“But the end result is a cacophony. A cacophony that at best yields a meager portrait of one individual’s disillusion and bitterness. Democravian artists have dwarfed the possibilities of the transgressives. To end, Corrag, with Molly Bloom reminiscing on the romantic past, I’m sure you’ll agree. Such a shoddy counterfeit of reality. When we compare that to the works of the Ontavians, collaborations that we will look at next week that mix the perspectives of symmetry and harmonics, it will all be clear,” said Miss Schilling. Gurgie turned around and gave a hard stare.
“But it’s about the common people struggling with the weight of history. Isn’t that a part of what Democravia represents?”
“It’s not good enough, Corrag. Not good enough. It disparages women.”
“But so does The Great Gatsby. Look at Daisy. Irresponsible and careless and destructive.”
“Yes, but Fitzgerald identified the malaise, the lack of tether in the primitive, unwashed American soul, the need for correction. The inevitability of self-destruction. That is a seminal work. If only Fitzgerald had correctly identified Zelda as a collaborator in his life work. The myth of the heroic male was still too strong. There were too many economic factors at work in its perpetuation. You’ve seen that in your history block. I want you to reference the SwiftBoat parody of masculine artistry. Nietzche and Me. You’ll find it in Unit 28, I believe, in the Library archives for this course. In your reflective piece tonight remember to present in a visually appealing manner and to comment on the works of at least three of your fellow students. That’s all for this morning, students. Smile all the while.”
Julian Alvarenga smiled wanly at her.
“Nice try, Corrag. Going for the gusto, aren’t you?”
“What is that, Julian? An obscure reference to 20th century advertising? Let me guess. Cigarettes.”
“Close. Try beer.”
“Try beer. Funny. Very transgressive of you.”
Julian was the first of his siblings to attend the Upper Deck. They were a family of former farm workers, the dark-skinned people of the Valley, mostly displaced, like the majority of work sectors, by the first generation of semi-autonomous bots. He had a permeable quality, as if life was just passing through him that reminded Corrag of a sieve. She looked him in the eye to test her theory. He looked her right back and smiled. This was strange.
“Corrag? Can I see you a minute?”
Miss Schilling lifted her head at her desk. Corrag nudged past Gurgie.
“I’ll wait for you," said Gurgie.
“By the O tank.”
“Fine.”
Miss Schilling looked tired. She patted her hair behind her ear and cocked her head at Corrag, who suddenly felt under siege, as if something had popped inside her skull.
“How is that essay coming?” asked Miss Schilling.
“It’s not.”
“I didn’t think so. I’ve seen this before, you know. I want to help.”
Corrag felt like crying.
“I’m taking a year. My father’s going to clear it with Axion.”
“Looks like poor Corrag is having a crisis.”
“You don’t need to rub it in.”
“I’m a little bit angry, frankly. I offered to help you months ago.” Miss Schilling thrust her hands out on the desk, splayed fingers on the console, which was flashing slogans and cafeteria menus and student visuals.
“But I don’t believe in it anymore, Miss Schilling.”
“Don’t believe in what? What you’re going through is perfectly natural. Your feelings of nostalgia and ... and anger are the signs of a higher calling. I so much want to recommend you for higher order augmentation. And it’s going to raise questions about the entire program here if you don’t complete the application process for Axion Fine-Tuning. You can’t do that to us, Corrag.”
Miss Schilling was sitting straight up on the chair and suddenly looking at her with that eagle-eyed augmented focus that made Corrag instinctively want to squirm. She looked down and away. Again the easy path beckoned -- to follow along and do what she was told and hope someday it would all be okay. That was the subliminal message, the factor X of the hidden curriculum not just of the Edmundstown Charter School but of the town itself. Perhaps even of Democravia.
“I’ll try.”
"More than try. Put in the Corrag effort that we all know you’re capable of. Top shelf stuff. Give it all you’ve got. Do it for us, for the Wildcats. For Edmundstown. Make us proud.”
“Is that all?”
"Yes, that’s all. Share with me, please. And Corrag?”
“Yes?”
“Smile. All the while.”
