The Mind Virus

by Donna Freitas

  I turned and saw Rain walking up the beach.

  “King Rain and Queen Skylar of New Port City,” the girl affirmed.

  The boys laughed, but their laughter was uncertain.

  I frowned. I didn’t want to be queen. I didn’t want to be anyone. Not anyone important.

  But Rain—Rain would make a good king.

  I walked away before he could reach us.

  3

  Ree

  stuck here

  I GLARED AT my mother. “You should’ve let me unplug while I still had the chance.”

  She couldn’t hear me, or was refusing to. My mother was three Cocktail Apps in as she sat on our terrace, which overlooked Main Park. She’d been Cocktail Apping a lot, ever since what happened to Char, and doing it by herself, which we were always getting warnings against on Reel Time. Apparently Cocktail Apping by yourself is a sign of antisociality, which was a no-no around these parts. Plugging in was supposed to reconcile the divide between real and virtual by making everything all virtual, all the time, and alleviating the anger and frustration people felt when they were still in their real bodies and always staring into virtual space, ignoring everyone else around them.

  Well. Liars.

  The virtual government was full of them.

  I should know.

  It was a government official who whisked me home the day that Char disintegrated, and who offered my mother and me a lifetime of unlimited downloads if we complied with two little directives—to which my mother agreed because all she cares about are App fixes. The two minor compliances that government wanted from us?

  1. That we stay quiet about Char.

  2. That we don’t leave our apartment until the government gives us the okay.

  What’s more, the “staying quiet” included mind-chatting.

  As in, no mind-chatting.

  We were informed of this teensy detail as though it was no big deal, as if it was totally normal and utterly ordinary for the government to turn off our mind-chats. Right.

  “No way are we agreeing to this!” I shouted that day, as I watched my mother’s head bobbing like she’d downloaded a Bobblehead App for children. But she barely even heard me. She was too busy taking in the virtual riches the government official was promising us if we stayed mum about what I’d witnessed in the park. “I am not letting us be bought! Mom!”

  “Shhhhh! Ree! I did not raise you to be rude.”

  “Yeah, you raised me to drown my mind in only the priciest of Liquor Apps,” I yelled, angry and helpless, since there was nothing I could say to my mother that would convince her that she was not doing the right thing. I was defeated the second this government lady—“just call me Mrs. Farley,” she’d said, complete with a disturbing fake smile—started filling my mother’s account with more capital than she’d ever dreamed of having, and we were well-off already. My mother’s eyes literally had capital signs floating in them, and they began dancing around her head, too, having a party, chinging and changing like an old-fashioned cash register.

  “Ree,” my mother had protested, but weakly. She was too busy focusing on the capital dance-athon going on in front of her face.

  I turned to the government lady. “Are you paying everyone at the park off like this? Because plenty of people saw what happened to Char! It wasn’t just me!”

  The government lady turned to me. “That’s not for me to discuss,” she said simply.

  As though Char turning to ash before my eyes was simple.

  As though this happened all the time.

  Then again, what if it did?

  The thought that it could, that maybe this wasn’t the first time, that maybe this was the government’s MO around—what was it the lady called it when my mother answered the door? Char’s “unfortunate disappearance”? As though Char had wandered off somewhere and not practically suffocated and screamed her way into virtual oblivion. Maybe I wasn’t the first person whose family they offered a lifetime supply of free downloads.

  A shiver rolled through my code.

  My skin flashed blue with it before returning to its normal Caucasian 4.5.

  I stepped between my mother and Just-Call-Me-Mrs.-Farley. “You may be able to buy my mother with Apps, but you can’t buy me!”

  My mother was still sufficiently lucid at that point to snap, “My daughter can be bought, I promise you. Now have a nice day and thank you for bringing Ree home.” She shoved Mrs. Farley out the door before she could take back the lifetime supply of downloads.

  That was nearly six months ago.

  I’d been trapped here with Mrs. Lush, aka Mom, ever since, totally unable to mind-chat, totally unable to communicate with anyone I know.

