by Andrea White
Zert opened his eyes to see a room filled with green light. He was lying on a dirt floor, naked. His father wasn’t there. The room was empty.
Across from him, an archway opened to the outside. Light poured in. Everything looked normal, except for the walls, which glowed green. As he crawled toward the white light, he tried to remember where the doctor said they would land.
Inside an ordinary light pole.
This place looked like a train station. The machine must not have worked. He looked at his arms, legs, and feet and decided that he was still his same size. He felt like a contestant on his favorite show, someone who had landed in an unexpected destination.
“Is that you, Zert?” his father called.
“Yes!” Zert yelled, relieved to hear his father’s voice. He neared the opening.
“Come on out. It’s safe!”
Zert crawled through the hole in the metal wall on his knees and struggled to stand.
The sun beamed down on him, but it wasn’t the sun he was used to. This one was bright yellow, not yellow smudged with gray, and it stood out, huge and swollen, against the blue sky. The sun he knew was much smaller and was usually covered by pollution clouds. He reached out and touched the air. Only air. Not glass. This wasn’t some virtual reality game, but something was warping his vision.
Zert’s father wasn’t there. He looked behind him to the train station, then he craned his neck to peer up and up and up at what appeared to be a green hat far above them. The lamp was so tall that Zert could barely see its top. He was standing in front of an ordinary light pole.
He had shrunk. His head throbbed with the craziness of what had happened to him. I’m a Rosie now.
He spotted his father’s head moving through what appeared to be a tangled jungle of green fronds, ivy, roots, vines, and trees. It looked like the kind of lush jungle he’d learned about in school, one that covered the planet in the days when dinosaurs lived.
He could see glass beads clinging to a tall green stalk. One of the beads slid down the stalk and burst open when it hit the dirt ground. A drop of dew on grass.
A dog crossed the trail on its way to bury a bone. But its movements were not wild and freewheeling like a dog’s but stiffer and more controlled, like a robot’s. Oh, and the beast had six legs. It wasn’t a dog at all but an ant. It was plodding along with a piece of wood in its mouth, and its antennae were probing the air like a blind man feeling his way.
The trunk of a nearby tree looked taller than the tallest building he’d ever seen. It reached high into the cloudless sky, and he could barely make out its leafy green top. The trunk was covered in bark in irregular patches, not perfect squares. Even if he searched, he would never be able to locate any model numbers on its base. This was a real tree.
When his father came into view, Zert saw that he’d tied two short, narrow green leaves over his body with a length of vine. He dragged two more leaves. When he spotted Zert, he put his hand over his chest and then gestured to the forest around them. He approached Zert and held him. “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” he said.
He helped Zert cover up with the leaves and vine. “Let’s get to Ellis Log and get some real clothes.”
A blast of wind rushed past, and swirling brown leaves, each the size of a blanket, floated around them like magic carpets. The leaves smelled fresh and nutty with the baked scent of dried earth.
“It’s … it’s beautiful,” Zert said. But that didn’t seem to capture how small he felt compared to the forever blue sky, how colorless he felt compared to the green world around him, how clean it all was. The air tasted brand-new, not used by hundreds of people and companies and then spit out, like old chewing gum.
A deafening whir startled him. His father whipped around and stared in the opposite direction. When he followed his father’s gaze, Zert gasped.
It was a parking lot. One for giants. A lifter was about to take off, and its headlights—planet-sized eyes—stared out at him. Its fender, a metal mouth, grimaced. Its roof was so high and its frame so wide that a whole city of Rosies could live on one of its front seats. The metal monster whined, then rose from the ground. Wind roared and spun around them like a tornado, a category 10 hurricane.
Zert was powerless against the wind. Dust stung his skin, face, and eyes. His hair whipped wildly. His feet were unable to keep a grip, and without doing anything, he bounced and floated above the dirt as if the earth had become a trampoline. His father shoved him back inside the light pole. As the wind gusted around them, Zert clung to the pole’s frame to try to keep from being blown away. It was too slippery to hold on to, and he ended up just pressing his weight against the curved metal.
