Midnight at the Electric

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  Their eyes met, and Lily put her chin on her hand. “Now . . . I know you’re still waking up, but I really want to pin this down. I’m your dad’s dad’s mom’s brother’s daughter . . .” Lily clasped her hands together. “I saw this thing on TV about ancestry that says even personality traits can get passed through the genes. I think . . . Now are you an INTP or an ISTJ? I think you’re an ISTJ . . .”

  “Do I have to answer that?” Adri asked.

  “No.” Lily looked a little hurt, then after a few seconds, she muttered under her breath, “Probably an INTJ.” Adri wondered how many genes she and Lily actually shared. They both had the same pointy chin, so it was vaguely detectable that somewhere in a giant family tree that had lost all its branches they were connected.

  “Hey, Lily?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe now would be a good time for me to pre-apologize. I’m not really a friendly kind of a person. I’m not charming or anything. I’m, like, the opposite of that.”

  “I’m gathering that,” Lily said, her eyes mirthful.

  “I just want you to know it’s not you or anything. It’s just the way I am. I really appreciate you hosting me. I’m really grateful. I just don’t think we’re going to be buddies or anything.”

  Lily studied her. She was about to speak when something drew her attention to the window. “That must be for you,” she said, crossing the room and opening the front door, waving her forward. “I never get packages.”

  A tiny dot in the sky was getting closer and closer. Mail was coming. Just as the drone came level with the porch, it dropped its load with a thud onto the top step, and then lifted and flew back the way it had come.

  Lily lifted a box and handed it to her. It read Adri Ortiz, Colonist. Adri’s pulse sped up.

  “Looks important,” Lily said. “I’ll give you plenty of space.” She walked to the porch stairs and turned for a moment. “Who knows, you may find out I’m not that much of a friendly person either. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I killed you in your sleep tonight?”

  Adri stared at her in surprise.

  Lily grinned and walked down into the yard.

  Adri found a kind of library/TV room behind the kitchen—full of lopsided, inviting old furniture and lined with shelves bursting with old paper books. She sat on the couch and opened the box.

  A Pixo lay on top, and as she held the tiny box in her palm, an image of Lamont Bell lit up above her hand, his own hands folded.

  Welcome to Kansas! You are one of the elite individuals who has shown you have what it takes to be part of our team on Mars. We’re so fortunate to have you, and I’m looking forward to meeting you! Our first session is scheduled for November 1 at 10:00 a.m.

  About a month before launch, you and I will meet individually in order to finalize your commitment. Until then, know that this is a time to confirm that we are a right fit. The next several weeks will allow you to familiarize yourself with our process, but it will also be a time for reflection. Twenty percent of our recruits find that they are unable to commit to the reality of leaving their home planet behind, and since we want only wholehearted commitment, we support this kind of self-inquiry.

  Please arrive at the Center on time for your session.

  Thank you.

  Adri couldn’t believe it; that was eleven days away. Why so long? She had rushed here just to hurry up and wait. She wondered how she’d survive the boredom.

  The box contained a bunch of small items for her to get used to: a wearable translation filter, a Pixo containing the profiles of the other Colonists on her team . . . Adri sifted through them, and then sitting back, at a loss for what to do with herself, she turned on the TV. They were talking politics about carbon capture locations in the South China Sea. Her eyes kept going to the barn lot beyond the windows, out to where she’d been walking that morning.

  Lily came back inside a few minutes later, and as she stood in the kitchen tidying up, Adri came to stand in the doorway to watch her. Inexplicably she dumped everything in the trash instead of the Cyclo-bin that stood right beside it.

  “Hey, Lily?” she said. “Do you know how old that tortoise is? Galapagos?”

  Lily cast a glance over her shoulder. “Old as sin. They live up to a century and a half supposedly, and I’d say she’s probably pushing that.”

  For a moment, Adri wondered whether or not to admit she’d been snooping in Lily’s box of mementos upstairs, but curiosity got the best of her.

