“A child’s been kidnapped!” she said.
Tara’s stomach dropped into her shoes. The cookie soured in her stomach instantly set onto rough seas.
“The mother’s blaming EAK!” Marjorie continued. “It’s on the news right now!”
“Which channel?” Tara sputtered out as she thumbed on her desk computer.
“All the channels!” Marjorie’s hands flailed.
The computer clicked on in an instant. Tara’s focus narrowed and her mind spun as she surfed news sites.
EAK Member Kidnaps Child.
Everywhere. International.
The story was the same everywhere she looked.
A man in a One Moment, One Child—EAK t-shirt had approached a mother in a supermarket. Charming and handsome, he’d offered the harried mother a break from her talkative five-year-old by taking care of him while she shopped. “He said it was a new EAK program,” the grief-stricken mother had told the police. “Helping parents in everyday situations.”
“Community rearing” had become one of the largest EAK offshoots. EAK Acts had a huge following, since they assisted people with their children by opening volunteer daycares, babysitting trees, tutoring programs, the list went on. They created daily Empower a Kid videos sharing inspirational stories on KidTube (created by YouTube for the EAK-related videos). But they created their own stories from their “assistance to the community” experiences.
Variants of “we have yet to receive a statement from the EAK community,” ended all of the news articles and newscasts. One brazen reporter looked directly into the camera and asked, “And in this time of tragedy, where is EAK creator Tara Jones?”
“Right here, you pansy pants, microphone eating, glory hound maniac!” Tara growled at the screen, then clicked it off to think.
Marjorie ranted a verbal diarrhea of salvaging and spin-doctoring ideas as she paced back and forth and wrung her hands. Tara’s mind worked quiet and quick, though just as active. And down a completely different path than Marjorie, which angered Tara more and more. Tara wanted to save the child, all the children. Marjorie only wanted to save her ass.
Marjorie called it saving face. Ha.
Tara finally banished Marjorie from her office in a shouting match that ended with her wielding the porcelain head of Cookie Monster and Marjorie submitting Tara her resignation via spittle and scream.
Tara collapsed into her chair. Gently, she replaced the cookie jar head on its shoulders. Then clicked her computer back on.
Her wrist beeped. Text from Doug.
YOU OK?
NOPE. Tara replied with a quick click.
PHONES RINGING OFF THE HOOK. REPORTERS. ALL THE BIG NAMES. STATUS QUO OR DIFFERENT NOW?
Tara considered. Considered accepting going on TV, speaking to a reporter for the first time ever. She had been asked before. Harassed, more like. Offered huge piles of money “for the cause” for her to do an exclusive at all of the top programs. Her answer had always been “everything I have to say I say daily online.” Well, not always. Once her answer had been a string of truly foul curse words that had Tara tasting the sticky tang of hatred for days. But she had never said yes.
Tara looked at the words on her wrist, blue glow against her skin.
DIFFERENT NOW?
No. No different. A child’s life was on the line, always on the line. This time, the one life hung in the spotlight.
STATUS QUO. Tara tapped back. BUT TELL THEM I’LL BE STREAMING LIVE IN FIVE MINUTES.
Her wrist chirped moments after she sent her text.
KEEP FLYING, LITTLE BIRD.
With a flare of renewed energy that lit her insides on fire, Tara sketched her idea on paper as she watched the minutes tick down. She thumbed on her computer again, set up her recording software, connected the feed to stream live on her KidTube channel, and began filming herself for the second time that day.
She let her anger show as she cursed the monster that stole the child. Steal any child. A foul, abhorrent use of the trust, love, and loyalty they had all built together under the EAK idea.
Her anger fueled her.
She asked her viewers to let their anger fuel them, and stoke their efforts to find the child.
“People are everywhere, and the only way he can hide is if we let him. The only way he will be unnoticed is if we are not looking. Hiding anywhere—in a city, in a crowd, in his own house—should be just a dream for this man, and anyone like him that chooses to commit a crime against a child.”
Tara uploaded photos of the kidnapped child, mostly taken from the mother’s social media pages, which were littered with them. “Here are pictures of him. Look. Find. See. Ask. He is on this planet with this child. We cannot let him be safe anywhere. There is only one of him, and all of us. Do not let him win. Do not let him have our child. Find him. Find him now.”
Tara ended her video with a hard click on her mouse and pushed away from her desk. She spun on her chair to face her sliver of golden sunlight over the San Francisco Bay. Fog had rolled in while she’d been recording, the light overwhelmed by a soup of gray shadows that smothered the city. Tara felt so small. Smaller and more helpless than she had felt in years.
If the child died, or worse…
She stared out her window, her mind trapped in her own thoughts.
And waiting.
Was it all worth it if the child was harmed or never found?
A warm, strong hand squeezed her arm. Doug’s smell of mint and sandalwood comfort filled her office.
“No matter what happens, it’s not your fault,” his low rumble soothed.
“Dammit,” Tara whispered. Her tear-filled eyes clung to where she knew the Golden Gate was, willing the fog to recede and her tears not to fall. Her fears to not come true.
