ISBN: 9781483532905
© Lisa Hall 2014
Table of Contents
Girl Found
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Epilogue
Girl Found
It was a beautiful morning. The sky above the shield was clear, bright sunlight hit the concrete blocks of the buildings, turning them a crisper shade of grey. The rail was on time, and as I followed the walkway to the civilian services plaza, the rich, enticing aroma of coffee filled the air. Good things were going to happen today, I could just feel it.
Mrs. Chan had been running the coffee stand that stood outside the rail platform for the Central City train for as long as I could remember. She was a small woman. Silver roots were beginning to show in her dark hair, but there wasn’t a single wrinkle in her face. She had three sons, the youngest a couple years older than me. I’d never met anyone who could recall Mr. Chan.
“Ellen, how are you doing this morning? The usual?”
“Yeah, thanks.” I’d been flattered when the woman had bothered to learn my name, until I found out Mrs. Chan made it a point to know everybody’s name. She was the local source for all information undocumented. There wasn’t a scrap of gossip that got past her.
“So,” Mrs. Chan began, “you graduate this year. What are you going to do now?” It sounded like small talk, but her eyes looked me over sharply as she talked. There was more to this than casual conversation. It was a good guess she not only remembered I graduated university prep this year, but knew about the scholarship and my field of study. Graduates meant jobs, which meant access.
“Depends on whether I get the scholarship or not. I meet with the advisor today.”
Mrs. Chan’s eyes widened as she congratulated me. It was overkill, but I found myself smiling along with her anyway. “Good for you,” she told me. “Your father must be very proud. I will pray to the fates for you.”
More like pray I got the degree and then access to cutting edge tech one of her sons would be happy to sell for me. “Thanks Mrs. Chan.” I took the cup she handed me and moved off to the side of the cart, out of the way of the next customer. Feeling chatty, I asked. “So, how’s Jimmy doing?”
Jimmy Chan was the youngest of her three boys, and the only one of the Chan brothers I knew. We’d only been separated in school by three years, but that was a chasm inside the Pittsburgh educational system. My best friend Katy’s brother ran around with Jimmy. That’s how I knew him.
Mrs. Chan’s face brightened. “He was just promoted to manager,” the woman said proudly. “They moved him to the main resource distribution center. He is in charge of all the delivery routes for six neighborhoods. You don’t get your ration delivery, you call me. I’ll make sure he sets you right.”
If I didn’t get my rations, it was likely because Jimmy sold them. “Tell him I said hello, and congratulations,” I told her and went to wait for the train.
My first memory of Jimmy Chan involved, and this was no coincidence, a delivery hauler of food packets. He’d been planning his career even back then. Stealing from the people inside the neighborhood was considered poor form, but taking a few packets off the back of a hauler making the rounds to Republic service centers and schools was a rite of passage inside the neighborhood. Jimmy had been present for mine.
Between Jimmy Chan and Eric Moreno, my friend Katy Moreno’s older brother, I could pretty much get anything I wanted in the way of legal or contraband goods, either one, but if it was your monthly rations you wanted increased, Jimmy was your man. Having Jimmy working for the resource distribution center was like leaving the back door open.
I moved away from the vendor stalls. All the seats on the platform were filled with upper level students like me waiting for the train into Central City, the business portion of Pittsburgh located inside the rail loop. The city had been planned to handle masses of people with the highest degree of efficiency, same as all the cities that had been rebuilt after the quakes. Davis, my guardian, told me that there had only been one city plan developed and that it had been copied, with minor changes, in every city built during the reformation.
This meant that every city in North America had a train that circled the business section with neighborhoods stretching out from it in lines served by a rail car that moved up and down between two rows of living quarters. Some of the neighborhoods were nicer than others, and then there were those that we’d all heard about, but few of us had actually seen. You needed a special pass to get inside them. The higher-ups of society lived there, members of parliament, city organizers, and the controllers of industry.
I took another sip of my coffee. Beverages weren’t allowed on the train, and I wouldn’t be tossing half of it. As my eyes glanced over the rim of the cup I saw a woman across the way from me, trailing her fingers along the edge of a cart where a man sat selling woven jewelry.
There was no way this woman was interested in his wares. The woman had pale hair that glittered gold where the morning sun struck, rendering it almost the same color as the heavy gold encircling her neck. I watched as the woman milled aimlessly among the collection of vendor carts surrounding the rail platform, staring up at the nondescript concrete buildings circling the plaza as she moved between the carts as if there were something special about them. There wasn’t.
I wasn’t sure what it was about her exactly, but my interest was piqued. I pushed off the railing I’d been leaning against and moved closer to her, watching as she milled aimlessly through the plaza. The jacket she wore definitely wasn’t a handout from the local resource center, and the oversized bag hanging from her shoulder could be real leather. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen real leather, but the bag looked expensive. When she stopped at a vendor cart that sold small plastic ornaments and purchased one—they sold for a credit each—her hand went into that bag and pulled out a memory stick to pay for that small treasure.
