Jinxed

by Amy McCulloch

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I nod, then turn and start walking in what I hope is a normal manner. They don’t seem to care that I was down in the ravine at all.

  I’ve barely taken ten steps when I hear a snarl behind me.

  ‘Wait, Rex IXX has detected another baku in the backpack.’ The unmasked man strides forward, grabbing my bag and forcing me to stop. Before I have chance to protest, he rips it down off my shoulders. He opens the zip and my beetle baku, still in his packaging, tumbles to the floor.

  My mouth goes dry. I’d forgotten about the beetle. And even though I don’t think I’ve committed any crime, my heart pounds with fear. These guards look deadly serious, and I don’t want to look like I’ve deliberately deceived them. ‘Please – I forgot because I haven’t had the chance to leash the beetle yet – I just got him this morning . . .’

  ‘Her story checks out, Jones,’ says one of the other guards, and my shoulders slump with relief. ‘Receipt from the Moncha Store is stored on the cloud registered to a Lacey Chu. Let’s go. Boss has sent us through another lead.’

  He grunts, tossing the ruined backpack at my feet, and I drop to my knees to scoop the beetle baku back into the bag. The men take off in the opposite direction, running in sync.

  When I touch my face, it’s damp with tears. It doesn’t seem like this day could get any worse.

  ‘LACEY, WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG? I WAS worried . . .’ Mom’s words die in her mouth as she rounds the corner and takes in my tatty appearance. ‘What happened to you?’

  I drop the backpack with a thud on the floor and don’t reply – just groan.

  ‘Let me look at that hand.’ Mom leads me through into the kitchen and sits me down firmly by the shoulders. This is when Mom really comes into her own – she is patient and firm and seems to have this untapped knowledge about all things medical. I have vague memories of her talking about going to medical school, but after Dad disappeared, she’d taken a job working for one of Moncha’s subsidiary offices that provided baku customer service. It’s not her dream job – but it allowed her to provide for the two of us.

  Attending Profectus was supposed to be my chance to help ease her burden and maybe allow her to rediscover some of her passions. But that’s not going to happen now. The rejection stings as much as my hand as Mom unwinds the makeshift T-shirt bandage from my wound. She hisses a breath at the sight of it, then clucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she says, as she disappears into our bathroom.

  ‘Ow!’ I cry out as Mom returns and cleans the wound with an antiseptic solution.

  She turns my palm this way and that. ‘You’ll live,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Any deeper and you might’ve needed stitches. That would have put an end to your intricate soldering days for the summer – what were you thinking?’ She leans forward and pushes my hair off my face, scanning my head for other scrapes or cuts. ‘Are you hurt anywhere else?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I lean back to push her away, my hand throbbing.

  She folds her arms across her chest. ‘Well, good. That means you can explain to me how this happened.’

  I wince. ‘Zora and I ran into Carter.’

  ‘Lacey!’ Mom’s tone is sharp. While she knows a bit about our rivalry, she’s more concerned that I don’t piss off the son of the second-most-powerful person in Moncha Corp.

  ‘What? He and his friends were jerks. Zora got spooked by one of their bakus and accidentally dropped Linus down into the ravine. So I went to get him.’

  ‘Oh honey,’ says Mom, disapproval warring with admiration on her face. ‘And Linus is all right?’

  I pull him out of my pocket to show her. ‘He’s a little bashed up. I’ll go downstairs and take a look at him, but he should be fine. I’m just so mad at those guys. And the fact that Carter got into Profectus and not me? Where’s the justice in that? I’m twice the engineer he is, my grades are always better . . .’

  Mom’s mouth draws into a thin line, any residual admiration disappearing. It’s disapproval all the way, now. I’m sure the V-shaped frown marks at the top of her nose have been caused solely by my obsession with getting into Profectus. She knows my motives are good, but I think the obsession reminds her of my dad . . . and that didn’t end well. All I know is that when I was around five years old, he had some kind of nervous breakdown, leaving Mom and me, never to be heard of again. I don’t know the whole story because I’ve never pressed, but I know my intense drive can be triggering for Mom.

