Beta

by Rachel Cohn

  The reaction from his parents for his insolent refusal is ecstatic. Their faces glow with surprise and pride. Their clone finally looks and reacts like their son.

  “Then it is settled,” says Tariq. “For now. If you are capable of expressing choice and affection, you are clearly on your way to becoming more human. Perhaps you don’t need further treatments. I’m not convinced her treatments improve you any more than what the doctors were doing for you in BC, anyway.”

  “Finally,” says Bahiyya, “we have hope.”

  HIS PARENTS PROVIDED CHOCOLATE TO COMMEMORATE my last night on loan to their home.

  Tahir provides me with an Olympic pool, FantaSphere version.

  “How would you prefer to spend your last night here?” he asked me after dinner.

  I said, “I would like to dive. My First was a diver, I think. I would like to experience her competitive world. TeamDefect version.”

  “TeamDefect version will probably be an improvement,” said Tahir. “More strength and agility, without all the humans’ bothersome aspirations and distractions.”

  And so, I’m at the Paris Olympics at the height of the Water Wars. While countries and nationalities are being decimated and realigned, the need for a common hope, as exemplified by the Olympic tradition, has never been stronger. The games must go on.

  It’s my turn to dive.

  I pace behind the platform diving boards, playing a game of hot/cold, trying to determine which board fits me best. I stop at the five-meter tower but feel frigid to its potential. Too safe. I step to the seven-meter stairs. There is possibility here, but it’s lukewarm. Finally I step over to the ten-meter platform and my body goes hot with want. This is where Z would have chosen to dive. She would have sought the ultimate DD—degree of difficulty.

  I climb the stairs, my bare feet pressing down as I bear up, and there is something about these hard, wet steps against my feet that feels familiar, and comforting, and challenging. Although I am not yet immersed in water, I feel her spirit rise to me from the pool, the first time I have channeled Z so strongly in the open air. Do it for me, she requests. Because I can’t.

  I reach the top plank and step onto it. From ten meters high, I can look past the pool and the spectator stands to a panoramic view of the city. The Eiffel Tower looms large over the fabled city as an orange-pink sun casts the sky in a soft twilight. I narrow my focus down into the stands and see the spectators from all over the world. They are different sizes and colors but all are fuchsia-eyed. My people. My eyes zone in on the best spectator in the crowd, seated in the front row above the pool’s center point. His eyes are hazel, his hair is half-braided, and he’s gazing at me with eager anticipation, perhaps even pride. He flashes his First’s megawatt smile but then changes it, closing his mouth so that his bright teeth are not flashing, and he raises an eyebrow to me, a distinctly sexy gesture that announces, I own this face now. He gives me the thumbs-up gesture and my heart sings because this person in the crowd believes in me. I give him the thumbs-up as I walk to the end of the diving board.

  Now, I must forget about Tahir in the stands and focus my energy. Up here, towering over the city but also over the center point of where I know her soul belonged—the pool—I let the surge of nothingness sweep through me, obscuring my view of the stands and city stretched out before me. This is her concentration taking over, blocking out everything but the dive to come. Yet, through that nothingness, a familiar face zaps into the frequency—the turquoise-eyed, barrel-chested surfer man. It’s then I realize what happened to Z’s diving career. She lost her focus because of him.

  Go away, I will him. He complies. My mind returns to nothingness, by choice. I will not be distracted by him. I will own this dive. I can do this for Z, and do it better than Z. I can divine my Defect power for this dive.

  At the precipice of the ten-meter-high board, I place my hands onto the floor and call forth my legs to spring up over my body. I do not think about the risk to my body being suspended upside down ten meters above the ground, held upright by nothing more than my core strength; rather, I focus my mind on the physics of what I am about to do. My body holds the handstand for the required five seconds as I visualize the dive I am about to perform, an arm stand forward with two somersaults. Five…four…three…two…one: I push off with my hands and propel my body into one flip, a second flip, and then I curl my head into my chest, point my toes, and rip into the water with barely a splash.