Most people banked using their civilian implants, the biogenetic devices required by the Republic. People with the kind of money that required separating your wealth from your person or risk losing half of your left arm in a robbery weren’t regulars in this neighborhood, which was why the young man wearing the dark blue jacket now shadowed the woman as I did. That memory stick had drawn the wrong kind of attention. He wouldn’t be finding a better mark today.
I tugged up my sleeve and tapped a spot on my forearm. A small piece of skin cleared, and the screen of my implant jumped to life, displaying the date, time and the condensed schedule I’d programed for the day, which consisted of a single entry labeled “advisor”. Today was the day I found out whether or not I had a future, and I had just over an hour before I was supposed to check in at the office. I couldn’t afford to be late for that.
But if a citizen the Republic cared about was mugged in this neighborhood, the entire block would be in lockdown until the authorities found the culprit, or in this case, the guy in the blue jacket. This was seriously going to screw with my plans for the weekend, possibly my plans to get to school on time if this went down quickly enough. The Civil Security building sat across the plaza. Response time to a report would be swift.
The guy in the blue jacket had been leaning against the railing. I moved to the same place he’d occupied and put my hands to the metal. People touched surfaces all day long, never thinking about what was there before them or after. That was a luxury I didn’t have. While the average citizen wasn’t aware it was happening, with each touch to a conductive material they were leaving a piece of themselves.
To anyone watching, I was merely waiting for the train. I knew from experience the railing was constructed of steel, and normally I would have avoided it like the plague, but today I needed to stop a mugging, or worse, and some information would be helpful.
Everything about the woman being stalked screamed upper class, and I wondered vaguely who she was or what she thought she was doing here. She wouldn’t be the first relative of a Parliament member to go sightseeing around the city, doing something they called checking in on the working class. I remembered slender fingers trailing along the edge of a metal surface. I could go back to that later, if there was time.
Right now I needed to make sure the guy in the blue jacket was really doing what I thought he was doing. I reached for the railing. Steel and iron sucked up mental ponderings like a sponge sucked water. Whatever the young man had been thinking as he touched the metal had been laid into it, and as soon as my hand registered the sensation of cool metal, a slew of pictures flashed in rapid succession inside my head; bits and pieces of every person who had touched this handrail filling my mind.
This was the part I hated, the massive overload of random nothing. Floating among the chaos of information was a snippet from a girl who thought a guy across the hub was cute. She posed, pushing out her chest, hoping he would notice her, and then she was gone. A man stopped to check the time, leaving behind a harsh impression of irritation at his friend before moving on. Another woman who’d stopped to grip this handrail had been aware she was being followed, but left no clue as to the identity of the follower, or even how long ago the event had taken place, although I could sense that she felt a chill that seeped into her bones. I could guess the season, but I couldn’t help her. That was the norm for this little talent of mine, too late with too little information.
The woman being tailed this morning was different. Every now and then this sensory malady of mine came in handy, and I reveled in those rare moments.
I pulled my hand away from the metal and the flow of information stopped. My vision, which had become enveloped in the flow of images, cleared. When the talent was working, I could either see what was going on in my head, or what was going on around me. Luckily, picking up images, no matter how many, took only a second in real time. I’d stumbled over my own feet a couple of times, but I had yet to step out in front a train.
I saw the slender male form wearing the blue jacket ahead in the crowd. I did what I should have done to begin with; I focused on him, held a picture of him in my mind, and put my hand back to the railing. It helped to be specific if it was a particular piece of embedded thought I was looking for. A clear, singular strand rose to the surface of the tide.
Bet the lady is loaded. I’ll be able to get one of those ZR-7 gaming systems, maybe even a full room hologram setup to go with it. It will be so jammin’. Staci will know my name then.
I pulled my hand away from the metal a second time, shaking my head. Staci would know you all right, at about the same time as every law enforcement officer in the city. The minute a kid off the State work polls stepped into a high-end electronics store and used credits off a memory stick to purchase a system that cost more than he’d make in ten years, the only games he’d be playing would be with Civil Security in a local detention center.
Detention centers were a free-labor situation for the Republic. Once you went in, only overcrowding or luck got you out. The chances of this kid ending up with an arrest were high—not that I was worried about him. We all make our choices. I blended into the crowd, keeping the young man, and the golden hair of the woman he trailed, in sight.
This guy’s motivation was clear, but thinking he could pull this off was ludicrous. The credits on the data chip inside the memory stick were likely encoded to keep them from being used should they be stolen. He’d have to pay a hacker to clear that and then, if he was remotely intelligent, he’d buy something with the remaining credits that he could use to barter with the Ghosts, disgruntled citizens of the Republic, for a stolen system. If he was really smart, he wouldn’t tell anyone about the system. This guy didn’t strike me as intelligent.
