by Susan Juby
What would she say to the Deciders when she saw them? She tried to guess how many there would be. Twelve, she thought. Twelve would be cool. There was that song called “Twelve Kinds of Terrific.” Maybe she would sing that song to impress them. Maybe they could give her some answers to her many questions. In her opinion, the Deciders had some explaining to do. Maybe from this day on, they’d be called the Explainers. The idea made her giggle again.
The golden path wound its way through a grove of trees, and as she came around a final bend, a building appeared ahead of her. It was rounded and silver and had mirrored poles that held up the roof, which curved over it and extended far out in front. The poles were dark and smooth, and her reflection wrapped around them as she approached.
Bright straightened up and looked herself over in one of the poles. She still wore the coarse pants she had taken from the sensitive and a PS officer’s black turtleneck, and she had added a tool belt for comfort on her way out of the House of Gear. The Deciders would take one look at her in her strange get-up and they would … her imagination quit, then restarted. Fix things. Yes, that’s what they would do. They had to fix things, because things were most definitely broken.
She paused under the overhang until her eyes got used to the deep shadow under the roof. Then she approached the door and knocked. No one answered. Bright pulled the door open.
Inside, the building was dim, and the air was damp and cool. The room she found herself in was huge, twice the size of the Choosing Room in the House of Gear, though it narrowed toward one end. Beginning halfway down the length of the dark room, banks of screens covered the walls and reached almost to the soaring ceiling. The screens weren’t full of advermercials, and they weren’t dark. Instead, they displayed rotating images of streets and games and houses and mind alter rooms, stilled equipment, empty classrooms. Every corner of the Store was represented. The screens, like the maintenance rooms, must be plugged into a backup power source.
Hesitantly, Bright stepped farther inside. Her mind tried to process the odour. It was like a great quantity of nutri had been spilled and not cleaned up.
She walked forward, her gaze fixed on the screens, and nearly fell into a pool in the floor. To her horror, her foot was wet and touching something soft. Bright shrieked, and the sound echoed around the vast hall. Jerking her foot back, she stood teetering beside the pool. In a gesture that had become automatic, she flicked on her helmet light. The pool was rectangular and set flush with the floor. An array of tubes was faintly visible between its glass walls. Instead of water, it seemed to be filled with nutri. Almost all of the space inside was taken up by a … something. No, a someone.
Bright resisted the urge to run away. Instead, she inched closer, adjusting the beam to get a better look. The creature in the pool was at least five times larger than the biggest person she’d ever seen. Most of that size was a thick, wobbling layer of gelatinous fat.
Bright gagged. What was this creature, and why did the Board of Deciders allow it to exist? What could it possibly do that was productive?
Its hand, which looked like a swollen pink balloon animal, held a plastic pointer. And at the side of the glass pool was a row of large buttons labelled Decisions.
Bright straightened and looked around the room. There was a glass pool cut into the stone floor every ten feet or so, and in each pool was a mound of pink and white flesh. Thin strands of white hair waved lazily in the baths of nutri.
These blobs were the Deciders!
She looked back at the one closest to her, the one she’d nearly fallen on top of. Its eyes were buried in fat, but one swollen hand was slowly moving the plastic stick toward the buttons. It might have been pushing through hardening plastic rather than liquid. Just as the wand came within touching distance of a red button, there came a sound like many doors closing. The screens went blank and the nearly indistinguishable background noise of liquid being pumped in and out of the tanks ceased.
Gurgles and soft, belching sighs rose all over the room, and Bright thought she heard bubbles rise in the tanks and pop at the surfaces. Then all was silence but for her breath and thumping heartbeat. In shock, Bright realized that the Deciders, barely alive when she arrived, had just died almost instantly when the backup power failed. She had been the only witness to the death of a roomful of bloated floaters. For that’s what they were. The people for whom she’d been working so hard. The people she never questioned. The Deciders. They were all just bloated floaters. In that instant, she no longer felt bad about her tendency to disobey. She’d been right to think for herself sometimes. The Deciders were blobs who decided nothing.
Now she was alone and unsupported, except for a clumsy bot, an annoying dressing-mate, and a strange man with nice eyes, and she was fine. Fine-ish, anyway.
She gave thanks for her light as she stepped carefully around the pools and headed toward the far wall, where she thought she’d seen a panel of switches. She tried not to imagine herself plunging into one of the pools, ending up buried in the wet flab of a dead Decider.
The beam from her pink helmet cut a narrow cylinder of light through the heavy darkness, and she nodded her head to illuminate the floor, then her goal: the panel of switches. It was obviously a remnant from a time before the Deciders got so huge they couldn’t support their own weight.
Bright wondered where the Deciders’ bots were. The Deciders had clearly been unable to care for themselves. Perhaps the bots had fallen into disrepair and the Deciders, unable to hoist their vast, quivering bulk from their watery beds, had simply given up.