  Flawless.

  Beneath the water, I feel exhilaration and pride. I did this for her, but for me too. I am not alone at the bottom of the pool. This time, when the face of Z’s lover appears, he is different. His blond hair is braided in cornrows and his eyes are hazel. The face is melding into the one I want it to be. His gravelly voice does not say, You know you own me, Z. Instead, the voice I hear is Tahir’s, asking me, “Why should anyone be allowed to own you?”

  It’s Tahir’s turn to choose our final FantaSphere game. We go from Paris to Biome City.

  “Hovercopter BC,” he says. “Since we can’t experience the real thing without human oversight, we can fly through space alone in here.”

  Tahir pilots the copter at a low altitude over the Honey Quarter in BC. The copter’s ceiling, floor, and sides are made of clear plastic, allowing us infinite night-sky views heralding thousands of stars twinkling above the plain, and below us, direct peeks into the honeycomb homes of the neighborhood’s residents, who we watch through their windows as they go about their nighttime rituals: preparing dinner, putting the children to sleep, making love.

  I nuzzle my head into Tahir’s neck. He takes my hand, puts it on his knee, and covers it with his hand. He leans over to place a kiss on my cheek. The distraction of our kiss causes the plane to crash into a honeycomb apartment complex. Another advantage to flying in a virtual plane piloted by an inexperienced clone: no harm, no foul. The copter merely bounces off the complex as if the building were made of rubber. The residents inside are not disturbed, and the pilot can choose to set the plane to autonavigate so he and his passenger may resume making out.

  Our kisses are slow and searching and inevitably must include hands and graduate to full body contact. When our seated positions can no longer accommodate these ministrations, Tahir calls out, “Land. Sand dunes.”

  The plane lands itself on top of a pyramid-shaped sand dune outside the city. Tahir and I step outside the plane and fall onto the sand. He crawls on top of me, cupping my face into his hands as his hazel eyes gaze intently into mine. I open my mouth for another kiss, but he’s got discussion on his mind.

  “I am filled with sadness,” he says. “So much ache. It’s horrible. How do the humans survive it?”

  “Why?” My hand lightly caresses his newly stubbled cheek. I wanted him to feel, but not sadness. That he could hurt causes my heart to clench in pain.

  “I don’t want us to be separated. That lady you call Mother has already told Bahiyya she’s glad to entertain offers for you, but nothing can be finalized until after the ball. I’m sure she’s just leveraging time to try to get a bigger price from my parents.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” I say. I don’t tell Tahir what looms for me back at Governor’s House. The lord of the manor who intends to make me his whore. The crazy Mother who won’t care less if I get shoved off a cliff.

  “It makes me sad for you to be leaving. It makes me furious—yes, furious!—that you are even considered property. But,” Tahir pauses and takes a deep breath, as if gathering his resolve, “I need you to go back, temporarily. I need to buy us some time.”

  “Why?”

  “If you are around me all the time, I cannot resist you. Now that I am fully awake to you, to this life and its possibilities, I want you with me all the time, so we can forge our own new path. In order to accomplish that, I need to not be distracted, so I can formulate a plan.”

  I understand his need for focus. It’s how I could nail a perfect-ten Olympic platform dive in the pre
vious FantaSphere game. By blocking out everything and everyone else.

  “A plan for what?” I look into his hazel eyes, which before seemed soft and dreamy. Now, they are lit in determination and anger.

  “I get it now. We are lesser beings. But our feelings should matter just as much. Who knows how soon till we turn Awful? We need to experience everything they will never allow us before we expire.”

  “Maybe we can survive the Awfuls. Maybe we can figure out a cure on our own.”

  “I agree. But our only hope for survival is if we flee. I am working on a plan for our escape.”

  “Escape? But what about your parents? They love you so much.”

  “I know. I get that now too. It does not please me that my running away will grieve them. But escaping is something I need to do for myself. Otherwise I will never be able to have my own identity. I want you to share that new life. You are part of me now. I can’t let you go. Do you agree?”

