The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  When my mile was done, my treadmill beeped a countdown, but no trainer came over. So I stopped, hopping my feet up awkwardly to the side while the treadmill’s band still spun. When it stopped, I climbed down and sat next to Ilana. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She looked back at me. Two fat tears streaked down her cheeks. I had never seen her cry before, never even imagined it. “No, Mori, I don’t think I am.” Then she leaned closer to me, so our bodies were touching all along our sides, and she whispered, “I’m scared, Mori.”

  “What are you scared of?” I asked.

  A trainer appeared then. “Mori Bloom, your test is complete.”

  “I think there’s something wrong with Ilana.”

  “We’re bringing her to the infirmary now.”

  “Can I go with her?”

  The trainer did not even hesitate: “No.” Then, as if I had already left, she turned to Ilana and extended a hand. “We’ll go get you fixed up now, okay?”

  It seemed the longest moment before Ilana spoke, long enough for flowers to grow, but then she said, “Okay.”

  She didn’t say good-bye or look back. She just let the trainer pull her to her feet, and the two of them left through a side door that I had never even noticed before.

  19

  Julia and I sat on the grass in her side yard. I had my knees pulled up to my chest, arms wrapped around them. Ilana’s house across the street was as still as the summer air around us. “She hasn’t been outside for three days,” I said.

  Julia plucked a dandelion from the lawn and began pulling out its tiny yellow petals, one at a time. “She took a pretty hard fall.”

  “So did you,” I said.

  She pushed a smile onto her lips. “Yeah, well, I’m tough.”

  “So is she,” I said.

  Julia’s smile faltered. “She’s not so great.”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t like her,” I said.

  “I never said I didn’t like her.” Her voice was as flat as dry paint. She plucked three more petals out of the dandelion.

  “But you don’t,” I said.

  The plucked-out petals were in a pile on Julia’s knee. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “She’s weird, Mori. And she doesn’t want to be our friend. She only wants to be with you.”

  “We could do something together. When she finally comes out of the house. We could do something with just us three girls. Like a sleepover or something.”

  “Maybe I’m busy. Did you think of that?”

  “But I didn’t even pick a day yet.”

  “I still might be busy.” She pulled another dandelion from the ground. This time she didn’t bother disassembling it: she just popped the flower right off the stem. “Or maybe I just don’t want to have a sleepover with her, like, ever.”

  I turned my body so I was facing her. The toes of our sneakers touched, and she pulled her feet back. “I just don’t understand,” I said. “She’s really nice, if you would just try to get to know her. You have lots in common.”

  Julia rolled her eyes. “Hardly.”

  “You’re not even trying,” I said. “All I’m asking is for you to try.”

  “You want me to try?” she asked, her voice rising like a roller coaster ready to crest. “Really? You want me to try? How about you? How about you actually try hanging out with the friends you’ve had your whole life? How about you try to hide that you were so excited to leave us, you jumped all over the first new kid who moved into our neighborhood? How about that?”

  “Julia—”

  Her gaze snapped back to mine, and now that she was looking at me, I wished she would look away. Her eyes were narrowed and flashing, like slits of fire trained right on me. “You know how Theo calls you dopey—”

  “He’s only joking with me—”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “But I’m not. You are a dope, but I’ve been your friend anyway, and I’ve tried to help you out, but if you don’t want my help, then fine. Fine by me.”

  She stood and turned away from me right as Benji coasted up her driveway on his skateboard with Theo right behind. Benji took his helmet off and looked at the two of us. Theo stopped his bike. “Whoa, did the north wind just blow through here or something?”

  “It’s nothing,” Julia said. “Just having a little discussion about our missing neighbor over there.”

  Theo and Benji looked at me. They weren’t stupid, and I was pretty sure they could tell that Julia and I had been fighting. Still, I swallowed hard and said, “We were just wondering when she was going to come back out.”

  “She took a pretty hard fall, right?” Theo asked.

  “That’s what I said,” Julia replied.