  “Last night I was looking around in my room and I found some old photos and mementos and stuff. There’s a postcard. From someone named Lenore to someone named Beth. From 1920. It mentions Galapagos—it makes it sound like she was really important—like this person was coming all this way to deliver her. Do you think it’s the same Galapagos?”

  Lily looked up, intrigued, as she wiped down the sink. “Must be. She came with the house when my mother moved in, a lifetime ago. Along with the books, furniture . . . everything. The family that lived here, it was like they just . . . disappeared, barely took a thing with them—or at least that’s how it seemed growing up.” Lily fiddled with the tap, which was leaking. “My mother said they were family, but I never asked her about it, just didn’t think much about it. Now that we’ve got no family left, I wish I had. They were Gottliebs or Godfreeds or something.” She finally got the tap fixed and turned. “My mind . . .” She tapped her forehead and then smiled sadly.

  Adri waited for her to elaborate.

  “I’ve got dementia.” Lily leaned back against the counter. “The other day I forgot, for a little while, that I was old. Isn’t that crazy? I thought I was in my twenties and that I was looking for a job, and then I was like, oh wait a second, I retired twenty years ago.” She barked out a laugh. “They say I’ll start forgetting who’s dead and who’s alive.” Her smile faded.

  “I’m sorry, Lily,” Adri said.

  “It’s the way it goes, I guess. They’ve got concrete that heals itself and all these diseases licked, but some things still get left behind in the dust. Just my luck.” Lily looked thoughtful. “My mother had this stack of letters, about those people or from them or something—dug up when she was cleaning things out. I remember seeing her reading them on the couch a couple times, very absorbed. But I’d bet she threw them away. She was never a sentimental person.”

  She sighed. “It’d be nice to know why they mattered to her,” she said. “How they were related to us. It’d be nice if I weren’t the last Ortiz on earth, after you leave. Some family all the records missed.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “You were already the last one in our family,” Adri offered. “Before you knew about me, and that wasn’t so bad.”

  “Oh,” Lily shrugged. “I always knew about you. I did a DNA search years ago, and you’re the only one who turned up.”

  Adri was taken by surprise. It made her bristle, that she’d been left in the dark. But it wasn’t like she would have reached out to Lily if the knowledge had been reversed.

  “Do you know Galapagos tortoises are endangered?” she said. “It’s illegal for them to be pets.”

  Lily studied her for a second, then smiled. “We should have her arrested.” She flashed a mischievous smile. “You wanna watch TV?” she asked. “There’s gonna be a segment on a little girl who died and went to heaven for five minutes.”

  Adri couldn’t imagine anything she’d less like to see. “How far is town?” she asked.

  “Less than a mile. I could take you.”

  There was longing in her voice, but Adri ignored it. “I’m gonna go for a run.”

  At first there was nothing but farmland on either side of her—wheat fields and empty pastures with no houses in sight. After about two miles she passed an abandoned convenience store with windows missing and a rusting gas stand out front. But there were also signs of life: a metal sign announcing that the street had been adopted by the Rotary Club, a car-charging station, a distant ad balloon fl
oating through the sky advertising Band-Aids. Within a mile she was passing little houses and then brick storefronts. Turning onto Main Street, she passed a grocery store that looked fairly decent, then a thrift store, a town hall, and a sanitation office. Otherwise Canaan was empty. Past town, fields of buffalo grass stretched along the side of the road and out toward the horizon.

  No wonder Lily was so desperate for signs of life. She wasn’t kidding when she’d said the town was dead. She was essentially all alone.

  That night, after Lily had gone to bed, Adri did a cursory search around the house for the letters Lily had mentioned, but nothing turned up. She pulled out the postcard again and read it. It was mysterious, the disappearance of the family, the idea that they might be related to Lily and Adri, the turtle as a mighty gift . . . one girl asking another: Will you be waiting for me? Will you love her as much as I do? The words struck her as all wrong. What was so important about a tortoise that a person would cross the ocean to deliver her? What kind of person would love a tortoise that much?