Corrag got out through the faulty energy panel that zapped her back with a slight jolt. The janitor, Mr. Breen, was already coming down the hall on the beat up old Segway, his laser torch repair tool swaying dangerously against his hip. At this time mid-morning the energy grid constantly experienced minor fluctuations as the wind either rose or fell, and the water desalination plants kicked in up and down the Kaiser aquifer, giving the bigger power users in the area headaches such as energy panel misalignments and nanowall absurdities. Mr. Breen smiled at Corrag as he would at a senior with some insider knowledge of these sorts of problems. Gurgie leaned against the wall and Mathew looked up and down the hall nervously at the river of well-dressed and contented Upper Deck students in their paisley and Kubik-patterned neoprenes with the various interchangeable logos of self-satisfied Democravian memes. There were few other teachers in the Upper Deck. Most of the classes, conducted via upload and lecture, needed only administrators to assist with student work in the study hall blocks. Miss Schilling had only a few more semesters of small class teaching before she would move on in the Axion system to upload lectures in a regional class encompassing the Western and Middle Southern districts.
At the O tank, Corrag fastened the mask to her face while holding her standard issue ExePad tablet in the other hand. The O had a sweet aftertaste. They added something to it, some kind of anesthetic. That was the rumor anyways. And on some days there was a caffeinated mix that heightened the fervor of students about to embark on a school-wide mission, one of the collaborative, experiential pieces. The last one, to Haiti, led by Mrs. Wilson, the head of the PTA, had been a disaster. Seven students had caught new forms of the pulmonary virus that had decimated the Caribbean and South America and had needed long stays at the Beth Israel Xen Kai Hospital in Matamoros.
“So, Corrag. Do you have anything to say?” asked Gurgie.
“Yes, I saw your visual. And yes, Of course I’ll go with you to the Spring Fest. What did you think?”
“Well, you have been acting very strange lately,” said Mathew, eyeballing her with mock augmented focus.
“I’ve had a lot on my mind. I haven’t finished my application essay.”
“Why not?” asked Gurgie. “You can’t be thinking about transferring to the VocAg?”
“I am.”
“Jesus, Corrag. You need to come with us tonight.”
“Okay. I said I would. But more importantly, how do we dress? We’re a team, right? Forget the Vences. Everybody’s going to do that. I have an idea we go as Daisy and Tom and Gatsby. I’ll be Gatsby. I have the perfect idea for a pants suit that my mother used to wear. It’s in a box in the attic.”
“But I thought we had discussed going as Joseph in The Assistant,” said Gurgie.
“No, I was going to be Tobler the Inventor,” said Mathew.
“Oh, that’s right,” said Gurgie, distracted by the sudden thinning of students as the next class began. They walked together towards the cafe. Corrag wondered at how easily Gurgie gave up on the Vences. The changes they all went through were happening way too fast and Miss Schilling was having way too big an impact on their social lives. Outside, a flock of small birds flew in a cloud by the energy panels, distorting and magnifying so as to seem a shade, like a hand drawing down upon the three of them as they walked along.
“The thi
ng is,” said Corrag, thinking aloud. “I like Daisy and Tom and Jay Gatz, whereas I don’t like Joseph. He’s too pleasant ... and passive.”
“Exactly. Just like Gatsby. Only the mask never slips,” said Gurgie.
“Well, I’m not feeling very Chinese. But I am feeling destructive,” said Corrag with a cackle, turning and leering at Mathew and Gurgie.
“Okay. Spring Fest is our last fling at childish role-play. So you want to celebrate that bourgeois trope of creative destruction. Be our guest,” said Mathew.
“I just want to have fun,” said Corrag coldly. “Mathew.”
“Oh, God. Fun. Right, I forgot how important that was to you.”
Corrag’s brows wrinkled. Mathew was upsetting her.
“Doesn’t mean we all feel the same way,” said Mathew.
“You’ll feel just like Miss Schilling wants you to feel, which is to say not feel anything at all. Isn’t that the preconditioning? Too numb to think for ourselves so we take on the augmented way and don’t have ourselves to answer to any more. How convenient.”
