The world was already crazy, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “You shouldn’t be driving or flying today.”
“I took the bank’s private jet service and brought Gunter.” He’s her favorite driver/bodyguard. She let out a long sigh. “I’m not going to change how I live because of this.”
“Yeah, right.” I crooked my thumb in Gunter’s direction.
Mom waved away my concern and dropped into the only clean chair in the room.
To be fair, Mom’s family had lived with private jets and bodyguards for eons. Not because of the Coalition, but because the family owns the second-largest private bank in Switzerland, a place renowned for its private financial dealings. And my mom, Gretchen Krieger Rausch, runs the mergers and acquisitions division of Banc Rausch.
Chase is damned lucky. Mom might look all Teutonic blonde, but if she’d seen that little move Chase made behind her back, he would’ve walked out of here minus a body part. Even her brothers are scared of her.
Something had brought my mother to Bern, something she didn’t want to tell me over the phone. Maybe she and Dad were getting divorced after all. When they first sent me here, I thought that meant they were splitting up. Three years have gone by, and nothing. Yet.
“What is it?” I pushed some clothes off my bed.
“It’s your cousin Winter. She’s not hurt or anything like that,” she added quickly. “But she is in the hospital.”
I sank down on the mattress.
“Winter hasn’t handled her parents being away as well as we thought. And her grandfather lets her run wild. Your father said it’s possible she wasn’t taking her medication. Now she’s had a psychotic break.”
“A what?” Psychotic? My Winter? I didn’t believe it.
Mom explained that the doctor, a new one Dad found for her, thinks Winter may be schizophrenic. Paranoid schizophrenic, in fact. She’d thrown herself into her “weird” art, wasn’t doing well in school, and was saying some crazy things about Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring’s whereabouts.
“Like what?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Mäuschen,” Mom said in her best Mom-to-five-year-old voice. “Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness where you lose touch with reality. Paranoid schizophrenics have delusions that everyone is after them or that the government is watching them. In Winter’s case, she said the government took her parents and locked them up in a secret prison.”
“Scheisse,” I half-whispered.
Winter and I never really talked about her parents. Her friends—Micah and Velvet, yes. And her grandfather, whom she adores. We even talked about Jet, the woman she has a crush on. Not her parents. She did say once (twice?) that she didn’t want to talk about them—too many people listening. I figured she’d said that because Uncle Brian and Aunt Spring were in Japan working on a super-secret project for the company. That’s what Dad said when he took me skiing that Christmas. He also told me to keep it hush-hush so a competitor wouldn’t pick up the info. And Mom had said not to bring it up because Winter was upset she got left behind. So I never pushed it.
Maybe I should have.
“Did you notice anything?” Mom asked. Sometimes her mom-radar was a little too accurate.
I shook my head. “She seemed fine all the times we’ve chatted.”
Actually, we hadn’t talked much in the last few weeks. But we did that sometimes. One of us would get sidetracked by a new project—hers are far more constructive than mine—and a month or two might go by before we checked in again. I should’ve known something was wrong this time, though.
“I know you two are close. That’s why I wanted to tell you in person. In case you tried to call her.” Mom hesitated, which is so unlike her. She leaned forward. “Aiden, you’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” She peered at me the way she probably did over the negotiation table, trying to read my tells.
Suddenly I knew what this trip was all about. She could have called me about Winter. Mom wanted to reassure herself that me being away from her and Dad for so long hadn’t cracked me, too.
“I know you and your father don’t always get along, but—”
“The universe abides, Mom.” I cut her off because I didn’t want to hear her spiel about my hacking being all about getting Dad’s attention.
She peered at me over her skinny black glasses. Okay, maybe my usual response wasn’t the best one considering she was doubting my sanity.
“I’m fine, Mom.” I smiled. She was still doing the peering thing at me, so I added, “I’m just bummed about Winter.”
“I know, mäuschen. Me, too.” She looked down at her hands. “Koji should have seen it coming. Spring is furious at him.”
Koji, Mr. Yamada, is Aunt Spring’s father—and Winter’s grandfather. She’d been living with him for the past three years.
Mom rose to her feet and dusted herself off. “You really do need to clean in here, Aiden.” She glanced around the room in disgust.
“Can I see her?” I hadn’t physically seen Winter in years. I hadn’t been back to Hamilton since I got shipped to Bern Academy. Dad came here for the holidays, and I usually spent summers in Zurich with Mom—or here in summer school.
“She’ll probably be in the hospital for a few weeks, Aiden. We’ll talk after the term is over, but your father still wants you to stay here this summer. Now, I need to fly back to Zurich and do some damage control.”
With that, Mom pecked me on the cheek and made her exit, Gunter in tow.
Psychotic.
I couldn’t wrap my head around that word. Winter was brilliant. Creative. Eccentric. Manic, even. But psychotic? She’d made incredible things out of Legos and old cell phones and duct tape when she was eight. At twelve, she’d built the winning design in the national robotics competition, the one where the ’bots had to navigate obstacles or battle each other—the challenge was different every year. I’d helped. Using a script I’d found on a Russian board (I was still a noob then), I hacked the program to shave corners off the course. It was a kludge; it worked but for all the wrong reasons. Winter, however, created the robot completely on her own in that crazy-intense way she had. Not crazy crazy. She just had a way of losing herself in what she was creating. I envied that.