  ‘St Agnes isn’t the end of the world, and you’ll have Zora with you. You can still be an engineer.’

  ‘Just not for Moncha,’ I mutter.

  Her expression softens, and she reaches out to stroke my hair. ‘No, not for Moncha. And if we have to move, we’ll move. Sometimes you have to change your dreams, Lacey. No matter how hard you work, sometimes things won’t go your way.’

  I want to protest, but I also know better. ‘I’m going to shower off and then go to my cave, okay?’

  ‘Okay, honey. But take a plate of food with you. You’ve had a shock today and you need your brain fuel.’

  ‘Not for St Agnes, I won’t,’ I mumble, dashing away to the bathroom so Mom can’t groan at me.

  The heat of the shower scrubs the dirt and leaves from my hair and skin, but leaves me feeling raw. The fact that the choice has been taken out of my hands is what makes it even worse. I sigh. I just have to make an education at St Agnes College my new dream. And if I can’t be a companioneer for Moncha then I’ll be a . . .

  My mind fails to come up with even a halfway decent alternative.

  At least I’ll be with Zora, I remind myself, as the shower water around my feet finally starts to run clear.

  Out of the shower, I throw on an old plaid shirt and some knock-off Lululemon yoga pants, winding my dark hair into a bun to dry naturally. I don’t have a phone to text Zora on, so I shoot her an old-school email on my ancient laptop, telling her I’ve found Linus and I’ll bring him around to her unit tomorrow after I’ve fixed him up.

  She responds almost straight away with a series of ‘Praise the Lord’ emojis. She has a real nostalgia moment whenever we email and fills the screen with as many emojis as she can.

  Heading into the kitchen, I pick up a pot of ramen noodles, nuke them in the microwave and pour them into a thermos, then pick up my backpack while yelling goodbye to Mom. The television blasts the theme song to her favourite show as I shut the door and head to the elevator. I press the button for the basement level.

  It’s time to work.

  The elevator doors open into the underground parking lot, but I’m not there for the cars. Every apartment in the building is allocated its own small, rectangular storage locker. Most people keep bikes, tents or hockey equipment down here, but I convinced Mom to let me turn our locker into my own personal workshop. At first it was like being in a big cage, but I’ve hung so much stuff off the wire mesh fencing, I’ve created a nice, private space. And I almost never see anyone down here. It’s just me and the unwanted clutter. Exactly how I like it. My cave.

  Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett and Steve Jobs may have had their parents’ garages, but Monica Chan and I have our condo lockers.

  ‘When you have the drive to invent, you find the space to make it happen’ – one of my favourite Monica quotes.

  I installed a thumbprint scanner in addition to the normal padlock for extra security. Occasionally it’s buggy and I have to force my way in, but this time I press the pad of my finger against it and it opens easily.

  Home sweet home.

  The place is a Little Mermaid’s grotto of electronic equipment and tools, including the precious soldering iron I’d used to fix Petal upstairs. I have drawers filled with silver wire and screws of all different sizes, PCBs stolen from broken equipment or rummaged from yard sales (we still call them that, even though none of us have yards – it’s mostly people selling unwanted junk on the advertising boards of our building). I have larg
e sheets of thin metal for when I make repairs, rolls of different filaments for my 3D printer, an old TV so I can watch my favourite K-dramas as I work, some computer monitors for Zora to look at code on, and a bookshelf filled with old manuals and scavenged university textbooks.

  In the far corner is a camp bed. Mom doesn’t like it when I sleep down here, but sometimes I work until my eyes droop and there’s no way I can make it to the elevator without nodding off. As long as I’m prepared to grovel in the morning, I can get away with it.

  Above the bed is the cheesy vision board Zora made me put up. It was a school assignment that we took to another level – we’d been tasked with creating a collage of images to define our specific goals for the future. We kept our school ones quite generic and boring, but made special versions for ourselves that were much more precise.

  Mine had pictures of Hong Kong, Tokyo and Seoul – the dream trip I wanted to take after graduating. I had researched train routes, ferries, accommodation, everything.