True, I judged him based on a first impression, but that impression came via my sensory talent. Three things affected how the talent worked; material, repetition, and saturation. Any material that conducted electricity worked, but metal absorbed the images best. I wasn’t sure absorbed was even the right way to describe what happened when people left pieces of their inner self lying around, but it appeared to be what was happening. It wasn’t like this talent had come with a manual.
If the metal involved was a tool handled by the same person over and over, the number of embedded thoughts or memories being absorbed into the matrix of the metal increased. The more that collected there, the more I could tell about a person.
Saturation worked a little differently. It was all about intensity of emotion. I encountered fear the most, with anger coming in a strong second followed closely by jealousy, which had a lot in common with fear and anger. The fact that I encountered negative emotions more frequently than happy ones did not escape me. There were few things to get ecstatic over in Pittsburgh. Falling in love was the positive emotion I ran across the most, and even that became jealousy or hurt all too often. Whatever the case, the deeper or sharper the emotion, the clearer and more accurate the information it carried, whether it was repeated or not.
This young man was very excited. Specifically, he found the fantasy reaction he imagined Staci having very exciting. Personally, I didn’t view his chances of getting laid any higher with a gaming system than without it, but he thought differently. He was risking prison to get the girl. Some people might call that romantic, and it might be, but as far I was concerned it ruled out intelligence, although I was happy to note he didn’t seem particularly violent.
I watched as the affluent woman walked past the ring of vendors set up around the train platform to enter a public toilet, probably to touch up her lipstick, she looked the type. I suppressed a groan at the sheer lack of street smarts being exhibited here. At least this situation was coming to a quick end in a place with no surveillance.
I watched from a safe distance as the man in the hooded jacket hovered against wall, waiting for foot traffic to pass by so he could slip into the ladies room unseen. I, being the right gender for the sign on the door, walked right in behind him to find the woman cowering against a sink, clutching her bag close as if for dear life.
He shot a quick look over his shoulder at me when he heard the door. “You, get over there by her. Do it!”
The young man gestured with the knife as he spoke, and I relaxed a bit. My guardian and trainer, Davis, ex-military block wall of a guy, had once told me only amateurs talk when there’s a weapon in their hand. While I was certain there were exceptions to that, I didn’t think this was one of them.
I raised both hands in the universal surrender position. Moving toward the woman, I spun on my right foot, catching the man in the ribs with my left. My left foot followed through, found the floor, and I let the momentum carry me forward as I landed a solid right hook alongside his jaw. The skin of my knuckle scraped along his face, and a mental picture of him surrounded by friends at a party flashed through my mind. He had no intention of keeping his ill-gotten gaming system quiet. He really was an idiot. He crumpled and the image stopped.
The woman gasped. “Oh, my, thank you! I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t stepped in. I think he was going to kill me. Do you think he was going to kill me?”
As the woman rambled I got a good look at her eyes. The orbs sparkled a little too much where the light caught, and the feel good vibe I’d acquired the moment the mugger had hit the floor immediately became anxiety. More than the color of those eyes had been modified and there were few reasons for those kinds of modifications, even fewer ways to attain them legally. This woman was nothing she seemed to be, and that insight opened a pit in my stomach.
What had I gotten myself into?
This was supposed to be easy. Save the girl and the best party of the year and still make it to school on time. Being detained for questioning was not on my schedule. In fact avoiding being held for questioning had been one of the goals of this exercise. I cursed my luck, and for all the good it would do me now, dipped my head as I turned to leave. Maybe those eyes of hers weren’t attached to a digital feed and she’d forget what I looked like.
Right, because the crazy green eyes in my head were entirely forgettable.
“You can’t go,” the woman said, her lips pursing. “The authorities will want to hear your testimony.”
Not what I wanted to hear. Citizens in Pittsburgh only talked to the authorities if they had to. Any incident you could walk away from made such an event entirely avoidable. Still hadn’t factored being dragged to Civil Security for what they diplomatically referred to as an interview into my morning. I straight armed the door open. “Sorry, I’ve got places to be. I’m sure your report will be fine,” I said over my shoulder and exited the building, hoping the authorities she was bound to call felt the same way.
Chapter Two
I didn’t run. That would draw attention. I moved toward an apartment building to the right, away from the rail platform, the first place I’d be expected to go. I stretched out into a ground-eating pace that was faster than jogging until I was around a corner. I stopped and looked back. The woman was leaving the building as if nothing had happened. I thanked my lucky stars and breathed a little easier. If she didn’t sound the alarm right away, she wasn’t going to.
I crossed my fingers and watched as the blonde from the bathroom continued to mill around between the vendor carts, stopping to stare at her own reflection, the oversized bag hanging open at her hip as she dabbed at her mouth. I’d really read this situation wrong. The blonde wasn’t a victim, she was working. She wanted that memory stick stolen.