When she reached the panel, Bright threw back her shoulders. She wished there was someone around to see her flip the switch. It would be a remarkable moment, requiring all of her fierce courage and determination, not unlike when a seemingly impossible new dance was introduced. But there was no audience for this. There would be no applause. It was just her. Doing the right thing. Alone. Which was really sort of a letdown.
She examined the panel. All the switches were black, except for a single, inch-wide switch that was red.
Grassly had said to flip switches until one worked.
She wiped a finger under the brim of her helmet, where sweat had collected, ignored the ache in her lungs, and reached for the first switch. She moved it from right to left.
Nothing happened.
Panic leapt in her and she jerked the switch back to the right.
She tried the next switch. Again nothing happened.
She really didn’t want to try the red one.
Bright flipped the third switch and the world started up again. Lights burst on in the great hall, and the screens popped on, one at a time. Dazed, she looked up at them and scanned the images of the Partytainment District. The House of Gear, the House of Splash, Office, Boards, Bends …
Where was the House of It? The place every favour longed to be. She examined the screens again. All of the Partytainment houses were either deserted or littered with dead favours and disabled bots. But the final screen was different: it showed nothing but an empty room. Not a recently vacated, luxurious, fun room, but an unfinished one with bare walls and wires hanging from the ceiling.
Suddenly she knew the truth: there was no House of It, and there never had been.
She’d been lost in thought for several minutes, staring at the screens, when she finally registered what she was seeing. She looked quickly from screen to screen. All over the Store, enlightened people were rising to their knees, spilling into the streets, and starting to crawl in the direction of the Natural Experience.
A screen in the top left corner captured her full attention. The image showed a tall figure sheathed in white standing outside a gate beside a smaller figure. Two bots scuttled anxiously back and forth between them. The white-clad figure had thrown his gloved hands up above his head, as though warding off punishing blows.
Grassly! The lights were hurting him!
Motion on another screen caught her eye. She recognized a road i
n the Productive Zone, filled with a crowd of at least a hundred PS staff, marching in unison toward … the gate of the Headquarters.
Bright turned and ran from the great hall of the Deciders.
34.00
There were small tears in the spacesuit. There were also larger rips, as well as thinned areas in the fabric that let through the lights, which felt like lasers hitting his skin.
Grassly tried not to whimper and moan, but the pain made it impossible.
All around him, the newborn lights pulsed their suggestions into the brains of the ancestors while he was burned alive.
“Are you okay? Your face is sort of squished up. Not good for your collagen,” said Fon.
In response, Grassly threw his arms up over his face and felt the elbow of the spacesuit rip open.
“Uh-oh,” said Fon, her voice fading as Grassly’s consciousness began to dim.
Another ripping noise sounded. The suit was failing, falling to shreds around him. Soon he would be gone. He would miss—
“Hold still,” said Fon. More tearing noises and then the pain in his elbow eased.
She was wrapping him in tape that Pinkie had tucked away in one of her compartments. Swaddling him in layer after layer of adhesive wrap.
Oh, blessed tape. Only …
He could barely hear the twitter of the bot question.
“What do you mean? He’s going to walk with his legs,” said Fon.
Another rapid burst of squeaks and dings.
“Ohhhh. I guess I did sort of tape them together.”
In his prison of tape and pain, Grassly tested his legs. They were bound together from thigh to knee.
“Only the top part, though. He can take small steps.”
Grassly was sweating heavily inside the glass helmet, and his ears rang with agony. Even so, he sensed Bright’s approach.
“Is he …?” Bright’s voice sounded different, he thought.
“I think he’s okay,” Fon replied. “But it seems like he doesn’t like those lights, so I got him taped up.”
The sound of marching boots seemed to rise through the concrete, and he tried to determine how far away the PS officers were.
“Let’s go,” said Bright.
“What’s the rush? The lights are on. Let’s just take stock of our faces for a minute. People can see us now. We have a responsibility to look good.”
“Fon!”
Grassly didn’t hear Fon’s reply. Unsupported seams along the joints of the cheap spacesuit gave way from the pressure of his too-big body. He felt a searing sensation at his wrist and groaned.
Neither favour seemed to notice. They were moving him along, his steps small and shuffling, like his legs were in shackles.
The suit split across the top of his shoulders and the light surged in. The pain was like diving into a sun with open eyes. Every cell screamed in protest. He was burning up.
He went deep and the lights went out.
35.00
Favours were good at many things, but getting dressed was at the top of the list. After dancing and hair and makeup, of course.
When Bright realized that Grassly’s spacesuit was failing everywhere it wasn’t taped together, she leapt into action, aided by Fon, Peaches, and Pinkie. The speed at which she moved made her dash from the hall of the Deciders look like an underwater dance routine.
She slipped out of her turtleneck and taped it over the largest holes on the back of the spacesuit. Fon handed over her cardigan, and Bright cut it up and affixed the pieces to the remaining vulnerable areas. Then she and Fon used the rest of the tape to cover every inch of Grassly, leaving only the vent in his helmet for him to breathe through and a narrow space for him to see. He’d gone completely limp, and Bright refused to think about what that might mean.