Time passed, and the shadows darkened. Someone came into the office a couple of times, vague shadows that scurried away after a low-voiced dismissal from Doug. The two of them waited together.
“Tara.” A soft voice. A soft touch.
Tara pulled up out of her internal mediation into a dark office and an outside full of night. She turned, her body and soul aching, to face the intern who had summoned her out of her blackness.
“They found the child.” A woman’s voice. A kind, motherly voice that spoke her words as a salve to a wound. “It was amazing. After your video went out, airports, bus stations, train stations were all inundated with people trying to travel to the city the child had been kidnapped in. People knocked on doors, searched woods and neighborhoods. Formed groups and communication trees. Set up posts at gas stations and malls. It was incredible.”
Tara’s heart pounded as she tried not to scream at the woman. Clare was her name? It didn’t matter. Didn’t care.
“Was he…” Tara couldn’t voice her perfect fear.
Clare’s smile answered first. “Completely fine. No harm done. Just a little shook up by all the commotion, and glad to see his momma. The man who took him…didn’t fare so well.” Clare chuckled, the sound’s alienness startling Tara after the day of despair she’d had. “The citizen’s arrest resulted in many broken bones and more than a little blood. All to that animal. The police are calling it injuries he incurred while trying to flee the scene.”
Tension left Tara so suddenly her limbs felt like jelly.
A squeeze on her arm. Tara turned to the crinkle-eyed smile of Doug.
Everything would be ok.
“You should go home, Tara.” Clare insisted. “It’s been quite a day.”
Tara patted Doug’s hand and just smiled back at him.
“I will, in just a sec,” she told Clare, then asked them both, “Give me a moment, will you?”
Doug maneuvered out without a word, though Clare threw a concerned look over her shoulder before she closed the office door.
Tara scrubbed her face with her hands. And breathed. Then thumbed on her computer, to make her third video post of the day. It was only five words long.
“Than
k you, everyone. Thank you.”
***
“Video. On.”
Tara’s soft voice, wispy with old age, floated into the bright, stark whiteness of her bedroom. She took a ragged breath through the tube that blasted two streams of cool, pure oxygen up her nose. Faint red lights blinked in the room’s upper corners, voice-activated video recorders set up for her daily video feeds. Licking her lips for the last bit of chocolate pudding her nurse had fed her for breakfast (because Tara wanted chocolate pudding, that’s why), she checked the wrinkles around her mouth for run-away food with a shaky, slow-moving claw.
Light pixels of blue, green, and red flickered into a holographic screen two feet in front of her, just above the thin hydro-coat blanket that covered her knobby knees. She could still see through the screen to her toes—one red sock, blue sock—that peeked out from under the blanket. On purpose. Even old women could be silly. And her colored socks had become a trademark over the years. On this day, her final video, she wanted to give everything she had left.
Light filtered down from the skylights overhead. The morning sun did all it could to make her days cheery as her time-ravaged body fought to live. Pain had become a constant companion, and Tara knew she had become hard to deal with on a daily basis. She ran her poor nurse ragged. Well, unragged, since Tara hated to be waited on, hated to be assisted, but she knew she needed it. Couldn’t do it herself. She could no longer perform even simple, basic tasks on her own. And no amount of super technology could help her.
Tara was dying.
Soon. She knew it would be soon. And she was more than ok with the final rest approaching after her long life. She looked forward to seeing Doug again. Like a father for the too-short years she had with him, she had missed him every day since he had passed more than seventy years ago.
The world hoped she would live to see the hundredth anniversary of Tara’s very first EAK post, but she had no desire to live another year, let alone another decade. The world would do just fine without her, once she was gone. Sometimes it didn’t think so. And Tara chuckled at herself that she now viewed the entire world like her own child, a single entity that she scolded and encouraged in kind. And sometimes it treated her like its lordly mother. Holy at one turn, and devil in the next.
Earth, the child she’d never had.
Though not completely true anymore, what with the moon installations, Mars colonies, a handful of space stations, and the Jupiter Orbital. All of which promised to watch her final video. As well as all the world leaders, and well, everyone.
Tara didn’t believe they all would, but this one didn’t matter as much. Not really. Not by itself. But all together, yes. All of her posts, as one basic message, had changed the world. Made it a brighter place, full of tighter communities, more open communication. Accepting people for who they were, and who they wanted to be. Confidence. Confidence bordering on arrogance, now.
They called it their Golden Age of Earth. Everything was possible, since the only thing that could hold them back were themselves. We will take on the Universe. War never again. Cure everything. Even Death.
Yep, arrogance. But the good kind, the innocent kind. A social movement of open hands, hearts, and possibilities around the world. It had been a long journey, but it had been one hell of a ride.
The screen on her lap turned to black, and the screen to record blinked on. Already more than eight billion subscribers had logged on and waited for her to press record and stream live.
Tara sighed and savored the moment. Alone. Her choice. Alone with her world. Her child. Just a few words—her last words—and then she could rest.
“Record,” Tara wheezed.
The pause screen cleared, then blinked a countdown to begin recording.
Three…
Two…
She took a deep breath.
One…
Recording.
