When We Wake

by Karen Healey

“The Department of Defence does not bow to the whims of teenagers. You either start cooperating, young lady, or you’ll be made to cooperate.”

  He stared at me for a while.

  I stared back. I wasn’t reading or singing inside my head. I was mostly napping, now that the gnawing in my stomach had given way to a floating emptiness.

  “You’re seriously retarding our progress. Do you want to be the one who tells children that their mother or father won’t come back from the war, because Tegan Oglietti won’t talk to us?”

  I flinched.

  “Dr. Carmen will not return until you eat,” he said. “She’s very disappointed in you.”

  I started crying big, fat tears that dripped out of the corners of my eyes and down my face onto the pillow, pooling around my neck.

  Dawson looked vaguely satisfied. “Now, be a good girl, and have something to eat, and she’ll come back,” he said.

  I closed my wet eyes and drifted back to sleep.

  On the fifth day, Dawson tried to bribe me with a guitar.

  My fingers ached for it, but I locked my mouth shut before I let anything out.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, I began, and went through a decade of the rosary before he left the room.

  Pray for us sinners now and at the time of our death.

  On the sixth day, I tried to get up and go to the bathroom. I passed out instead.

  I woke up in bed, with something that I recognized as an IV poked into my arm. Light brown fluid was flowing through it, and I felt much stronger.

  Dawson and Marie were standing at the foot of my bed. Dawson looked grim. Marie looked nervous and hopeful.

  “All right,” Dawson said tightly. “What do you want?”

  Ringo is my favorite Beatle. He wasn’t the best drummer in the world, and he definitely wasn’t the best singer or songwriter. He was the last one to join, when they kicked out their original drummer, and he was sure they were going to replace him, too. And he was left-handed, playing a right-hand drum set. The other Beatles laughed at most of his compositions because they sounded like other popular tunes. But he stuck with it, with all of it. He invented lots of incredible fills to get around his hands, and he wrote “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden,” and he sang “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which is one of my top-ten favorites.

  At his funeral, everyone talked about what a great musician Ringo was. And he really was. Not because he was particularly gifted, but because he never gave up.

  I’d learned to be good at the guitar without any of the natural musicality that Owen had, and I’d gotten decent marks at school without being supersmart like Dalmar, and I’d kept going with free running, even though I wasn’t naturally athletic like Alex.

  Talent is great, but persistence is totally underrated.

  “I want to live outside the compound,” I said. “I want to go to school.” My voice was cracked and scraggly from disuse. I sounded at least seventy years old. Or a hundred and seventeen, ha-ha.

  A muscle in Dawson’s jaw jumped. “Your demands are unacceptable.”

  “I’m going back on my hunger and talking strike, effective—”

  “I need to talk to some people,” he said furiously, and marched out. He sure looked like a military guy then, back straight, jaw set.

  Marie lingered, under cover of checking the IV. She bent over me and fluffed my pillow. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered.

  I gave her the faintest ghost of a wink.

  She carried a tiny smile out with her.

  I lay there and contemplated my toes. There was a limit to how far I could push this. I didn’t want to make them so angry with me that they gave me up as a dead loss and tossed me out into this strange new world. And I really didn’t want to sabotage or delay Operation New Beginning. Bringing back soldiers was good work, and helping out was the right thing to do, even if I didn’t want to do it at the expense of my freedom.

  It was so nice to have energy and a clear head. If I was honest with myself, I wasn’t positive I could go without food again.

  Dawson came back after a couple of hours, Marie beside him.

  “I have a counterproposal,” he said. “You will continue your participation in Operation New Beginning as an outpatient, undergoing daily interviews and testing. You will give us your full and complete cooperation. You will go to a school that we select. You will take part in carefully selected media opportunities, which we will supervise. And until you become a legal adult, you will live with Dr. Carmen.”

  I sat up in bed and looked at Marie. She nodded, that tiny smile hovering at the edge of her lips.

  “Dr. Carmen has generously offered to take this role as your guardian, and you will be under her supervision and authority, which you will respect,” Dawson continued. “I want you to understand just what sacrifices taking you into her home will entail on her behalf.” His expression said, quite clearly, that he would never let me within five hundred meters of his home.

  “I don’t want to get tested every day,” I said.

  “Twice weekly,” Marie said before Dawson could open his mouth. “We do need that data, Tegan. I know you don’t want to imperil the project.”

  “No, I don’t. Twice weekly is okay. And I want to be able to talk to the media by myself.”

  “No unsupervised media,” Dawson said. Not like he was an adult telling an unruly kid what to do. Like someone explaining something to—well, not an equal, but a not entirely stupid subordinate. “Sections of this project are highly classified. If you don’t agree to this condition, I can’t let you out.”

  I paused, thinking of the blank man in his hospital bed, but for only a moment. After a month underground, I needed to get out. I needed to see sun and breathe unrecycled air, or I wasn’t sure what would happen inside my head.

  I needed to see what this new life had in store for me.

  “Agreed,” I said, and held out my hand.

