by Lydia Kang
I spend the morning in the lab, extracting Dyl’s DNA from the second hair sample. Cy pointedly ignores me, reviewing journal articles and punctuating the relative quiet with low cusses. Apparently everything he reads pisses him off. My work goes well, but by afternoon, the windowless lab makes me twitchy and claustrophobic. I need some sky. Inside the nearest transport, I order it to go up, but it doesn’t budge.
“Oh come on!”
“Sorry,” Wilbert’s voice pops in, sounding sheepish.
“Let me guess. The agriplane is off limits.”
“Our section of agriplane is sealed off. But the fences go all around, and we’ve got a clear plasma grid above it you can’t see. Can’t get in or out, so it’s safe. Marka already okayed your access, but you have to ask every time.”
“Thanks, Wilbert,” I say, but a chilling realization comes over me. Vera’s and Cy’s bad attitudes suddenly make more sense. They’re just prisoners. I mean, we’re all prisoners. I’ve got one place to live, and that’s it.
Forever.
Wilbert interrupts my thoughts. “Er, Vera’s already up there,” he warns. I exhale noisily. Vera’s the last person I want to see. “Don’t worry. She’s usually in a good mood when it’s sunny.”
The transport zooms upward a short distance and opens to the stairwell.
“Hey, Wilbert,” I say before I step out of the transport. “Can I . . . Do any of you guys ever leave Carus? You know, to go shopping or something.”
“I—” Wilbert stops himself, and the rest of the sentence gurgles, stuck in his throat. “Outside of our junkyard runs, no. We don’t. Marka goes every few weeks for food or supplies we can’t grow or make ourselves.”
“Oh. That’s what I thought.” There’s no way he’s telling me everything, but I don’t want to push it.
I take sixteen steps up to the illuminated dome above the stairwell. The window’s been fixed, though a few shards are still scattered on the floor. There are no remnants of my blood anywhere. On cue for my arrival, the glowing red dot by the door to the agriplane switches to green. I push the door open.
The brilliant light of the sun stuns me, and my head throbs. It’s the opposite of brain freeze. A solar headache. Ow. Finally, my eyes adjust to the brilliance, the blue above and the gold ocean of crops, and the blob of green before me.
Uh, not a blob of green. It’s Vera, lying on her back on an outdoor chaise. There is nothing but green skin, green breasts, and a white thong. I’m speechless. And envious. Geez, she looks like a lingerie model. From Mars. I must have made a noise of surprise, because she opens an eye.
“Oh.” She flips over onto her stomach. Her ass wiggles without even a hint of cellulite. How utterly depressing. She pats an empty chaise beside her. “Have a seat.”
“I’m not getting naked, thanks anyway.”
“Suit yourself. But chica, you need a tan . . .” she starts.
“. . . like I need skin cancer. Again, no thanks. Have you seen the color of my skin?”
“Yeah, it blinds me.” She chuckles.
On the other side of the dome, I see another huge field of green. This must be where Vera farms all her other plants and stuff. Though it looks inviting, it doesn’t call me the way the gold plane of crops do.
I push my sleeves up to feel the warmth of the sun on my arms. There are only faint, pink streaks where the cuts once were. How could that be?
“Hey Vera,” I say, hoping the sunshine will keep her non-hostile for a while. “When my dad used to visit, did he use special medicines on you?”
“Huh? No, not really.” She reaches over to a tall glass of brown liquid with a straw. It looks like dirt and water mixed together. “We all had little quirky problems he’d help us out with. My vitamin deficiencies, stuff like that.”
“Because when Cy fixed up my arms, he used this purple liquid—”
“Oh! You got the brew. Nice.”
“What brew?”
“An extract Cy’s making in the lab.”
“What’s it supposed to do?”
Vera cracks open an eye. “Can’t you tell?” She takes her long leg and deftly pokes my arm with her big toe. “Do you have any scars?”
I study my arm in the bright light. “Hardly.” Oh. The crazy healing. It was fast. Too fast. “How did he synthesize that stuff? That could be worth so much money. If every pharmacy bot had that at everyone’s house . . . wow.”
