Hungry

by H. A. Swain

  “And the best part,” Dad says, reaching into his bag, “is that you’ll have plenty of time to figure it out, because you each get one.” He pulls out five more gray boxes. “But first, we have to recycle your old Gizmos.” Papa, Mom, and both of my grandmothers happily pull out their old Gizmos and lay them on the table.

  “Of course, we need to fix any bugs before we launch to the public,” Ahimsa explains as Dad hands the devices around. “So, we’ll be collecting data while you use yours.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Dad says. “Just a log of functions and malfunctions that occur.”

  Ahimsa turns to me. “Obviously we want you to show yours off to all your friends.”

  Obviously, I think, you don’t know me well if you think I have a lot of friends or that I like to show off devices.

  “We want to get some buzz going in your demographic,” Ahimsa says, “because that will create demand, and you know what demand creates.…” She waits for me to fill in the rest.

  “Profit,” I mumble.

  “And…?” she asks. When I don’t answer, she looks at my mom and dad, who both chime in. “Profit makes the world go around.”

  “I’ll go throw these in the compactor, so we can get your cyber assistants uploaded,” Dad says, gathering up the old devices, then he realizes he only has four in his hands. He looks up at me. “Where’s yours, Thal?”

  “Mine?” I ask nervously. “Um, uh, I’m sure it’s in my room somewhere. I’ll take care of it later.”

  He shakes his head. “We have to crash your old one.”

  “Can’t I keep it?” I ask.

  Ahimsa scowls. “Keep a piece of obsolete technology? Why?”

  I can’t answer since the truth would incriminate me as a hacker to the CEO of One World.

  “Don’t worry,” Dad says, cheerily. “Astrid will operate on your new phone, too.”

  Lucky me, I think, but what I say is, “I’ll go get it,” and trudge off to my room. All the time I’ve spent over the past year reconfiguring my Gizmo will soon be smashed into a million tiny Recyclabits. At least I know how I’ll be entertaining myself for the next few weeks while I reconfigure the new one.

  I find the Gizmo nestled in my bed beneath a wad of blankets. “Sorry, old girl,” I tell it as I carry it off to its death. “You’ve become obsolete.”

  * * *

  Sitting in front of my room screen the next night is a worthless endeavor because I can’t focus on my assignment. I’ve tried every possible position—lying across my messy bed, sitting up at my desk, curling around a big pillow on the floor. But no matter what, my head aches, my stomach rumbles, and my mind keeps wandering to Basil. I’ve tried a dozen times to find more info about him or the Analogs, but every search comes up as empty as I feel. It’s as if there is no group called the Analogs and no one with the name Basil (first or last) has ever logged on to a OW site. No record at any EntertainArenas, PlugIns, TopiClubs, or ICMs. No purchase history. No birth records with that name from fifteen to twenty years ago, and there are no Basils in the Dynasaur chat logs. Either he’s more of a virtual ghost than I am, which sends a shiver of delight down my spine, or he lied to me about everything, which makes my grumbling stomach queasy.

  To take my mind off Basil and my belly, I pull out my new Gizmo and try again to hack into the operating system. So far, everything I’ve tried has failed. In addition to cloaking this sucker, Dad’s team must have upgraded the firmware so none of the old Dynasaur programs I used before work this time. I’ve tried tweaking the old programs and even written half a dozen new ones since Dad handed me the device last night, all to no avail. After another half hour of failing to install my own operating system that will allow me to turn off my locator and make Astrid sleep on command, I throw the Gizmo across the room out of sheer frustration. It skids across the floor and slips into invisibility. I never thought I’d think this, but I miss my old Gizmo.

  From her hiding place, Astrid shouts, “Your family genome map is due in an hour!”

  “Oh, shush,” I shout back, but I glance at the clock on my main screen and see that she’s right, so I try to refocus on my assignment.