When the wind finally stopped wailing, Jack ventured back into the open, and Zert poked his head out.
The lifter rose up through the lacy green ceiling of leaves into the cloudless sky, toward the blue, green, red, and purple gaseous highways. It turned onto the blue highway and headed for somewhere he would never go again.
“Dad,” Zert said, remembering Low City DC. “Where’s Uncle Marin?”
“I don’t think he made it,” his father said. “I searched. The arrival booth is empty.”
Zert stuck his head back inside the light pole. “Uncle Marin!” His voice rang uselessly around the circular space. Where was the man who’d come up with this idea in the first place? Where was the guy who’d wanted them to minimize?
It seemed like a lifetime ago that first one Mag Lev door, then a second one, had closed. Then, Dr. Brown had yelled, “What’s going on?” Zert remembered smelling cauliflower and chemicals and then there was nothing.
But before that, there was plenty. His uncle’s strange and excited behavior in the doctor’s office and Glade’s parting comment of “I’ll see you soon” as Marin left for the taxi-lifter. And also …
“Dad, did you notice the tube of Permanent Lipstick that Uncle Marin dropped in the basket?” Zert asked.
His father nodded. “What about it, son?”
Once, Cribbie had dressed up as a Superpox victim for Halloween. He had drawn boils on his face with red marker, but when he sweated, the red dye had dripped onto his shirt. Permanent Lipstick never faded. “Do you think … Uncle Marin … could have drawn those boils on Chub? To make sure I didn’t back out?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” his father said. He began cracking his knuckles. “Dr. Brown was very clear with us. He told us there were risks. Maybe … Marin will still come through.”
“Uncle Marin told Glade that he’d see her later,” Zert said to his father.
His father closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. “Maybe he just didn’t want to tell her good-bye.”
But Zert felt as if he knew better. Uncle Marin, the bold adventurer, had never intended to shrink.
His father shook his head even though Zert hadn’t spoken his thought aloud. “He’s your mother’s brother,” he said. “He wouldn’t trick us.”
Zert’s ears grew hot. That third Mag Lev door hadn’t closed. “I think he did,” he said with a deep breath. “Dad, what about Chub? What if she doesn’t have Superpox? Is she OK?”
“I suppose so. Brew came to pick her up. He wouldn’t destroy her if he didn’t think she was sick,” his father said.
Zert felt his throat catch. How could this have happened?
“Why would Marin trick us?” his father asked. He was popping his knuckles.
“I don’t know,” Zert said. “But remember how he uses stunt doubles when a show is too dangerous? I can’t help but feel like we’re his doubles.”
“We’re not even on his show,” his father muttered through gritted teeth.
“I get that, but … I don’t know. It doesn’t add up to me.” Zert shook his head. “I’m thinking—”
His father interrupted, “Look, we have to make the best of this now.” He scanned the forest, the parking lot, and the blue sky. When he spoke again, he sounded as if he had made up his mi
nd. “We can’t worry about Marin. He’s not here, and we’re small. We’ve got to concentrate on survival. Or …” His father’s voice trailed off.
“Or else we’re toast,” Zert said, then added, “Mini-toast.”
His father smiled a little. “Speaking of food …” He shifted his attention and stared down at the ground.
A shadow had detached itself from the dirt and was writhing.
It was a brown snake, some kind of python that wrapped around people’s necks and squeezed them to death. Zert clutched his father’s arm.
“Zert, it’s just a worm,” his father said.
The thought of having to kill their own food instead of buying it prepackaged was bad enough. “Are we going to eat worms?” he asked. When his father didn’t answer, Zert felt his mouth go sour and practically shouted, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Think about it,” his father said as he grabbed the worm’s tail. “Mankind has killed most of the mammals in the world, but there are quintillions of insects left.” His father yanked on the worm’s tail. Or was it the head? The two ends looked the same. But much to Zert’s relief, his father’s idea for dinner slipped away and dove back into the earth.
