Ultraviolet

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “I hope they’re friendly.” I took half a step and stopped. “Just in case, Lux, armor one with helmet.”

  The suit flashed and the military armor appeared. Even though it was weightless, I could feel the energy in the air, swirling around my body, and it made me feel safer.

  “All right, who sent you? Who do you work for?” A man with a crossbow leaned out the open window of the house on our left. He had a thin beard and very short hair, almost like he had shaved his entire head and it was all growing back in together. I thought he looked older than me, but he was really thin so maybe it was just the lack of baby fat talking.

  Felix put his hands up.

  I didn’t.

  “We don’t work for anyone,” Felix said. “I used to work for Cygnus a ways back, but they fired me.”

  “For what?”

  “I showed them how to make a better sort of aluminum, and that was apparently a big no-no.”

  The man with the crossbow raised an eyebrow. “Okay. What’s her story? What’s with the… whatever that is?”

  “It’s holographic armor,” I said. “I invented solid holograms after I got laid off from Cygnus, and now they sort of want to kill me for inventing it, more or less.”

  “Huh. I guess I can see that.” He angled his crossbow away from us. “Got names?”

  “Felix James.”

  “Carmen Zhao.”

  “Well, howdy. I’m Jeff.” The guy with the crossbow glanced down and I realized he was looking up our names on his phone.

  “You have phones?” I asked.

  “Of course we do,” he muttered. “We’re outlaws and refugees, not savages.”

  “But how do you charge them?”

  Jeff pointed upward. “Solar panels on the roofs.”

  I nodded. “Cool.”

  “How many people are here?” Felix asked.

  “No questions,” Jeff said, still focused on his phone.

  “I can save you some time, if you just look up the name Ultraviolet,” I offered. “That’s me. That’s us.”

  He raised an eyebrow and continued tapping away on his phone. “Interesting.”

  “Yeah, that’s us. Interesting,” Felix muttered.

  “Ignore him,” I said. “Look, we’ve been running all over the city the last few days, trying to help my parents and my friends, and now… we just want out. No more fighting Cygnus, no more trouble. I know we can’t go back, so we’re not. We left. And we went looking for anyone else who might be out here, and we found you.”

  “Yes, you did.” Jeff put away his phone and focused on us again. “I just saw some interesting clips. That’s some slick gear you have there, Miss Ultraviolet.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled.

  “And now you just want to retire to the countryside and live here with us?”

  “Well… maybe.” I nodded. “If that’s all right with you. We don’t really have a plan, exactly. We’re just making it up as we go along at this point.”

  “It shows.”

  “Hey!” Felix glared at him.

  Jeff waved his hand to dismiss the remark. “No offense. You seem like a lovely couple of terrorists, but we can’t afford to have a pair of lightning rods like you here. So if you don’t mind, kindly show yourselves out.”

  I blinked. “Really? Just like that?”

  “Well, ordinarily I’d be just tickled to make friends with folks who’ve been smashing up drones and offices,” he said dryly. “That’s right up my alley, it really is. But seeing as how you’ve got a whole mid-Atlantic conglomerate and the BPD tearing up an entire city to find you, I really can’t take the risk.”

  “They’re doing what?” I pulled out my phone and scanned the headlines. He was right. Cygnus, Susquehanna, and a handful of other major companies had financed a city-wide manhunt for me and Felix, and in the last few hours alone they had broken into dozens of private homes and interrogated hundreds of people, none of whom had anything to do with me or Felix, as far as I could tell. “What the hell is going on? What are they doing?”

  “They’re undoing everything we did,” Felix said softly. “All the public relations, all the fans, all the support, gone. You’re not the hero anymore. Now you’re the reason everyone is scared, or had their door kicked in, or their brother got detained. Everybody hates us now.”

  “Looks that way,” Jeff said. “So if you don’t mind, please get the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t move. I was too angry and confused.

  What the hell was it all for? We left the city. I sent messages to Frost and Brian, they knew we were gone. But they were terrorizing the city anyway. Why?

  “It’s about the future,” I said quietly.

  “What is?” Felix asked.

  “This little war of theirs.” I held up my phone listing the SWAT breaches and detainments. “They’re doing this so the next time someone gets it in their head to fight back, they won’t. This is to scare off any future Ultraviolets.”

  “Yeah.” Felix sighed. “You’re probably right.”

  “So we need to fight back now,” I said. “Right now, before everyone really is too scared to stand up to them again. Come on.” I started walking away.

  “Come on where? Where are we going?” Felix followed me.

  “We’re going to find that Dean guy you mentioned before, or someone like him. Someone who’s already fought back. People willing to fight back with us.”

  “Hey!” Jeff waved from his window. “Hey, are you talking about Dean Yeager?”

  I stopped and looked back at him. I had no idea what the mythical Dean’s last name was, so I said, “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say so? I’ll go get him for you.”

  Chapter 13

  Outliers

  We met Dean Yeager in a little wooden house that smelled vaguely of honey. The first thing that caught my eye was that he looked a lot younger, and taller, and stronger than I was expecting.

