The Cageless Zoo

by Thomas K. Carpenter

"It seems certain elements outside of our society, called the Frags - their name, not ours - have been lurking around your personal files. We can't tell if they've modified anything, well, since we can't check them. But I should warn you."

  Gabby put her hands on her hips. "What do you mean messing with my personals?"

  "The LGIE believe the Frags may have modified your files. Might be trying to influence your views on reality." Bracket paused again, clearly conflicted. "They've requested that I ask you if they can verify your personals. They might be able to get authorization to do so without your permission, but they'd like to not make this a big deal."

  "A big deal? My personal files are a huge deal." Gabby raised her voice louder than she intended, but she couldn't help it. "My whole life is in those files. I don't want anyone snooping around in them just to find out if these, so called, Frags have modified something. My virus protection is up to date, thank you."

  Administrator Bracket waited until she had stopped, then smoothed his hand across his desk.

  "Given the nature of the LGIE's request, I'll forgive you for this outburst, this once. Please keep control of your emotions, Ms. DeCorte."

  Gabby dropped her gaze and her shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry, Administrator Bracket."

  "Well, the request is made. And it's clear from your response that you're not willing to give them access freely," said Bracket. "So you can return to your Advanced Game Theory class."

  Gabby had her hand on the doorknob when Bracket spoke again.

  "You might want to have a talk with your parents about this. I'm sure the LGIE will be contacting you soon and you'll want to know what your options are."

  Gabby nodded and left his office. The hallways were dreadfully quiet. She wanted to turn on some mood music but she couldn't muster the thought to activate it. The silence suited her anyway.

  Instead of going to class, she circled the hallways, kitting her bad mood so she wouldn't scream. When at last she'd dropped agro, she pinged Zaela and told her to meet outside school at the FunCar lot.

  Their LifeScores were both above rank after the morning and she needed a sanity break, even if it cost them a few points. Plus the rest of afternoon had few opportunities to score.

  There were opportunities to gain a few points where they were going, too. If they played their cards right. The hard part was going to be convincing Zaela. She hated the Library Museum.

  Chapter Three

  Gabby met Zaela at the edge of the school grounds. The school lawn appeared as a perfectly manicured green field with bushes shaped into different animals.

  "Hey Z, your outfit looks totally twinked," said Gabby.

  Zaela stopped and put a hand on one hip, her eyebrow raising as her head tilted. She wore a yellow shirt that glowed like a small sun and a pink ruffled skirt. Black cat figures on the skirt danced around her waist, sometimes disappearing into the folds.

  "What's up, Gabs? You only compliment my clothes when you're going ask me for something. At least you didn't compliment my skin color, then I know you're in deep," said Zaela.

  Gabby smirked. "Well, since you mention it. Your skin is looking particularly bronze today." She paused. "And as always, it goes well with your silky black hair."

  Zaela rolled her eyes. "Next you're going to be asking me to go to the Library Museum."

  "Well actually." Gabby held out her hands, palms up. "I am. Pretty please? I'll let you pick all the games in the FunCar."

  "But Blair the Chair is so weird."

  Gabby hugged her friend's arm and jumped up and down. "Please...," she whined.

  "Fine. Only because you're my best friend." Zaela pointed her finger at Gabby. "But I get to pick all the games. You promised."

  "Fine," said Gabby. "Let's get going."

  The two girls stepped off the school property and the manicured lawns and animal bushes disappeared. Instead they were replaced with rolling ads from Tata Motors. The makers of the FunCar owned the available ad space around the school. Once the two girls were off school grounds, they were assaulted by the wallpaper-like ads.

  "Bydaway, your outfit is pretty fragadelic, too," remarked Zaela, as the girls made their way to the nearby FunCar lot. "For a pale and skinny blonde chick, anyway."

  "I put it on random wardrobe generator this morning. I had other things on my mind," said Gabby.

  The FunCar lot was filled with hundreds of bubble shaped cars with four puffy tires. The vehicles were used by any citizen to get from one place to another.