The urgency of her task so consumed her that Bright barely noticed the PS staff, led by the staggering, twitching commander, until the mass of men in black was upon them.
“Uh, Bright?” said Fon.
Bright finished taping one of Grassly’s wrists, then looked up and took in the scene around her. The commander’s head wobbled on his neck, and his hand jerked spasmodically against his red badge. The PS officers surrounding him had their releasers out, awaiting his orders.
Bright got to her feet and sighed. “Let me guess. By order of the Deciders, we have been released from our contracts and you would like to thank us for our service?”
The commander swayed as one knee buckled, then righted himself. “And we would like to congratulate you in advance for coming back better than ever at some point in the future,” he gasped.
“You’ve got a good memory,” whispered Fon in Bright’s ear.
“Thanks,” said Bright.
The bots trilled in agreement.
Bright stared straight into the dataglasses of the man who was so clearly coming apart, and was exactly the kind of person who should be a target of the releasers, and yet had managed to get the rest of the PS staff focused on everyone else. She had to admire his technique.
“It’s really light out,” she said. “You should take your glasses off and live a little.”
“By order of the Board of Deciders—” he said, grunting out the words before she could cut him off.
“I can see what’s happening to you. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. But we have a chance. At least, we might. Take your glasses off and find out.”
“By rorder rof,” he began again, his words as garbled as his nervous system.
“There is good news and bad news,” Bright announced, loud enough for all the PS officers to hear. “Which do you want first?”
“Tell them the good news first,” said Fon. “No one likes to wait.”
Bright nodded. It was sound advice.
“We can have a new start,” she said.
A murmur rose from the crowd.
“Is that like coming back?” asked a voice.
“Better than ever?” said another.
“Now hit them with the bad news,” said the unsuspecting Fon.
“There is no coming back better than ever. The Board of Deciders are gross beyond belief and are all dead. The Store is falling apart and so are we. Our only chance is to get this man—” she pointed to Grassly’s swaddled body “—to the Natural Experience and onto the ship he has waiting to rescue us.”
More murmuring from the assembled PS staff. Many of them were showing signs of failure, and Bright felt sad for them. And for herself. Life inside the Store really wasn’t much fun anymore.
“The House of It’s still okay, though, right?” asked Fon. “We’re still on track for an awesome promotion?”
Bright patted her dressing-mate’s shoulder. “No,” she said. “It’s not. And we’re not.”
Fon gasped like she’d just taken a punch. “Ugh. Your bad news/good news balance needs work.”
“We escape together or we die together. You can take off your glasses and let the light in, or you can release us and that will be the end for all of us.”
“I’m getting releaser elbow,” said a PS officer. He slid his releaser into its holster. “I’ve had enough.”
Another said he’d been on shift for too long and hadn’t seen any credits for all the overtime, then he, too, put his releaser away.
“A new start?” asked the commander.
Bright had to strain to understand him. “Yes, but we don’t have a lot of time. If you take off your glasses, you will get knocked out for a minute or so, but you’ll be fine. Then we’ll lead everyone to the ship.”
Bright supposed she could lead the PS staff to the ship without enlightening them, but she didn’t entirely trust them. It was much safer for them to get a dose of the lights.
“Can I be fixed?” asked the commander.
She didn’t know if he could be fixed. She didn’t know if any of them could be fixed. Maybe they would all die, filled with uncertainty and fear. Then again, maybe everything would be awesome where they were going.
Hope. That’s what she was supposed to be spreading here.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s possible that you will be fixed. At least there’s a chance. If we stay here, there’s no chance.”
That did it. All the PS officers holstered their releasers.
“Maybe you could drop those?” suggested Bright.
The releasers clattered to the ground. Several of the officers reached hesitantly for their dataglasses.
“Are the lights nice?” asked one.
“My dataglasses have always been a little tight,” said another.
“I like lights,” said a third.
“When you take off your glasses,” Bright said, “you will feel funny for a little while, but then everything will be different. Everything will be better. And we’ll all go to the ship together and escape.” She didn’t know what else to say to encourage them.
“May I?” said the commander.
“Of course.”
Bright hoped he wasn’t going to tell all his men to pick the releasers back up, but some part of her knew he wouldn’t. He looked as done as the PS officer with releaser elbow.
“Officers,” said the commander. “It has been an honour working with you in service to the Deciders. You are the finest team of personal support staff this Store has ever produced.”
Sniffles sounded among the men.
“Now it’s time for the next team-building challenge, and we will see what the future brings.”
“You’ve been a great commander,” cried a voice in the crowd.
“The best!” added another.
“Thank you,” said the commander.
There was a half-hearted round of hip-hip-hoorays that died out before it could really get going.
“Okay, men. On your mark.”
The officers stood as straight as they were able, which wasn’t very straight.
“Get set!” The commander’s voice was now strong and clear. It gave Bright the chills.
The officers raised their right hands beside their foreheads.