I was so busy watching the show the woman was putting on I almost missed the two Civil Security officers carrying the young man’s body out of the bathroom. No bullhorn, no visible squad car, no hovercraft full of backup disturbing the air. Most of the passing crowd missed him being dragged away. I pulled my head back, falling against the cool surface of the wall, feeling the tension that had built up after seeing the woman’s eyes sparkle drain away.
My plans for the day remained intact. The authorities had no intention of showing up until that little device she was trying to offload met the end of its usefulness, sometime later in the week. The GPS readings pinging from the memory stick as it moved through the Pittsburgh underground would be tracked and matched to GPS records on file from civilian implants in the same area and time and then the round up would begin. The only people somewhat safe from this were the very dissidents they were after, the people known as Ghosts by the general public.
Ghosts got were called that because they couldn’t be seen on the Republic’s computer grid. Ripping out your implant did come with one benefit—the Republic couldn’t track you. There were some downsides as well. Without an implant there was no access to public services. No food rations, no public transport, no medical treatment, no jobs on the State work poll. That last one wasn’t all that bad. Prison jobs were better than some of the poll jobs, depending on how much education you’d acquired.
I returned to the train platform. No sleek white and silver passenger cars hovered over the magnetic tracks. I tugged up my left sleeve and tapped my implant to check the time. It was seven fifteen. The train would be back around in ten minutes. I would make it to the school on time and everything would be fine.
Strains of the new hit by Treasure Thrill sounded in the microscopic implant in my ear. I interrupted the second verse when I tapped my implant to answer the call. “Why good morning Miss Moreno,” I said. “I didn’t know artists knew about this time of the day.”
Katy was interning with a local freelance artist, an arrangement garnered by her brother, Eric. She was learning to design ad campaigns and graphic notices, paint business signs, that kind of thing. Her personal artistic work was accomplished at night on her own time. She never got to sleep before midnight. “Hmm,” Katy groaned at me, and I heard the rustling of sheets. “Just getting into bed, I’ve got the day off, but before I forget, Mom’s planning a big dinner to celebrate your scholarship. She’s invited the whole family, and you’re supposed to bring your dad.”
I winced. Mamma Moreno was another romantic not easily dissuaded, although her tactics were technically legal. “Your mom isn’t still trying to set him up with your aunt Kee, is she?”
“Until they get married, or one of them dies. You know Mom,” Katy said. “She’s still looking to move you up from honorary second daughter to daughter in law. You get that university slot, prepare for that effort to step up.”
A picture of Katy’s older brother slipped into my mind. Broad shoulders, solid arms, abs that rippled combined with dark hair and blue eyes—Eric was every girl’s idea of the perfect male. I, however, was the last girl on Eric’s mind, because I was his sisters best friend, and in protest of his mother’s efforts. There was likely a third reason as well, but I had no intention of touching him to find out.
“Thanks for the warning,” I told her. “I’ll call you as soon as I know.”
“Stop with the humble routine, we all know you’re getting in,” Katy said. “Laters.” The call disconnected.
My smile broadened. Despite my morning, this weekend was shaping up to be everything I’d imagined it would be. Family dinner Friday night, an evening roaming the streets with no curfew in effect, and Eric would be there for all of it—Katy never went out on the streets after dark without her big brother, but first, the scholarship.
The train pulled up alongside the platform. I boarded and found an empty seat near the doors, and as I settled in for the ride an inappropriately deep, sultry female voice sounded overhead.
“We’ll be entering platform F in five minutes. The Central City rail is”—her breathing hitched and the voice gasped—“on time.”
Snickers and a few giggles sounded through the car. The older woman seated across from me clucked her tongue disapprovingly as she shook her head. The city’s rail communications had been hacked, again. Funny, but stupid. I couldn’t comprehend courting a prison sentence to lighten the mood, but then I was headed for a high-level education and a position out on one of the colonies, not packing monthly resource shipments at the local distribution center. My life was—gasp—on track.
Chapter Three
Two hundred university scholarships are awarded by the State each year to a graduating class that averaged two thousand students. Competition was fierce, as in, “ask for my help and I guarantee you’ll get the wrong answer,” and nobody was going to feel guilty about doing it. If you needed help, you didn’t belong at the top.
The Pittsburgh University Preparatory Academy stood in the center of a walled compound, the concrete building rising twenty stories into the air. If the building hadn’t been located in Center City, the portion of Pittsburgh inside the rail loop, it would have been too tall for the shield. The fine, superconductive mesh covered the city like a huge umbrella, spreading out from the Spire at its highest point, spreading down over the walls surrounding Pittsburgh.
From the train I could see security drones patrolling the upper floors and the roof line. Area surveillance at the roof line only happened this time of year when students found out whether their efforts to forge a future had been successful, or if next week would find them on the low-tech end of the State work polls. There’d been eleven suicides so far this year, seven of them this week, and it was only Tuesday. That number would jump by Thursday, no pun intended.