  It had a photo of a spaniel baku, my dream companion.

  It had pictures of Profectus Academy, of students walking through the huge two-storey height doors, into the hallowed hallways and then graduating as new Moncha employees.

  It had a picture of the research and innovation lab at Moncha, where I dreamed of working as a companioneer.

  And it had a picture of Monica Chan herself, standing, arms folded and looking powerful, signature fringe on point, in front of the next generation of bakus.

  I kneel forward on the squeaky camp bed to take the pictures down – even the ones of the trip. I’d never be able to afford to go now, on a beetle baku owner’s salary. I blink back tears. It’s hard to look at the gaping hole left on the corkboard.

  Taking a deep breath to pull myself together, I dump the clippings in the garbage can and get settled at my scratched-up glass-top desk. I place Linus down on my workstation and pull up the typical schematics for a dormouse baku on the nearest screen. You can find anything on the Moncha-cloud, but most people don’t mess with their bakus as Moncha-approved vets will only work on bakus that haven’t had any unauthorized repairs. Zora, however, trusts me.

  The work takes my mind off Profectus, and it takes me a good hour to get Linus’s tail straightened out, manipulating the metal back into shape with the help of a heated clamp and the soldering iron. He looks almost as good as new. I can’t check the movement or camera until he’s charged, so I leash him to the mains using an old cable of Petal’s. It’s not nearly as fast as leashing it to his owner, but it will work.

  I rub my eyes, the impact of the crazy day finally hitting me. I can’t believe I started the day in the Moncha Store, getting my leash and picking my beetle baku. Feels like a lifetime ago.

  I suppose I should leash my scarab beetle and give him a name so he can start learning my behaviours and downloading my feed from the Moncha-cloud.

  Ringo? Too retro.

  Herbie? Too eccentric.

  Dune? Too geeky.

  I’m stalling, and I know it. I lift the backpack up, groaning at how heavy it is. When it lands on the desk with a resounding thud, I remember the hunk of twisted metal I carried home with me. That’s what’s weighing the pack down. With a lot more excitement than before, I tear into the already ruined backpack, tossing the beetle up on to a shelf, still in his box. I’ll leash and name him later.

  I tip out the crumpled metal, pulling away bits of dirt and leaves that cling to the surface. It has no distinguishable form, but my instinct was good: there is something really valuable here. The metal that isn’t covered in either my blood or scorched by some sort of burn mark is dark as onyx, a deep, rich black that I can almost see my reflection in it. I stare at it without touching it, trying to figure out where to begin.

  The hole has almost torn the thing in two. I can’t figure out what would have caused a ‘wound’ like that. Certainly not being run over by a train, or a falling from a height.

  Finally, I realize that the metal is curled in on itself around the hole – I’m going to have to unravel it to see if there are any parts to salvage. Unfortunately the burn means the beautiful black metal itself is pretty useless and will just end up in the garbage.

  Junk. I wasted all that time and energy carrying home junk.

  No point being delicate with it now. I take the metal in my hands and wrench it apart. It refuses to budge at first and I think about getting a hammer from the toolbox, but then finally it gives.

  I gasp.

  There, tucked into the burnt space, is a face.

  NO QUESTION ABOUT IT: IT’S DEFINITELY a face. The eyes are open, one lid dented, the nose is squashed and pointing off to one side, but its little triangular ears are in almost perfect condition.

  It’s the ears that get me. The rest I might have written off. But those ears are perfect. They’re a level up in design I haven’t seen before, with tiny filaments spun out into simulation fur, soft but strong, and most likely vital sense receptors just like they are in real cats.

  That’s what this hunk of metal is. A cat baku.

  A very expensive cat baku, if the quality of the materials are any indication.

  I run my fingertips over the ears, half-expecting them to twitch in response. But they’re lifeless.

