by Anna Sheehan
People had been parting around me like Moses and the Red Sea for most of the day, with expressions ranging from sel fish curiosity to outright loathing, and I’d gotten used to being the elephant in the room that everyone looked at but no one spoke to. But when I stepped away from the line, I was immediately accosted by a well- dressed boy who looked like an Asian version of Mr.
Guillory.
“So, you’re the Sleeping Beauty,” he smarmed. “I’m Soun Ling. Pleased to meet you.” His tone suggested that the opposite were true. Still, he stuck out a soft hand for me to shake. I couldn’t figure out how to touch him without dropping either my tray or my notescreen, so I left his hand hanging in the air. He ignored this slight. “Would you care to sit with us?”
A handful of the kids behind him, male and female, snickered. I wasn’t sure what they were laughing at, but they made me uncomfortable. I’d been the new girl in school enough times to know full well that things could get very unpleasant very quickly if you allied yourself with the wrong group of people.
Either you alienated others or, more often, ended up the butt of some horrible conspiracy. That was why I had treasured my friendship with Xavier so dearly.
I wasn’t sure why, but I knew without a doubt that Soun Ling was the wrong person to have my name attached to. I stood helpless, wondering how to extricate myself from this predicament without making an enemy of Soun, or anyone else.
“Rose!”
The name cut through the bustle of the cafeteria, and my head turned toward the lifeline. Bren’s hand shot up over the heads of the other students, and I sighed with relief. “My friend is waiting for me,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Bren actually counted as a friend, but it was close enough.
Soun Ling’s eyes looked daggers at Bren. “Already sucking up to the CEOs, eh?
I should have known.” He turned his back on me.
I swallowed, relieved but still nervous. What had he meant?
Bren had saved a seat across the table from himself. When I approached the table, he pulled his notescreen off the spot and nodded at the empty chair.
“Thanks,” I said, sliding into the seat.
“Don’t mench.” He pointed at some of the people around the table. “This is Molly, Anastasia, Jamal, Wilhelm, Nabiki, and Otto. Everyone, this is Rose.”
The others looked at me blankly, as if they had no idea why Bren had dragged me over but weren’t going to argue with what he thought best. “Hi,” they all said, almost in unison, then seemed to forget I was there as they turned back to one another. I hoped I wasn’t supposed to remember all of their names. They were a rainbow of diversity, but their hairstyles looked uniformly expensive, and the cells around their necks were universally top- of- the- line. Their notescreens were all top- notch, too —I recognized the same logo as on my own wildly expensive screen.
I sat quietly at the table, nursing my food. I still couldn’t eat much without feeling sick to my stomach. The doctor told me it might be some years before I could eat normally. The others chatted on, making jokes and teasing one another. Usually when I was at a school for the first time, people asked me questions, and I answered. But this time all the questions had been asked by the reporters, and they’d heard the answers on the news. They didn’t seem to have anything to say to me, and I didn’t know what to say to them.
After I had nibbled for a while in silence, Bren cleared his throat. “So how’s the day going?”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“I saw you get set on by the jackals.”
“Jackals?”
“Yeah, Soun and his cronies. Bunch of burning speds. Their parents are wannabe rich. They like to hook up with the real rich kids and milk them for presents. Sorry, I should have warned you about them this morning.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“No, I thought you’d be safe. We aren’t in their grade. I underestimated your fame.”
I shook my head. “I’m not famous.”
“I didn’t say you were an idol or anything, but absolutely everyone knows who you are.”
I sighed, unable to look at my barely touched tray any longer. I felt nauseated.
“Bren? Soun said to me . . . that I was already sucking up to the CEOs. What did that mean?”
Bren grinned, self- deprecatingly. “That’s just what they call us. It’s because of our families. My grandfather’s just one rung down the ladder from Guillory.