  I leaned back and stared up at the clouds that puffed across the sky like smoke from a train in picture books. Once Theo had told me that there weren’t really shapes in the clouds, that it was just our brains that were hardwired to see them because we were always trying to make sense of the world around us. “She has to come out today,” I said.

  “Maybe she’s sick,” Theo said.

  “She’s not sick,” Benji said. “Maybe she really hurt herself.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me,” Theo said. He drummed his thumbs on the handlebars of his bike. “She fell down and then the whole row of treadmills lost power?” We had told Benji and Theo about it, several times, but Theo still wanted to go over it again and again.

  “She didn’t fall. She stumbled and then was running again, and then the treadmills stopped,” I told them.

  “It was stupid,” Julia said. “She was stupid. She was trying to keep up with me and she couldn’t, so she fell.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why—” Theo began.

  “She’s just so stinking competitive,” Julia said. “Like about everything. She thinks she’s so great. So strong. So fast. So pretty.”

  “She is,” Benji said.

  I said, “She doesn’t think she’s pretty.”

  Julia scoffed and tossed one of her braids over her shoulder.

  “Well, she does, but she doesn’t think it matters. That’s just the way she’s constructed, that’s what she said to me.”

  “Constructed to make a mess of everything,” Julia said.

  A cloud skirted around the sun, and a crow flew above us.

  “Hey, maybe Ilana being gone—maybe it’s not even because of the fitness test. Her family is all free-spirited, right?” Benji asked. “So maybe they took a spur-of-the-moment vacation or something.”

  The steady pace of Theo’s drumming stilled. “It still doesn’t make sense that the treadmills would break during a test. Those trainers must be in some trouble.”

  “She just sat there afterward,” I said. “Everyone else in your row went for ice or whatever, and she stayed, and they left her for last.” I didn’t tell them that she’d been scared. That something seemed really wrong.

  “So you think maybe it was her fault?” Julia asked, a tinge of hope in her voice.

  “I don’t know,” I told them. And I really didn’t. All I knew was that she was gone.

  “You know, we said we were going to go back to number nine. Why don’t we go today?” Benji said.

  “I don’t know,” Julia said.

  “To explore. And because, you know, honey.”

  “Mmm, honey,” Theo murmured. “That would probably make us all feel better.”

  I sat up. I did want to go back. I wanted to read more of Agatha’s notebooks, and maybe I could find the gardening stuff that Ilana and I were looking for. Then, when she came back out, we could go right to Oakedge. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Julia sighed. “All right, but I have my painting lesson today, so we can’t be in there too long.”

  We rode around the cul-de-sac to number 9. We took the path around back, then clambered down through the bulkhead door and stopped for warm honey before we climbed upstairs. It was so delicious, I took a jar and slipped it into the backpack m
y parents had insisted I start carrying around. It had a first-aid kit in it, including an EpiPen, even though I hadn’t been allergic to the yellow jacket stings, and a phone that could only dial three numbers: Mom’s, Dad’s, and the emergency line. It didn’t even have a touchscreen, just three big buttons, like a child’s toy.

  When we emerged from the basement, I stopped short in the bright kitchen. There were cheery yellow curtains and a deep porcelain sink that shone bright white. Along the windowsill were old-looking bottles in varied colors of glass. I felt like I had stepped into a home I had lived in once before. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  Julia sniffed. “It stinks up here.”

  “It’s been locked up for ages,” Theo said.

  “We could open a window,” I suggested.

  Theo just shook his head. “Let’s look upstairs,” he said. I followed him up to the second floor of the house. There was a narrow hallway with three doors, each a bright white. Theo walked down the hall and opened the door at the far end. It was filled with human limbs.

  I stumbled back. “What is this?”

  Theo stepped into the room. “They’re fake. Early robotics. See?” He picked up an arm and turned it so I could see the metal ball that would go into the socket at the shoulder. Some red and blue wires were laced around it. “Old-school, as Benji would say.”