  Outside her window, the moon was rising. There were astronomical observatories there now, too small and distant to see. She tried to picture her new future.

  As people on whom the future depended, Colonists had access to astronomically expensive, government-controlled nanotherapies that were only available to a select few. These therapies meant a Colonist’s life might go on an extremely long time. Adri looked down at her hands, trying to imagine living a century and a half, and even longer than that.

  Of all the things that Adri had tried to get her head around in the past week, this was the hardest. What would living for hundreds of years be like? Did she even want to live that long? She gazed out the window and tried to picture it; she looked at her hands and tried to imagine them as three-hundred-, four-hundred-, or thousand-year-old hands.

  Suddenly she realized what it was that had felt so off about the room since she’d arrived. In all her sixteen years in Miami, she’d always been able to hear the faint sound of waves and the motorboats headed across the water. She’d never slept more than a mile away from the ocean.

  CHAPTER 3

  For the first time that Adri could remember, she started sleeping in. She spent every morning—for the next ten days—parked on the comfy, crooked couch in the library, flipping through the channels in a haze of purposelessness—no studying to do, no devices to kill time with. She thumbed through old books (some of them so dusty they made her cough): a combination of pulp mysteries, romance novels, world history, old fairy tales, some books in Spanish, most in English. The shelves had warped a little under all the weight.

  Lily seemed to accept fairly quickly that they weren’t destined to be friends and mostly kept her distance. Apparently, it took effort. She watched Adri when she thought Adri didn’t notice, and she often opened her mouth to strike up a conversation before making a visible effort to stop herself. Only at meals did they talk at all about the vague outlines of their lives: Lily’s husband had died ten years before. Her mother had been a single mom and had run the farm on her own. She had no siblings.

  Adri was curious about her—her obsession with angels, her attachment to her lonely farm. She wanted to ask her things, but asking people things was like opening a box you couldn’t close. So she was polite but not open. She answered the usual questions about her own life: Growing up in the group home had been fine. No, she didn’t remember her parents. They had died in the flash floods during a cyclone, before Miami built its levy system, its floating roadways. No, she wasn’t sad about it—it just was the way it was. They both went their own way most of each day.

  Lily was busy enough for both of them, anyway. It seemed that, for one measly house, there was endless upkeep. She worked constantly on the yard, carrying newspapers out onto the porch in her spindly arms or pushing wheelbarrows full of mulch across the barn lot. As someone whose backyard had always been the ocean, Adri had never dreamed how much work went into owning one tiny piece of earth, pretty and peaceful as it was.

  Outside, the birds flitted past the windows, hunkering down as fall set in. From the couch, there was a good view of the tortoise house, and every once in a while Lily would appear there, taking a break. Without knowing she was being watched, she’d sit next to Galapagos nose to nose, petting her and talking to her. Other times, she’d come walking into the house and startle at the sight of Adri, like she’d forgotten she was there. She’d shake the moment off, trying to hide her confusion, and Adri pretended she didn’t notice.

  They coexisted, and Adri began to think it wasn’t going to be so bad. Still, another thing Adri had never been able to change was that people disappointed her, and Lily was no exception. It bothered her how Lily kept the heat on full blast and walked around indoors in shorts. (“You should turn the heat down, Lily. You’re not on solar, and it’s wasteful,” she’d pointed out. Lily just said “huh” in response and kept it on ninety.) How she loved shows about girls going to heaven but didn’t know anything about current events. And how she drove a dinosaur of a gas-devouring car.

  So it made it harder when it occurred to Adri that since her Theta was dead, she needed to ask Lily for a ride to Wichita.

  “I thought you said you weren’t blind.”