  When Gabby snapped her fingers at a nearby car, its blue exterior was replaced by a white one with skulls. Each skull had a pink bow on it.

  The bubble shield retracted enough for the two girls to climb inside. Once the two girls were strapped in, Gabby commanded the FunCar to take them to the Library Museum.

  "We're going to play Brush Battle," said Zaela.

  Gabby groaned. She really would rather play Geostack or Shared Destruction. Those would actually get them some decent points while they were skipping school, maybe even breaking even for the day. Brush Battle was strictly artistic and barely got more than she got for brushing her teeth in the morning.

  "You promised."

  Gabby nodded. "I did."

  "I need a break from all that score grinding." Zaela paused, a thoughtful and sad expression shading her face. "I wish creativity scored higher in LifeGame."

  "Sorry Z." Another time she might have tried to talk her out of Brush Battle, but she sensed her friend's need and let it go.

  As the game started up, she felt the FunCar lurch forward, and brushes appeared in their hands. The sense-webs in her skin made the brush feel real beneath her fingertips, but she wanted to squeeze it tighter to get a better grip and that screwed up her control of the brush tip.

  The car's bubble disappeared as a surrealistic landscape was painted over their eye-screens, making it appear they were floating through a rounded and droopy landscape of pastel watercolors populated by strange creatures including one with a candy-striped hat.

  Zaela brightened along with the surroundings. "Ohh...Dr. Seuss!"

  "Who?" Gabby had never heard of this Doctor, nor why he would be in an art game, but before she could ask again, a floating canvas appeared before her.

  The object of the game was to pick an object out of the landscape and paint it. Scoring was given for closeness of the reproduction. Zaela's paintings were always spot on. Gabby always thought her own appeared to be different colored blobs with lines sticking out of them.

  By the time they reached the Library Museum, the girls had played Brush Battle three times. When they climbed out of their FunCar, Zaela exclaimed, "I think I got almost five points for that."

  They'd both gotten over three hundred points for the morning's track hack, but Gabby didn't say anything. She didn't want to ruin Zaela's good mood before they got into the Library.

  The FunCar dropped them off near a colossal stone building without any digital adornment. No ads played across its walls, nor were there any murals or paintings. The Library Museum was like a gray block of stone resting in a vat of rainbow ice cream.

  "Remember, no skins," said Gabby. "You know how Blair gets."

  Zaela huffed. "Not like it matters anyway. The walls interfere with the signals and she doesn't have repeaters. The world gets all fuzzy and out of place in there."

  The girls' outfits disappeared as they entered the Library. Flesh-colored and skin-tight undersuits covered their bodies from thighs to neck. The underclothes ensured that no one could peek underneath their digital skins and see them naked.

  Inside, Gabby took a long, deep breath, inhaling the delicious scents of real paper and ink.

  "What are you smelling? It smells all musty in here," said Zaela.

  Gabby ignored her friend and went in past the entryway. The Library Museum wasn't much of a museum as museums go. It was more of a storage facility for books, paid for by some long dead rich person. Blair the librarian had never told her who.
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  The massive space that disappeared into the gloom was filled from floor to ceiling with books. Even the spaces on top of the shelves were cluttered with books, that looked like at one time had been stacked neatly, but with time slowly slumped to the edge.

  Even on the shelves, books were double and triple stacked. Blair utilized every available space within the facility to store books, barely keeping a wide enough aisle for her chair to fit.

  Gabby cupped her hands around her mouth. "Blair! It's me, Gabriella!"

  The words were absorbed by the endless rows, crammed with books.

  "Why can't Blair the Chair mind-text like a normal human?" muttered Zaela.

  "Why do that when I have great hearing?" asked a mechanical voice from a nearby alcove.

  Zaela squeaked and put both hands across her mouth. Her eyes were wide and her face wilted in embarrassment.

  A woman in a motorized chair, covered in tubes and wires, wheeled into view. Her skin was a rich chocolate, much darker than Zaela's, but she had kinky hair where Zaela's was straight. The hair was tangled and held back with a bit of twine.

