“Oh, of course, you want to check it and be the one to tell us. Lord it all over us. Maybe your parents should dampen your selfishness.”
“Hey,” Benji said, trying to step between us. “That’s enough.”
Outside, the safe-in-place siren still moaned over and over again. I felt the phone slipping from my hand. Julia’s arm flew up and swung back straight toward Benji’s head. He ducked, but the phone still caught his ear on its way by.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He cupped his ear in his hand.
Julia was already across the room, chasing the phone that fell with a resounding thud near the back door. I gasped. My dad was going to kill me, plain and simple. I put my hand on Benji’s arm. “Are you okay?” I asked again.
“I’m fine.” He lowered his hand and revealed a bright red ear. “Just a little ringing. Nothing so small as a phone can take me down.” He forced a laugh.
“It’s barely scratched,” Julia said, holding the phone up. “It might not even be from the fall. It could have already been there.”
“It wasn’t already there,” I said. “And it’s not just a little scratch.” I could see the crack across the phone’s screen even though I was several feet away. I felt my stomach churning. I turned back to Benji. “Want me to get you an ice pack?”
“No.” He looked down at the floor. “I want to hear what it is.”
“Mumps,” Julia said flatly.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Ilana cleared her throat, ready to tell us, I supposed, but Julia spoke first. “Are all of those bumps from the bees?” Julia pointed at my arms.
“Yes,” I said. But I looked down at my arms, at the faint red bumps that were still there. I didn’t know if they were all from the bees. Not really. I wrapped my arms across my chest. “Do mumps even have a rash?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we look it up?” She started typing into the phone.
“Give it back, Julia,” I said.
She didn’t. She focused her eyes on the screen, her expression getting darker and darker, and then she said, “Oh, no.”
“What?” Benji asked.
“It says that complications include swelling of the brain or of the tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord.”
“That’s meningitis. It’s saying this can lead to meningitis,” Benji said, his voice cracking. “Do you know how they test for meningitis? A spinal tap. They stick a big needle into your spinal cord and pull out the fluid.”
“Benji!” Theo exclaimed. “None of us has mumps.”
“How do you know?” Julia demanded. “It says you can be contagious before symptoms even show up, so you could have it and not know it and be spreading it. And it can be two weeks before symptoms even appear.”
Theo rubbed his temples. “Wait, we aren’t thinking about this logically.” He took a notebook and a pencil out of his pocket and began to draw the molecule-like map of Old Harmonie that we were all so familiar with: the center city with spokes coming out leading to each village, then each street. “They have at least three cases, and they can know where those people live and work, so what they have to do is trace where they would go. Like if they live over in Fruitlands and then go to work in Center Harmonie, then they would look at who they work with and where each of those people lived.” He squinted his eyes shut. “The lockdown is so that those of us who haven’t been exposed won’t be. It doesn’t mean that the disease has already spread all over—they’re doing this so it won’t. It might not even be anywhere near us.” He circled the villages on the opposite side of Center Harmonie from us.
Julia put her finger down on the circle that represented our village. “But it could be right here. I mean, maybe it was even your mom who brought it in.”
“What?” Theo asked.
“Your mom was out there to get your special, perfect cake. Maybe she caught something.”
“Julia!” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Julia said, tossing a braid over her shoulder. “You all know it’s true. If it’s something really bad, it had to have come from outside, and Theo’s mom was just out there mixing with regular people in their cities just so he could have that stupid cake.”
“Statistically, that’s not very likely,” Ilana said. “There must be a hundred people who go out of Old Harmonie each day to do their work.”
“Right,” Theo agreed. “Anyone who has been outside, or come in from outside—they could be the patient zero.”
Julia sucked on the end of her braid, then let it drop. “What if someone snuck in?” she asked. “Our fences aren’t very strong. Someone could be sick and they could’ve snuck in and are infecting everyone.”
“There’s no way a stranger could just walk around Old Harmonie infecting people,” I said. “And why would someone want to do that, anyway?”
“To try to find medicine, of course!” Julia said.
“Mori’s right,” Theo said. “If someone did sneak in, they would’ve been caught right away. Then maybe there would’ve been one of these lockdowns for an outsider, but it would be over quickly. No, if this came in from the outside, it had to have come in through the gates.”
Benji’s eyes grew wide. “The gardeners! The ones who were pulling out Mr. Merton’s old rhododendron before Ilana moved in. What if they had it and they spread it? We could all be infected!”
“Did you go over and let them sneeze on you?” Theo asked.
“Of course not,” Benji said.
“Then how would you be infected?”
“Diseases can change,” I said. “They’re really smart, actually. They mutate and adapt to take advantage of the human body.” I was ready to tell them how the influenza virus was especially good at mutating in order to find new ways to get onto animal cells, but from the looks on their faces, I could see this was not the right time for that story. “Anyway, it’s kind of cool, but, then again, not exactly.”