  Somehow, from that brief conversation with Felix, I had gotten the idea that he was middle-aged or older, and would be thin or paunchy, and definitely raggedy with some awful beard and thinning hair. I mean, anyone who abandoned civilization to live in the woods years ago should be looking pretty rough by now, right?

  Nope. Dean looked like a lumberjack. But not a real lumberjack. More like one of the really good-looking actors who play lumberjacks in advertisements online. He smirked at me in my holographic armor and said, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “Oh, sorry. Lux, clear.” The armor vanished and I got a curious look from the strange man. “Solid holograms.”

  “You don’t say.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Come on in.”

  The second thing I noticed, after Dean stepped back and let us into his house, was that his house was full of amazing things. Intricate little cups, animal figurines, busts of historical figures including Shakespeare and Amelia Earhart, three working cuckoo clocks, several hanging mobiles of birds in flight, and on and on.

  And it was all made of wood.

  Dean eyed us up and down as he led us back to a small dining table with gorgeous eagle-talon feet and we all sat in tall-backed chairs covered in carved leaves and vines and flowers.

  “Did you make all these?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Dean leaned back and narrowed his eyes at us. “So, Jeff says you guys got your wrists slapped by Cygnus, and then you spit in their eye, and now they’re burning the whole city down to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Uhm… that’s not exactly how it happened,” Felix said. “We both got fired for—”

  “For inventing things that would help mankind, yeah, I know.” Dean pointed over at an alcove behind us. “So did I.”

  I looked back in the alcove and saw two printers sitting side by side. “You invented the 3D printer?”

  Dean smirked and shook his head. “No, that was a little before my time. I invented the thing next to it.”

  I looked again. It just lo
oked like two identical printers. “Which is?”

  “A recycler.”

  I blinked and look back at him. “You mean…?”

  Dean nodded. “Things go in, feedstock comes out. Everything in this house was made by those two machines. The recycler strips old things down into feed, and then the printer turns the feed into new things. So when I get bored, I start turning sticks and brush into furniture.”

  I looked back at the recycler. “But… that would change everything. People could just recycle the things they have into new things, or turn broken things into fixed things, and all it would cost is a little bit of electricity. Which is free if you can make your own solar panels.”

  “Yeah, the suits at Cygnus weren’t too thrilled when they heard about it since most of their profits come from selling feedstock, so… here I am.” Dean gestured to the beautiful room. “I guess they didn’t take too kindly to the idea of a machine that would completely ruin their business model.”

  “Wow.” My imagination raced off faster than even I could follow it. With this machine, this little white box sitting in the corner, a person could make anything in the world, all by themselves. They could turn old junk into the solar panels to power it, they could make their own clothes and furniture, they could make their own electronics and tools. The only thing they couldn’t make would be their food, but with a few printed tools, they could build greenhouses, or maybe one day even design a printer that could turn feedstock into cheeseburgers.

  But what would happen to the city if everyone had everything they ever wanted and didn’t have to spend half the day in a mine or a factory? What if there were no more companies or jobs? What if we spent our lives just creating things and spending time together?

  I guess… everyone would be happy…

  “What did Cygnus do to you?” I asked.

  “They came after my family. Detained them,” he said. “But my dad told me not to give them what they wanted. After ninety days they had to let everyone go, and by then I was long gone.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Nine years.”

  “Nine? And you’ve been living here like this ever since?” I glanced around the little house. It was still lovely, but the idea of living nine years, or even nine months, in a place like this somehow didn’t seem too great, isolated in hiding, never seeing family, never having a normal life.

  “More or less.” Dean shrugged.

  “Have you ever tried to… I don’t know, maybe tell people about your recycler?”

  “I did. It blew up the feeds all over the world, everywhere except here of course.”

  “What!” Felix and I stared at him. “You mean everyone in the world has this technology except in our own country?”

  “Yes. Yes, they do.” He said it so slowly, so lazily, with this terrible dead weight in his eyes.

  “But… why don’t we know about it?” Felix asked.

  “Because they don’t want you to know.” Dean grinned. “You didn’t think the homeland firewall was really meant to keep digital terrorists out, did you?”

  “You mean, it… it keeps us in?”

  “Yep. It took me two years to hack my way out into the real Internet.”

  It was a chilling thought. I mean, you hear people argue about politics all the time, and yeah, sometimes we sound like the bad guys, and sometimes we are the bad guys, but in the big picture, in the long run, you want to believe you’re one of the good guys, you want to believe you’re on the right side. Even with all the corruption and greed, even after everything that had just happened to me, there was a part of me that still believed that this was a good country, just going through a bad patch, just because of a handful of bad people.

  But at that moment, I couldn’t even believe that anymore.

  “So, the rest of the world is amazing and we’re… this.” I slumped in my seat and stared out the window across the clearing at a line of crumbling stages where people used to sing and dance in funny costumes. Or so I’ve been told.

  “Yep.” Dean just sat there, watching us. Maybe it amused him to crush the spirits of strangers, or maybe he was just so used to knowing the truth that he didn’t care anymore. Maybe he’d given up.