  Dawson shook it with no hesitation. “I’ll get the lawyers to draw up the contract,” he said. “And you will not pull any stunts like this again, however justified you think your actions are.”

  “Hey, that wasn’t part of the deal,” I said, and smiled at him.

  Wonder of wonders, he smiled back.

  And that’s how I strong-armed the Department of Defence into letting a girl with no legal existence have a life.

  I’m pretty sure they’re regretting that now.

  When they find us, I imagine they’ll make me pay for it.

  It turned out the army base was in Williamstown, where there’d been a smaller navy base in my time. I’d lived in the next suburb over, in Newport. I’d walked along Hobsons Bay and tossed spare bread for the ducks and black swans. I’d watched the huge container ships drift past, and smiled at the gray navy ships bristling with radio masts and gun barrels. There had been pleasant houses with big gardens and lots of glass windows to let in light and air and a view of the bay.

  Now the houses turned inward, windows smaller and shaded. The green colonial vegetation was gone, too delicate for the harsher sun and strict water restrictions. What gardens remained were Australian natives or gene-doctored plants, made to withstand the droughts. The sea was higher, swallowing the estuary and a good chunk of what had been the waterfront.

  And the black swans were gone, another great extinction that humanity added to the list.

  You’d think the changes would make me sad, but, except for the heat and the swans, it was okay. It’s easier if you treat the past like another country. You can tell yourself you’ve moved, and it’s just been a while since anyone got in touch. And after so long underground, the freedom was exciting. I felt like someone in a fairy tale who’d won herself a prize through her own bravery and perseverance. And I was going to help people. I was going to bring soldiers home.

  We drove past all of that and went on, over the bridge that had replaced the West Gate, closer to the city proper. The houses there had cha
nged, too, gleaming with their own newness.

  When I first saw Marie’s house, I had no idea where she was going to fit me. It looked as new as the others on the block, and really, really small—a little one-story building that was maybe about the size of my old living room, in the middle of a largish section.

  She pulled out keys for the security door.

  “People still use keys? I was expecting some infrared wand thingy.”

  “It’s hard to hack a physical lock,” Marie said, which just went to show that she’d never had a best friend like Alex teaching her the lock-picking ropes. “But the house is electronically protected, too.” She whispered something under her breath, and the inner door swung open at her touch. “There. The house computer will recognize you now.”

  It turned out I didn’t have to worry about Marie finding a place for me. The visible part of the house was only the hallway and the kitchen. A pretty big kitchen, with a lot of shiny equipment that my mum would have loved. To the side of the door was a flight of stairs leading down to the rest of the house underground, where Marie and I would live like wombats in a burrow, hiding from the sun.

  That was my first clue that this new world was even more different than I’d imagined.

  For the next fortnight, I did my psych interviews and checkups like a good girl, and the rest of the time, Marie put me through an intense catch-up curriculum on history and technology and social customs.

  I’d wanted to go to school right away, but I didn’t know enough about really basic things, like how to use a “computer,” which is what all those plastic sheets were that the medical staff had been scribbling on. Yeah, I know, you were laughing at me the whole time I was describing them, right? Well, whatever. To me, a computer was a bulky screen with a processor inside and a mouse and keyboard, or maybe a book-sized thing you flipped open and rested on your lap, or, if you didn’t mind a tiny screen, part of your phone.

  It definitely wasn’t a thin sheet you could fold or crumple into your pocket, or open to full size and shake rigid and then scribble all over with a stylus, or type on with a keyboard application, or gesture at. Marie taught me the most basic universal signs and then let me train my computer in how I wanted it to work. It occasionally suggested new moves, and I nearly always took its advice.

  I named it Koko, after that gorilla that talked in sign language, and if it’s possible to love an inanimate thing, I loved that computer. Koko put me back in touch with the world.

  Here’s another thing people ask a lot: What happened to your friends and family after you died?

  They assume I just looked that up right away. I mean, why wouldn’t I? Information is everywhere, and even in my time, there was a lot available. But you’re forgetting that formats change, files get corrupted, servers crash, and data goes missing. And there’s so much information that it can take a while to unearth anything, especially the lives of ordinary people from a hundred years ago. I didn’t have a lot of spare time, and I didn’t have much inclination to search. I had moved to another country, and people from my old home didn’t get in touch anymore; that was how I wanted to handle it.

  I wanted to remember them as they were. Not discover who they had become after time had worked on them and passed me by.

  Anyway, it took me about a week to climb a decent way up the computer learning curve, and that was just one thing. For most of you, all the stuff that you do every day, you learned how to do without thinking much about it—buying books or music or movies, cooking, putting out the garbage, doing laundry, taking showers. I had to relearn all that in two weeks, concentrating hard the whole time.

  I bet you wouldn’t be laughing if you’d had to deal with computers from my time. You’d have loved the showers, though. No auto timers to cut the water off, no need to account for every drop in the weekly ecobudget. Future showers are depressing, though I know Alex and Dalmar would have approved.