  Maybe my friends at High School 4.0 thought I was dead.

  I went to the edge of the terrace and leaned over the side, so far that my legs lifted off the ground and I teetered precariously. My feet were in the air and my torso was angling toward all the guys and girls strutting around the park, showing off their fancy downloads, like normal people my age who’d just gotten out of High School 4.0 for the day.

  Was I worried about falling and crashing to the ground on my head?

  Oh no.

  There was an electric fence around our apartment courtesy of the government.

  Aka, the government lady was just being polite when she asked for our compliance. What she really meant was, “You and your mother are now prisoners of the state because you know too much information. Here, have some free Apps for your troubles!”

  Thanks a lot, government lady!

  Thanks a lot, Emory freakin’ Specter!

  At first, I didn’t believe it. Could they really imprison us like that? Would they?

  But then I started testing the boundaries of the apartment, pushing at them. I could go into the hallway outside the front door, but only by about two yards, just to the edge of our neighbor’s place, before a tingling would start in my code. The farther I tried to go, the more it became electric.

  Electric like it would electrocute me.

  You know, like zap me to virtual death.

  Like I was some dog inside a fence surrounding a yard.

  In the beginning I’d assumed I could just push through that painful buzzing somehow, that it wouldn’t be pleasant, but that it wouldn’t kill me either.

  Wrong!

  It didn’t kill me, obviously, but there came a point where the world just stopped. I couldn’t go any farther into the hallway, any farther into the City outside our apartment, because the electricity racing through my code began to burn like lightning and I wondered if I really would die some terrible death like Char. I kept pressing my hand into the edges of it, like there might be a hidden hole or a way through, but eventually, if I pressed far enough it would propel me backward.

  Once I figured out my mother and I were trapped, that we weren’t just being nice staying home a la the government’s request, I went a little crazy. It didn’t even matter that I’d spent so much time lighting up my code with electricity that I’d come away with my virtual skin blackened like I’d downloaded a Barbecue App to my face. It didn’t matter that I was gasping, nearly unable to breathe in the Atmosphere 6.0.

  I had to get out, whatever the cost.

  So I ran onto the terrace and stretched my hand over the railing.

  At first there was nothing, and the breath seemed to return to my virtual body.

  I stretched my hand farther.

  And there it was—that tingling again.

  I leaned over the side and felt the tingling intensify. Farther and farther I went, and the tingling became a burning like before. Steam poured off my skin. In a moment of desperation and delirium, I climbed up onto the railing, balancing there, feet curled like a bird’s around it, arms wide, fingers stretched into the atmosphere.

  I closed my eyes.

  Then I stepped off the edge.

  There was some sort of electrically charged net around the terrace and I fell right into it, a
fly caught by the government spiders’ invisible web, suspended there until it zapped me unconscious. At some point, I guess my mother came out of her stupor and pulled me back onto the terrace. When I woke I was staring up at the moon and the stars, lying on the ground. The App World had just switched seasons to the Spring Night Sky, and the Big Dipper was winking straight overhead. My virtual skin was gray and still smoldering orange in places.

  Right now, at this very moment, my mother had moved on to her fourth Cocktail App of the day, drinking her lunch like always. Palm trees shaded her lounge chair and the fake blue of pool water splashed her legs. She must have downloaded a Piña Colada, one of those special enhanced cocktails that came with the atmosphere included, a vacation and a drink all packed into one pricey App.

  “Might as well enjoy it, Mom,” I said, echoing what she kept telling me over the last few months, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me or would ignore me if she did.

  Ever since the throwing-myself-from-the-terrace incident, I’d stopped trying to escape.

  Well. That’s not exactly true.

  I was biding my time, testing alternative ways out of this prison, ways out via the Gaming Apps, seeing if any of them led me to another place in the City. It was known to happen. It was one of the glitches in the fabric of our world.