  I didn’t know what the rest of the world was like. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, or Felix, or the rest of the country. But I didn’t want to end up like Dean. I was willing to run away to protect the people I cared about, but I wasn’t going to sit on the two greatest inventions of the century and let millions of people suffer for the rest of their lives when they didn’t need to.

  “Can I have the specs for the recycler?” I asked softly.

  He nodded. “I’ll trade you for the specs on your holo-suit. I’ll even throw in my app for the real Internet, if you want it.”

  “Done.” I didn’t even pause to think. This wasn’t about me anymore.

  We took out our phones and exchanged data for a moment.

  He sniffed. “You’ll have to jailbreak a printer to make it spit out a recycler, but I’m guessing you two can figure that out.”

  “Yeah,” Felix said. “No problem there.”

  “And you’ll need some rubidium to make a holo-suit,” I said.

  He frowned. “Where the hell am I supposed to get that?”

  I pulled out my backpack and fished out one of the extra rods of rubidium from the warehouse. “You can have this one.”

  He took it warily. “Thanks for the present.”

  “It’s not a present,” I said. “It’s a trade.”

  “For what?” He tightened his grip on the rod.

  “Lunch.” I smiled a little. “Please.”

  Dean snorted, and then he grinned and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  An hour later, we ate lunch with Dean, Jeff, and a handful of other people living in their little village in the woods. Meals were apparently a community event since the village only had one really good oven. I suppose they didn’t have enough metal for Dean to recycle them a second one. But whatever the reason, they cooked and ate together.

  What they gave us was some sort of stew, or pot pie, or casserole, some mixed up pile of meat and vegetables in a thick sauce. To this day I’m not certain what all of the vegetables were, and I have no idea what the meat was, but it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

  I had seconds.

  Dean’s friends were not chatty. They sat and ate quietly, casting uneasy looks at me and Felix, even though Dean assured them that we weren’t cops, or anything else scary. They didn’t seem eager to believe him. And when they were done eating, they cleaned up and headed back to their homes scattered around the old fairgrounds.

  “So you’re going back to Baltimore?” Dean sat on yet another beautifully sculpted stool at the foot of a tree, picking his teeth with a toothpick shaped like a unicorn. “That seems stupid.”

  I frowned at him. “It’s dangerous, yeah, but saving the world isn’t stupid. We can help people, we have to try.”

  “Actually, you don’t. I’m not.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s your choice.” I didn’t want to get into an argument with him, and I really did believe he was free to live his life however he wanted, even if it meant not helping people. But I still wanted to smack him for being an ass.

  “New plan,” he said. “You guys stay here. We fix up a house for you. And then we do a little advertising of our own. Reach out to some people in the city that you know, friends and family, and bring them out here. Everyone gets a recycler and lives like a king, and everyone gets a holo-suit so they can fight off the corporate goons.”

  “With you in charge?” Felix asked.

  Dean laughed. “You think I want to be in charge? You think I want to wear a tie and tell people to send me their status updates every day? Hell, I just want to be left alone. But I figure I’m a lot safer with a hundred armed neighbors than with just Jeff and his crossbow watching the front door. And the best way to make sure no one wants to rob me
is to give everybody what I have. The recycler.”

  I had to admit, the idea wasn’t crazy. A village in the woods full of only the people that we trusted, everyone living a life of luxury, depending on nothing more than the sun and our brains to keep us safe and free. It sounded deceptively easy.

  “And what happens when Cygnus gets nervous about all the people heading off the grid?” I asked. “What happens when they decide it’s not worth the risk of leaving us alive and they send in the troops?”

  Dean shrugged. “That will be an interesting day.”

  “Oh, stop pretending to be a badass. People will die, that’s what’ll happen!”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Probably. But better to die free than to live like cattle, all caged and mindless.”

  “Uhm, no, I’d like to chime in,” Felix said. “I’m not a big fan of anyone who says that dying would be the best thing. You see, living like cattle back in the city may suck on many levels, but as long as we’re alive there is hope, there is the chance we can fix things. But if we’re dead, then there’s nothing. Maybe you’re counting on some mansion in the sky, but I don’t believe in that stuff, so I’d like to stay alive on all counts.”

  Dean flicked his eyes over to Felix with a dismissive snort. “Whatever.”

  I agreed with Felix. Being alive, under just about any circumstances, would be better than being dead, and hanging out with people with only a casual interest in staying alive made me nervous. “All right then, thanks for the data and the food, it was very nice. I guess we’ll be going now.”

  “Watch your backs,” Dean said from his seat. “They don’t play nice.”

  “Yeah, well, neither do we,” I answered.

  We walked back through the strange little village, across the wide overgrown field that used to be a parking lot, and got back on the road. Sitting on the holographic motorcycle, slowly winding our way up the streets strewn with fallen branches and rusty cars, we sat in silence, staring at the pavement and the leaves.

  “So, we get a printer, and print out a recycler, and then we’re set for life,” Felix said calmly. “We find a decent house, fix it up, print some solar panels, water filters…”