  Adri clutched the armrests as Lily veered into a parking spot in front of an enormous white stone building in downtown Wichita. In the last hour she’d almost rear-ended the same car twice, chased a pedestrian out of a crosswalk (“Did you see that woman’s face? I think she pooped her pants,” Lily said), and driven up a small portion of a one-way street before Adri had stopped her.

  Now she pulled a hat out of her purse and put it on. It was shaped like teddy bear ears.

  “You look like a crazy person,” Adri said.

  “You look boring and average,” Lily replied. She turned and climbed out of the car. She swiped her palm over the meter uncertainly as Adri climbed out of the passenger side and tried to smooth out her wrinkled button-down. She was so nervous her heart was fluttering, but she didn’t know if it was from the near-death experience of the drive over or what waited inside the Center.

  She took in the sights around her. Miami had been full of oceanic blues and grays; Wichita, on the other hand, was a “city of the future”—well financed and well maintained, with sleek buildings and needlelike, soaring spires rising out of the manicured greenery below.

  Most of it had been built in the last fifteen years as more and more federal agencies had left Washington, DC, which was more swamp than city now. The Center, its partners from China and Nicaragua, and Plan Z—had located here because there were no floods, no quakes, no hurricanes, good infrastructure, and lots of wide open spaces to build, test, and launch.

  Lily reached for her arm but pulled back as they climbed the stairs.

  “You need help?” Adri asked.

  “I’m trying not to invade your personal space,” Lily puffed, looking small and overwhelmed as they climbed.

  Adri reached for her hand. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m not a total asshole. I don’t, like, push baby strollers into the street or anything.”

  They were still holding hands when they checked in at a security desk, and were ushered into a long white hallway to the doorway of a crowded room, full of people Adri’s age.

  Lily studied the room, looking confused. “What is this place?”

  Adri looked at her. “The Center. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah.” Lily nodded, and then smiled, amused. “Duh.” She pulled her hand out of Adri’s reluctantly. “I’ll be outside with the other leftovers,” she joked, and stepped away.

  The room was buzzing with people gathered in clusters, their voices reverberating off the bright, empty walls. Adri recognized her crew mates from profiles she’d watched: Alexa, an engineer from Denver. Saba, a botanist from Kuwait. A couple of athletes who’d been training for the Olympics before they’d switched to the Institute track in kinesiology. A guy named D’Angelo who did nano-eng
ineering, and a programmer named Shyla. With the exception of a couple of experts in their forties, they were all in their early twenties or younger. The Center chose young Colonists for their physical fitness and their likeliness to populate Mars with future generations, but Adri knew from the literature that this group was among the youngest they’d ever had.

  She chose a seat near no one and adopted her standard approach of looking absorbed with something on the wall while the others introduced themselves to each other.

  The lights in the room suddenly dimmed, and behind them the walls lit up with holographic pictures of Mars, so detailed and layered that it seemed you could reach your fingers in and pull out handfuls of the red dust. They were engulfed in a landscape full of enormous mountains, dizzyingly deep craters, and enormous boulders.

  A moment later a man entered the room, trailed by a circle of light. A hush fell over the room as they all turned to look at Lamont Bell—midforties, dressed in a slick navy blue suit. He exuded authority, confidence, and excitement.

  He laid a tablet down on the desk in front of him, swiped at the screen for a moment or two—completely unfazed by the room full of staring people—and then looked up at them all.

  “I know all your faces, but it’s great to meet you all in person. I want to congratulate you again on making it here; we’re very happy to have you. You’ve been selected based not only on your abilities but also on the strength of your character, as we have been able to assess you. We want and need good people for this project. And in this room, we’ve got some of the best. Now, flattery out of the way, let’s get to it.”

  He swiped at his tablet. The three-dimensional landscape shifted, its images orbiting around them.

  “Let me go over some of what you already know. Mars is a beautiful place. It contains the biggest volcanoes known to exist in the solar system, craters that make the Grand Canyon look like a pothole, breathtaking riverbeds—dry for now, but we hope not forever—and ice fields that stretch for miles.”