Beat (3 page)

It had taken more months to rig up an analog connection between my EarCom and the reader; I didn’t want a wireless connection, not in the always-monitored world of New Frisko.

One night, in my room, maybe four months ago, I finally heard the one uncorrupted sound file on the reader. That night, my room felt small, my bed uncomfortable. I worried the Enforsers were going to somehow find out and come and take my new treasure. Perhaps they would even take me and I would disappear like Teacher Harris and others we sometimes heard about in quiet whispers.

So I never told anyone about the song or the magazine pages. Or anything else. I wasn’t going to become a quiet whisper.

I coasted along the road that marked the border between the downtown district and the residential areas.

Nope. Tonight I would make sure of that. I might even become a shout.

“We’ve been hearing about your work in the Enjineering Dome.” My dad spooned some fruit soup into his mouth; a small drop ended up on his chin. He didn’t notice. Mom’s hand appeared, dabbing at the spot with her gray napkin. He gave her a smile. She gave the same smile back.

Ugh. Even the napkins were gray. It occurred to me that life in New Frisko was pretty gray, too. Boring, easy to keep clean, totally practical.

“They say your ability with new tek is precocious,” Mom said. She swallowed a bite of protein paste. The paste was gray, too.

I snorted. “Isn’t ‘precocious’ a word you use with little kids? Like babies?” Sometimes I wondered if Mom and Dad ever actually came home from their jobs at the Nursery.

“Teknically,” Mom said. “But you’ll always be my baby.” She made a ridiculous face at me. She and Dad looked at each other, my dad offering Mom a small smile. I knew they were thinking about four years ago. That night I’d tried to forget.

But they were good in the Nursery, caring for the little kids too young to be exposed to a world with a bio-toxin in the air. A bio-toxin that attacked hearts that were beating really fast. Of course I knew they worked in the Nursery, giving so much to the babies there, because they had wanted my sister so badly. I’d been excited about having a sibling too, even though a sister wasn’t as cool as a brother. Mom had gotten pregnant despite the doctors telling her that some condition she’d developed would keep her from having her second child. Everything had gone amazingly until six months into the pregnancy.

I would never forget Dad’s face when he showed up late that night. He looked like his entire world had broken. He’d spent all of five minutes at home before riding his cycle back to the hospital.

Mom had tried to put on a strong face when I saw her at the hospital the next day, but I could see her broken heart through her eyes when she cried. I was still ashamed of how much I cried that day.

“In any case,” Dad said. “Looks like the algorithms are placing you in the Enjineering Track for Level 8.”

I poked at the gray paste on my partitioned tray, fighting the excitement that boiled in me. I loved tek but it would be a lot better if I could choose my track instead of a computer. I used my spoon to cut a canal in the paste. What was this stuff, anyway? They didn’t talk about food much in school except to rag on the old fast food and Rest-Ronts that used to be everywhere.

“Enjineering’s a good track, Nik,” Dad said. “The selection algorithms never go wrong.”

“They got
us
right,” Mom said.

I swallowed my protests about not being able to choose the job I would do for the rest of my life; my mom and dad loved what they did and I’d never heard them complain about anything related to their job or life. And it wasn’t as if I had my eye on a girl or anything, but everybody knew that pre-Infektion couples chose who they would marry out of love.

I watched my mom and dad, seeing how calm and satisfied they seemed. I remembered their faces during that awful time when we lost my sister. Somehow they’d found peace. Now, Dad was always easy-going. He smiled easily, and listened to me when I complained. Today when I got home he noticed my frustration right away. Even from the living room, he could still tell when I left my shoes on the floor and didn’t put them away, a habit I’d picked up from Bren.

“Rough day shadowing?” He and Mom were playing some kind of game with holocards. They’d tried to explain Jin to me before, but I’d gotten bored after they’d talked about how many cards you held in your “hand.”

“Yeah. I guess I finished my work with Rojer today. Got transferred to Dev 2.” I plopped onto one of the soft couches in the living room.

Dad turned his head around. “This is bad?”

“The project with Rojer was awesome, Dad. That cycle was going to be pretty fast.” I leaned back. “But Fil’s stuff is boring. And too easy.”