Students who saved up absences to skip this week had the right idea. If I weren’t so paranoid, I would have taken similar steps yesterday. Instead, I tried not to think about it. That was difficult to do when you had to walk around a cleaning crew to get out of the building at the end of the day.
Human security officers patrolled the ground areas inside the walls. The school told us it was for our protection. We all knew it was to keep non-students from helping themselves to the technical and chemical resources stored inside. Enough of the school’s supplies found their way out on to the streets despite the guards; sometimes because of them.
As I came close to the gates, I felt my implant vibrate ever so slightly as it was queried for authorization codes. Approach the gate without proper authorization and you risked an armed response. It wouldn’t be fatal, but it would be an extremely uncomfortable and potentially messy response. It was nothing you wanted to be standing next to.
My guardian, Davis, the guy everyone else knew as my dad, told me he couldn’t feel his implant engaging. I could, another dubious benefit of my talent. You couldn’t get anywhere or do anything in Pittsburgh without an implant, and because I could feel mine engage, I could identify every security checkpoint across the city. After the big shake the Republic kept track of everything, including the public—for the benefit of the public, of course.
There were people inside the city that would pay for that kind of information. It wasn’t an offer I could take them up on. They’d want to know how I knew. Not at first maybe, but eventually, and I couldn’t tell them, that wouldn’t be safe for me. The first time they got rousted by the Republic, the girl that could see things with her hands would become their best bargaining chip. No thanks.
My safe route to a life worth living was an education that would get me out to the space colonies.
I entered the building and lined up at the front desk. The notice I received last evening over my implant said to check in by zero eight hundred. With the last name of Morris, there was no chance the advisor would get to me by eight, but log in later than suggested and you tempted fate. Should the Administrators need a reason to cull candidates, checking in late could become one of those reasons. Best not to gift the needy with easy solutions.
I waved the arm with the implant across the reader on the desk. The reader beeped, showing no signs of hesitation, or in the case of this mechanical box, no signs the information presented had met with an incongruity in my records that should be investigated.
Every bit of information on my implant was false. When record checks were performed, the kind that went back to my birth records, the ones that matched the DNA profile documented at birth to a fresh collected sample of DNA and checked all the files for updates, what they were clearing was the best hack job money could buy. I even had a bank account, which meant my hacked implant had passed the strictest civilian security check in existence.
“Cutting it close,” the guard told me, as she reviewed the screen at her station.
I shrugged. “I’m here.”
The inner door lock clicked and I walked between the detector panels, checking the time with a smile. I don’t know what the lady at the desk was thinking. I had two minutes to spare.
I wove through the crowded halls down to the counseling and advisement section of the building, ignoring a sea of faces as I passed. The conference rooms had been opened to accommodate the crowd and they’d filled up first. I found a gap in the students lining the hallway and slid down to the floor to await my fate. Sixteen years of school and it all came down to this moment.
I surveyed the students around me as I waited. Expressed emotions ran the gambit, but the majority of faces seemed coated with an uneasy dread. They all just wanted this moment over. I could empathize. The methodology at work here was a cruel one.
In my opinion, the school should process those who had failed to graduate along with those who wouldn’t be coming back next term due to poor scores on Monday and Tuesday—get the losers out of the building, fast, so if they did jump, they could do it off a different roof. Those who managed to graduate would then be processed on Wednesday. Not the best news, but an acceptable fate, leaving Thursday to be nothing but one big party as only those receiving a scholarship would attend.
I would be attending on Thursday in this scenario.
That’s not how the school managed this week. Instead, two thousand plus students with all kinds of potential outcomes were randomly selected into groups and then herded alphabetically through the offices of three advisors over the course of four days. Unnecessarily diabolical.
An elbow nudged my arm. I swiveled my head, and the guy seated next to me tipped his chin up in a kind of wordless acknowledgment that seemed to be popular with males. His hair was a particularly nasty shade of green and pulled back in a ponytail. The rest of him failed to make an impression.
“There are several activities available to help pass the time this morning,” the young man said before launching into a laundry list of offerings. “First, there’s the dead pool. We’re at number eleven this morning, ten suicides score related with one rumored to being investigated as a murder. A special category has been added for the outcome of that particular event.”
“You expect them to have a murder solved by Thursday?”
He looked at me and his lips tugged into a quick frown. “Maybe not, but we’ll be watching, and you’ll still be in. Not interested in dragging things out,” he said, “I can see that. Pools specific to today include whether or not the person sitting by the bathroom door gets puked on, and if so, what time.”
I couldn’t imagine that being entertaining. “I’ll pass on that too.”
“Not into bodily fluids? Okay,” the guy said. “That leaves the total number of alarms pressed by the advisors today, with a side bet for which individual advisor has the highest. There’s the end of the day totals for non-graduates and graduates. There’s,” he paused, as if thinking, while the drone drifted by overhead. “There’s the bit of dust or angel candy should you wish this day had never happened.”