Jao opened the door and let Chase in, a couple of opened packages tucked under his arm and a soda from the canteen in the other hand.
“I see we’re down to one doorman again.” Chase dropped a package on his desk. I could hear the clink of jars and the rustle of wrappers. “I cannot believe the school has the audacity to search our packages. The headmaster probably gets a cut. My smoked salmon better be in here.” He flung a loosely rewrapped package on my bed. “All you got was a stupid book.”
The torn paper flopped open to reveal a large book, Kinetic Sculptures of the Twentieth Century.
Only one person would be even remotely interested in this shit.
Winter.
The universe has impeccable timing.
Sometimes.
3.0
THE SOUND OF HUMMINGBIRDS DROWNING
WINTER NOMURA
My eyelids were like lead, and the world wouldn’t come into focus. The wings of hummingbirds beat in the gaping chasm between my ears—where my brain should be. In the distance, I could hear the trickle of words seeping into my consciousness.
“You’ve been sick, Ms. Nomura,” a kindly voice told me. “Go back to sleep and it’ll all be better in the morning.”
My eyes fluttered closed. I couldn’t help sleeping.
I didn’t dream. I just listened to the growing chatter of voices droning on inside my skull, filling the emptiness with a torrent of words.
Hospital.
Japan.
Mental breakdown.
Somewhere deep down, though, I knew where I really was.
The hummingbirds told me before they drowned in all the words. Then the words gelled into pudding.
10:03 PM. TWO WEEKS LATER. SOME
WHERE IN THE CITY OF HAMILTON…
Welcome to the MemeCast, citizens. I don’t care what you call me. The MemeCaster. Van girl. Night crawler. Meme Girl. Whatever. You’re gonna forget it someday, anyway.
That’s how we’re built.
We forget. We find out something big, act all shocked and outraged for a day or two as the implications soak into our smooth, little brains. Then something else—something shinier and prettier or bigger and badder—gets dangled in front of us. We move onto glossier things—and, without someone reminding us, we forget.
That’s why I’m here. To remind you. Of what you may have already forgotten and what you may forget in the future.
First, the past.
Last month, three young people stumbled across something dark and dangerous in our city, something that most of us suspected deep down but were unwilling to give voice to. They showed us that a certain three-letter corporation and its minions are behind some of the car bombings in our fair metropolis.
“Hold, on, Meme Girl,” you may be saying right now. “That’s crazy talk. Why would TFC and these other companies blow up cars? Here, at home?”
The why is not too hard to fathom: they make money off our fear. When the real terrorism wasn’t enough anymore to drive us to “buy buy buy,” they created their own terror—but just enough to make us want to cocoon ourselves in a brand-new security blanket of stuff—and forget.
These kids caught a glimpse of the proverbial smoking gun—black van guys setting a bomb—and put it on paper—in the form of an underground comic. As a reward, they were carted off to Detention. The Big D, variety. You know it exists. And those kids were forced to tell their stories, day after day, until the drug—the same one that so many of you pop at the TFCs on every corner—bleached their brains of those events. Now they don’t remember what they did for us. Neither do their friends and families.
And I bet most of you don’t remember, either.
“But Meme Girl,” you say. “I couldn’t forget something like that.”
Well, sometimes the forgetting curve isn’t enough. Sometimes it needs a little help.
Now for your listening pleasure tonight, we’ll start with the eleven-thousandth cover of an old ditty about the ’burbs: “Little Boxes,” coming to you from the Sneetches. You know, even the children “are put in boxes / and they come out all the same.”
4.0
THE CHIP FAIRY COMETH
VELVET KOWALCYK
Do not wear fishnet stockings and a boiled wool skirt to a dank garage. Or any garage. In June. Book of Velvet. Chapter 47, Verse 233.
Obviously I don’t read my own book because there I was, perched on a rusty John Deere riding mower in Spike’s sweltering garage. The pits of my vintage Ramones T-shirt were sopping. And who is so damn lazy that they need a tractor to mow that postage stamp of green out there?
Anyway. Richie and Little Steven finally let Spike join the Wannabes. Their lead singer got drafted, and I suspect the boys secretly coveted this shack as a practice space.
And poor Spikey needed the practice. His voice sounded like a wounded animal’s with gravel stuck in its throat.
The song wasn’t helping. It had the emotional depth of Cheez Whiz. I could write a better song than that—if this weren’t such a waste of time. The urban/folk/metal rage-against-the-machine thing the guys were striving for wasn’t going to happen.
I so missed Winter—and Micah. My bangs were still blue, which Winter and I had done together before she went to the hospital. The darn Nomuras wouldn’t let me see her. And then Micah ended up in juvie for god knows what. And now I’m stuck listening to this crap.
Summer is going to suck.
“Velvet! Earth to Velvet.” The music had stopped, and Spike was bellowing at me instead of singing. Frankly, it was hard to tell the difference.
“What?” I growled.