  A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s swim in front of me as the program I wrote cranks through lines of code, looking for traits I share with my parents and grandparents. I’ve found all the easy physical features. The OCA2 SNiP that gives Grandma Apple and me our green eyes. My earlobe attachment from Mom and Grandma Grace. My inability to roll my tongue just like Papa Peter. And the more complicated multigene soups for personality traits where I can pinpoint my family’s propensity for intelligence and shyness and why none of us have perfect pitch. I’ve accounted for all the disease mutations that have been carried by my grandparents, treated in my parents, and altered in me. But, no matter how many times I run the data, I come up with a mutation on my chromosome 16 FTO gene that doesn’t make sense.

  Someone knocks softly on my door. “Come in,” I call, assuming it’s Grandma Apple, but when the door slides open, my mom stands there.

  She’s still in her lab coat and has her hair pulled back in a tight low bun, but she’s slipped off her shoes and pads into my room barefoot.

  “You’re home early,” I say. “It’s only seven.”

  “Easy day in the lab.” Mom drops down on the bed beside me. She reaches back to loosen her hair, letting it spill over her shoulders. She looks younger that way. And pretty. I try to imagine my parents falling in love. Did their hearts race when they thought about each other after they first met? I almost laugh out loud at the thought of my mother feeling as out of control as I do.

  “Remember when we used to play spalon when you were little?” she says, lifting a lock of thick hair from her shoulder and examining it for split ends. “I’d look like a crazy person when you were done with me.”

  “I can’t believe you’d sit there for that long and let me put braids and clips and ponytails all over your head.”

  “I wasn’t very playful when you were little, was I?” Mom says with a sigh.

  “I had Grandma Apple.”

  “What are you working on?” She points to my screen.

  I stiffen because I don’t want her to see my mistake. Chromosome 16 and its FTO gene were her first babies. The thing she loved more than anything until she had me. Her breakthrough in the lab tweaking this gene to create an ongoing satiety response in humans meant no one would ever feel the sensation of hunger again. Once no one felt the urge to eat anymore, Synthamil finally caught on. That made her a superstar scientist at One World.

  “It’s our family’s comparative human genome map,” I tell her. “I’m almost done.” I start to close my screen, but I’m too late.

  “Wait.” She stands up to get a better look at the line of code I’ve puzzled over for the past hour. “That’s odd.” She points to the questionable letter sequences. “Did you check the public genome databases for this mutation?”

  “Of course, but I didn’t find anything. Maybe there was a glitch in the program I wrote.”

  “I doubt it.” Mom stares at the code and shakes her head, bewildered. “Could be a spontaneous mutation.” She gathers her hair in her hands and twists it back into a bun.

  “Can that still happen? I mean with the inocs continually fine-tuning DNA?”

  She thinks this over, then she says, “It would explain a lot.…”

  I’m not quite listening to her puzzle through the implications of what she’s seeing while I attach a footnote about the possibility of spontaneous mutation. “All I know is that I’m glad to have this done!” I hit send and submit my assignment. When I look up, Mom’s still deep in thought. “What’s wrong?” I say. “You’re looking at me weird.”

  “Is your stomach still growling?”

  I shrug, unwilling to admit the truth.

  “Because if your FTO gene is flawed that could cause all the symptoms of hunger. And if you have it…” She paces around my room. “It could be present in a
larger population. But what would be causing it?” She stares at the screen while biting the side of her mouth. “There must be a specialist I can take you to—”

  “No way,” I say. “Leave me out of it.”

  She whips her head around. “I can’t leave you out of it.” She jabs her finger at the screen. “You are it and I’m trying to help you.”

  “By dragging me off to some specialist who wants to patent some new procedure?” I say. “I’m not going to be someone’s lab cat.”

  “Lab cat?” Mom asks.

  “Isn’t that what they used to experiment on?”

  “Rats,” Mom says. “Lab rats.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be one of those either.”

  “Science is constantly evolving, Thalia. We have to be open to new advances. What if no one allowed me to do my work when I first started? Where would we be then?”

  “Your work was for the greater good,” I argue. “Not for personal gain.”

