The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

In the front row stood all the muckety-mucks from Krita. They wore suits and had their hair done just so. I wondered if any of them had ever even been artists or scientists. My parents were in the back sipping glasses of wine and nibbling on hors d’oeuvres with some of the other scientists. It was the scientists who did all the work of Krita, but I knew that, silly as they sometimes seemed with their fancy suits and tech gadgets, it was the executives who kept everyone’s eyes on the big picture of progress. That was one of the biggest differences between inside our Kritopia of Old Harmonie and outside: inside, we never stopped experimenting and innovating, but outside they were just struggling to get by and couldn’t work on making the world better.

  Theo stumbled over whatever he was saying, and DeShawn laughed. Theo kept going, though. “When it came time to decide on how to reveal my latency, I decided the best thing was to keep it simple.”

  I felt my body tilting forward. His latency! What had he chosen?

  “Because,” he went on, “the bigger issue is not what the latency is, it’s what you do with it. The latency I have selected is puzzles.”

  Puzzles—that was one of the very first latencies to be understood and released. These days it was considered a little less exciting than some of the other ones, but, thinking about it, it actually seemed to suit him.

  “I chose puzzles because I think our world is a puzzle. In school we learned about the explorers in olden days who were discovering parts of our world for the first time. They didn’t even really know what they would find, just that they were sure to find something as long as they were bold and struck out on the journey.”

  As Theo spoke, his mom mouthed the words, and I wondered how much of what he was saying he really believed.

  “In more modern times, the puzzles have been in the realm of science. When we unlocked DNA, that was a great advancement that helped us to understand things like diseases so that we could live better, longer lives. And then there is the latency itself, a puzzle that was solved by my friend Mori Bloom’s great-grandmother Lucy Morioka.”

  My gaze snapped back up toward the stage, but it felt like half the world was looking at me. My life was filled with reminders that Old Harmonie wouldn’t be what it was if it hadn’t been for Baba, and yet they shocked me every time. It was Baba—my great-grandmother, known to the rest of the world as Dr. Lucy Morioka—who figured out how to tweak the brain in such a way that you could release a hidden skill without damaging the mind. I could see the questions written on the audience’s faces as they glanced at me: What will you do? What will you contribute?

  “So I have to wonder, what puzzles remain? What is there left to understand, and how will it change our world? Some people think we should be happy as we are, that we have already made so many great advances that we can just keep perfecting those. But that wasn’t the spirit in which Agatha Varden founded Old Harmonie. Our future lies in innovation, in puzzle solving, and I am looking forward to helping to sustain that spirit of creativity, ingenuity, experimentation, and order on which we were founded.”

  “She wrote it for him,” Benji said. “She totally wrote it for him, right?”

  Next to me, Julia nodded.

  “So thank you for coming to my Thirteenth, and thank you for being a part of Old Harmonie. Enjoy the cake.”

  The singing started behind us and I turned to see the giant cake being wheeled toward the stage by a baker with a tall white hat. Her face was pinched with exertion. Julia hopped up next to her and helped her push the cake all the way to the edge of the stage. The timing was perfect. Just as we cooed out the final “Happy birthday to youuuuuu,” they arrived in front of Theo, who bent over and blew out all thirteen candles with one healthy blow. I wondered what he wished for, if he wished for anything at all. He’d probably tell me that wishes were as silly as my trees, something you did if you couldn’t make your desires happen for yourself.

  The Krita people patted Ms. Staarsgard on the back and their smiles spread wide, revealing perfectly white and perfectly straight teeth, so I guess they thought he had done a good job. Benji had slipped away during the singing, and now he returned, practically dancing over to me. He held out a piece of cake—coconut with raspberry frosting, just like I’d wanted—and said, “I have the best news. Dr. Kellerman just told me. Guess what it is! Guess!” But before I could guess, he told me: “Someone is moving into Mr. Merton’s house!”

  3

  When we got home from the party, I bolted upstairs to change out of my dress and the shoes that pinched my toes. Once back in my comfortable shorts and T-shirt, I grabbed my bike and rode around the neighborhood to check on my trees. Compared to the rest of Old Harmonie, Firefly Lane had been put together in a particular rush. There’d been a measles outbreak in Boston, and Krita needed to move a bunch of their employees into Old Harmonie quickly. So all the trees had been planted at the same time, in neat little rows. It’s only when you get out to the edges of the forest that you have the wild old trees: oaks and pines and maples all mixed together. That’s another reason why I like it out there: things were left to nature to figure it out, and nature tends to be smarter than people.

  I went on and on about those trees and the need for biodiversity, until one day my dad came home with three little saplings. Just three, but at least they were three different varieties. I planted the maple out past the tennis courts, the oak tree on the edge of the forest behind our house, and the elm—a species nearly destroyed by disease ages ago, but saved in the seed bank—I planted that out front of number 9 Firefly Lane.

  Just like the trees, the houses on Firefly Lane were all the same, as if they had been squeezed out by a 3-D printer and plopped down at equal intervals. Each was a different color, with different landscaping, but you could still tell they were the same, inside and out. Even if you’d never been to someone’s house before, you would know just where everything was.