  Her head tilted awkwardly to the side, held up by a padded catch. One tube went into her nose, while another disappeared into her half-open mouth. Her body was frail and sunken like a deflated tire, but her eyes burned with the intensity of a whirling galaxy.

  The voice, coming from a speaker box built into her wheelchair, crackled with sarcasm. "Seems you should be taking your own advice."

  Blair ran her motorized chair past Zaela, who had tears forming in her eyes. The chair-bound woman rotated around until she was facing Zaela.

  "Oh get over it. We all say stupid things sometimes. Though you look like you say more than your fair share," said Blair's mechanical voice, which Gabby always thought was strangely expressive.

  Gabby stifled a laugh, catching a nasty glare from Zaela.

  "Well you did deserve that," said Gabby.

  "Anyway," said Blair. "I don't mind-text usually because I'm busy sending commands to my chair or to Frank, my robot-helper. It's bad enough I get the two of them confused sometimes and walk Frank into a wall."

  As if he'd been called, a silvery bipedal robot lurched out from between two rows. The robot was an older model, built like a linebacker and with unresponsive servos that made his movements sluggish. Two plastic caps had been crudely glued to his neck and squiggly lines covered his arms as if they'd been drawn by a four-year-old.

  Frank picked up a stack of books near the entryway and wandered back into the rows.

  "So how can I help you, Gabriella?" asked Blair.

  Besides the enjoyment of smelling and reading old books, Gabby often came to the Library Museum because Blair was the smartest person she knew. But when Gabby opened her mouth, she realized she didn't have a question to ask.

  "You're not still worried about getting into University are you?" Blair asked. "And while I don't agree with what they have to teach, you've got their shtick down cold."

  Gabby shook her head. "It's not that." She paused and quickly glanced at Zaela. "It's the LGIE. Some group called the Frags have been messing around with my personal reality files and the LGIE wants to take a peek to see if they've changed anything."

  "The LGIE? The Frags? Is there something I should know about?" asked Zaela.

  Gabby had promised Zaela last year that she wouldn't try to "fix" her LifeScore anymore.

  "It's not what you think," said Gabby.

  Zaela crossed her arms. "Then what is it?"

  "I don't know. That's the thing." Gabby hesitated talking about the boy with the ice-chip eyes that had appeared in the hallway. She didn't want to talk about him just yet, especially when she wasn't sure she'd really seen him.

  She sighed. "Really I need to know what I should do about it. Administrator Bracket told me I should talk to my parents, but they'll just tell me to cooperate."

  Gabby wandered to a table that had a space on it not stacked with books and jumped on, almost knocking over a stack.

  "Everything is in those files: who I talk to, all my mind-text histories, programs, mods, skins, and recorded thoughts. Plus all the things I've seen and done in the last few months."

  She thought about the pranks and hacks she'd done. They might not be looking for those things, but they would find them. Then Gabby realized that Blair was perfectly still, except for her wide expressive eyes, that seemed out of place on such a wasted body.

  Zaela realized it too the moment before she was going to say something, so she closed her mouth and peered sideways at Blair.

  The chair-bound librarian slowly pulled away from the two girls and circled around the table. They watched Blair until she made a complete rotation and came to a stop.

  Gabby realized then how quiet it was in the Library Museum. Stray bits of static crackled on Blair's speakers, unformed thoughts or some other flotsam Gabby couldn't understand. Tubes gargled with liquid, at once silent, then straining for air, making a sound like a kid sucking on a straw.

  In another part of the Library, muffled sounds of servos grinding and cladding footsteps made it past the walls of books stacked high to the ceiling.

  "Do you still study history in school?" Blair asked. "No. You don't, do you? Such a shame." Even through the speakers, disappointment flooded her voice.

  "We study the history of the gaming movement and specific histories if they help us be more competitive...," Zaela offered, but her voice trailed to nothing as she realized Blair hadn't really asked.

  "Back two centuries ago, the world was split into two factions. There was a secret group called the Stasi. They were the most effective secret police ever known, even keeping the scents of its citizens so they could be tracked by dogs if they tried to run."