  “Robotics or prosthetics?” I asked as I eyed something that had a leg-like shape, but was made from an arched swoop of metal and plastic. I had seen something like it on history videos of the Paralympics: runners with these artificial legs bounded along like cheetahs.

  “Look at this,” Theo said. His voice was soft. When I turned I saw he held, cupped in both hands, a tiny device, the size of a fat bumblebee and made of yellow-and-black metal. When he split his hands, it dropped for a moment before rising up and buzzing around the room. It bumped against the window. I laughed and clapped my hands over my mouth, and then it turned and headed straight for me. My eyes widened, but it came to a soft landing on my shoulder. “It likes you!”

  The robot bee stopped humming and seemed to shut itself off as it perched on my shoulder, but I could still feel its tiny insect legs pinching onto my shirt.

  “A robobee!” I exclaimed. “Your mom told me and Ilana about them. And then I read about them in Agatha’s notebook.”

  “You on a first-name basis with her now?”

  She did feel like an old friend. “She was working to save the bees; my great-grandmother suggested she clone bees, you know, older bees that had survived, and then use robobees to teach them how to forage and everything.”

  “It’s a pretty good idea, actually,” Theo said. “Then once the clones learned, they would pass it on to their descendants. It wouldn’t take too long in insects.”

  “Dr. Varden wasn’t convinced,” I said.

  I started to tell him about how Dr. Varden said she was getting tired of manipulating nature, but then Julia called to us from downstairs: “Hey! You have to see this!”

  I tried to remove the robobee, but it was stuck in my shirt. Theo reached over to try, too, the back of his hand brushing at my hair. I saw his cheeks flush a little, and I almost teased him for it, the way he always teased me, but I stopped myself. His fingers tried to loosen the legs, but they stayed firm. “I guess you’ll have to, you know, get it from the inside.”

  “Right,” I said as my cheeks grew hot.

  “Guess you have a new pet.”

  “Guys!” Julia called, more urgently.

  We clomped back down the stairs, our footsteps echoing in the house. Benji and Julia were in the room off the kitchen where there were several file cabinets and then, pushed back against a corner wall, a computer. Not a new one, not at all, but it was definitely recognizable by its flat monitor and keyboard.

  “Boot it up,” Theo said.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Benji agreed.

  I scanned it for a power slide. “Will it even work without the right fingerprint?”

  “They didn’t always use fingerprint scans,” Julia said. She pressed down on a button with a circle that had a small hash mark at the top.

  Nothing.

  “Try some power,” Theo said. He picked up a cord that came from the back of the computer and pushed it into an outlet in the wall—another outdated invention we’d learned about. People used to plug electronics into the wall before wireless electricity.

  “I doubt there’s still power in this pl—” Benji began, but with a groan and a whir, the machine booted up.

  “Should we be doing this?” I asked, then answered my own question: “We shouldn’t be doing this. It’s against the rules. You can’t use someone else’s technology.”

  “They aren’t rules, they’re guidelines,” Benji said. “Anyway, those guidelines are for tech devices. This is—” He waved his hand at the machine that was still grinding to life. “Practically an antique. It’s history,” he said, knowing my soft spot.

  When the machine finally turned on, the Krita logo was on the screen. It was surrounded by tiny icons. Some were pictures with a label beneath: WIRELESS PRINTER, VOIP, MUSIC. But others were files: Bee Records, Bee Research, Humanoid, Utopias—History, Calliope, Old Harmonie, Wrightsville, Citroen, and more.

  “Where do we start?” Benji asked.

  “With us, I guess.” Julia clicked on the file marked “Old Harmonie.” A window opened up with several more folders: Manual, Operatives, Scuttled, Children.

  Julia’s cursor huddled over “Children.”

  “What about the manual?” I asked. None of this felt right to me.

  “Boring,” Julia said. “ ‘Operatives’ sounds intriguing. Are there special secret missions going on here?”

  “Doubtful,” Theo said.

  “Let’s look at this one, then.” She clicked on the file marked “Scuttled.” The window was jam-packed with folders. “I guess they scuttled a lot.”

