The Place Inside the Storm

by Bradley W Wright

  “The same thing happened with Bao,” Shen broke in. “I had to roll back the update. Alberto did too. But Xel is okay?”

  “Yeah--seems to be,” I answered, running my hand through his fur and feeling his body rumble with a low purr. “He said something about perceiving things differently. I don’t know what that means. I didn’t use the same mod as you two, though. I modded the mod.”

  “What did you change?” Alberto asked.

  Soon we were into a deep discussion of the T91 firmware code. Xel curled next to me on the bed, one ear turned my way as if he was listening in. I had been hacking since I was old enough to read and write. My parents were both programmers. It was the natural language and activity of our family. Except for Zoie--my little sister didn’t want anything to do with writing code. Sometimes I wondered whether I really cared about it myself. Maybe I just did it because it was expected, because I had never really tried anything else. I was good at it though. I knew that. My solution to the problem in programming class earlier had been much better than the one in the book--simpler and more elegant. It didn’t matter though. I was a freshman in a junior level class. They weren’t going to listen to anything I had to say.

  I ended up transmitting my version of the firmware to Alberto and Shen so they could try it out and made a plan to speak with them the next day so we could compare notes. With a quick command, I hopped then over to Dazzled.

  Rosie, my best friend from Oregon, was online. I browsed through her recent feed. There were posts about parties, class trips, a recent outdoor education field trip. Looking at her posts I found myself yearning for home. Not this place, this wasn’t home. Yes, it was colder there, and it rained all the time, and everybody was poor, but it was my real home. PacNW was poor, a rogue cluster with no support from the federal government. Before we moved, my parents were both programmers for the cluster government. My father complained all the time about having to keep the power and sewage treatment plants running with patches on top of patches, both physical and digital. He had jumped at the chance to move south, and my mother had been excited about it too. Xia Yu Corporation was a step up for both of them. They had explained it all, but it still felt like a step back for me. It had never been easy to make friends. The few I had were precious. Suddenly, Rosie’s avatar popped up.

  “Tara! How are you?”

  I felt the tears I had held back earlier begin to roll down my cheeks. “I’m okay,” I answered but my voice was thick with the sob I was holding in.

  “You don’t sound okay.”

  “I miss you,” I said. “LA sucks.”

  ***

  I spent half an hour talking to Rosie, calming down and telling her about the new school, the building where we lived, the few trips we had made on weekends to museums and shopping. Eventually, her mom came home and she had to go. I said goodbye, feeling better but still not great, then settled back and just lay there on my bed, thinking. Leaving the PacNW cluster was not like a normal move. It would be hard to go back. The federal government was fine with people moving out, especially skilled workers.

  They didn’t allow migration back into rogue clusters like PacNW though. I would probably never see Rosie again unless she decided to go to college somewhere outside PacNW and her parents actually let her go. I was picturing us reuniting freshman year of college when a message marked urgent popped up, pulsing silently. I considered ignoring it but decided it might be from my mom, asking me to pick Zoie up or something.

  “Open new,” I said and the text zoomed in. It was a string of numbers, a line break, then another string of numbers. Below that it said:

  freedom and safety

  There was nothing else to the message. I looked at the sender line and it just said anonymous. I had never seen that before. I didn’t even know it was possible. I looked back at the numbers. They were GPS coordinates I realized suddenly. Weird. Maybe it was some kind of joke or marketing campaign.

  “Tara?” my mother’s voice said. “I’m home. Are you in your room?”

  “Close message. Archive,” I said and the message faded away. “In here,” I called.

  I heard footsteps then my mother’s head appeared, leaning into the doorway. She kept her hair short since the move. I was still getting used to it.

  “Resting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you do your homework already?”

  “I only have one assignment. I’ll do it after dinner.”

  “Okay. You all right? Ava told me you covered your biosensor.” Her voice was distracted, and I could see that she was looking at something in her feed. Ava was the house computer. I could never bring myself to call the computer by name. I called Xel by his name, but that was different. I glanced at the woven metal tube on my wrist. There was just a bit of sun left above the horizon and the steel thread gleamed in the light from the window, throwing off tiny rainbows. Rosie gave it to me before I left. All minors in the federalist clusters were required to have biosensors. It was like a tattoo but with functional circuitry. I liked to cover mine up because otherwise the house computer was always telling me my blood sugar level was low or I was dehydrated.

  “Fine. I just want to rest until dinner.” I answered.

  Zoie’s head and torso appeared then, leaning around the doorway too. She was still wearing her black leotard from dance class.

  “Lazy sister,” she said, “Always sleeping.”

  “Shut up, Zoie!” I sat up. “Mom, make her go away.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” my mom said, disappearing from the doorway.

  Zoie’s face lingered for a moment, sticking her tongue out at me, then she was jerked away with a look of surprise.

  I flopped back down on the bed and closed my eyes. Something felt weird about the way my mother had been acting the last couple of days. She wasn’t normally distracted. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking to each other but, when we did talk, she was usually laser focused like she was with everything else she did.

  My father, on the other hand, was always distracted--reading something in his feed or thinking about some problem he was working on. Nothing new there.