“What did you think?” he asked so innocently.
Richie groaned.
“Dude, do not ask her. She’ll tell you the truth,” Little Steven said, throwing up his hands as if to deflect the shrapnel he knew was going to fly.
He was right. You ask, you’d better really want to know. You call, you’d better really want to talk. And if you ask me to hang out, you’d better have more in mind than sitting in your filthy garage.
“The words water buffalo come to mind,” I said flatly.
Richie and Steven stifled a laugh. Spike looked crestfallen, but he sidled over to me.
“I thought we were going to do something,” I told him as I dusted off my skirt.
“We are.” He leaned in to kiss me, but I dodged the full-on bullet.
“No, you’re doing something.” I flicked a pigtail over my shoulder. I’m just watching. As usual. “Sitting on my ass in a sweatbox doesn’t constitute doing something.” I pecked him on the cheek and made for the exit.
“It’s a nice ass,” Spike called as I ducked under the rising garage door. “Well, it is,” I heard him say to the boys.
Great. In school, I was the one with the weird clothes and blue hair. Now I’m the one with the nice ass.
Time to find something to do. Thing is, I had no clue what that was. So I just walked.
The slap of my boots on the pavement was a hypnotic sound that drowned out my dreary poor-me thoughts. Soon I found myself outside Black Dog Architectural Reclamation and Bakery—or at least what was left of it. Micah didn’t like to let on that he lived there in the homeless village behind those concrete walls. But Winter said Black Dog Village was a really cool place.
Now, it was a burned-out hull decorated with yellow police tape. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I was glad that Micah was in juvie—and that his mom had gotten that TFC apartment—before all this happened. Still, it’s hard to believe what the news said—that they found bomb-making materials here. Micah wouldn’t knowingly live with Coalition terrorists; but I guess you never know your neighbors, even in a place like this.
“ID scan.” Two cops had come up behind me while I stared at the rubble. One tapped behind his ear.
Damn. They were checking for the new ID chips.
“We’ve still got a few weeks left in the grace period,” I stammered as I fumbled in my pocket for my mobile. They’d have to accept the old ID until then, right? Trouble was, my parents were dead set against the new ID chips that had to be implanted in your skull. The compounds had been using implants for years, but now the city was making its own special chip mandatory.
I offered one of the cops my mobile. The officer with the scanner ignored me and swiped the device by my right ear. I tensed to hear the warning go off. Instead, the scanner chimed pleasantly.
“She’s good,” he told the other cop as if I wasn’t even there. “Anne Marie Kowalcyk. Fifteen. 122 Walnut Avenue.”
“Thank you for complying, Miss.” The other cop handed back my mobile. “This new chip makes our lives so much easier.” He nodded toward the remains of Black Dog.
I stood there like a stunned mullet while the cops rode off into the sunset. I’m good? Thank you for complying?
I felt behind my ear. What the hell? There was a raised disc under the skin. The damn chip fairy had visited me in my sleep. Not cool.
Thou shalt not stick shit in my skull (or any other part of my body) without express written permission. Maybe not even then. Book of Velvet. Chapter 1, Verse 1.
Someone had some explaining to do.
5.0
THE UNIVERSE COMES HOME TO ROOST
AIDEN
The glossy bit of code was as smooth as glass, with no place to grab onto, no hidden doors for me to rattle open. It was a hard nugget of gorgeousity. Mom thought it would keep me busy on the flight. Her bank thought it was the next wave in encryption: security in a tiny package.
Security isn’t about code, though. It’s about trust.
With a few clicks, I logged into the bank’s database of employees and located a likely mark. Two calls, one message, and a l
ittle digital dumpster diving later, I’d convinced one of the software team members to divulge his password to the project source code. Most people trust a call from their own tech support.
And with the password, I found the key to unlock the code.
The actual key.
Information—whether it’s money, messages, code, etc.—can be encrypted with a long string of characters called a key. And most encryption needs two keys. One locks, or encrypts, the information so it can be sent securely; another unlocks, or decrypts, the stream at the other end. The longer and more random each key is, the more secure it is. Sure, you can write a program to crunch through every possible combination of characters, but that kind of brute force attack can take weeks—even months.
Humans are always the weak link in the system. There’s no security patch for us. We’re hardwired to trust. Social Engineering 101.
I’d found only the decryption key in the bank’s files, but that’s all I needed.
Still, it was way too easy. And it didn’t take my mind off what was in that book Winter had sent me, the book that was now stuffed into my backpack in the overhead bin. I didn’t dare take it out on the plane. You never knew who was flying the unfriendly skies.
The flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and made an unhappy face at my mobile. I flicked it off and shoved it into my backpack. We’d obviously come to the tray-tables-and-seats-in-their-upright-and-locked-positions part of the flight. We were on approach to Dulles.
Take-offs and landings make me a little jittery. Not for the obvious, we’re-all-going-to-die reasons. No, if we crash, we crash. Everything is everything. But with my portable electronic devices stowed properly in my luggage, I only had the stupid ads to look at as they played across the seat-screen in front of me.
The Forgetting Curve (Memento Nora) Page 2
