Wormhole Pirates on Orbis

by P. J. Haarsma

  I turned to Theodore and pinched him.

  “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  “I want to make sure you’re not a hologram,” I said. “When did you get that award?”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Then how . . .”

  “Wow! I’m first.” Theodore was glowing. He stared at the screen, watching himself with the biggest smile I had ever seen stretched across his face.

  “It’s got to be a fake!”

  “Who cares? I’m first!”

  By now I was forced to shout over the noise of the students. On the screen the placement results scrolled in front of us. Theodore’s name was first, and it shot out from the screen.

  “Look, there’s my name!” he shouted. “Yes! And Max is second! And look, JT, there’s yours!”

  The air did not move. It was as if a vacuum had sucked it from the auditorium. The entire place was reduced to a point of singularity. But it can’t be! The third name on the list was Johnny Turnbull. Now all of the students were rocking the pods and banging on them in unison. Grace’s name was fourth on the list, right behind mine. Dalton was fifth. Every one of us placed before any of the Citizens. Beside our name was our Guarantor’s name: Charlie Norton. The crowd continued violently rocking their pods in disgust. I poked my head out, and an angry alien above me threw something. It stuck to my hair.

  “What is it?” I turned to Theodore for help.

  Theodore scrunched his face and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Get rid of it!”

  Gingerly, he swiped at my head, and flung the thing out of the pod.

  “This isn’t good!” he shouted over the noise.

  “Is it ever?”

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “JT!” someone shouted. It was Max.

  Cautiously I peered over the edge of my pod and saw Max and Grace defending themselves from an assortment of projectiles being sent their way.

  “Get Vairocina!” she shouted.

  I could do better. I sat back and accessed the central computer through the pod’s uplink. The energetic coolness of the central computer washed over me as I pushed inside it. Without looking, I launched myself down the first corridor of data and accessed the Illuminate. I felt stronger whenever I was inside the central computer. Much more confident than I did on the outside. I located the auditorium on the network grid with my first try. A simple binary code stood guarding the power to the entire room. I reached in with my mind and disconnected the power. I bet that would shut them up.

  “Vairocina!” I hollered while still inside the computer.

  “This is a nice surprise,” she said, floating through a portal. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can you get the pods moving in the Illuminate and get all of us out of here?”

  “Everyone?”

  “Just the humans; you’ll have to restrict the power flow. Can you locate us by our staining?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  I pulled out of the computer.

  “Did you do that?” Theodore asked.

  “Yeah, hold on!”

  The pod jerked sideways. The doors out of the auditorium cracked open, flushing our pod with light. Theodore and I scrambled out and found some of the other kids already waiting.

  When Max finally appeared in the doorway, she gasped, “I’m telling everyone now: Don’t try so hard next time.”

  “When did you get that award?” Grace asked Theodore, getting out of her pod as quickly as possible.

  “I didn’t. That was a fake, but the score still counts,” he assured everyone.

  “Did you see Ketheria’s score, JT?” Max asked.

  “No, why?” I replied. I must have been inside the computer when her score came up.

  “She placed last.”

  “Last of us?”

  “No, last in the whole Illuminate.”

  Staying at the Illuminate was not an option. I had no intention of facing anyone from the student body after the way they’d reacted to our placement scores (I especially didn’t want to face a mob of them). I also wanted to ask Charlie how Theodore could receive an award without even knowing the event had taken place. Almost immediately, we jumped a chute back home and found Charlie sitting in the garden with Ketheria. She was leaning up against him, wrapped in a blanket, drawing on an O-dat.

  Charlie stood up when he saw us. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “They don’t like us very much at the Illuminate,” Max informed him.

  “We’re too smart,” Dalton added.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, everyone,” Theodore moaned, and rolled his eyes, his tone implying that he was the cause of the entire problem. I looked at Max as she bit her bottom lip, trying not to laugh.

  Charlie raised his eyebrows and let out a deep breath. “The placement exam.”

  “You knew?” I questioned him.

  Charlie nodded.

  “Why didn’t you warn us?” The edge on my words was a little too sharp. I tried to soften my tone a bit. “And when did Theodore get that award?”

  “The Citizens always honor their own, especially the student who places highest. When Theodore received the best score, the Chancellor refused to acknowledge it. The Keepers made him do it, but he would only perform the staged production you saw.”

  “The Keepers monitor the test?”

  “They wrote it.”

  My mind was swimming with questions again. I couldn’t even fathom what Charlie meant. And I couldn’t care less. I really didn’t want this attention. Not at the Illuminate.

  “Your sister’s feeling much better,” Charlie said as Max sat next to her.

  Ketheria. I forgot. “I’m sorry,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  I really wanted to ask her about the test. Did she even answer the questions? How could she place last? It just didn’t fit.

  I stared at Ketheria, and before I said anything, she said, “The exam means nothing, JT. It only fills their need to label everyone. Forget it. But congratulations just the same, Theodore.”

  “Thanks,” he replied. He was still smiling. In fact, he hadn’t stopped smiling the entire way home.