“There’s always something to learn. Just take a load off, then get back to it.” Dad turned back to his game.

“You hungry, Nik?” Mom asked, tapping a holocard.

“Not really.” I got up and went to my room, chatting with Bren, Koner, and Melisa about school and tek stuff through the EarComs before getting to my homework.

Now at dinner, watching Mom and Dad eating the protein paste and other nutritives, I wondered how my life would have been different a hundred years ago. The New Chapter was all about efficiency, even down to the new spelling rules. The stuff I’d seen about the pre-Infektion times painted a world that was a lot more complicated, that allowed people to do what they wanted. It might not have been efficient, but I thought it would have been a great time to live. And die, of course; the Bug had killed a lot of happy, inefficient people.

Ninety percent of all humans had died, and that was followed by a couple years of radical change, which led to the New Chapter and the Papa with its knockout, the savior of humanity.

“You’ll enjoy enjineering.” Dad wiped his gray napkin across his face, dropping it onto his tray. “You got these?” He used his chin to point at the food trays and stood to go to the living room. Mom followed him.

“Yeah.” The truth was that I liked working with tek, and I
was
good at it. Really good at it. But it burned to not be able to choose anything. Who knew? Maybe I’d been placed in a class with people that some algorithm had said I would become friends with.  “Hey, Bren’s coming over in a bit.”

Mom called over her shoulder. “That’s fine. Don’t forget curfew.”

Like I could.

As I grabbed the trays and took them to the Food-Jeni, the machine that delivered all of our meals, I heard the skreen on the living room wall come to life. Speekers’ voices discussed the news and business of the day while I scraped the tiny remnants of dinner off the trays into the tube that carried away leftover food and recycled it. I waited, hoping the computerized system wouldn’t make a note of too much food being left uneaten, as it had in the past when I hadn’t been able to bring myself to choke down the paste.

“Optimal heart health requires all proteins and other nutrients to be consumed,” the stupid thing had said. I’d had to get another helping of the bland paste from the Jeni.

I wished I had lived a hundred or more years ago, when I could have tasted those hamburger things. And French fries. I wasn’t sure what “French” meant.  I knew that frying was an old way to cook things, but I’d never heard the word “French” outside of one of the ancient magazine pages.

Setting the trays in the Jeni, I hit the button and the shiny steel door slid down. The Jeni hummed as it carried the trays to the sanitization plant.

I sat with my parents for as long as I could stand the fake good looks of the speekers and their oily voices. After a little while, I left the living room, with a quick glance back at my parents. They seemed happy even though they hadn’t chosen anything about their lives. Some algorithm in the matching system had paired them up. They lived according to the schedule their Papas dictated to them, letting the knockout put them to bed every night at the same time and keeping their heart rates under control.

As the Papas instructed, they played Bounce-a-Walk three times every week, bouncing and catching those ridiculous blue balls with every step. They went to work, watched the skreens, and just let their lives go on calmly under someone else’s control, believing everything the Admins and Speekers preached to them. They believed the Bug was still in the air even though it couldn’t possibly still be around, according to the information in our textbooks about toxins and bacteria. They laughed and repeated the New Chapter’s motto at the end of every broadcast: “Better safe than sorry; better calm than dead.” They seemed happy.

Maybe I was asking for too much.

“It’s not asking too much to be able to choose something,” I said to myself, stepping into my room. “Or to have some fun that doesn’t involve walking and bouncing a blue rubber ball.” I sat at my desk, my zip hanging from the chair, and took the EarCom out of my ear. I lifted my vid-goggles to my eyes, letting the ear buds built into the vid-goggle straps slide into my ears. “But it
is
asking too much to believe all that spam about the Bug.” Only the adults I knew
really
believed the Bug was still around, but nobody was brave enough to test that idea by stopping the knockout.

Not until tonight, at least. I checked my Papa. It was early yet.

The front door of the house announced Bren’s arrival.

“Hey,” he said, walking in my room a minute later.

I grinned. “Bren. Da. Brenda.”

He shook his head. “What’re we doing?”

