathers did not go Off Path on their own, and so nobody needed emergency procedures.

  But these procedures must have involved the overhead lights coming on, Talia thought, because that’s what was happening. The lights were coming on. The visioneers were lifting, hours before Calisthenics were scheduled to take place.

  In Quadrant 1, Lona Sixteen Always was heading into the choir room, watching Nick as he did an impression of the choral director and the way his bottom lip quivered. Lona was picking up Julian’s folder of music from his assigned slot. She was listening to Mr. Santolar’s quivering lip tell them that the concert was in just a week, and don’t make him regret choosing such hard music for high school students. And then – then she wasn’t.

  Then she was in the bay with all of the other Pathers from Sector 14, and the shrieking sound she heard had nothing to do with choir music. One person was screaming, and then another, and then, as the visioneers lifted, the whole room filled with the sounds of terror.

  Lona felt warm light on her face. Sunbeams streamed in the slender windows that surrounded the top of the bay.

  Julian spent every spring break visiting his grandparents in Florida, and sometimes they went to Cocoa Beach. Julian belonged to the local parks and rec swim team, and in the summer they practiced outside for ninety minutes every night. Julian had more fresh air than most people of his generation, which was another reason that Julian had been chosen.

  And yet, as Lona peered up at the slivers of light piercing in through the top of the gymnasium, she intuitively understood something: this was the first time she had ever seen the sun.

  INSIGNIA

  by S J Kincaid

  CHAPTER ONE

  NEW TOWN, NEW casino—same old plan. Arizona’s Dusty Squanto Casino made it easy for Tom Raines, since he didn’t even have to pay his way into their virtual reality parlor. He slipped into the room, settled onto a couch in the back corner, and looked over the crowd of gamers, taking them in one at a time. His gaze settled on the two men in the opposite corner, and locked onto target.

  Them, Tom thought.

  The men stood with VR visors on, wired gloves clenched in the air. Their racing simulation blazed across an overhead screen for anyone who wanted to bet on the outcome. No one would bet on this race, though. One man was a good driver—he navigated the virtual track with the skill of an experienced gamer—and the other was pitifully bad. His car’s fender dragged across the wall of the arena, and the fake onlookers were screaming and dodging out of the way.

  The winning racer gave a triumphant laugh as his car plowed across the finish line. He turned to the other man, chest puffed with victory, and demanded payment.

  Tom smiled from his solitary spot on the couch.

  Enjoy it while you can, buddy.

  He timed it just right, waiting until the winner started counting up his bills to rise to his feet and wander into his line of sight. Tom noisily rattled one of the VR sets out of its storage container, then made a show of putting on the glov
es the wrong way, before painstakingly adjusting them so the cloth and mesh wiring clasped his arms up to his elbows. Out of the corner of his eye, he became aware of the winning racer watching him.

  “You like playing games, kid?” the man said to him. “Wanna have a go next?”

  Tom gave him the wide-eyed, innocent look that he knew made him appear a lot younger than he was. Even though he was fourteen, he was short and skinny and had such bad acne that people usually couldn’t guess his real age.

  “I’m just looking. My dad says I’m not allowed to gamble.”

  The man licked his lips. “Oh, don’t you worry. Your dad doesn’t even have to know. Put down a few bucks, and we’ll have us a great race. Maybe you’ll win. How much money do you have?”

  “Only fifty bucks.”

  Tom knew better than to say more than that. More than that, and people wanted to see it before taking up the bet. He actually had about two dollars in his pocket.

  “Fifty bucks?” the man said. “That’s enough. This is just car racing. You can race a car, can’t you?” He twisted an invisible wheel. “Nothing to it. And think: you beat me, and you’ll double that fifty.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, kid. Let’s have a go.” A condescending chuckle. “I’ll pay up for sure if you win.”

  “But if I lose . . .” Tom let that hang there. “That’s all my money. I just . . . I can’t.” He started walking away, waiting for the magic words.

  “All right, kid,” the guy called. “Double or nothing.”

  Ha! Tom thought.