  “But . . .” I wanted more from my sister. I wanted an explanation. It infuriated me when she was so passive.

  “I just didn’t do the test,” Ketheria said. “Is that enough? It’s better this way.”

  My little sister could be odd sometimes, and unfortunately, this was one of those times. The device on her head didn’t seem to stop her from always knowing what I was thinking, either. I never knew how to reply whenever she blurted out a piece of advice or some sort of warning. I leaned forward, tugging at the O-dat she was writing on.

  “What do you have there?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  On the screen were lines spiraling around a fixed point like a swirling galaxy. Just kids’ stuff. Doodles, really. I ran my hand over her hair, bumping my fingers against the metal bolted to her head.

  “You look better.”

  Ketheria poked her chin up at Charlie and said, “I’m hungry.”

  “She’s better,” Max agreed.

  From behind me, Theodore called, “JT?” He was now standing at the doorway to the house. “Can you come here?”

  I followed Theodore inside. “What is it?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  Theodore stopped outside the room to our sleepers, where we had left Ketheria at the start of the spoke.

  “Did you see this?”

  I looked in the room, but I didn’t enter. “No.”

  “She’s been busy.”

  I knew Ketheria wasn’t feeling well, but I couldn’t understand what would make her do this. Drawn on the walls, the floors, and even the sleepers — everywhere Ketheria could reach — were the same spirals she was doodling in the garden. There must have been thousands of them.

  “I guess that’s why Charlie got her th
at screen,” he mumbled.

  Charlie came up behind us and said, “She started right after you left.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked him worriedly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is something wrong with her?”

  “Nothing. She’s as fit as a fiddle.”

  “What’s a fiddle?” Theodore asked.

  “For such smart kids, you don’t know much about Earth, do you?”

  I didn’t know much about anything anymore. I just wanted to sit somewhere and turn my brain off. I wanted everything and everyone to go away. What if Ketheria was sick, I mean really sick? What if she had picked up some weird alien disease that no one knew would affect humans? I mean, Ketheria ate practically everything she could fit in her mouth. Maybe it was in the food. If Ketheria really were sick, would anyone care? Like the Chancellor said, we were the labor caste. I’m sure there was a motto written somewhere on one of their factory walls that read: IF THE MACHINE BREAKS, GET ANOTHER ONE.

  I tried to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I tried to read, but all I did was reread the same sentence fourteen times. I gave up and went for a walk.

  I had never looked at the plants in the garden before. I had watched Charlie coax some of the more shy plants to come forward, but I never really examined them. The ring was rotating into shadow now, and the fading light was grabbing slivers of purple, red, and bright green. I saw that some plants were spiked, protecting thick flowers blooming under the thistles, while others puffed up their tentacles and wiggled in the breeze. They really were striking.

  I rounded a huge tree whose surface was a golden green, its skin as smooth as any metal I’d known. I placed my palm against the trunk. The tree was cool under my touch. It stood there unresponsive to the pressure of my hand. Leaning against the tree, I wondered how long it had stood in the garden, just being a tree. Did it ever try to be a better tree? Did it ever worry about what the other trees thought about it? Was I going crazy?

  I didn’t want to think that Ketheria was going crazy. I forced the thought from my head. All she did was draw on the walls, I told myself. But I knew this wasn’t like her. I knew she wouldn’t care about the exam. I should have seen that coming, but the scribbling — this was something entirely different.

  I paused at a curve in the stone path. I saw Max sitting on a crystal bench just five meters in front of me. She was playing with a small plant she must have coaxed out of the bushes.

  Max showed no sign of concern about the cycle’s events. At least, she didn’t appear to — but then, she never did. I liked that about her. Grace could get upset over a tear in her skin, but not Max. She was always looking for more, always ready to try something new. I watched Max brush her brown hair away from her face. That’s when she saw me. I felt my skin go hot when her eyes caught mine.

  “He’s cute, isn’t he?” she said. I thanked the Universe that she hadn’t noticed I was standing there staring at her. I stepped toward her, and the plant shuffled back into the bushes.

  “I don’t think it likes me,” I murmured.

  “Oh, quit thinking the universe is against you.” Max made it sound like a joke, and I smiled.

  “We’ll find out next cycle, won’t we?”

  “And we’ll deal with it then.” Max stood up. “You know, I can’t believe Theodore beat me. He’s much smarter than I give him credit for.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that the entire student body of the Illuminate hates us now?”

  “Should it? Maybe now you won’t think you’re just a knudnik. You can’t tell me that you didn’t want to place well and show those Citizens a thing or two.”

  She was right. I did want to beat them; I just hadn’t prepared for the consequences. How does she know that, though? Sometimes I think Max knows me better than I know myself.

  “Were you looking for me?” she asked.

  “Huh?” I muttered, distracted.

  “We’re you looking for me?”

  “Um, no. I was just going for a walk.”

  “Oh, good, then, can I join you?”

  “Can I say no?” I smiled, and something inside me stirred.

  “Absolutely not.”

  We followed the stone path to its end and picked up a dirt path that weaved its way through a patch of wild trees.

  “This is a big estate,” I remarked, looking back over my shoulder.