  They would have approved of the toilets even more.

  In the base, where they were trying to limit my culture shock, I’d had a bathroom like one from my time, with a flushable toilet and warm water to wash my hands. But Marie’s toilet was a box bench built into the wall, with a seat, and a hole, and some sort of container positioned under the hole. There was no cistern. There was no flush button.

  The first time I went to use it, I had no idea how to.

  While I was still staring, Marie knocked on the door.

  “I forgot to say,” she said when I opened it, “humanure wasn’t widely adopted in your time, was it?”

  “No,” I said, then, “I’ve heard of it, though.” Dalmar had once enthusiastically explained the concept, but the idea of using my own poo as compost had made my face curdle, and he’d changed the subject fast.

  But there was no escape from Marie’s ten-minute lecture on how to use the hole toilet. To my relief, Marie didn’t keep a garden. Instead she put the collection container on the curb every week with the food scraps, and it was taken away, mixed with everyone else’s manure and food scraps, and turned into compost for the big farms on the city outskirts. Marie got a tax deduction, and we all got to eat food grown in human poo.

  Culture shock. It’s the little things.

  It was pretty cool, though, once I got over the shock. Dalmar would have been thrilled to know that something so practical and Earth-friendly was in widespread use, and it made me happier to think that some part of the future he’d been working so hard for had actually happened. Alex would have been more pleased about the social changes that meant that people could basically marry anyone who consented and love whoever they loved without fear.

  I so badly wanted both of them there to see what they’d helped bring about.

  Anyway. Sentimentality aside, I got used to the house computer responding to verbal commands and stopped groping for light switches whenever I entered a room. I even worked out how to watch things. Marie had a huge archive of documentaries and old movies.

  But her music archive was nonexistent. She had some tracks, sure, but they were all called things like “Rain on Summer River” or “Windy Evening.” I thought they might have been nature songs, but they were exactly what they said: the noise of rain hitting flowing water, the sound of air moving through branches. There was even one called “Long Train Trip.”

  When I asked Marie about it, she looked embarrassed. “I like to listen to white noise while I work,” she said. “I find music distracting.”

  “You don’t listen to music for fun?” I asked.

  “I used to, before I moved to this house.” She smiled. “Perhaps you can reintroduce me to the pleasure. I’ll set up a monthly allowance for you on my account. Shall we make it eight hundred?”

  I did a rough conversion in my head—inflation was another thing to get used to. That was about fifty dollars, or what I could easily spend on music in a couple of weeks.

  “Sixteen hundred?” Marie guessed, watching my face. “The amount doesn’t matter. I just have to tell the store something.”

  “Sixteen hundred is fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I blew it all twenty minutes later. Well, I had to. On top of the new music I wanted to try out, the complete Beatles catalog was supercheap, and there were three extra John tracks that John and Yoko’s estate had released after I’d died.

  When Marie knocked on my bedroom door that evening to tell me she was going to the supermarket to pick up a few things she’d forgotten on the weekly order, I tore myself away from the White Album and told her I’d go, too.

  “I can, right?” I said.

  “Oh, certainly,” she said, and touched her EarRing. That was another thing I had to get used to, mobile phones as jewelry. Look, just assume I didn’t know anything, okay?

  “Tegan will be coming with me,” she said to the person on the other end, and then cut the call. “Zaneisha will discreetly escort us there and wait in the car,” she explained.

  Sergeant Zaneisha Washington was one of the two soldiers a
ssigned to my protection detail. I was pretty sure I would like her, if I could get over the embarrassment of having my very own bodyguards. I didn’t want to be discreetly escorted. But I really wanted to get out of the house, so I kept my mouth shut and nodded.

  If I’d ever thought about food in the future, I’d imagined that it might be, like, pills and potions and stuff, but food was still food. I didn’t know many of the brands in the supermarket, and I didn’t recognize a few ready-to-heat dishes, but the only real difference was that there was absolutely no meat for sale.

  There were plenty of vegetables and breads and even a small fish section. That was pretty much what Marie had been feeding me, and it’s not like I objected to fish and lots of fresh, tasty veggies—but when I saw the lack of meat at the supermarket, I realized it wasn’t a choice.

  “Can you buy meat?” I asked.

  I meant, was it even possible to buy meat, but Marie looked really taken aback. “Are you a meat eater?” she asked. “Red meat?”

  “I was,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I’d been happily eating her food all this time. It wouldn’t be a hardship to keep it up.

  “We could get some meat,” she said, frowning. “But it’s taxed so heavily…. And I’m not sure there’s a supplier in our neighborhood. It might have to be a special treat, Tegan.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said quickly.

  “And people do talk…. It’s—well, I don’t care about fashion, but the ethics of the time have changed. I should have covered this in more detail, I’m so sorry—”

  “It’s okay! Honestly! I was thinking about giving up red meat, anyway.” This was mostly a lie. I’d thought about it, to the point of realizing it would probably be a good idea, but I had the disadvantage of a mother who did incredible things to steak.