Executive CEO, not quite chairman, but really powerful. My dad’s on the board, about four steps down from that, and Mom’s head of research for the Central Graphics Department.” He started nodding to the other kids around the table. I noticed most of them had stopped talking the moment Bren opened his mouth. It reminded me a bit of the way people deferred to Daddy at company picnics. I wondered if Bren knew how powerful he was, or if he was oblivious. “Nabiki’s dad is the leader and creator of the Neuro- Linguistic Research Department.”
“My mom is vice president of Research, Development, and Human Factors,”
said one of the boys, a tall Nordic blond with a thick German accent. He had to be Wilhelm. “My father controls Uni Germany, back home.”
“My parents head up the Bio- Chem Agricultural Quality Control Team on Titan,” said the girl named Anastasia. She sounded so Russian I could barely understand her.
“And Jamal’s own half of Europa,” said the fiercely redheaded girl with the freckles.
Jamal threw back his dark head and laughed. “Only about a third.”
I gulped. “And you?” I asked the redhead.
“Molly,” she supplied, reminding me. She grinned through her freckles. “Me, I’m just a scholarship student. My parents were some of the first colonists on Callisto, which makes me kind of royalty there, but that doesn’t get me so much as a supper invite on Earth.”
“Don’t let her kid you,” Bren said. “It got her a scholar-ship. Besides, she’s got the most brilliant mind for fundamental economics. She’ll change the entire economic structure of the planet the second she gets out of college. My granddad’s already considering inviting her to board meetings.”
I felt rather uncomfortable. “I’m nothing so interesting,” I whispered.
Jamal and Wilhelm laughed as one. Tall as a mountain, Wilhelm had to bend down to peer into my eyes. “You own every one of us, Liebchen,” he said fondly.
I knew I had turned red again, but I whispered, “No, I don’t.”
“Might as well,” said Jamal. “ Particularly —” But whatever he had been about to say was cut off by Nabiki, who elbowed him in the ribs. Jamal threw a surreptitious glance toward the only one of the party who hadn’t spoken yet, and then he closed his mouth. I searched through the names Bren had rattled off. Otto, that was it.
I couldn’t see Otto’s face. He had long, shaggy black hair, which he did not keep pulled back as the other boys did. He hadn’t looked up from his plate. “So who’s Otto’s family?” I asked.
There was an uncomfortable silence. I didn’t understand it until Otto finally looked up at me. I froze. I had thought him either Asian or Caucasian, but he was neither. His eyes were yellow, and his skin, now that I looked at it more closely, was nearly blue. He was pleasant- enough looking, with a strong nose and a fine- featured face. But his coloring simply wasn’t human.
“Otto doesn’t talk,” said Nabiki. She smiled at Otto, whose face remained entirely expressionless. She touched his shoulder in a way that told me their relationship wasn’t entirely platonic. “He kind of doesn’t need to.”
“ Wh- what is he?” I realized as I said it that I was being rude, but I couldn’t help it. He unnerved me.
“Genetically modified from alien DNA found on Europa,” said Anastasia.
“Technically, you own him. And the technology as created him.”
It took me a moment for the words to make sense. Her accent was so thick, and the words were impossible. “Me?”
Bren looked
annoyed. “It was one of Guillory’s pet projects. They banned most genetic modification just after the Dark Times, but Guillory’s been lobbying for eases in the restrictions his whole life. Otto here is one of a hundred human embryos who were implanted with the Europa microbe DNA. Only thirty- four of them survived full gestation. Only a dozen survived past puberty, and of those, only four seem to function with adult minds. It was carnage. Otto is the biggest success, but he doesn’t talk.”
“Why not?”
Otto opened his mouth, with a hint of a smile edging the corners of his lips. A strange noise erupted from his mouth, as if someone were screaming by sucking in breath rather than exhaling. It was very quiet, and it sounded more dolphin than human.
I jumped, and everyone at the table laughed. “He loves teasing people,” Nabiki said. She nudged him. “Otto, come on —be nice. She’s almost as weird as you.”
Otto seemed to think for a long moment, then slowly held out one long fingered bluish hand. I blinked at it. Nabiki looked annoyed. “Go on, take it!” she hissed.