  “What does that even mean?” Benji asked.

  “Abandoned,” Theo told him. “Like that room full of arms and legs. And that.” He pointed at the bee on my shoulder.

  “Do that one!” Benji said, pointing at a file marked “Artificial Intelligence.”

  When Julia clicked the file open, it was full of subfolders. She clicked on the first one, “Prince Philip.” Inside, there were documents and photos. When she enlarged a photo, I saw my robobee. Then she opened a file called “Specs.” It told of the bee’s development, its size, its weight, and its purpose:

  To lead honeybees to proper sources of nectar and thereby maintain honey flows.

  “Dr. Varden was mad about the bees,” I said.

  The next line read:

  Further study: record memories of processes and insert into honeybee clones. Expected results: clone bees will more quickly learn their roles. They will learn flight patterns and feeding areas. Drawbacks: will only learn specific route, patterns of android bee. Further work needed to push clone bees to adapt and learn for themselves.

  “Whoa,” Theo said. “That’s a few steps beyond what your great-grandmother suggested.”

  “Inserting memories?” Benji asked. “Do bees even have memories?”

  On my shirt, the android bee flitted its wings. “They’re not memories like we’re thinking of. It’s the procedure. How to do something. So, maybe, how to go out to a flower and remove the pollen and bring it back to the hive. It would be like if someone inserted the memory of how to skateboard into your head,” I explained.

  “No need, no need,” Benji said, grinning widely. “I’m a natural.”

  “Natural at falling on your butt, maybe,” Theo said.

  “I wonder where all those cloned bees wound up,” Benji said.

  “This is the scuttled folder,” Theo said.

  “So?”

  “So scuttled means gone. The clones were killed and if there are any more of these android bees, well, they’re probably in the junk heap. They’re scrap.”

 
“Oh,” Benji said as he pet my bee. “Poor little guys.”

  Julia closed the first folder. I scanned the names of the other files: Koko II, Phineas, Victoria, Alana, Andromeda, Gage II, Gage III, Bot2000, DARYL, on and on, name after name. “All of these projects were canceled?” I asked. “I wonder if each one is a different android version of an animal?” Then I reread the names. “Koko II! Ilana and I saw that at the museum.”

  Julia clicked on the Koko II folder, and a picture of the huge robotic gorilla appeared. It looked even more menacing than in person.

  “Ilana and I saw your mom at the museum, Theo. That’s when she told us about the robobees, and about this gorilla. She told us that they taught the robot to communicate. They taught it two hundred fifty words, because that’s how many words a typical human uses, and then it could have pretty simple conversations.”

  “I’m pretty sure I use more than two hundred fifty words,” Julia said.

  “This was what came before chat bots,” I explained.

  “Animal chat bots?” Benji asked. “So cool. I want a chat bot dog. I would name him Cornelius, and he would talk to me about all the skateboarding stuff you don’t want to hear about. It would be so dope.”

  Julia closed the folder, then opened up “Victoria.” When she clicked on the picture, we all rocked back. It wasn’t an animal but a human. Sort of. It wasn’t exactly right, though it was hard to pinpoint what was wrong. She had white skin, and dark hair pulled back from her face with a bright blue headband that matched her eyes. She smiled. Maybe that was the problem. The smile wasn’t quite right.

  “Ugh,” Julia said as she clicked the photo closed. “Creepy.”

  Theo reached past her and said, “Click where it says ‘Problems.’ ”

  “This is silly,” I said. “Learning about all these projects that never went anywhere. They didn’t work. We move on, right?”

  “Normally you’re the one who wants to learn about this stuff,” Theo said.

  I knew he meant the history, but I thought about what his mom had said, how she was interested in animals and artificial intelligence, and how she thought Ilana would be, too. That’s what all these projects were, I realized, more work by Dr. Varden and others on mixing biology with AI. And with this Victoria, it seemed, they were starting to push toward humans. I had a sick, sour feeling in my stomach. Something worse than a hive of wasps was waiting for us in this room.