“Still passing,” I told him.
The guy with the green hair nodded as he stood up from the floor. “No problem. Heavy odds are on ten for the puke show, since you have a front row seat.”
My eyes narrowed, crinkling at the corners as I looked across the hallway to the bathroom door. A young man wearing a shirt so blue it almost glowed sat there like he hadn’t a care in the world. No doubt he was sure he had graduated and had no other goals. He was stupid if he thought that. Educational success got you in the running for a prime placement, but it wasn’t a guarantee. The government took what it needed and discarded the rest, a firm believer in the old mantra “the world needs ditch diggers too.” Lots of them considering what I’d seen over the course of four years at university prep.
I tapped my implant. Almost an hour and a half till show time. The chances I’d be out of here before anything disgusting happened were slim to none. I groaned inwardly at that pleasant thought. “Good to know,” I told him as he stood and moved off to hustle someone else. I leaned my head back, making a half-hearted effort to get comfortable on the concrete floor and hoped midmorning wasn’t the heavy favorite based on experience like the dead pool was. I truly had no interest in watching anyone hurl or die.
The dead pool was the biggest one of the year. People started drawing lots the first day of fall term. The main pool centered on the total number of suicides for the year, and then broke down according to gender and method, and from there into subcategories I didn’t concern myself with. I’d never put credits in the dead pool.
I took a deep breath and watched as another kid came out of the advisor’s office looking like he’d been punched in the gut. So far no chunks had flown, but no one had exited the office dancing either. All this negativity was putting a dent in the extreme optimism I’d cultivated. My goal wasn’t simply to graduate; one of those two hundred scholarships was mine. I had never entertained a second option.
“Abrams, Michael F. Please go to the advisor’s office.”
The overhead call came from a nearby drone hovering near the ceiling. A young man got up off the floor, friends wishing him luck as he made his way through the hall, when a strangled cry froze his body in place, one foot finding the floor in slow motion as one of the office doors slid opened and a sobbing girl emerged.
The low-level buzz of quiet conversation came to a stop as heads turned and necks craned to see what the commotion was. The monitor drone patrolling the hallway sped overhead, a short apparatus emerging from the metal alloy of its body as it moved. The unit was armed. An advisor must have pushed the alarm.
The drone hovered near the office, lights blinking on its matte-grey surface, indicating activity. The girl’s implant was being read. A digital voice broke what had become a tense silence. “This is a verbal warning. Please return to the administration desk.”
The crying girl looked up at the bot, tears streaking down reddened cheeks. It was obvious the poor thing was in shock. The news she’d received this morning hadn’t been expected, and she’d protested the issue with the advisor or the drone wouldn’t have been called. Never argue with an advisor.
A trip to the administration desk was the last thing anyone wanted this week. It meant the required eighty-five percentile cutoff hadn’t been met. You’d failed. However many years of educational achievement you had accomplished were stripped out of your implant records. Civil Security downgraded your file to Advanced Comprehensive graduate and you spent the rest of your days on a crappy State poll work detail that was still better than cleaning the streets or sorting the recyclables.
Education fueled success in Pittsburgh and the Republic controlled education. I thought about all the work I’d put in during that time. I couldn’t imagine losing that, and as I watched the girl, I found myself hoping selfishly that I would never be walking in her shoes. I had this process to look forward to in University as well, if I got the scholarship.
The drone repeated the directions and the girl started shakily down the hall toward the admin office. She wouldn’t look anyone in the eye as she went, and that was fine because the crowd had moved on to pretending she wasn’t there. She already didn’t matter.
“Anyone interested in number twelve for the dead pool?”
I turned to look in the direction of the voice. A young man wearing a striped shirt and jeans laughed at his own joke. No one joined in.
Chapter Four
How many students graduated and who got scholarships depended on how many bodies the Republic needed and where they needed them, not strictly grades; a fact many didn’t internalize until the bad news was delivered inside the advisor’s office. Hard work put you in the running for a prime placement. The right degree line didn’t hurt either. The hard sciences held an unrefuted advantage when it came to getting ahead in Pittsburgh.
My overall score was high, I was certain I would graduate, but I might not get the scholarship I wanted. While I knew what my score was, I didn’t know anyone else’s. The school had stopped posting scores openly when people started getting killed to move them off the top of the list. I was glad competition was no longer quite that fierce.
It was frustrating to think that after all the effort, I might not be going on to university. I hated that I was even considering failure as a possibility, but it was hard not to as I watched one pale face after another leave the advisor’s office. Seeing defeat was humbling. Doubt never set well with me, I much preferred to know, a side effect of being able to source the environment for information. I went back to convincing myself one of those scholarships was, in fact, mine. I would consider no alternative realities, I told myself resolutely.