  She crosses her arms and raises her chin. “I’ve been paid well for my discovery.”

  “But that’s not why you did it. The money came later. Right?”

  She nods but then admits, “When I started out, there was still public money, from the government, for researchers, so I could at least get started on my work before I had corporate sponsorship. It’s harder now. Researchers have to find revenue streams however they can. I’m lucky to have One World behind my work, but there are still reputable people out there who put science over profit. I would only take you to someone who has your best interests at heart.” She cocks her head to the side and searches my face as if I’ve become temporarily unrecognizable. “Surely you know that I want what’s best for you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say, but even I’m not totally convinced anymore.

  Mom looks over her shoulder at my screwy genome. “No,” she says looking back at me with pity. “Something’s not right here, and we have to find someone to fix it.”

  * * *

  It doesn’t take Mom long to find the specialist who might have the answer. In less than twenty-four hours, we’re sitting across from Dr. Darius Demeter who leans back in his sleek office chair and stares at us over his expansive faux-wood desk. He’s listened to Mom talk nonstop for fifteen minutes about my “symptoms.” My ketone, dopamine, and insuline levels. My height, weight, and metabolism. The optimal formula for my Synthamil. The hollow feeling I’ve described. My growling stomach. My irritability. I sit there, barely breathing, afraid that all the talk of hunger will trigger some crazy banshee screech from my insides.

  Of course, she also marches out my messed-up genome sequence as further proof that something must be deeply wrong with me. Dr. Demeter nods, occasionally grunts, and jots down notes on his Gizmo as my mother yammers on. Now he pauses, gathers his thoughts, and finally launches into his interpretation of her data.

  “Unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more of this.” He leans on one elbow and taps the side of his head with his finely manicured index finger. Everything about him appears too well-kempt from his precisely trimmed steel-colored hair and close-cropped beard down to his pointy brown wing-tip shoes so polished they nearly gleam. There’s not a wrinkle on him. Not a hair out of place. Not a speck of stray lint to be found. It’s as if no variation from perfection will be tolerated by this man. He gives me the willies.

  “Obviously I don’t have to tell you, Dr. Nguyen,” he continues, “that we know she’s receiving the proper amount of nutrition. More than anybody, you understand how Synthamil is calibrated, so I won’t waste your time convincing you that her feelings of hunger are not physical.”

  I slump back in my seat and cross my arms. “Here we go.…” I mutter.

  “Thalia!” Mom gives me the eyebrow. “Hear the doctor out. He’s an expert in this field.”

  Dr. Demeter is not deterred by my skepticism. He leans forward and folds his hands on top of his desk then gives me a weak smile. “It’s a very honest and natural response to believe you need more nutrition when you feel this way. During the obesity epidemic in the early twenty-first century…”

  “I didn’t say that I needed more nutrition,” I protest.

  He sits back and fires off a round of questions. “Do you ever dream of food or imagine what it would be like to eat? Do you find yourself searching for an elusive scent or sensory experience, but no matter how hard you try, can’t pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for?” I feel color rising to my cheeks. “Have you used forno to try to quell the desire to consume?” I flush and squirm in my chair, willing my insides to stay quiet.

  He plows ahead, not needing to wait for my answers. “There’s a pattern in these cases. It starts with a vague sense of malaise, an unnamed desire, a hollow, empty feeling that can’t be assuaged. The body may respond. In some people it can express itself as a sexual desire even when there’s no hormone surge initiation. In others, it mimics what humans used to experience as hunger. The stomach growls, energy levels dip, moods swing and yet, as we can see from the data, you are receiving enough nutrition. Which can lead us to only one conclusion.”

  “Let me guess,” I say, my sarcasm barely contained. “It’s all in my mind?”

  He lifts his hands as if to say, Who knows?

  My mom has little patience for this. “What’s your research show?”