  Blair's mechanical voice had a wonderfully knowledgeable cadence to it. Gabby could listen to Blair talk all day, and sometimes did, when the school grind got the best of her. While Gabby was a top student, the ever-counting LifeScore made her feel anxious, always. Coming to the Library Museum eased that worry as she could, for a brief time, learn for the sake of learning.

  "The Stasi monitored the population through overlapping layers of informants." Blair paused and before the speakers could crackle to life again, the projection of Gabby's mother blinked into the middle of the entryway.

  "Gabby, honey. Why aren't you in school?"

  Her mother's hair had been cinched back in an oppressive ponytail. Gabby had gotten her looks from her mother: broad nose, full lips and a slightly chubby face that she hated. Her mother used a wrinkle-free skin so the two were often confused with sisters.

  "I..." Gabby paused, carefully choosing her words, "...was doing research on a new game cycle I heard they might implement for the Final Raid. They've blocked the links to it, so I thought I'd try the Museum for an old hard copy."

  Her mother's hand reached up to rub her forehead. That's when Gabby knew that something was wrong.

  "That's fine." The projection of her mother blinked a few times from the weak signal, while she crossed her arms. "But is there anything you should be telling us about? The LGIE stopped by a little while ago to talk."

  Zaela shrugged and gave her a told-you-so look.

  "I don't know, mom. Administrator Bracket told me about it today. I was going to talk to you tonight when I got home," said Gabby.

  "I think you should come home right now. After I contacted your father, he left work immediately," said Gabby's mother. "They're expecting an answer tonight."

  Gabby's stomach did a barrel roll. Her father never left work unless it was a major emergency. For that matter, he never stopped working, constantly playing mini-games with his fellow workers to help define new business strategies.

  Even though her hands shook, Gabby steeled herself. "Tell Dad not to contact the LGIE. I didn't do anything. I can explain what Bracket told me when I get home."

  Her mother nodded and the projection disappeared. Gabby turned to Zaela and Blair, shoving her
hands under her arms so they would stop shaking.

  Frank the helper-robot stood behind Blair's chair holding two books in its silvery hands. He must have wandered up while she'd been talking to her mother.

  Blair's voice crackled to life. "You should get going. You don't want to worry your parents any more than they already are."

  Frank lurched forward and dropped the two books into Gabby's lap. The first had an owl on the cover with no title and the second was titled "The Secret History of the Stasi."

  "I've been meaning to give you the first book for some time. The second is to help with your current crisis," said Blair.

  "Thanks Blair." Gabby leaned down into her chair and gave Blair a delicate hug. She smelled like medicine and ink.

  Blair had once told her that since she'd been confined to a wheelchair, she missed hugs most of all, so Gabby always made sure to give her one before she left.

  Zaela was a bit more squeamish and only touched Blair's chair. "I'm sorry for my comment earlier. I should have never said that."

  There was dreadful gurgle from Blair's tubes in the moment after Zaela spoke. Blair rotated backwards and piloted toward a tall pile of books in the corner.

  "Come here," wheezed Blair's mechanical voice.

  Zaela cautiously followed the wheelchair to the corner. Blair's emaciated hand lifted slightly, pointing to the middle of the stack.

  "There," was all Blair said.

  The book pile threatened to fall over when Zaela pulled the book from the middle of the pile. A curious stare fell over Zaela's face as she read the cover. Then as she paged through the book, her face erupted as if a warm light had been shone on it.

  Before Gabby could see what the book was, Zaela shoved it into her backpack.

  "Thank you, Blair."

  To Gabby's surprise, Zaela leaned down and gave Blair a hug.

  The two girls returned to the FunCar in silence. Neither felt like playing any games on the way home. Gabby tried to muster the energy to look at the precious books that Blair had given her, but instead stared outside the bubble window.

  Beneath the onslaught of advertisements, flooding down the street or flashing past the bubble, Gabby noticed that the leaves on the trees were turning bright colors. She'd forgotten that it was autumn, as she'd been so busy trying to get herself and Zaela into Blizzard University.