“Really not awesome,” Benji said. “Maybe we should go to my house. My mom is home. If one of us gets sick I want there to be an adult around. Some diseases can kill you in a matter of hours. They just overtake you and, like, the next thing you know, your skin is falling off.” He rubbed his hand gently over his ear.
“It won’t do us any good to panic,” Theo said. I studied his face, trying to determine if he really was this calm, or if he was just trying to reassure the rest of us. His face was still, but there was a little twitch at the corner of his eye. “Benji already got hurt and we almost broke Mori’s dad’s phone. This is getting out of hand. We should just play that card game or watch TV or something.”
Julia replied as if Theo hadn’t spoken: “There are all sorts of workers that come in from outside. Any one of them could have brought the disease. That’s why we shouldn’t let so many people come in. Or go out. It’s not safe out there.”
“They’re supposed to screen them, aren’t they? And the decontamination showers?” Benji asked. He rocked forward. “Just so this sort of thing won’t happen?”
It was true that anyone who came in from outside, even just to do a simple job, had to be pre-screened and then got a medical scan each time they came onto the grounds, plus the awful decontamination showers. But like I’d told my friends, diseases are tricky. They want to survive, and so they figure out how. If Krita wasn’t aware of a particular disease profile, it might be able to slip past the systems.
“That’s why I don’t think it was an outsider,” Theo said. “They have more intense screening than someone from here who goes in and out all the time.”
“Like your mom,” Julia said. “Or Mori’s dad.”
“My dad doesn’t have mumps,” I told her.
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. If it’s been here for two weeks, it could be everywhere. We all could have it. And then what?” Julia asked.
“Most people who get mumps make a full recovery,” Ilana said.
“Except Mori just said that diseases can morph or whatever�
�so maybe this one is more deadly. I want to know who has it, where they work, and what village they live in. They should be sending everyone a message with that information.”
“They can’t just give out those details,” I said.
“Why not?” she shot back. “Anyone who has it should be quarantined and their house needs to be, like, totally cleaned out or whatever. And anyone they came in contact with needs to be told. It’s to keep us all safe. That’s why we live in here. We follow the rules and we stay safe and we don’t end up with a disease taking out half the city.”
“But how does it spread so fast out there? Outside the fences?” Ilana asked. She wasn’t looking at me; her gaze was still on the cards spread on the table in front of her, but I knew she was talking to me. “When there’s an outbreak, don’t they have lockdowns, too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They do things differently out there. It’s a lot more chaotic. They don’t have all the rules and the precautions in place like we do.”
“Don’t they have vaccines?” she asked.
“Sure, for most things. But some people choose not to get them out there.”
Ilana tucked her knees up to her chest. “So they have different rules outside the fences. Can’t we help them?”
“This is so not the point right now,” Julia said, exasperated.
“We do help them,” I said. “We have, like, school supply drives at the beginning of every year. And they get our old textbooks, and—”
“I mean really help them,” she said.
“We can’t force them to make good choices,” Theo said.
Then her voice started to rise. “Do they have the thirty percent enhancement? Or latency?”
We all just looked at Ilana. I’d never seen her lose her cool before, not even with the yellow jackets. Julia tugged on one of her braids, and Benji rubbed his ear again.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, maybe some of the surgeries—”
“Probably no artificial retinas,” she said. Now she did look at me. Right at me and through me so intensely that I thought my heart might explode.
“Ilana,” Theo said, his voice calm and adult-sounding. “Krita tries to help the world, but it starts at home, with the Krita families. We can’t help others until we protect ourselves.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair, is all,” she said. “They’re out there and we’re in here.”
“That’s what Theo is trying to tell you: we’re here because our families work for Krita,” Julia said.
“Right. Your families work for Krita. Your parents or your grandparents.”
“People can apply,” I said. “People can get in that way. Like your parents, right, Benji?”
“My mom did,” he said. “She was working for a different company outside and came up with this patentable idea—don’t even ask me to explain it—and she sold the patent to Krita and part of the payment was moving here. That was before I was born, though.”
“So you didn’t have to apply,” Ilana said. Her eyes were flashing. “None of you did.”
“You didn’t have to apply, either,” Theo said.
“That’s true,” she said. Her body stilled.
And then none of us said anything.
17
It was Benji who finally broke the silence. He turned the television on and found a special behind-the-scenes program about this celebrity couple, Zane and River. At first it kept getting interrupted by messages telling us that we were in the midst of a safe-in-place—“As if we didn’t know,” Theo muttered—but the warnings came less and less frequently. It didn’t make much difference, though. None of us were really watching. It just gave us something to look at instead of one another.
KritaCars arrived to take my friends home. Mom returned to the house shortly after, but Dad stayed at the central offices. “It’s fine,” Mom said as she poured herself a glass of lemonade. “Everything is fine.”
What choice did I have but to believe her? She told me that mumps wasn’t even all that serious.
“So why did we need to be in lockdown?” I asked.
“The vaccinations aren’t one hundred percent effective and we want to keep everyone safe.”
“What do you mean?”