“Drew, Paul J.,” the drone called out.
My head dropped back against the wall and I flexed my glutes, trying not to be obvious. I’d been sitting so long that my butt had fallen asleep. The girl next to me had been snoring for close to an hour. How she managed that, I hadn’t a clue. I’d tossed and turned all night, and right now anticipation had me strung tighter than a bow.
“Gah, this sucks!”
The loud proclamation carried through the space. Everyone turned to look as a girl pushed off the wall and started pacing the narrow path in the center between feet and bags lining the hall. The drone overhead twittered over to keep her in range as it monitored her behavior. A young man nearby said something to her I couldn’t hear, and she turned to stick her tongue out at the floating ball of mechanics that had moved up behind her. I knew exactly how she felt. This did suck. I wanted to get up and run, feel the circulation moving in my legs again, but I wouldn’t, not until I had the award notice. Then I’d be running, straight to the colonies.
Well, not straight into space. I’d need a university degree first. There was no doubt in my mind I’d attain that goal as well, as soon as I cleared this step.
“Hunt, Joseph E.”
Joseph Hunt got up, and the girl beside me that had been snoring, slumped over into the empty space, curling up on the floor. Apparently he’d been holding her up. I cringed inwardly at the idea of a stranger leaning and snoring on me for hours. Joseph looked down at the girl as if he should be concerned, but hadn’t a clue what to do. The drone called his name out a second time. He cast an anxious look over his shoulder, and then he looked at me.
“Go ahead, I got this,” I told him, maintaining my role for the day as humanity’s caretaker. Joseph Hunt flashed me a quick, relieved smile and headed in the opposite direction.
I looked the girl over with a sigh, and gave her a nudge. She didn’t move. My face wrinkled as a nervous flutter settled into the pit of my stomach, and I tried to recall the last time I’d heard her snore. It hadn’t been more than a couple minutes at the most, had it? I wasn’t sure, I’d tuned her out. My nerves began to tingle, and not in a good way. Please tell me I hadn’t been sitting next to a dead girl.
“Maybe you should check for a pulse.”
My gaze shifted from the prone female to a young man seated across the hallway. Our eyes met and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. Touching her was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d touched a dead girl once. I had no desire to do it again, but I couldn’t keep prodding at the girl any more than I could ignore the situation that had developed. I’d said I’d take care of it. Now I was stuck.
The nervous flutter expanded in my stomach, spreading, as my entire body caught on to what I was about to do. Every nerve ending I had seemed to screaming “Stop!” I took a deep breath and, reaching out with two fingers, leaned over the girl to check for signs of life. Please let there be a pulse.
Metal wasn’t the only material I plucked information out of. Anything that conducted electricity worked fine; differently, but it worked. Images from metal were crisp and clear, solid like the material they came from. Images conducted by water tended to be dreamy, and if I could use the term, wishy-washy. They tended to fade in and out.
The human body was sixty percent water amplified by the little jolts of electricity our nerves use to communicate. Metal ions flow through the blood stream, and every citizen of the Republic came equipped with a slip of conductive plastic built into their left arm. I got way too much in the way of useless information when I touched a person.
People are messy. We daydream and fantasize, and most of it means nothing. Dead people were empty, at least the one I reached inside of had been. I hadn’t followed up the experience with a study, until now.
My fingers sensed the heat from her body before coming into contact with her skin. My brain processed this as indication of life and wanted to send the message to my fingers to pull away, but I also knew that heat didn’t necessarily equal life. It takes time to for the body to get cold. I didn’t know much beyond that, and in that split second of indecision between touching the girl and not touching the girl, I touched the girl. I blamed gravity.
A series of disjointed images tumbled out at the speed of light. Wild images of people dancing at a party became birds wearing pink hats in rooms with walls that breathed as bodies floated through confetti-filled air. A dog barked before bursting into a kaleidoscope of colors. Bright, flashing lights began to strobe, making the back of my eyes hurt, and then snippets of what might be movies or a severely overactive imagination mingled with what could be scenes from daily life, it was hard to tell. It all combined in a mad maelstrom that left me with a throbbing head ache and the desire to vomit. I pulled my hand away.
The hallway came back into focus, but at an odd angle. I couldn’t tell if that was because my head was hanging, or if it was residual from touching the girl. I pressed my lids closed, then shook my head and leaned away from her.
“She still breathing?” a voice from the opposite wall asked.
I opened my eyes to find a panel of observers awaiting the verdict. The last thing I’d wanted for this was an audience. No help for that. If they noticed anything off, they didn’t mention it. “Yeah, she’s asleep.”
One of the guys snorted. “Asleep my ass. She’s on something.”
I agreed to the likelihood without confirming. I didn’t want to risk making explanations, but he was right, the girl was dusted. Touching the chemically addled left me feeling seriously removed from reality, unsettled in a way I couldn’t describe, nauseated, and a little dizzy.