“Took a while. He had to figure out which cells made the stuff, and how to keep it from degrading outside of his body.”
“His body?” I ask.
“Yeah. Cy’s like, Mr. Fix-Himself. Or Fix-William. That’s what we used to call him when he first got here.”
“Fix-William?”
“William is his last name. Anyway, we couldn’t do anything to him. Hex even stabbed him once, on a dare. He just healed up in a few hours.”
The tattoos. No wonder they keep changing. His body must metabolize the ink so fast that he gets a clean slate every day. Though why someone would purposely torture himself daily with that gigantic sewing machine/tattoo contraption is beyond me. Sounds like a hobby from hell. I don’t even want to think about what he uses for the piercings.
“Wait. How long have you been in Carus?”
“Hex and I came here as infants, the same year. Gawd, I’m surprised Marka doesn’t have white hair, we drove her pretty crazy.”
I suspect they still do, but wisely, I don’t say anything. “What about Wilbert?”
“He came two years ago. He was in a safe house in southern Okks, on the verge of being taken by Aureus. He didn’t want to join and got beat up pretty bad. Your dad helped him escape before Aureus swallowed them up. Actually, that’s when we first met your dad. Not sure I forgive him for bringing that two-headed wiener here. Lucky us,” she groans. “Stupid anti-vegetarian. Cannibal, my ass.”
I start to ask about Cy when she holds up a hand. “No, no, no. Ain’t going there with a ten-foot bean pole. Ask him yourself, if you don’t value your belongings.”
“Why? What’s he going to do to me?”
Vera turns her head away from me. “Anger management issues. At Carus, it’s also colloquially known as HRPPD.”
“Excuse me?”
She yawns. “High Risk of Profanity and Property Damage.”
In a few seconds, Vera starts snoring lightly. She looks so lush and green, I wonder if I should find a watering can and give her a douse. I should go back to the lab, but the agriplane awaits. It’s so otherworldly, compared to the lumpy buildings in town and holo-everything I’m used to.
I walk toward the perfectly planted rows of crops and slip between the golden stalks. They’re several feet taller than I am and curl over my head, giving me some much-needed shade. Golden pea-sized berries hang heavily from their tops. Sunseeds.
“Perfect food, made perfectly for you!” I say, singsong-y, like the commercials. I touch the warm clusters and pick one sphere, popping it into my mouth.
“Grrrreeeeblecch!” I spit it out. I forgot: They may be nutritionally perfect, but they’re horribly bitter. All those flavors and textures have to be processed to turn them into perfect little iced cakes and pizza and stuff.
“Are you all right, Zelia?” a voice crackles beside me.
“What?” I whirl around, but there’s no one there. The dry, golden fronds of the sunseed plants crackle in the gentle wind. There’s another crackle, but it’s not coming from the plants.
My holo.
I pinch my ear stud, and the screen comes up, still blurry as ever.
“Zelia?” It’s a man again. Even though he’s whispering, the tone is deeply resonant.
“Yes! Yes, it’s me. Who is this?” I put my hand on my stomach to keep it from flopping up and out my throat.
“It’s Q. I’ve been trying and trying, but the transmission never goes through.”
“You know Dylia, don’t you?” Harsh static answers me for an eternity of thirty seconds.
I’m as memorable as a clogged vaporizer sink. This is not what I expect from anyone, ever. I shake away the pleasant but intrusive thought.
“Do you know us from school? Who are you?”
“This channel isn’t safe. The less I say, the better.”
Ugh. Thwarted again. “But what about Dyl. Is she okay? Is she safe?”
“For now, but not for long.”
My heart. It hurts. Like every drop of blood is being squeezed out and it’s shriveling into something hard and small. I’m at the mercy of everything I don’t have control over. Everything.
“You have to tell me something. Anything. What can I do?” I beg.
“Zelia!” a voice booms behind me. It’s Hex or Cy, I can’t tell. The distant crunch of footsteps on fallen crisp fronds grows closer.
“What can I do?” I cry at the gray screen.
“For one thing, don’t tell anyone about us.”
“But—”
“Don’t talk about me. I promise I’ll tell you more when we meet.”