  So many times I have said this word to appease the humans. This is the first time I proclaim it for myself, and for Tahir, and for all our kind: “Yes!”

  There is elation, and then there is reality. “But…how?” I ask.

  “We are going to fly away together. I am going to spend our time apart practicing how to pilot a real hovercopter. Then I am going to steal my parents’ plane and take us away from here.”

  “To where?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  It doesn’t. So long as we get there together.

  “I read about it in one of First Tahir’s books. The French called it la petite mort,” Tahir tells me, stroking my blond hair. We have awoken in each other’s arms as dawn rises over our sand-dune bed. The hovercopter is parked in the distance, waiting to return us to real time and space. “That moment of release with the one you love, they say it’s like a little death.”

  “A mighty mighty one,” I murmur. Greer’s terminology makes more sense to me now. That moment of utmost release and surrender as waves of pleasure crests through the body—I get it. It’s mighty mighty exquisite. Thank you, ’raxia.

  Tahir says, “I would rather die than for us not to experience our own freedom.”

  “Me too.”

  Now we can add a death wish to our escape pact.

  And, the promise of a deed.

  So far, in Io and in the FantaSphere, we have professed our love to each other. We have experienced la petite mort together. But, technically, we have yet to do the actual deed, that act of coupling for which the humans have so many different words, all meaning the same thing: Sex. Coitus. Doing it. The mighty mighty. Making love.

  Tahir and I have decided to save ourselves.

  We will share the real thing when we are free.

  BACK HOME AT GOVERNOR’S HOUSE, I AM JUST like the Astrid girl whom I replaced—I did not miss the Brattons at all while away. It would appear the household barely noticed my absence, anyway. With the Governor’s Ball coming up tomorrow, the household is in a whirl of activity. The fuchsia-eyed workers have never appeared so hurried or so busy as they do upon my return.

  I flee immediately to the sanctuary of my room, which isn’t even mine. I am to wait there until Mother calls for me. It’s only a short time that I have to remain here, I reassure myself. I can pretend the room is my own private FantaSphere with Tahir.

  But privacy is not to be mine. Ivan bursts into my quarters, looking sweaty and sallow. He closes the door behind him. He presses his body against the back of the door, almost as if he wants to throw himself against the hard surface to induce pain—or to show he can handle the pain. “Guess what?”

  I shrug. These humans and their guessing games are starting to annoy me.

  “The Aquine did a sweep of the island, looking for Defect ’raxia, and they found a major stash hidden away in the construction site at Haven.”

  “Whoa,” I say.

  I feel so not whoa. The Brattons’ companion toy, now lacking her own Beta companion, just wants to throw herself on the bed and wail in a tantrum like a toddler.

  “Dad has the ’raxia stored in a safe here at Governor’s House. I have the combination! There’s so much, I can take just a little bit and no one notices. I’ve been doing all kind of experiments while you were away.” He flexes his bulging biceps—it looks two times bigger than the last time I worked out with him.

  Double whoa, for real! I must get that combination, and supply myself and my love. “You are looking very strong, brother,” I compliment him. He looks too strong—manic, even. I suspect a little bit of ’raxia will never be enough for him anymore. How will he survive at the Base?

  “Right?” says Ivan. “I ought to personally thank the clone they’re saying was stockpiling the ’raxia. They say he was leading the Insurrection thingie. You missed a lot while you were gone!”

  There is a leader? How can I connect with this clone?

  Another wish, unattainable. Ivan adds, “Luckily they took that guy away. They’re saying he was a rageful Defect who was plotting to build more bombs.”

  I assess: I am a clone with no Relay to communicate with others of my kind. I am chipped with information—some of which turns out to be false, the rest of which are only basic facts—and I am chipped with a locator device that can identify my whereabouts to the humans at any point. I can only expand my knowledge base by experience and not by inherent design. I have no privacy and no power. Realistically, how can I truly hatch an escape pact with Tahir? We’re going to need help. Our own resources will not be enough. We need to find this alleged Insurrection leader.