  I fidgeted and thrashed, unable to get comfortable.

  “Is there something wrong, Tara?” Xel asked from the foot of the bed where he was curled up.

  I knew he wasn’t really sleeping. He didn’t sleep. But it was part of his programming to act like a real cat. So, he spent a lot of time laying on my bed with his eyes closed.

  “I don’t know what’s up with my mom, Xel. She never used to be too busy to talk to me. It’s almost like there’s something she doesn’t want to talk about. Like she’s avoiding having a conversation.”

  “Interesting,” Xel replied. “In western psychological theory, there is a concept known as avoidance behavior or avoidance coping. It is related to anxiety. Perhaps your mother feels anxious about having forced you to move and leave behind your friends. Maybe she is avoiding speaking with you so she doesn’t have to discuss it.”

  I eyed Xel. He had never offered this kind of opinion before. “That sounds really possible, Xel. I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I answered.

  He looked back at me, blinking his eyes slowly.

  “Dinner is ready. Please come to the dining room.” It was the house computer. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

  “I’ll be back in a while, Xel,” I said, patting his head. “You stay here. Mom doesn’t like it when you’re in the dining room.”

  Xel squeezed his eyes closed again, nodded, and cocked his head to the side, watching me go.

  ***

  “The problem is that the concentration of the droplets is suboptimal...”

  My mother and father were discussing a project at work. My father was on a team working to make Xia Yu’s cloud brightening technology more efficient. I didn’t understand it, mainly because my father never stopped to explain. I looked over at Zoie and saw that she was zoned out, staring at something virtua
l happening behind her specs. I zoned out too, staring at my plate. Half my dinner was still there, uneaten. The idea of putting another bite in my mouth made me feel nauseous. It was instafood. All the right nutrients were there in the right amounts, but it didn’t taste very good. You had to eat it without thinking about what you were putting in your mouth and swallowing. If you concentrated on the food or the flavor at all, it became difficult to continue. My father used to cook real food sometimes when I was younger. He liked to try complicated recipes. My mother never cooked. Now, we ate instafood pretty much all the time, except on the rare occasions when we went out to eat. I got up, scraped the rest of my food into the composter, and put my plate in the washer.

  “I’m going to do my homework,” I said.

  My father didn’t look up, just nodded and kept talking. Zoie didn’t look up either. She was smiling at something, eyes distant. My mother turned her head, giving me a strange look. I couldn’t tell what it meant so I shrugged and continued on out of the dining room. Back in my room I flopped down next to Xel.

  “How was dinner,” he asked.

  “Same as always,” I answered. “More weird vibes from my mom.”

  “Maybe you should ask her about it directly when you get a chance.”

  “That’s probably good advice,” I said, thinking about my mom’s face when I got up from the table. “I will.”

  I spent the next hour working on my homework. I had to write a two page biography of an important scientist. That was all the info the assignment gave. Since starting at PVCSTEM I had noticed that the teachers gave really vague assignments. I didn’t do well with vague so I always asked Xel to help.

  He suggested Margaret Hamilton--a computer scientist who worked on the Apollo space program--and gave me a possible outline. I researched her for a while then quickly stitched all my notes together into a paper. It was eighty percent done. I could finish it tomorrow. I didn’t feel like doing any more. I was in the middle of a good book--an old SciFi novel from the nineteen-seventies. I wanted to just go to bed, read for a while, and then fall asleep.

  “Done with your homework?” It was my mother, poking her head around the door again.

  “Yes. I’m going to get ready for bed.”

  “Okay. Remember, I’m picking you up from school at eleven-thirty for your doctor appointment tomorrow.”

  I looked at her, puzzled. I didn’t remember her saying anything about the appointment before. “What doctor appointment?”

  “It’s just a check-up.”

  “But I just had a check-up before we moved.”

  “They weren’t able to transfer your medical records. You need to see your new doctor. Be at the front desk at eleven thirty, okay?” She was already walking away.

  “Mom?” I called after her but she didn’t answer. I turned to Xel. “Do you see what I mean? She’s acting weird.”

  He looked toward the door. “You should go talk to her, Tara.”

  “I don’t want to right now. I’m going to get ready for bed.” First, though, I pulled up my calendar and checked the upcoming events. There it was--sandwiched between a quiz in math class and a notification that my essay was due by three p.m.--an appointment with someone name Dr. Kimberly Gutierrez.

  I couldn’t figure out how I had missed it before. I took off my specs, dropped them on the desk next to my bed, and got up. “The appointment is there, Xel. Am I losing my mind?”

  “It is common for human adolescents to go through a period of absent mindedness and distraction at your age. There are hormonal effects--”

  “Adolescent!” I said, cutting him off. “Did you just call me an adolescent?”

  Xel blinked at me. “Technically, the age of--” he began, but I cut him off again.

  “Fine. I don’t want to be called an adolescent, though. Can you just say teenager?”

  “Very well.” He seemed taken aback, as much as it was possible for a cat to express something like that, anyway. “I apologize if the term distressed you.”