  He crosses his legs and taps the side of his head again. “As best as we can surmise, some people, especially those who might be at risk for obsessive-compulsive disorders, may not be able to handle the stress of not eating. Afterall, we are hardwired to eat. Because our inocs and daily Synthamil cocktail now regulate nearly everything, including the serotonin production in our brains, we rarely see the kinds of OCD behaviors that would have been present in the past. Ritualistic behaviors such as repeated hand washing or door locking or a heightened sexual response have largely been eradicated. But this question of not eating seems to be trickier than we thought. No disrespect, of course,” he quickly adds when my mom blanches.

  “None taken,” she says, but I sense she’s miffed.

  He hefts himself from his chair and walks toward the window behind his desk. “The problem is that eventually the thought cycles about food and eating become actions.” He turns, hands clasped behind his back, eyes locked above our heads as he lectures. “The desire to fill the perceived emptiness becomes a physical imperative.” His pace quickens. “Patients begin to seek experiences that they believe will alleviate their overwhelming urges. They may turn to forno or engage in pica.”

  “Pica?” Mom asks.

  He props himself against the front edge of his desk, arms and ankles crossed, and levels his gaze at her. “Consuming nonfood items. Dirt, lint, fabric.” He shakes his head. “I’ve seen patients eat all kinds of things.”

  Mom makes a sick face.

  “It’s very sad,” says Dr. Demeter. “And the worst untreated cases often end up in jail, because as we know, engaging in such activities can lead to illegal behavior.”

  Before I can ask why eating dirt could possibly be illegal, Dr. Demeter spins around and heads to the window, booming, “But luckily we caught this early!” He turns and smiles. “I have no doubt that with some cognitive behavior therapy, perhaps an added dash of serotonin to Thalia’s Synthamil, and constant monitoring, we’ll get this under control in no time.”

  “Do you think the mutation on her FTO gene has anything to do with it?” Mom asks.

  “I doubt it.” He waves away her concern. “I’d say a month in our rehab facility, and she’ll be well on the road to total recovery.”

  My stomach drops. “Rehab facility? A month?”

  Dr. Demeter has settled himself in his chair again. “Yes, I run an inpatient treatment program.”

  I shake my head. “No. No way. I am not going to be locked up for an entire month!”

  “We find that having a controlled environment for several weeks facilitates the process,” says Dr. Demeter.

>   “Mom?” I catch her eye. My breath quickens and sweat prickles my armpits. “You can’t do that to me. I won’t let you.” I press my hands into the chair, wanting to push off and flee.

  “Well, um, Thalia, if that’s…” Mom stutters.

  “Dad would never go for it,” I say. “And Grandma Apple wouldn’t either. They won’t let you lock me away just because my stomach sometimes growls.”

  “Thalia,” Dr. Demeter says in a calm, even voice. “The thing you need to understand is that this will get much worse. If we take care of it now, you will save yourself from lengthier, more intrusive therapies down the road. And I assure you both, my facility is state of the art with a very comfortable, homey feel. Our care is excellent. And seeing as you’re Dr. Nguyen’s daughter, I would personally oversee your case from start to finish.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Mom says, clearly flattered.

  “I’ve been such a fan of your work for years,” Dr. Demeter goes on, buttering up my mother. “And not to be too presumptuous, but I believe you would find our research very interesting. You would be welcome to visit anytime and see the exciting discoveries we’re making.”

  Mom leans forward eagerly as he talks. This is too much for me. I slam my hands on his desk and shout, “We’re talking about my life, not your research!”

  Mom jumps. We stare at each other for a few seconds before she says, “Honey, we’re talking about both.”

  Tears press hot against my eyes. The thought of being locked in a lab for a month is almost unbearable. I won’t be able to see Basil again or talk to Yaz or be with Grandma Apple. “You can’t do this to me.” I fumble for the knit holder Grandma made me and pull out my new Gizmo. “I’m calling Dad.”

  “Put that down. You’re being ridiculous!” Mom says sternly. “And embarrassing. We’re trying to help you.”

  Dr. Demeter folds his hands and presses his long index fingers against his top lip. “I can’t force anyone to come here. Unless there’s been an arrest and a court order.”