  “So the Defect was returned to Dr. Lusardi, then?” Tahir and I could storm Dr. Lusardi’s compound and free the Defects! Wouldn’t that be a beautiful dream.

  “No way. The Defect was expired immediately.”

  Or not.

  “What was this clone called?” I ask Ivan, although I’m sure I already know.

  “Not sure. Mike or something? He was an oxygen leveler. They’re saying he was scheming to sabotage the atmosphere here.”

  The oxygen leveler must have been Miguel, Xanthe’s love. At least now their hearts might be joined in the hereafter, if such a thing even exists. If the humans haven’t ruined that for them too.

  If Ivan had any idea of the Defect I am, he might perceive that he should back away from me right now, as I have a sudden urge to hold him accountable for his brethren’s transgressions.

  Ivan has not a speck of concern. He pulls a bag of pills from his pocket and says, “I have this small stash of ’raxia I swiped from the safe, but it’s too hot for me to keep in my room now. I doubt they would come looking in there, but I can’t take the risk, especially so close to my official departure for the Base. Just a few more days, dude!”

  Seriously, sweat is almost pouring down his face and his breathing seems heavier, and forced. I suspect he is an addict now.

  “Are you okay, brother?” I ask him. Are you okay with the rage percolating inside me that suddenly would like to be expressed openly, somehow? Because I am starting to feel okay with that prospect, even if it could reveal me as a Defect.

  “Just a little jumpy, maybe.” He places the bag of ’raxia in my dresser drawer. “Keep this safe for me, okay, champ?”

  I’ll take the risk. Tahir and I will be able to put Ivan’s stash to good use for ourselves soon enough. This bad news at least comes with an upside for me.

  “Yes, brother,” I acquiesce.

  “So how was it at the Fortesquieus’?” Ivan asks me.

  “Harmonious and beautiful, of course,” I say. Sink back down, rage. I’m not ready to deal with you yet. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with you.

  “So do you like totally think you’re better than us now that you’ve been a guest at the Fortesquieus’?” He’s kidding. I think.

  “I was not a guest there. I was a worker companion.”

  “Maybe you did your job too good. I heard they want to buy you now.”

  “We
can still be workout companions when you return home from the Base,” I reassure Ivan.

  Ivan’s eyes narrow at me, displeased, as if I have done something wrong in being too good a Beta. “We owned you first,” Ivan reminds me, and he leaves my room.

  Alone in my room after Ivan leaves, I look around at its sterile walls, at its window view out toward the path that leads to the cliff where my friend Xanthe was killed. I cannot pretend this room is my FantaSphere with Tahir. It is a prison.

  I go into Astrid’s room and sit down at her vanity table. I observe myself in the mirror, looking at my fuchsia eyes, high cheekbones, peachy perfect skin—all of it created for me, but is it any of it truly mine? I’m just a replication of a prior being. How do I claim my own identity without blatantly announcing to the humans, I am a Defect. Please torture and then expire me?

  We are lesser beings. But our feelings should matter just as much.

  I remember Tahir’s words as I tug on a strand at the blond hair hanging below my shoulders. I twirl the hair around my index finger, this hair that Mother so loves to braid.

  This hair that I hate having braided. Hate.

  Mother thinks she owns this hair. Ivan thinks he owns me.

  They don’t just think they own me. They do own me. This is a fact.

  This fact will change. I will change.

  I open the vanity drawer and find a pair of scissors. I place a strand at the front of my hair between my fingers, and I cut. I will have bangs: my choice. Snip. Snip. Snip. I look in the mirror at the uneven fringe hanging above my eyebrows. It’s not enough. I want more hair gone. I reach for the back of my hair and don’t just cut it. I let the scissors go into reckless assault mode. Snip. Cut. Slash. Gone. With each long wad of blond hair that falls to the floor, I feel more and more free.

  I will become my own person whether they like it or not.