  “Aren’t you curious how Charlie got it?” she wondered. “He doesn’t talk much about it.”

  “Charlie has a lot of secrets.”

  “That’s normal on the Rings of Orbis.”

  The dirt path came to a dead end, and we stood in front of a thick-looking wall of cut and polished boulders. We both squinted to see the top.

  “Typical,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “This wall.” I placed my hands on the rock. “It’s no different from anywhere else. This place is just bigger and prettier, but it still has the same purpose as every other place on the rings.”

  “And that is?”

  “To keep us here,” I said.

  “JT, you need to lighten up a little. Seriously.”

  The next cycle, Ketheria followed us to the Illuminate. She acted as if nothing had happened and didn’t show a single sign of the melancholy that seemed to plague her last cycle. Needless to say, I was nervous about our reception. The first anomaly occurred the moment we arrived — Riis was not in the plaza to meet us.

  I caught a group of students staring, following our every step. Another group shouted something across the plaza while pointing at us.

  “Let’s get inside quickly,” I whispered.

  “They’re just jealous,” Max replied.

  I concentrated on my feet, trying not to look at anyone as we headed straight for the storage lockers. Riis wasn’t there, either. Instead, Dop and his misfit friends were waiting for us. Theodore’s storage bin was open and Dop was playing with a screen scroll. It was the same one that was given to Theodore in the fake ceremony held with the Chancellor. The Illuminate must have put it in the locker, like Riis said.

  “How did you get in there?” Theodore demanded.

  “You’re knudnik; I’m not,” was all he said.

  Some of the kids went straight to their lockers in the oval foyer. I stood next to Theodore, along with Ketheria and Max. My anger was quickly connecting the neurons in my brain, igniting them one by one, but Max went first. “Why do you care how we did on that test if you know you’re so much better than us?”

  Dop tossed the award into the locker and said, “Because you cheated.”

  “I did not!” she pushed the words through her clenched teeth. Her fists were already balled up.

  Dop pointed his willowy finger at me. “He’s a softwire. Everyone knows it. He used it to get inside the central computer and change the results. There is no other way.”

  Theodore’s eyes narrowed and he stomped toward Dop, not something you would normally see Theodore do. “I answered every one of those dumb questions! In fact, they were easy. If I had more time, I would have answered them all.”

  Dop and his friends laughed in Theodore’s face.

  “Maybe with the help of the Softwire’s little friend inside the central computer.” Dop motioned his head toward me.

  “Who told you about that?” I spoke each word slowly, trying to control my anger.

  “Who do you think?”

  I blinked as my mind rebooted. Riis? She wouldn’t. Why would Riis tell Dop about Vairocina? She didn’t like Dop.

  “You’re lying,” I snapped.

  Dop shrugged his narrow shoulders and smirked.

  “You’re a creep, too,” Max said.

  “What do you want, Dop?” I asked him.

  “Admit that you cheated.”

  “All right.”

  “Uh, JT? I didn’t cheat!” Theodore’s eyes flew open.

  “If you beat me at Quest-Nest. Then I’ll stand up in front of the whole Illuminate and te
ll everyone I cheated, but you have to win in the arena.”

  A smile snaked across Dop’s face, a devilish smile that made his eyes sparkle. “I like that,” he hissed. “I will destroy you.”

  “But if I win —”

  “You won’t,” he boasted.

  “But if I do, then you have to leave us alone, and we each want one of those things you guys wear on your neural ports,” I said, pointing to the metal device on his friend’s ear.

  “A pob?” There was an edge of scorn to his tone.

  “You can afford it.”

  “Fine, I’m not going to lose.”

  “One for each of us,” I repeated, motioning to everyone in the room.

  Dop hesitated for a moment, but then said, “Deal. In three phases you register in the Illuminate league and I will humiliate you at the arena. Then everyone will know the truth.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Dop shoved his way between us while his friends slunk behind him. Dop never stopped grinning. It was an overconfident grin, as if his quest was already accomplished. I smiled right back at him. Little did he know that I had been playing Quest-Nest since I was born.

  “I don’t know about this,” Theodore whispered, even though I was sure Dop couldn’t hear us.

  “He’s gonna wish he never made that challenge,” Max said.

  “Thanks, Max.”

  “The tap said the Illuminate league starts in three phases. We need to practice before then,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You can’t make that sort of bet, JT. I didn’t cheat,” Theodore insisted. He looked at Ketheria. “Are you gonna let him do this?”

  “It’s not my decision,” she replied. “Anyway, Dop is nervous.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Does he know we’ve played before?”

  “No. It’s just that no one expected a knudnik to do so well on the placement exam. Maybe he’s worried about what else you know.”

  “Don’t you wish you’d taken the test now?” I asked her.

  “I’m not the one playing,” she answered.

  “She’s right,” Theodore agreed. “Maybe you should use her as a partner. She was always the best at finding the bait.”

  “Thanks a lot, Theodore,” Max protested.

  “There’s too much at stake here. If Dop wins, everyone will think I cheated. I won’t be first anymore,” he pointed out to her.