She pushed a strand of her dark hair out of her face. “What matters is we’re taking care of it. Don’t worry.” But as she spoke, she looked out the picture window toward the street. Flocks of KritaCars were driving around dropping people back at their homes.
A moment later a bot rolled up to our door. “In accordance with Krita Corporation, we are scanning all community members.” It blinked its black eyes first at me and then at Mom. “Thank you for your cooperation. You are clear.” And then, silent as the wind, it rolled away.
“Does that mean we don’t have it?” I asked.
“Yes, honey.”
“I need to show you something,” I told her. In the kitchen, I took Dad’s phone out from under a stack of magazines. “He forgot it and we were looking at it to try to learn more about the mumps and we dropped it and so—I’m sorry.”
“Honey, it’s okay.”
“But we used someone else’s tech. That’s a basic rule.”
“Some days we make exceptions. You all were scared and alone. It’s understandable.”
Somehow the forgiveness was more frightening than the lockdown itself.
“It’s late,” Mom said. “I’ll clean up. Why don’t you go to bed?”
It wasn’t really a question or even a suggestion. I gave her a hug and then walked upstairs.
My bed was lofted and had a wide window alongside it so I could look out at the trees. I watched the gray clouds move against the black sky, fast like on TV when they want to show you that time is passing.
I wasn’t tired at all. The day kept playing over and over in my head like a broken movie.
I read more from Dr. Varden’s notebook. I hoped there might be something about my great-grandmother, like how I wrote about the things my friends and I did in my journal. That night I had resorted to a bulleted list:
•Safe-in-place drill (aka “lockdown”). We were in “the woods” and we all came to my house (WE = Ilana, Julia, Benji, Theo, and me).
•We cracked Dad’s phone.
•We were going to play a card game but we never did.
•Mom said not to worry about the mumps. Sometimes when she says not to worry, it makes me worry more.
•I don’t think Julia is ever going to forgive me and I don’t know if I’ll forgive her.
It wasn’t a very good entry, but if I ever did lose all my memories, maybe this wasn’t even a day I wanted back.
Dr. Varden’s journal seemed less concerned with being able to re-create her days. Maybe that wasn’t the reason they kept journals back then. I knew that scientists kept research logs, and some people in olden times wrote them just to remember things for themselves or work through their thoughts. I flipped through the notebook to find where I’d left off.
Just as a hive works together for the common good, so, too, can people, given the proper training and structure. Education and rewards would be key, perhaps even a lack of knowledge of the system. Humans are, after all, by nature rebellious against tight structures. Perhaps as we have bred Italian bees to be more docile, we could breed our humans to be more cohesive.
Dr. Varden wrote more about the genetic changes she was trying with the bees in order to keep them alive. And then Baba appeared again:
Lucy has an idea that might work. It’s a mix of cloned and robotic bees—where the robots teach the clones how to behave. She tells me that Vijay Kumar at the University of Pennsylvania and those working on the robobees project at Harvard have had some luck with robotic hives—individual droids that react to the needs of the group. But they are not natural in appearance or essence. They are shadows of the real thing. Which is not to say the logic behind the programming would not be useful.
That was what Ms. Staarsgard
had been talking about at the museum: the robobees that could act as one. Still, I wasn’t sure if Dr. Varden was talking about the bees or still ruminating on humans. It was wistful, I thought, to want humans to be other than how they were. I mean, you could ache and ache to be different from yourself, but there wasn’t much you could do about it. Like how I’d wanted to go into number 9, but was never bold enough to do it until Ilana said she would come with me. I just wasn’t a very brave person.
Or the world out there. Ilana said it wasn’t fair that we had things that they didn’t. It would be great if everyone had the safety and the technological advances we have here. It wasn’t just us keeping other people out. Not everyone would buy into the rules. Not everyone wanted to fight the chaos. And Theo was right, you couldn’t force them. And that was the nature of human society—chaotic and cruel, unless you had safeguards in place like we did in Old Harmonie. Maybe that’s what Dr. Varden was getting at. Old Harmonie is a place where we work for the common good.
I am growing weary—and wary—of all these manipulations, but Lucy says we must try.
I flipped back to the cover of the notebook. The date written in Dr. Varden’s neat hand said it was from the year before she left Old Harmonie, which meant that she and Baba had still been friends right up to the end, or close to it. But she also said she was feeling tired of the manipulations they were doing on the bees, the changes that Baba was pushing. It wasn’t so different from the latency, I thought, tinkering around and trying to get things just right.
Outside, a cloud passed over the moon, and downstairs, I heard a door open and close as my father came home. My parents spoke to each other in soft tones, too quiet for me to hear the words, though I thought I heard my name. Probably that’s when they decided to keep me home for another three days, just in case.
“In case of what?” I asked when they told me in the morning. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sun was already shining and the sky was a gorgeous blue without a single cloud. It would be a perfect day for checking on Oakedge.
“In case one of your friends happened to have been exposed.”
“All my friends were here with me. And then the scanners came around to check everyone. If they were sick, they’d be in the hospital.”
The Firefly Code Page 12