Mathew and Gurgie looked at each other, letting their confusion about Corrag’s defiance of the Democravian ethic of obedience show in the glance held between them.
“Corrag. Okay. We’ll go as Daisy and Tom and you can be Gatsby. But we’ll be Daisy and Tom as Walser’s Chinese, as the assistants, and Gatsby will be the Inventor. We’ll turn the two books around.”
“That’s the Gurgie I love the best." Corrag threw her arms around Gurgie and spun in the hall. A teacher, Mr. Aarnits, glared at them through the open doorway of his classroom, and the emosensor directly overhead glowed a warning green.
The crowd outside the Taylor Jabones Civic Center seemed to undulate and throb as the Lyons family portagon pulled up to the curb. Mostly dressed in velvets and vintage chambrays and shades of purple and green, the colors of the Edmundstown Wildcats, purple for the Upper Deck and green for the Lower Hall, the students were an unrecognizable and restless mob in the customary spirit of the Spring Fest. Corrag had mixed feelings about the night. She mainly wanted to dance and forget about the issues confronting her at that moment.
“Good night,” she said to nobody in particular as she stepped away from the open door of the van.
“What time do you expect to be picked up,” said the driverbot, speaking from a juncture of the neckpiece and the swivel-cam head. It was Alana’s voice.
“One thirty, please,” said Corrag.
“Not acceptable. Twenty-two thirty at the latest. We will be at the loading station then. Please be there as well. Mind your manners.”
Mind your manners. That was just like Alana, to remind her of the proper way to behave at a Spring Fest. As if she had not been a rabble rouser before Corrag had been born, one of the late 2020s leading Unoits who had marched on Federation Councils demanding an end to supression of the Vallegos and increasing availability of subsidized mezzopeptide and other corrections to the unenfranchised dwellers of New Canaan, as Democravia had then called itself. Corrag shuddered at the image in her mind of her mother as a young woman just a little beyond her own age.
As she made her way through the sea of bedecked and masked youth of Edmundstown, Corrag kept looking out for the familiar sight of her two closest friends. She had on a mobster fedora over her mass of long curls and a bone white Venetian bauta mask, tight cut Wall Street pants with black neoprene Night Wolf galoshes. A low cut, long, red vintage Hollywood silk coat and in her hands a digital wand-clock with wings finished off the outfit. Somebody jumped into her path with a black Zorro mask and a Spritz gun.
“Who are you?” asked the masked figure.
“No. Who are you?” asked Corrag.
“Your best friend.” There were hoots of laughter as the crowd of booters egged the masked youth on. Corrag pushed by the group, and they sprayed their Spritz guns into the air, letting off the rainbow hues of the plasmic concoction. This caused an outbreak of similar Spritzfire around the pedestrian square in front of the Civic Center. Then the real fireworks began from the roof of the Center, and the crowd went berserk with cheering and shouting. Corrag stopped in her frenetic rush to the entrance steps and watched the waves of exploding color fanning out over her and descending on the crowd from the black night sky. The explosions and the crowd’s reactive shouts of glee merged into a dull throbbing at the back of her mind. Corrag had a flash image of the fireworks she’d seen in the desert at her grandfather Al’s ranch in Sonora. The old man had never been a hand at the consensus and thus remained outside the Democravian orbit until he died. But at his funeral he had been made an honorary recipient of the Arts Benefit Lifetime Award and his books uploaded into the official curriculum of the Augmentation Board, the 14 members from around the world, mostly Republican Homeland and Democravian, who controlled the IPP keys, the core of the Interneural Web, the old INW along whose frequencies ran the entire collective virtual sphere.
Corrag was about to look at her emosponder when she felt a tap on the shoulder and turned around to see two characters from some macabre production of musical theater complete with wigs and vintage paper Chinese umbrellas.
“Where did you get the umbrellas? I love them.”
“You haven’t said anything about the matching boots,” said Gurgie. She pushed out her foot and Mathew rolled his eyes.
“Lizard skin. There was a Yaqui Indian in the family service who made them for my brother and I,” said Mathew. His V mask in the dim light of the fireworks somehow perfectly fit him.