I gingerly put my fingers on his palm, and with great gentleness, Otto’s fingers wrapped around my own.
“Good afternoon, Princess,” I thought in a voice that wasn’t really my own. “I am Otto Sextus.” The name came to me as 86 at first, and I knew, without explanation, that he and all the others had for some reason been named as numerals. Another thought came to me that wasn’t as clear. It was almost, for lack of a better term, inaudible. Treat us well, treat us well, treat us well. It was a plea, accidental, a background drone of a thought. For a brief second, I saw Otto, and three other blue- skinned teenagers, with a background shadow of half a dozen half- formed figures.
I gasped. Those words and images had been my thoughts, but they hadn’t come from me.
“Shh,” was the word I thought, but the feeling connected to it was something along the lines of, Don’t worry, fear me not.
My thoughts seemed to drift for a moment, until I wasn’t sure what I was thinking about. “Your heart is troubled.Your experience . . . interrupted. . . .”
The first real expression I had seen flashed over Otto’s peculiar face. I felt a blast of disconnected fear. “I am sorry, dear Princess,” he thought at me. “Your troubles are greater even than my own.”
He pulled his hand away rather quickly and stared at me for a moment before he looked back to his tray.
Everyone was staring at me as if they’d just seen an alien. Which was ironic, considering the circumstances. Nabiki’s eyes shot sparks. “What did you say to him?” she demanded.
I was trembling from the experience. I understood hardly any of what just happened. “I said nothing.”
Nabiki frowned and then gently put her hand on the back of Otto’s neck. He sighed, and the troubled look faded a bit from his eyes. Nabiki frowned again, but this time more chagrined. “Sorry,” she said to me. “I thought you’d been rude to him.”
I shook my head. “Never,” I said earnestly. His circum-stances horrified me, but he didn’t.
I tried to find what I needed to say. “If what you say is true, and somehow I’ve inherited you and your family . . .” I hesitated a moment and took a breath. It was so horrific a thought, akin to human slavery. “I swear to you, the moment I come into my inheritance, I’ ll — I don’t know —give you back to yourself or something. Sign the rights over. I don’t know how it works. But I’m so sorry.”
Nabiki smiled. “He says thank you. It isn’t your fault.” She hesitated, her brow furrowing. “He’s sorry about this. But, ah, if you don’t mind, he doesn’t plan on touching you again.” She turned to Otto, confused. “Really?” she asked. Otto slightly lifted one hand, either a shrug or a signal to go on.
Nabiki tossed her head. “Okay.” She turned back to me. “He says there are too many . . . ‘gaps’ in your mind. Too much space. He nearly got lost.” She shrugged. “ Sorry—what he thinks doesn’t always translate perfectly into language. What does he mean by gaps?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, but I was afraid I did. Stass had been a series of breaks in my life. I stared at Nabiki. She seemed like a perfectly ordinary girl, Japanese descent, expensive earrings, fashionable haircut, but whatever relationship she had with this strange semi- alien- being spoke of a hidden depth to her. “Are you two . . . ?”
“Together?” Nabiki said, indulgently embarrassed. “Well, yeah.”
Otto turned his head deliberately to her and flashed his hint of a smile.
“What are you . . . ?” I realized Otto wouldn’t answer. “What is he doing when he . . . does that?”
Nabiki shrugged. “No one really knows all of it. Somehow he’s able to manipulate the electronic impulses in your brain so you can think what he wants you to think. He can’t control your actions or feelings or anything, though. It only touches surface thoughts. Apparently those little microbes on Europa have some kind of rudimentary communication via electro impulse, probably for breeding purposes. It came out in Otto like this.”
“Can all your family do that?” I asked.
Otto shook his head slightly, then glanced at Nabiki, who took his hand again.
“Only one other of the . . .” She seemed to find the sub-ject dif ficult, too. “The four,” she finished. “And then three of the simple ones, but they don’t think very clearly, so it’s pretty useless.” She glanced at Otto’s expressionless face. “It breaks his heart.”