“It’s up to you now.” Her voice, a near whisper, barely carried past her bed.
“Take care of each other. You are all you have.”
Tara paused.
“I’m proud of you.”
“End Recording.”
Introduction to “Staying Afloat”
Angela Penrose recently moved with her husband from her native California to Seattle, and loves having bald eagles in the neighborhood. When she’s not writing, she’s probably reading, playing computer games, or watching documentaries on TV. Before inheriting the family arthritis, she spent every spring attacking the hard soil in the back yard with a pickaxe, and growing new plants from seed.
About “Staying Afloat,” she writes: “While travelling in Mexico, I saw fields on hillsides so steep I wouldn’t want to have to climb them (even when I had two good knees) much less establish crops there. It made me think about what would happen if the annual rainfall doubled or tripled or more—watering a steep slope makes it more likely to slide, not less, contrary to popular belief. And I wondered whether there was a solution that would be viable for small farmers, whose economic situation is usually pretty marginal. Then I remembered something I learned about the Aztecs in sixth grade, and it all came together.”
One of the singular joys of editing an anthology is purchasing an author’s very first professional sale. Judging by the control and skill with which Angela wrote the following story—about a problem that exists around the world, and a very elegant yet simple solution—I foresee a very long and successful authorial future ahead of her.
Staying Afloat
Angela Penrose
Just past eleven o’clock at night, the rain pressed hard against Paula Casillas’ back, forcing her to lean into the storm to keep her balance. It felt like she was being shot by a steady hail of tiny bullets—tiny, cold, splashing bullets that soaked her jeans and trickled down the neck of her heavy rain jacket.
The maize field she stood next to was well enough established that the rain wasn’t damaging the plants directly, but the soil was saturated, and what’d been a slight rise in the middle of the dirt road ninety minutes earlier was now a shallow stream creeping up around her ankles.
Lightning lit the sky, painting the experimental field with a blinding flash. Paula counted three seconds before thunder boomed.
To the west, the land rose into steep and unstable hills. Too many hills were unstable now, with the rain pouring down ten months of the year, harder than ever before. Who would have thought that the farmers of the altiplano would have ever had to worry about too much water? Paula remembered her Abuelo Jimenez muttering about drought in the many years when the rains were light and brief, but he’d never complained of too much water. But since the mid-twenty-first century, the old farmers spoke of drought years with what almost sounded like nostalgia.
“Here it comes.” José Orozco pointed up-slope with his flashlight, picking out a sparkle that wasn’t just wet soil. Paula nodded and whispered a prayer. The water was coming down, rushing out of the mountains, and the field was in its way. And between the maize field and the coming flood was a fence of bright orange plastic that she and her grad student had assembled and installed just two days earlier.
“It will hold,” said José. He took a few steps closer to the slope, clearly visible even in the dark and the rain. Unlike most graduate students Paula knew (or had been, in her day) José had a social life, and had come out to meet her after the awaited rain interrupted him at some club. His white pants and shirt practically glowed in the dismal night; the smart grey jacket didn’t dim the effect much.
Youngsters. Paula was only forty-two, but sometimes José made her feel old. Luckily, he did it in a way that she didn’t mind too much.
Paula nodded to his back and repeated to herself, it will hold. Maybe if they asserted it often enough, it would be true.
It should hold. The plastic, an American product pushed by smiling, blond spokesmen in expensive “casual” suits who promised miracles every time they opened their mouths, called it “Tufflon.” Twenty-eight times stronger than s
pider silk, it was light and cheap, and was one of the wonder products being sold all over the world as an essential part of the climate warrior’s toolkit.
Practical applications—practical from the point of view of the people being battered by the changing world, and who did not have the bank account or credit line of the average American—were harder to come by. Yes, it could help keep soil from washing away in a heavy rain on a perfectly flat field, but when the problem was flooding, that wasn’t so helpful. It was good for covering windows before one of the too-common hurricanes, and cheaper than plywood, but while useful, that was hardly a revolutionary development.
The leading edge of the floodwater hit the plastic barrier. Paula played her flashlight across it and could see the inverted-V shape channeling water into the drainage ditches on both sides of the field.
Paula and José had spent an entire day up on that slope, pounding wooden support stakes usually used for wire fences, stretching and securing the plastic, moving the stakes to get the angles correct and let a single long strip of the stuff—shaped with a dart held with duct tape—stand up straight with its lower edge hugging the ground. Once it was set, they secured the bottom, poking holes with nails and pushing sharp twigs into the ground to pin the edge down, because if the water just swept under the plastic, they might as well not have bothered. Then they’d had to pull up most of the twigs and resecure the bottom edge using other twigs with bends or forks in them, so the plastic wouldn’t just lift off with the wind.
A little leakage was acceptable. Unavoidable. But if the orange plastic dam would hold, would it channel most of the water away? This was something any farmer could afford, could install on his own to protect a field at the base of a hill, or actually up on a slope, as so many Mexican farms were.
Lightning flashed again, casting a white glare over the sodden field. The crack-rumble of thunder was less than two seconds behind. The rain kept falling, and more water poured down the hill.
Fiction River: How to Save the World Page 11