It reminded me of the bracelet incident—and now this day was officially dredging up far more of my past than I was happy about. I didn’t want to think about dead girls or military internment, but it was too late. The latch on the memory vault had been thrown.
It had happened my first year of school. When I was little, I didn’t understand I was different. I didn’t understand how dangerous being different was. I learned that lesson when I was four. My teacher had walked past my desk, stopping to talk to another student, when the sun caught one of the stones in the bracelet she wore. I’d reached out to touch it. My hand brushed the metal charm next to it.
Big mistake. The room took a hard turn, spinning around me, and as I tossed my lunch all over the poor kid sitting next to me, I remember thinking the merry go round was going too fast, and I couldn’t find my bunny. I didn’t have a bunny. When the school nurse started asking questions, I told her about the “medicine” my teacher had been taking.
Snorting was the correct term for what my teacher had been doing, but I didn’t know that then. Dust addicts were a thing I hadn’t encountered and therefore didn’t know about. Out of curiosity or design, I never knew, the military showed up, and the affair ended with Davis breaking me out of a military detention center, both of us needing new identities. I was popular that year.
As bad as that had been, it still beat touching the dead girl. That had been the emptiest feeling ever, like being suspended over a bottomless chasm with nothing holding me. That memory was in the vault too, that place where I stashed all the images and memories I never wanted to see again.
The memory of the dead girl, more than any other, didn’t always stay there, and it was my fault, but I couldn’t help it. I was using that dead girl’s name. Forgetting her as if she never existed seemed wrong to me. Her name had kept me safe for nearly sixteen years. I owed her, and that acknowledgment kept the memory near.
The hypertension of the crowd faded over the course of the morning. It made sense. No one could sustain those initial levels without losing it completely, which thankfully, no one did. Whoever had chosen ten for the odds on favorite in the barf pool had lost. The boy in blue remained vomit free.
A ball started bouncing back and forth across the hallway with no singular purpose and the noise level increased as people eased and began to chat. I saw a few kids with ear buds, their feet moving to rhythms I couldn’t hear. Mine were in my bag, but I couldn’t bring myself to use them. I wouldn’t risk not hearing my name when it was called.
I watched as the ball hit a canvas sneaker and bounced high. A spot of wall came to life and fell to the floor where it changed colors. At first I thought I was seeing things, that I’d been daydreaming so long my mind was making things up to keep me entertained, or worse, that I’d somehow absorbed the drug from the girl curled up next to me. The talent had taken a spike when I hit puberty, and every now and then what I could do with it surprised me.
But the walls were not coming to life. The errant spot hadn’t quite turned industrial grey when a canvas shoe stomped down on it. Snap, pop, crunch. Yellowish green gut juice squirted out across the floor. One dead camoroach.
It didn’t take much to amuse this crowd. When you’re in a state of emotional anxiety you’ll laugh at about anything. Hoots and cheers sounded all around. “Way to go!” one boy congratulated. “You almost splashed that chick next to you.”
“Yeah, aim better next time, man.” An outraged female out of my line of sight encouraged him to shut the hell up.
“Check for sensors,” another voice chimed in.
At the mention of electrical equipment, I shook my head. Historically roaches were bottom dwellers, insects that sought the darkness. This new model began appearing after the big shake. The insect’s ability to change color had conspiracy theorists swearing that camoroaches were the result of genetic tampering by the government, not radiation and chemical exposure.
Also, according to this theory, the bugs were loaded with surveillance equipment that fed back to the Republic’s main computer bank, same as implant data. Roaches don’t have predators to evade or prey to stalk, leaving no natural reason for the mutation; thus, it was a government conspiracy.
Tell that to the mashed bug. I don’t know why roaches started blending with their environment. I do know that in the name of maintaining authority, the Republic monitors as much as it can. That’s why DNA is documented at birth and implants are mandatory for every citizen. We are tracked twenty-four seven and the government doesn’t need super bugs to do this, especially those that end up on the bottom of a shoe.
People who come up with theories like nano-driven mutant spy bugs have no comprehension of the kind of resources a venture like that would consume, not only to get up and running, but to utilize and maintain. Not to mention the assertion ignores that there’s already a way to monitor the populace. A second modality isn’t necessary. I went back to watching the ball bounce.
Chapter Five
“Morris, Ellen J.!”
Finally. Waiting had numbed more than my extremities, but the metallic-toned sound of my name coming out of the drone hovering above the hall found the anxiety I’d busily denied and called it to the surface. What if I didn’t make the cut? I didn’t have a plan B.
I pushed to my feet, hiked the strap of the multicolored beaded bag I carried over my shoulder, walked past the kid in the blue shirt, who’d now made it well past noon unsullied, and stepped up to the office door. Time to find out what fate had in store. I waved my implant over the reader and the door slid open.
“Close the door, please. It’s been taken off auto. Too much traffic outside.”