Yeah! His dinner had escaped. Zert knelt next to the hole. “I got here by traveling through one kind of wormhole.” He peered into the deep hole and smelled only dirt. “If I crawled through this one, think I could go back?”
Jack put his hand on Zert’s shoulder. “Good try,” he said. “Let’s go. We’ve got to get to Paradise before dark, or else.”
Or else what?
15
HEALTHCARE UNDER A LOG
“Our entrance to a new world,” his father said.
The log was crumbling around a door reinforced with wood that looked like Popsicle sticks. A sign embedded in the wood read:
Over 12 million people entered this continent through Ellis Island. Welcome to Ellis Log.
“A log,” Zert muttered.
“A log,” his father repeated in a respectful tone.
Inside, the walls of the unevenly shaped room glowed with the same eerie green light that he had noticed inside the light pole. There was no flooring, just dirt on the ground. Zert started to say, “On,” for the laser lights, and then he remembered. No laser technology. No wind or solar power. No bots. No RASM portals. No holo-imagetubes. No g-pipes. Ugh. Not even any electricity.
Racks of clothes stretched across the room, but this didn’t look like any clothing store he’d ever seen. It was too dark and jumbled inside the room. Backpacks were stacked on the floor. Boxes stood piled on a rough-hewn table.
“First things first. Let’s get you vaccinated,” his father said, smiling. He handed Zert a homemade box. The lettering on it—“Superpox vaccine. One tablet confers immunity.”—was uneven, as if it had been written by a kindergartner.
The cough tablets at their old neighborhood drug kiosk were always triple-sealed in biodegradable wrappers, but here at Ellis Log, Zert was able to easily tear through the flimsy wrapping of the Superpox vaccine. A single blue tablet came out and rolled around on his palm. It looked a little dirty.
His father nudged him, and Zert put the tablet in his mouth. It sizzled on his tongue.
His father clapped him on his back and beamed. “Finally vaccinated,” he declared.
Tears clogged Zert’s throat. His father had given up so much for him to have this basic healthcare: his store, his customers, his home, his memories, everything. Unable to speak, Zert turned away and began flipping through some of the clothes on the rack.
Dr. Brown had said, “Your T-shirt alone, Zert, would cause a sensation.” Now, as he chose a pair of blue pants and a blue shirt, both covered in pockets, he understood what the doctor meant. Even the cheap clothes he wore every day were much fancier than those he saw here. The stitches in the pants he held were uneven and far apart, as if sewn by a child. He imagined the Rosies wearing their simple, makeshift clothes as he tore off the leaves he had on and slipped into his new clothes. He’d read that old-fashioned cloth didn’t heat or cool your body like clothes made from Breathe fabric. But his outfit of one hundred pockets wasn’t completely uncomfortable.
He selected a backpack from the floor. Inside it were some tools: a knife, a cooking pan, a rope, and a hammer with a sharp blade. He held the hammer up for his father to see.
‘“What’s this?”
“A hatchet,” his father said.
In a side pocket of the backpack, Zert found a small container of water. He checked the backpack again. No food.
Shrinking made a person hungry. Dr. Brown had arranged for Zert and his dad to have water, but Dr. Brown should have given them something to eat, too. And worms didn’t count.
He’d like to see his uncle eat a worm. Or wear these backward clothes. Or lose over six feet in height.
“Dr. Brown isn’t in on whatever Uncle Marin’s plan is,” Zert told his father. The doctor had sounded surprised when Uncle Marin hadn’t stepped into the Mag Lev.
“Zert, please stop talking about your uncle. He might be …” His father’s voice trailed off. When Zert glanced over at him, he thought his father’s blue pants and shirt looked depressingly like a prisoner’s uniform. But on his head, his father wore a furry cap with a tail.
Zert had to laugh.
His father stroked the tail.