“Where?” I can’t hide the desperation in my voice.
My question goes unanswered as the thick static resumes. The crunching steps are close, so I turn off my holo. It’s Hex. I must look panicked and ill, because immediately he puts four hands on me as if I’m going to fall over.
“Hey, you look awful. What happened?”
“Nothing. I just needed some air.” I steady myself, but I have to hyperventilate a little. He appraises me and steps back, crossing both pairs of arms.
“You’re pretty spooked.”
I wave my hand around. “There was this . . . thing.” In a flash, I remember the bird that got zapped by the blue fence on my first day. “It flew by my head,” I lie.
“Oh, the white bats. Yeah, they’re irritating.” He spins around, but the airspace is bat-free. “Oh, I almost forgot. Cy wants to talk to you. Something about hogging one of the lab machines.”
“Why didn’t he come himself?”
“He’s stuck in the lab. He promised not to murder my basketball in return.”
“How kind of him.”
Hex shrugs. “That’s what siblings are for, right?”
I can’t help it, but I don’t remotely think of these people as family. Dyl is all I have. She’s real. These people, this place, it’s not the same. Hex sees my face and shades his eyes from the sun.
“You miss your sister, huh?”
My eyes water involuntarily at his question. “Yeah.”
He steps forward and wraps his arms around me, my face peeking out between his two left arms. Being hugged by a four-armed dude is unbelievable. It’s all comfort and warm muscles and just . . . wonderful.
I wipe my face off with a sleeve. “So, you have a lab too, right?” I ask, heading for my conversational comfort zone.
“Eh, I’m just twenty butterfingers in there. Marka forced Cy to watch over my shoulder and I managed to isolate my trait, but I kept screwing up the next part. No one, not even fourth-world countries, will benefit from having three noses or four pairs of lips, so my work is kind of done.”
We walk back to the stairwell entrance, where Vera is decently dressed in a white bikini top and sarong. She’s reading on her holo and eating a small handful of soil by moistening her finger in her mouth, pressing it into the dirt, and then licking off her brown fingertip.
“That is so wrong, on so many levels.” Hex shields his eyes.
“Move along, people.” She waves us away, too absorbed in her reading to parry with Hex’s insults. Hex throws me a conspiratorial smile.
I smile back, but it’s not real. Underneath, I’m a tangle of conflicting thoughts. What if Q is the only person who’s really on my side?
• • •
I CLOSE MY EYES WHEN I PASS through the doorway of the lab, and ready myself for the upcoming argument. I’m not hogging Cy’s machines. They’re our machines now.
What I don’t expect is to see Cy at his desk, clutching the edge of it so hard, I can see the cut of his triceps. His tattoos are so dense today that hardly any patches of pale skin show on his arms or neck. Black plugs widen his earlobes. The expression on his face isn’t the usual mask of anger or irritation. It’s crestfallen. As if he’s failed to erase a heartbreak he wishes didn’t exist.
I creep forward, afraid to say anything. The screens above him show news clippings from a few medical journals.
NIH halts neural transfer research due to high mortality
Long-term stroke reversal study proves ineffective
Case studies of promising neural growth factor reveal negative results
And something far more worrisome—a spreadsheet of a lab protocol, marked with red stylus lines. It’s crossed out violently as if it’s been raked over by bloodied fingernails.
As I peer at the images, my foot hits an errant metal scoop on the floor. Cy jerks his head up. His eyes meet mine, and for a second I glimpse the sorrow inside them.
Oh god, I know that feeling. The same one I felt when Dyl was taken.
Before I can say anything, he’s out of the lab, but not before I hear him bark through the doorway, “Screens off!”
The seven screens on his desk blur to gray.
• • •
CY DOESN’T RETURN TO THE LAB. In fact, I don’t see him for the rest of the day. At dinnertime, there’s a rare, multiple-Carus-member showing in the kitchen after Vera makes a huge eggplant Parmesan casserole. Only Cy is absent. No one wall-coms him to join us; they seem more cheerful without him around.
I wish he’d come back. Some soft, squishy part of me feels guilty for not saying anything when he was upset. I know what I wouldn’t say. Crap like “It’s going to be all right.” The biggest lie in Holo-Hallmark history.