  The palm trees rooted around my mother’s chair began to fade, along with the splashing of pool water. I watched as she called up her personal App Store.

  She must have been imagining a European vacation.

  Cocktail Apps in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and even the Colosseum swirled around. Her head lolled left and right. She laughed happily, her finger hovering between some sort of fancy cathedral and what looked to be one of those crazy houses in Barcelona, by that nutty architect—what was his name? Gawdi? Gaudí? I was almost impressed that my mother had moved beyond palm trees and fake blue pool water to something with a little cultural value, when her attention and mine was caught on a new App that appeared, hovering right between her eyes, steady and confident and irresistible. It glittered and sparkled, an icon in the shape of a present that beguiled like no other App I’d seen before.

  Except one.

  That day that Char . . .

  “Mom, don’t!” I yelled, and ran to her. I yanked her virtual hand away before she could touch it.

  She shrieked and finally came out of her drunken stupor to look at me, to really see me standing there, my fingers curled around her thin bangled wrist.

  “Insolent girl,” she shouted. “Get your hands off me!”

  I let her go and jumped back. I stood there, gaping at her.

  My mother opened her mouth to say something else. I could see her white pearly teeth, nearly glowing from the Dental Whitening App she downloaded each morning. But then her lips closed tight and her face went slack. She passed out in the lounge chair, the liquor finally sending her code into automatic shutdown.

  The Apps from her App Store popped out of the atmosphere.

  The poison one, the one that had ended Char, disappeared along with the rest.

  For now, my mother was safe. We were safe.

  But for how long?

  4

  Skylar

  body snatchers

  I STARED UPWARD.

  My stomach churned.

  A wide banner was draped across the library entrance.

  REFUGEES GO HOME, it said, in big block letters.

  The place was bustling, full of Keepers moving in and out of the grand building, running up and down the marble steps. Children played on and around the sea monster statues on either side of the entrance, laughing and shouting. People sat on the stairs, their chins tilted toward the sun, taking in the warmth and the light of the morning, now that the rain from the night before had stopped. It reminded me of my first day out in the Real World, when I’d snuck out of the Keeper’s mansion and come here to find Rain and ended up seeing the New Capitalists marching down the street with their big black boots, looking for some girl, looking for me. Things had changed since then. New Port City was full of activity lately, the dark sense of dread and division that Jude’s people had hung over everything and everyone finally gone.

  Replaced by a new kind of dread and division. For the refugees.

  The banner flapped in the breeze.

  I rode my bicycle here as often as I could to check on people camped out in the parks and vacant houses. Each time I visited, there was more graffiti in the street, on the sidewalks, everywhere I turned.

  YOU ABANDONED US. DON’T EXPECT FORGIVENESS.

  GO BACK TO YOUR APPING LIFE.

  DOWN WITH APP WORLD CITIZENS.

  THE REAL WORLD DOESN’T WANT YOU HERE.

  Then, the worst of them, or, the worst in my opinion:

  THIEVES! BODY SNATCHERS! YOUR BODIES ARE OUR BODIES TO SELL!

  After Jonathan Holt first announced the borders were closing in the App World, there had been virtual slogans that people chanted in the streets, full of celebration and the accompanying relief about not having to support Singles like me anymore. Wards of the state, dependent on charity. That day seemed like a million years ago. Now the App World refugees were dependent on us to take care of them, to find them homes, to help them assimilate back into real life, to learn to do the most basic things so they could care for themselves. It’s amazing what people forget. And it’s amazing how difficult it can be to reteach the body the simplest of simple tasks. Or to learn to walk and talk and read when you’ve been plugged in since birth.

  I took a deep breath.

  Right below my feet, scrawled on the sidewalk in the chalk that the children used to play, was the simple phrase YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE in a bright, angry red.

  Facilitating peace between the refugees and the longtime citizens of New Port City was proving incredibly difficult. We’d all known it wouldn’t be seamless. But it was shaping up to be far more problematic than anyone had predicted.