  “I’m sorry for yelling, Xel. It just seems so clinical.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay. I’m going to brush my teeth.”

  ***

  Ten minutes later I crawled under the covers. Xel was curled at the foot of the bed, eyes closed, purring. I put on my specs and opened the book I was reading. The page scrolled up and I picked up where I had left off.

  The unforetold, the unproven,

  that is what life is based on...

  It was a line of dialogue, one character speaking to another. I thought about that for a moment. It seemed true but it also seemed to have nothing to do with my life. Every day was the same for me, everything predictable. Something unforetold might be nice but I wasn’t going to hold my breath. I shrugged and continued reading.

  Chapter 3

  Escape

  I stepped off the train at McConnell and shuffled along with the crowd, crossing the street and heading toward PVCSTEM. Luckily, the air was clear and there were no pathogen alerts so I was free of my respie at least until the afternoon.

  The day was warm and muggy already. The heat made the stiff fabric of my school uniform feel hot and rough against my skin. My mom said I would get used to it before long and then I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

  She was from California back when it was still called that, before the plagues and floods and the reorganization. So was my father. Neither of them had ever gotten used to the cold and rain in PacNW so I didn’t know how they could say I would get used to the heat.

  “Tara, honey. Good morning.” Renata, the security guard, waved me in and squeezed my shoulder as I passed through the doors.

  “Good morning,” I said, turning to smile back at her as I followed the crowd of other students through the airlock.

  Inside, I pulled up my schedule on my specs and scanned it while making my way to my locker. Math first period, Biology second period, then meet my mother downstairs to go to my appointment. Lovely.

  ***

  “Tara, your turn.”

  I looked up from my tablet where I was carefully coloring the parts of a cell. I had chosen lime green for the cytoplasm. I thought it looked nice but my lab partner Jonas did not seem impressed. He was a new student too--six inches shorter than me with perpetually greasy looking hair plastered to his forehead. He was pointing to the microscope. There was only five minutes left but I tapped a button on my screen anyway and the yellowish cluster of cells under the microscope lens faded in. I stared at the screen for a while, focusing on different parts. Zooming in and out and making notes.

  “Time to pack up class. Put your scopes on the shelf. Wipe down your tables.” Mr. Bhatia’s deep voice reverberated through the lab. Unlike most of the other teachers at PVCSTEM, Mr. Bhatia didn’t seem to like being called by his first name. Everybody called him Mr. B. Jonas took the microscope to the shelf while I wiped down the table. The wipes had a nasty, overwhelming citrus smell that made my head hurt so I touched it as little as possible and carried it to the garbage on the end of my tablet stylus. Mr. B dismissed us with a wave, barely looking up from his desk where he was fiddling with a broken piece of equipment.

  “Bye, Tara.” Jonas was right behind me in the crowd of students squeezing out of the classroom.

  “Bye, Jonas,” I replied over my shoulder.

  I didn’t want to get into a conversation with him. He was into some sort of VR game and talked about it incessantly if you got him started. I understood. I could be obsessive about things and bad at conversation too. Right after we moved, we went out to dinner with a couple of my parents’ new coworkers. They had a daughter my age who went to a different school. I spent the entire meal telling her about Xel and didn’t realize she was totally bored until my mother mentioned it later. That wasn’t a good conversation. Jonas was all right. I didn’t feel like humoring him right then though so I hurried off, walking fast and not looking back.

  I stopped by my locker quickly t
hen headed downstairs. My mother was already there in the lobby waiting. She was seated on the bench by the door, her back straight as the wall behind her. Her clothes were always crisp and perfect looking.

  She stood up when she saw me. “Let’s hurry. I already signed you out.”

  An autocab was parked at the curb outside and the doors clicked open as we approached. I climbed in first and my mother followed.

  “Where would you like to go today?” The car computer had a pleasant, female voice with a slight British accent.

  My Mother gave the address of the Xia Yu Family Clinic and the autocab immediately pulled away from the curb, inserting itself cleanly into the flow of traffic.

  “Under current traffic conditions, your trip should take approximately twenty-three minutes.”

  “Great,” my Mother replied, looking at the clock on the dashboard. “We should be there right on time.” She tapped the contact on her specs and switched to looking at something in her feed. I stared out the window, watching the scenery. She was giving quiet voice commands, dictating responses to work-related messages. I felt like I should follow Xel’s advice and try talking to her but there was a tightness in my throat that stopped me from speaking. I imagined various ways to start the conversation but nothing seemed right. Instead, I just kept watching the buildings pass by outside. So many of the storefront windows were covered--places that used to sell clothing, jewelry, parts for old-fashioned cars you operated yourself. They still had a few manually operated cars back in PacNW but they were outlawed years ago in the CoastSW cluster. Outside of Playa Vista the streets were dusty and barren. The few trees still standing were dead. The few people on the sidewalks and the train platforms moved slowly or grouped themselves in patches of shade. Soon though we reached the outskirts of Santa Monica and things began to look nicer. There were office buildings with palm trees and grass outside, people strolling the sidewalks with young children, restaurants with outdoor seating.