“What kind of fur is that?” Zert asked.
His father took off the cap and ran his fingers through the tail. “Rat,” he said, putting it back on.
Zert shuddered. “Are we going to hunt rats?” he asked.
His father dodged Zert’s gaze.
Jack, the rat killer. “You can hunt worms and rats, but I’m not going to,” Zert said.
“Our first rule has to be survival,” his father said.
Survival.
Zert’s stomach rumbled. Had he escaped Superpox just to face starvation?
A few hours later, it began to rain. From the trail where he and his father had been hiking, Zert saw lightning crack the sky open. It was the longest, thickest, and whitest lightning he had ever seen. And the thunder—deafening in volume—sounded like bones breaking. This was plain rain, not the modern colored rain that he was used to, and it beat the earth in a fury. It seemed as if the entire outdoors was creaking and groaning as the wind bent trees, bushes, and stalks of grass all around them.
Wearing the backpack he’d picked up in Ellis Log, his father darted toward the grass lining the path. “Follow me, Zert!” he yelled. “We need to find cover!” Another flash of lightning illuminated their path up the rise, and the hill took shape. They still had so far to go to reach the top.
In the BIG world, rain that came down this fast and furious fell in one thick sheet. Here, individual drops, the size of his shoes, fell with huge spaces in between them, but Zert couldn’t tell where the drops would fall next. He managed to evade two drops, but he got splashed on the head as he joined his father at the edge of the path. His head rang as if he’d been hit in a boxing match by someone wearing a soft glove. Two points for Zert; one for the sky.
The cold rain drenched him as a gust of wind raced past.
“Hang on to the roots!” his father shouted over the roar of the storm. “So you won’t get blown away!”
Zert dove for cover in the grassy jungle lining the path. The screeching wind tore through his clothes, but he steadied himself by staying close to the blades of grass, which formed a canopy over his head. The wind was picking up speed and growing stronger.
His father seized a stalk of grass. His clothes blowing sideways, Jack turned to say something else, but the wind seemed to tear the words out of his mouth.
Zert gripped the blade as if it were a rope, not letting go of one until he’d grasped another. He battled his way through the rain and mud for what felt like hours. All his effort and concentration were focused on following his father, not getting blown away, not slipping, not stepping on anything scary.
; Every five or six steps, his father turned to check on him. Zert waved him on.
The rain slowed, but Zert didn’t have time to feel relieved about this before water and mud torrented down the rise. He clung to the blade’s roots and tried to get air as a thick soup of water and mud ran over and around him. He had been longing for a big breakfast, but now?
I’ll settle for not drowning on my first afternoon in this new world.
16
THINK SMALL
“How m—u—c—h l—o—n—g—e—r?” Zert managed to ask. When his father turned to look back, Zert could see his face was ashen, his hair disheveled, his clothes soaked, and his breathing heavy.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. They hiked for a while, and now the sun beat down on them like an enemy. The grass provided little shade, and Zert’s once-muddy clothes became dry and stiff.
“Just beyond that next rise,” his father said after he had caught his breath. His T-shirt, which clung to his belly, was drenched, this time with sweat.
Zert wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “You said that the last time.”
“I know I did,” Jack snapped. “But I hear a stream.”
The sun must have gotten to his father. Streams didn’t make noise. At least the one in Eco-Hotel didn’t.
His father was sweating and breathing hard, but Zert knew he’d never admit he needed a break. “I need to stop, Dad,” Zert said and plopped onto the ground, watching his father closely.
“OK,” his father said. He stopped and, groaning softly, lowered himself to the ground. He folded his legs slowly.
Zert slipped off the backpack that he had picked up at Ellis Log. He still couldn’t believe that neither Drs. Brown nor Rosario had provided any food. He’d had no breakfast, except for those soggy chips, and he’d barely touched the bag that he’d left in his jeans pocket. Zert took a swig from his water bottle. The water tasted so good. He wondered why he had never bothered to drink much of it before.