“Oh, you guys are absolutely the best. Shall we go in? These Spritz guns are driving me nuts.”
“Let’s do it,” said Gurgie.
Inside, the event organizers had pumped up the O to maximum levels and the band onstage was putting out a synthesized auralscape that was also simultaneously being relayed along a local intranet. Dancers were plugged into wireless ear clips and gyrating along to the pulsating power chord driven harmonics. Refreshments in the form of fermented Maxergy drinks were being dispensed by generic bots laid on by the Western council, and info-point stands along the perimeter of the hall manned by Democravian council workers were representing the various work sectors, including a recruiting officer of the Democravian Military Defense Wing, a cubicle of mimics and aerobesthetes from the ArtSmile Corps, the VocAg table dispensing samples of hormone replacement snack from local Valley growers and cooperativa pickles, and of course the Daughters of Harmonious Memory, a social organization that looked after orphans and whose members' ancestors had fought in the New Canaanite wars, were flashing images of vintage industries such as the Hollywood cinema, the primitive visualscapes that had once so entranced the older set. Gurgie, Mathew and Corrag stepped along, driven by the sweep of the crowd into the middle of the dance floor where the lights from the emosensors were pulsating the fastest. The band began playing Heaven’s Gate, a classic Spring Fest staple. Dancers jumped together, craning their heads back and pumping both fists in the air to the bass line rocking the hall. They came closer together and then fell back like a human wave, the youth of the Valley celebrating the apogee of the year. The rockers with the Spritz guns, along with the girls, many of them costumed as simple sex workers or in jury-rigged uniforms with the insignia and the classic meme of the HumInt Corps, Ridet Geritur, linked arms on the outside of the dancers and began to circle. And then the choreographed symbolic imagery was lost, subsumed as the dancers spilled out beyond the circumference of the steppers.
When the song ended, Corrag looked around, slowly coming to her senses. She unsnapped her ear clip and felt her way towards the outside of the dancing mob with her hand. The next song increased the intensity, and the circle of Lower Hall booters renewed their boundary walk. Corrag waited for the right moment, a lull in the energy pattern, and broke out through the human line. She walked over to the refreshment valve and slipped on an O mask. Her head cleared and she felt for an instant a sense of euphoria, somehow almost organic, as if she were suddenly light years
away, on a distant moon of her own, with no impinging concerns about the future and what it held weighing her down. She wished she could hold on to the moment. Even better, she wished she could share it with someone.
All the Zorros and Buzzyears and the Hillaries and Eunique Biebers -- they were all kids she would have known from Lightning Leagues or fencing classes or the myriad theatrical productions she’d been in through the grade and middle schools. Corrag found it fascinating that in this sea of familiar yet bizarre anonymity she was free, free in a way that carried an exotic charge of exhilaration. She had overheard parental stories about the dangers of Spring Fest, about kids not being able to distinguish reality from fantasy and jumping from the upper balconies awash in feelings of euphoria and invincibility. This was their first taste of the Augment, after all, of the freedom that came with giving up their childish identities. But Corrag wondered about herself. Would she be truly able to merge with the path and put the Democravian nation’s well being before her own desires? Sometimes she thought she was too enamored of her own thought processes, of the way her mind wanted to dig and scratch its way out of the traps the adult world set. She was a feral creature, a throwback to a more primitive way of life. It didn’t seem to be something she’d inherited from Alana and Ricky, the two of them epitomes in her mind of the deep-rooted and loyal communitarian ideals that ran in her family. Where did she get it, this unhappiness, this habit of solitary thought she’d secretly cultivated in the midst of privilege?
A boy in a uniform, tall, with a purposeless gait, approached from out of no particular direction, from the darkness. His mask was the same as Corrag’s, just a little older, not as shiny in the pulsating flashes of neon, and he stopped in front of her. Corrag looked carefully, noting the moment of recognition with some distance. Nevertheless, her heart skipped a few beats and her mind raced. She didn’t expect this. It wasn’t fair of him to just show up. Without turning, Ben Calder addressed her, staring out at the dance floor.
"I thought I might see you, Corrag.”
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 2