  All of the houses were the same, that is, except for number 9, the abandoned farmhouse at the end of the cul-de-sac’s loop.

  Number 9 was Dr. Varden’s house. It’s where Old Harmonie started, not that you could tell from looking at it. Three stories tall, white with black shutters, and a sagging shingled roof. Siding boards hung off it at odd angles, and the lawn—if you could call it that—was a tangle of grass, clover, and wheaty weeds that served as a breeding ground for ticks and snakes. Though there was a jaunty red mailbox at the end of the driveway, no one lived in the house anymore. Dr. Varden was long gone, and no one else had ever moved in.

  My mom said the only saving grace was that the house was set back from the road, and in the summer and spring, the leafy trees nearly obscured it. But I thought there was something noble about the way it stayed there unmoved, unchanged: it was as steady as my favorite old oak out in the forest.

  I wanted desperately to get into that house, but even on a warm summer evening, the thought gave me goose bumps. I wanted to see what was left of the life that went on there before, and, more than that, to see if there were any traces of my great-grandmother. Baba, who’d died when I was five, and Dr. Varden had been friends for decades, but then Dr. Varden just left without even giving a reason why. If she had wanted to stop working, she could have gone over to the retirement high-rise that overlooked the old Quabbin Reservoir. She and Baba could have even shared an apartment. Instead, she abandoned Old Harmonie and Baba.

  That was another reason I wanted to go in: to find out why Dr. Varden had left. But it was off-limits. One hundred percent. No one would go with me, and I wasn’t bold enough to go alone. My dad always said I was curious enough to be creative, but timid enough to be safe. I think he meant it as a compliment.

  Actually once, when I was seven, I’d walked down the driveway, all the way to the front door. There were stairs then, wooden ones, though the middle one was missing. I had put my hand on the railing and was ready to climb up when Julia started yelling my name from the street. I’d run back to her, and she told me I was just about the craziest p
erson she had ever met, and didn’t I know that place was haunted? I didn’t believe in ghosts or anything, but I was still too chicken to go try again.

  I stopped my bike to look at my elm, checking it for telltale signs of Dutch elm disease. The pointy oval leaves were all bright green and fluttered in the slight breeze, turning over to show their silvery green undersides. Each one was roughly the same shape and size, but there were tiny differences if you looked closely enough. That’s the thing about nature: it doesn’t offer up its secrets easily. You have to spend some time with it to really understand.

  The wind picked up and as it blew past the old farmhouse, the structure seemed to moan and sway. Had it been so run-down when Dr. Varden lived there? Probably not. She was a professor at MIT when she bought the farm with the old farmhouse. And then she invited friends to come and live, too, a group of artists and scientists. My great-grandmother was one of the first. She was a top neuroscientist. Cohousing, it was called. Each person had a house, but they had shared things, too, like a field and walking trails, and a park, and a common house where they would have meals together. All the old buildings are gone, except for the common house. That’s the village museum now.

  Thinkers, Dr. Varden called the earliest residents of Old Harmonie. Like Baba. Always coming up with new ideas and new ways of looking at problems. Sometimes I feel like I could do that, too, like it’s just below the surface and if I could only pull it out, I’d be as innovative as her. I guess that’s what the latency is all about, but sometimes I worry that even with my latency released, my ideas will never be as new and revolutionary as what Baba did.

  A lot of those early thinkers worked for Krita, a huge corporation, and then Krita started offering to buy people homes in the cohousing village. They said it would conserve energy because people could carpool—this was back when people actually drove their own cars everywhere. So many people were interested that they bought another plot of land and added a whole new village. It happened quickly after that: Krita built a satellite office out in Old Harmonie, then the satellite office became the headquarters of the corporation. They bought more land. Made more villages. And by then the village that Dr. Varden started was a full-blown Utopia. It had happened naturally. If there hadn’t been the measles outbreak, it probably would have kept growing at the same slow and steady pace. Once the city had been built, all that needed to happen were the rules and guidelines and everything that made it official. Krita did that.

  “What are you doing?” I recognized the voice: Theo’s.

  “Checking my tree,” I said as I turned to face him. He straddled his dirt bike. “Her name is Elma.”

  “Of course you named your tree.”

  “The maple by the tennis courts is Sappy. And the oak by my house is Annie. Like Annie Oakley. But Elma is my favorite. Don’t tell the others.”

  He rolled his eyes, but I could see him smiling. “You shouldn’t go down by that house, you know. There are snakes.”

  “They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone,” I said. I knew this was true, but still I backed away.

  “But they’ll attack if you scare them.”

  I took a few steps back toward Elma and my bike. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  He looked past me at the house. “I’ve never understood why you were so obsessed with number nine. Even when we were little.”

  “It looks like it belongs there, don’t you think? The way the driveway curves around to it, and how it’s up that little knoll. Our houses, they’re just dropped where it was convenient, not where they were supposed to be. I mean, aren’t you curious about it at all?”

  He wrinkled up his nose. “I have a nice house with whole windows and shutters that aren’t ready to fall down and crush someone.”