Late into the night, I reach the final stage of making multiple copies of Dyl’s DNA. I was thrilled up to the part when I trashed the entire batch by pouring the wrong buffer into the replicator.
I have exactly one strand of Dyl’s hair left. One chance. I’ll make it happen. Even if I don’t, something else buoys my hope and quells the panic that Dyl is slipping out of my grasp.
Q’s voice continues to haunt me. The clock on one of the screens flashes 1:45 a.m. I head out the door for answers of a different sort.
In the hallway, I ask, “Where’s Wilbert?”
“Down the hallway, take the left transport to level one.”
If only the walls could tell me what I really wanted to know. What Dyl’s trait is, and how Q knows her. If Dyl knows how much I love her. Why Cy’s heart is as broken as mine. The secrets of the universe. The usual.
As I head for the transport, I figure it doesn’t hurt to ask. “Do you know who Q is?”
“Q is a letter of the alphabet,” the wall answers tonelessly.
Great, thanks.
“Okay then. What’s the meaning of life?”
“I have been programmed by Hexus to reply ‘meatballs,’” it says.
Oh lord. Serves me right for asking.
Before long, I find Wilbert’s workroom. A couch and coffee table sit in the center of the room, a cozy contrast to the mess of hardware everywhere else. Instead of rows of lab tables (or the naked women in his bedroom), computer screens cover each wall. Broken machines with their guts spilling out—hair-thin photon wires and internal gel circuits—lie on every inch of available floor space.
“Wilbert?” I carefully step over the broken chunky machines, making my way to the sofa, upholstered in a vomitous tan plaid.
“Yee-ah.” Behind the largest pile of junk, a hand waves, followed by one of Wilbert’s heads. “Be right out.”
“Is this all for your doctorate?” I say, poking the innards of what looks like a titanium espresso machine. Part of the gel circuit sticks to my hand, and I try to wipe
it on my shirt. It stays aggressively attached to my finger, like a bit of gummy candy with glue-like aspirations.
“Oh, that’s not good. Here.” He emerges from his mountain and hands me a tiny spray bottle. “Use that.”
I spray the goop on my finger, and it dissolves enough for me to wipe it off on my sleeve.
“Can you believe that drop of gel held enough storage space for one million books?” His eyes are wide open and eager with a geektastic expression I know so well. I’ve doled it out enough times myself. “Want something to drink?”
“Sure. Got any of that mushroom tea of Vera’s?”
“Ugh. You like that stuff?” Wilbert makes a face at me and punches in an order.
“It’s growing on me.”
“Fungus has that effect on people,” he chortles. After handing me the steaming cup, something small, brown, and very rodent-like emerges from his shirt and squeals at me.
“What the eff is that?” I shriek, spilling hot tea on my pants. I pull my legs up onto the couch.
“Callie! Bad girl!” He scoops up the hairy thing and puts it on the floor. Now I can see that it’s the size of a tiny dog. A shiny pink, coin-shaped nose wiggles in delight. Dark, glistening eyes dart back and forth between us. “This is Callie. She’s a recombinant pig.” It’s the weirdest, furriest pig I’ve ever seen. Even the curly tail is covered in brown fuzz and is more pom-pom than tail.
“So how’s the lab work going?” he says, scratching Callie’s rump.
I answer him with an expression of disgust, and wisely, he doesn’t pursue it. Callie, however, isn’t as polite. She makes a super-pig jump onto the couch, pounces on my chest, and licks my ear with vigor.
“Ew, ew, EWWWW!” I shake my hands, and poor Wilbert scrambles to grab Callie off me. With a grunt and squeal, Callie goes back into his shirt. I wipe away the pig spit and pop out my slime-covered holo stud.
“There’s a sink over there. I’m so sorry. Callie isn’t usually so frisky with strangers. She must really like you.”
“Splendid.” Oh, it’s so nice to know I attract pigs. I head for the sink at the corner of his room. After a warm blitz in the sink, the slime is vaporized into smoke and sucked into a hole at the bottom. My holo stud sparkles.