I slid the illegal reader out of its hiding place in the drawer of my desk. A month ago, at this desk, I’d found a miniscule portion of a video file that hadn’t been corrupted. I’d had to tinker with my vid-goggles so they could convert the file format, but that hadn’t been hard.

“Did you bring your vid-goggles?” I held the reader up so he could see it.

“Of course.” Bren slid the lightweight, folding goggles out of his pocket.

We sat on my bed and connected both of our goggles to the reader through the jacks I’d rigged, and I tapped the reader. I heard Bren suck in a breath and hold it. I realized I was doing the same thing. No matter how many times we saw it, the short clip was amazing.

Lines flashed in the hololenses of the vid-goggles, fuzzy sound filling my head. A few seconds passed. An image materialized of a man, a metal weapon in his hand, sliding across a blue car. I drank in the sights of what had to be part of a pre-Infektion movie. Loud explosions burst in my ears, fire and bullets flying everywhere.

“Those cars are huge,” Bren muttered.

“Yeah. The buildings are all square and stuff, too.”  We watched the cars, scanned the streets, ate up the sight of stores and people running on ancient concrete. Had it hurt to run on that hard stuff? Had ankles gotten broken all the time? And the man’s weapon. I guessed it was what they used to call a gun based on other things I’d read and heard. The clip ended abruptly.

“Do you think those guns were as bad as Keepers?” I looked at Bren through the goggles.

He shrugged. “All I know is I never want to have anyone shoot anything at me.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” We laughed.

I tapped the reader, and the clip played again. The old buildings stood tall and irregular, giving the sky a jagged appearance. Explosions, the man firing his tiny gun, so much smaller than an Enforser’s Keeper, glass shattering, screaming. Then over.

I played it again. Or at least I tried to. After the lines flashed, the image on my vid-goggles went dark. I tapped the reader.

“Dok,” Bren said. “Make it go.”

“Make it go? Seriously?” I picked up the reader, scanned it. It didn’t look broken. I tapped it again. Still nothing. “What am I, a dokter of tek?”

“Something like that. Heal it!” Bren laughed. I kind of laughed, too, my mind going in two directions. Lots of kids used ‘Dok’ with their friends as a short for ‘Dokter.’ Because dokters had saved humanity.

I thought it was kind of silly. What if mekaniks had saved people? Would we say “Mek?”

I lowered my vid-goggles as I wondered about nicknames, looking closer at the reader. What was wrong with this thing? Just once more; I wanted to get a closer look at the stores to see what they were selling. I waited for a moment and tried tapping it again.

Nothing happened. Stupid old tek with its short battery life. I would need to take it to the Enjineering Dome again and recharge the battery. That would be tricky, again, but that was fine.

“Battery must be dead.” I elbowed Bren. “Can’t bring it back without charging it at the Enjineering Dome.”

“Spam.” Bren took his goggles off and folded them. “I gotta kill at least another thirty minutes. Jan had her friends over again.”

At the mention of his sister, her face flashed my mind. Long black hair, darker than Bren’s, bright blue eyes, a really big smile. And only a year younger than us. Jan was sometimes a little gigglier than I could sit through, but I’d had a nice conversation or two with her about propulsion and gravity fields. When it was just the two of us, her sense of humor got a lot sharper, too.

I forced a goofy grin at Bren. “You didn’t want to talk about cycles and boys?” Why were girls like that, anyway? Boys and cycles every time you got two or more of them together.

“I know,” Bren said, rolling his eyes. “And what’s the point anyway? Algorithms choose who you marry.” He got kind of a dejected look on his face.

I tried to ignore the warmth in my chest as I remembered laughing with his sister about a dumb mistake someone had made in the Enjineering Dome. He was right. What was the point, anyway? I checked the time. He had to go.

I kicked him out, quietly reminding him to be careful sneaking out later.

“Don’t worry Dok,” Bren said, and he headed home.

I popped my EarCom back in and touched the right front corner of my desk, activating the skreen and keyboard in my desktop. I IMed some friends, but not the people I would be meeting tonight. I spent the next hour messaging and then chatted with Bren through my EarCom, figuring we usually talked about this time and if the frequencies were monitored, we didn’t want to do anything unusual tonight.