  A gust of wind whipped at the banner and it snapped loudly.

  It was true, the refugees were packing this city, nearly tripling the population and well outnumbering the port’s original residents. But for now, the refugees were keeping to themselves, staying away from the city center where the Keepers socialized and worked. Maybe everyone had grown to like the emptiness of their city, the quiet and manageable size of the population before the recent exodus from the App World. They certainly didn’t seem to feel obliged to help people reintegrate into a new and productive life in the Real World.

  “Whose side are you on?” said a man who was sitting on the stairs.

  At first, I didn’t realize he was talking to me, or that he’d been watching as I stared up at the banner. “What?”

  The man was older, with gray hair and kind eyes. The skin on his hands was wrinkled and brown and run through with thick veins. “Are you prorefugee or anti–body-snatcher?”

  He asked this like it was the most normal question in the world, like he might be wondering what I’d eaten for lunch or if I thought it might rain later on this afternoon. At least he didn’t seem to know who I was. “I’m prorefugee.” I tried to keep my voice even. “What about you?”

  The man tilted his head a little, thinking. “I haven’t decided. I’m not sure I like . . . foreigners in our city.”

  I made sure my tone was steady when I responded. “But the refugees aren’t foreigners. They’re people who were born here and will always belong to this world.”

  He shook his head, the silver of his hair shining in the sunlight. “I’ve lived in New Port all my life, and you won’t convince me they belong here as much as I do. These people abandoned this place for a virtual life.” He chuckled. “And left all of us to care for them like servants.”

  “Janitors of bodies,” I said quietly, more to myself than to him, that phrase Jude had used the first night I saw her echoing from my mouth.

  “Exactly, just like that,” he said. The man began to pull himself off the g
round, slowly, until he was standing. His movements were tired but fluid, like someone who’d lived in a real body his entire life. He smiled, the lines around his mouth crinkling across his face. “Well, you have a nice day.”

  “You too,” I said, watching as he shuffled away.

  I pressed heavily onto the bicycle pedals and rode off toward my Keeper’s mansion, putting my conversation with the old man behind me. My hair flew out behind me as I went, a feeling I liked now that I no longer was a wanted person and could move freely about the city, head uncovered. I still got looks from people who recognized me, but I no longer felt afraid. And some of the refugees who recognized me smiled and waved. The ones who were glad to keep their bodies, I supposed. The rest just stared.

  I stopped at a corner. Snatches of speech rang in my ears. Queen Skylar. King Rain. Refugees go home. Body snatchers. I stared up at the beautiful tree rooted into the cobblestones. A weeping beech. They were everywhere in New Port City and I loved them. The glossy green leaves cascaded toward the ground like a waterfall. I knew I should keep going straight to see my Keeper, who was busy these days helping the refugees who were staying with her. Straight would take me down the old boulevard peppered with mansions once stately and majestic and jaw-droppingly beautiful, abandoned for decades until recently. Now they were full of App World refugees seeking a new and real life.

  Right would take me down the hill to the Body Market.

  My hands tightened around the handlebars of the bicycle. The sunlight pressed into me, burning my skin, making my face hot. I squinted up at the sky and took a deep breath. Then, once again I put my foot to the pedal and pressed down hard.

  I went right.

  There it was, just ahead.

  The hotel, once bustling, rose up alongside the Body Market. A grand archway beckoned passersby to enter its stalls, open to the air, modeled after the famous markets of Europe, the ones that used to sell fruits and vegetables and meats in the cities of old, back before technology forever changed the ways of the world and all the people in it. Back before markets like these began hawking bodies and body parts. The first time I visited it was freezing cold, everyone bundled in winter coats, crowded into the aisles, waiting in long lines, well-heeled shoes sinking into the lush red carpet. But today it was empty, the canvas tarp stretching out over the entrance to provide shade for the crowds tattered with holes and dark in places, dirt-stained from weather and neglect, the red carpet lush no longer, and not even red. It had faded to more of a dull rust color.