  “Well, I’m curious. It was Dr. Varden’s house. There could be anything in there.”

  “Yeah, like spiders and mice.”

  “You know what you should do? You should go up there with me so I can just see it for once. And if you’re right about it being all old and falling down with spiders and mice, well then, I can forget about it.” Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. It would just mean I would need to find a way to get the spiders and the mice out before I could explore.

  “Sure, Mori. I’ll get right on that.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. It’s against the rules to go near there, you know that.”

  I did know that. And normally that would be enough for me, but not when it came to number 9. “You’re not exactly the A-number-one rule follower.”

  “It’s a stupid old house and I don’t even know why they left it there.”

  “They had to. She made them promise not to change it or move anything inside or out. You could walk in there and it would be like a portal through time.”

  “Those don’t exist.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But haven’t you ever wondered what’s inside? I saw pictures of the original Old Harmonie and the houses were all different then. That’s the way Dr. Varden intended it. A community of individuals coming together.”

  “You’re a real dope, you know,” he told me. “Forget the tree; I think we should call you Sappy.”

  “And I’ll call you Thorny,” I told him.

  He straightened himself up. “Thorn, I kind of like that. I am Thorn, master of Firefly Lane.”

  “I said Thorny, not Thorn.”

  “It sounds like the name of a god, don’t you think? Thorn the Mighty. Thorn the Impaler.”

  “Thorny the Insane.”

  He laughed, and grabbed the handlebars of his bike. “But really, Mori, you should just stay away from that house. The great and powerful Thorn decrees it.”

  “Right,” I said. “Anyway, you did a good job today.”

  “I got through it.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes.

  “I thought your speech was really good. And I liked how you just said your latency instead of making a big deal about it.”

  “My mom wanted to, but when I ended up choosing puzzles, I think she was a little bit disappointed I didn’t go for something flashier. All my testing pointed to puzzles, except for like one little spike toward language acquisition. I think she wanted me to do that so I could talk to all the bigwigs at Krita around the world.”

  “I think puzzles are a perfectly respectable latency,” I told him. “And your reasons for choosing it were really good, too. I mean your reasons aside from the testing.”

  He looked down at his shoes. “Those weren’t exactly my reasons,” he said. “I mean, I want to make new discoveries, but really I just like the process of solving things, of figuring them out.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “I don’t really care how it turns out. I mean, like, the ‘bold new directions’—who cares?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Sure, Krita cares, and when good things happen at Krita, they help make Old Harmonie better, so I care about the outcome that way. But in the moment, that’s not what I think about. I meant what I said about the core values, though, those matter—creativity, ingenuity, experimentation, order—those are all part of puzzle solving.”

  “What about community?” I asked.

  “You know community isn’t actually a core value.”

  “Yeah, but that’s why we have those core values, to keep our community together. And part of that is the outcomes of the projects, so, I mean, it’s all tied together, right?”

  “I guess so.” Theo shrugged. “Anyway, it’s what I chose.”

  “Have you had it done yet?”

  “Not yet. Monday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you scared?”

  He turned so he was looking right at me. “A little,” he confessed.

  My stomach turned. I had never known Theo to be afraid of anything. When I was little, the latency seemed so cool. There was a hidden secret talent and it was going to be released—tha
nks to the work of my great-grandmother—but now I wasn’t so sure. What would mine be and how would it change me? I looked at Theo, trying to memorize every bit of him so that I would know if something was different after his latency was released.

  “Seriously, Mori, the stare is getting creepy.” Then he flashed a grin. “Though I can understand if you can’t keep your eyes off me.”

  I blushed, hard. “It’s just that Mariah Samms called you swoony, and I’m trying to figure out what exactly it was she saw.”

  Now it was his turn to blush and turn away. He had milky-white skin that made it hard to hide anytime his cheeks turned pink. He regripped his handlebars. “See you tomorrow, then.” He started pedaling and gave me a wave as he left. I hesitated a moment before going over and picking up my bike. “See you later, Elma.” And then I rode back home, where my mom and dad were waiting for me, dinner on the table: kale noodles with fresh tomatoes.

  4

  The house across from Julia’s had been empty for almost four weeks, since before the end of the school year. Mr. Merton had been living there, and then he was not living. “They took him out in a van without any windows or markings or anything,” Julia whispered to me as we crouched on her lawn watching the gardeners who worked in Mr. Merton’s yard.

  “Did they have a sheet over him?” I asked.

  “Yep. And the people who carried him out, they wore jumpsuits, like those gardeners, only all white instead of blue. And they had these weird black sunglasses that covered the whole top half of their heads.”

  “Creepy,” Benji said.

  “Seriously creepy,” she agreed.

  The gardeners were pulling out the oversize and ratty rhododendron that had grown so high it covered Mr. Merton’s first-floor window and reached for the second. It was giving them a lot of trouble.

  “Theo’s getting his latency today,” I said.

  “It’s weird that it’s puzzles, right?” Benji asked. “I thought for sure it would be one of the neuro-physicals. You know, hand-eye coordination or something.”