“All right, that’s enough drama,” said Bren. “Speaking of which, Ani, you doing drama this year?”
I was too shaken by my encounter with Otto to concen-trate. I tried for a few more bites of my meal before the tone sounded to send me back to class. As everyone stood up from the table, I caught Otto staring at me. I had the unnerving sensation that he was staring right through me, as if I were some magical creature made of glass. He blinked when he caught me looking back at him, and then he hurried to catch up to Nabiki.
What had he seen in my mind that scared him so?
– chapter 5—
My first afternoon at school went no better than the morning. Elementary astrophysics might as well have been graduate- school advanced theories, for all the sense it made to me. An hour later I trudged into my math class, and an hour after that I scurried out as fast as I could, unable to make head nor tails of it.
Then came history. My teacher began a brief overview of the first twenty years I had missed, and I was suddenly glad I’d been stassed through it.
The Dark Times came less than two years after I went into stass. I had assumed it was some kind of economic depression, which it was, to an extent.
But the biggest problems had not been with the money.
I spent the class tying the facts that Ms. Holland was telling me —population statistics and weather patterns and economic fluctuations — to the events of my elongated childhood. It was quite gruesome, and I couldn’t help but feel that I — or at least the structure of my parents’ corporate society —had been deeply responsible for much of it. Likely, this class was intended as a warning to the children of the high echelons to avoid the mistakes of the past. But to me it still felt like the present — my time, my generation’s mistakes. Revulsion and guilt stabbed through me the entire hour.
The first factor that lead to the Dark Times was a steady population increase, which had been building for two hundred years. I’d seen that. There wasn’t space for anyone when I was young. Even the wealthy had to abandon the concept of vast estates and settle into controlled gated communities, like ComUnity and Unicorn.
The next was an economic boom leading to widening gaps between the rich and the poor. I’d noticed that, too. The poor starved, while my family bought me designer mink coats when I was three and had a private state-of-the-art stass tube for me, worth the whole of Unicorn Estates together.
Some years before I was stassed, there had been a few seasons of dif ficult weather, due to a climate shift i
nstigated by some volcanoes. This was no one’s fault, exactly. There was a food shortage, which did result in a lot of deaths, I recalled, but mostly in marginalized countries. It hadn’t touched our family.
The first sign that things were really going wrong was the resurgence of tuberculosis. It had begun in prisons, where inmates’ health had not been carefully monitored. A resistant strain had developed in one prison in the South, and the habits of prisoner transfers and recidivism was such that before long, most of the prisons in half the countries in the world were riddled with TB. Countries with a high percentage of prisoners were particularly vulnerable.
The disease wasn’t caught before many prisoners had been released into the general population without adequate health care.
It spread. Newborns, the poor who suffered from malnutrition, all those with reduced immunity were susceptible. This included any HIV victims who hadn’t received the vaccine in time, which meant half of Africa. It also included many of the affluent, among them millions who had been promised an extended life by having their organs regrown from stem cells and transplanted. TB spread unchecked for a few years before anyone noticed what was going on. Most people didn’t realize when they had a cough that it was anything serious, and some of the carriers showed no symptoms at all.
They were instigating a series of mandatory TB status clinics all around the planet when I was put into stass. They seemed to have the tuberculosis under control when the next plague hit.
It really was the next plague, and not just a figure of speech. Bubonic plague resurfaced, in New York, two years after I was stassed. I was already cringing in horror from hearing of the TB deaths in Africa when Ms. Holland brought in the effects of this next plague on top of it, and I swear my heart stopped. When the tone sounded, Ms. Holland told us that the rest of the over-view of the Dark Times would have to wait until next class.
I was not looking forward to it.
I dreaded hearing what had happened to everyone I loved. My mother and father, my beloved Xavier. Knowing they were dead was one thing. Knowing the details was harder to stomach.