  Now that I know what I’m looking at, the crumpled heap makes much more sense. My blood is on the tail – that’s what sliced my palm when I was down in the ravine. The gaping, scorched hole is on the right side, where the ribcage would be. Also, where a lot of key tech would be stored. Maybe in real animals it makes sense to have the majority of the ‘thinking’ tech in the head, but that’s not how it works with bakus – the motherboard is in the main body, not the brain. It’s a shame, as that probably means the poor thing is unfixable.

  My eyes widen as my fingers run over the cat’s broken body, gentle now as if I were diagnosing a real animal. The tech on display in front of me is unbelievable. I can barely stop turning it over and over in my hands, finding something new to marvel at each time. The metallic strands that cover its body are so thin they have the smooth texture of real fur. As I attempt to follow the connections down through the body, I can see that each one of them would be charged with gathering different types of data – maybe weather conditions, or solar energy, or measuring information from its owner – like resting heart rate or core internal temperature. A lot of bakus have these sorts of capabilities, but I’ve never seen them encased in such an elegant shell.

  I swallow and take my hands off it, placing my palms on the glass. Someone must be really missing this baku. I can’t help but wonder how it ended up down near the train tracks . . . or how it got such a huge hole in its side.

  I bite my lower lip. I should really return it to a Moncha Store so they can run any tests to see who the owner is. I could go in the morning.

  Or, a naughtier voice in my head says, you could wait to see if anyone comes looking for it. If there’s still a functioning tracking beacon within the baku’s shell then someone will arrive to claim it. If not . . . then who would know? It’s as good as mine, just the same as any of the other tech I’ve scavenged.

  My guilt temporarily set to one side, I get to work.

  For the next couple of hours, I clean the baku up, scouring off the scorch marks with a wire sponge and wiping off dirt and dust that has collected around the metallic strands of ‘fur’. Every now and then, I gasp. I keep uncovering tiny, beautiful details in the machine’s bodywork, elements with an impeccably smooth finish I know couldn’t have been accomplished by a machine. No, someone made this by hand. Crafted it. Soldered and manipulated the metal and electronics with the skill of a sculptor. I feel like an apprentice studying the long lost work of a master.

  ‘Got something good in there, kiddo?’

  I almost leap out of my chair at the sound of the deep male voice. But I instantly breathe a sigh of relief. It’s only Paul. He looks the part of a scary intruder – he’s got a scraggly grey beard and
a ruddy, often grease-stained face, with piercing bright blue eyes that gleam out from beneath the bushiest eyebrows I’ve ever seen. But he’s harmless. He’s my fellow basement tinkerer, hobbyist DIY-er and cave-dweller, always pottering around and fixing things other people throw away. Old technology that they have no use for. He’s got the best collection of telephones that I’ve ever seen. He even has an old fax machine. Positively ancient.

  Sure, he scared the living crap out of me the first time we met, sticking his chubby fingers, blackened by dirt and calloused from hard work, through the holes in my wire mesh cage and giving it a shake.

  He says he did it to get my attention, since calling my name didn’t seem to work. I get it. I dive deep into the zone when I’m working, and it’s almost impossible to drag me back to the land of the living. With my safety goggles and headphones on, the rest of the world disappears. It was that focus, laser-like intensity, that was supposed to get me into Profectus. Oh well.

  Paul and I are comrades in engineering. Still, I find myself turning my back on him as he peers in, blocking his full view of the broken cat baku. I’ve overlooked some of his . . . less than legal, say, DIY jobs, the things I’ve seen gathered in his locker that I know don’t belong to him, so I’m sure he wouldn’t breathe a word. But my body is tense and defensive of my find.

  I feel protective of it.

  ‘Oh, just a bit of junk I found on the street, you know how it is.’

  ‘Sure do.’ His lemur baku climbs up the wire fencing and peers in. George is a pretty advanced baku for a guy like Paul to own – level 4, at least – but he won’t tell me what his job was at Moncha before his accident. Paul only has one arm. I assume that George was his upgrade baku once he got on disability. ‘That’s why I need a baku with opposable thumbs!’ is his long-running joke.

  ‘Well, I’m turnin’ in for the night. You need anything?’ We often remind each other to do normal things – like eat and drink. Tinkerers understand.