Hungry (11 page)

“I had to see our first test group,” Ahimsa says as she gives me a cool, dry peck on the cheek. “How are your classes?” she asks, standing back and surveying me with arms crossed.

“Fine,” I tell her with a shrug.

“And your ICM?”

I roll my eyes, which makes her laugh.

“Yes, I know,” she says. “A necessary evil for the least common denominator among us. We really should have an exception for gifted children like Thalia,” she says to my mom.

“It’s good for her to interact with kids her age,” Mom says glancing from me to Grandma Apple.

“Enough chitter-chatter!” Dad is like an eager kid dying to show off his new favorite toy. “Come see what I have.”

We all gather around the low table in the living room. I feel like we’re at a birthday party, watching a little kid open a present as my dad pulls out a small gray box and cradles it on his lap. “This,” he says ceremonially lifting the lid, “is the latest generation One World Gizmo.” He reaches in and takes out a small black device about the size of his palm and the thickness of his finger. I glance at Ahimsa. Her dark eyes shine with pride.

“Looks just like the last generation,” says Grandma Grace.

“Yes, it does,” my dad says. “But this one can do something no other Gizmo has ever done.”

“It can do something that no other working device on Earth has ever been able to do outside of a lab,” Ahimsa adds.

“Cure male-pattern baldness?” Papa Peter jokes, patting his shiny scalp. We all laugh, even Grandma Grace.

“Nope, still can’t do that,” Dad admits, but his enthusiasm isn’t the least bit diminished by our teasing. He turns the new Gizmo over and over in his fingers.

“What’s the most annoying thing about your Gizmo?” Dad asks.

“We only get to name one?” I say. Papa, Grandma Apple, and I look at each other and laugh with our eyes.

“Yes!” Dad eggs me on. “The thing that most burns your butt!”

I think for a few seconds then say, “That I have to have one at all.”

“Exactly!” says Dad. “That’s why you, my darling, were the inspiration for this.” He holds the Gizmo flat on his palm for us to see, then he rubs his hand over the surface and it disappears. Everyone stares, flabbergasted.

“What? Where’d it go? Where is it?” we ask each other.

Dad laughs. “Still right here.” He rubs his hand back over the surface and the Gizmo reappears.

We ooh and aah. Ahimsa claps her hands, delighted by our reaction. I lean forward to get a closer look because even I’m impressed.

Dad smiles big at me. “We finally mastered the nanotechnology of invisibility cloaking!”

“And it works the same, whether you can see it or not?” Mom takes it from Dad and practices making it disappear and reappear in her hand.

“All the same functions,” Ahimsa says.

“Does the cloaking mode scramble the locator?” I ask.

“Excellent question!” says Dad, clearly proud. “Most of the work in cloaking up until now was to scramble radar signals so objects couldn’t be detected by other machines, but we did something different. We embedded tiny crystal molecules like hinged shingles across the surface. On one side they absorb light and microwaves so you see the object, but when you flip them those nanoparticles cancel the electron scattering. In other words, it bends the light around the object so your brain thinks it’s not there.”

“Say what now?” Papa asks with a laugh. Then he waves his hands and admits, “Aw forget it. I’ll never understand, but it sure is amazing.” He takes the Gizmo from Mom and plays with it before giving it to Grandma Grace, who is equally impressed.

“And the best part,” Dad says, reaching into his bag, “is that you’ll have plenty of time to figure it out, because you each get one.” He pulls out five more gray boxes. “But first, we have to recycle your old Gizmos.” Papa, Mom, and both of my grandmothers happily pull out their old Gizmos and lay them on the table.

“Of course, we need to fix any bugs before we launch to the public,” Ahimsa explains as Dad hands the devices around. “So, we’ll be collecting data while you use yours.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Dad says. “Just a log of functions and malfunctions that occur.”

Ahimsa turns to me. “Obviously we want you to show yours off to all your friends.”

Obviously
, I think,
you don’t know me well if you think I have a lot of friends or that I like to show off devices.

“We want to get some buzz going in your demographic,” Ahimsa says, “because that will create demand, and you know what demand creates.…” She waits for me to fill in the rest.

“Profit,” I mumble.

“And…?” she asks. When I don’t answer, she looks at my mom and dad, who both chime in. “Profit makes the world go around.”

“I’ll go throw these in the compactor, so we can get your cyber assistants uploaded,” Dad says, gathering up the old devices, then he realizes he only has four in his hands. He looks up at me. “Where’s yours, Thal?”

“Mine?” I ask nervously. “Um, uh, I’m sure it’s in my room somewhere. I’ll take care of it later.”

He shakes his head. “We have to crash your old one.”

“Can’t I keep it?” I ask.

Ahimsa scowls. “Keep a piece of obsolete technology? Why?”

I can’t answer since the truth would incriminate me as a hacker to the CEO of One World.

“Don’t worry,” Dad says, cheerily. “Astrid will operate on your new phone, too.”

Lucky me,
I think, but what I say is, “I’ll go get it,” and trudge off to my room. All the time I’ve spent over the past year reconfiguring my Gizmo will soon be smashed into a million tiny Recyclabits. At least I know how I’ll be entertaining myself for the next few weeks while I reconfigure the new one.

I find the Gizmo nestled in my bed beneath a wad of blankets. “Sorry, old girl,” I tell it as I carry it off to its death. “You’ve become obsolete.”

*   *   *

Sitting in front of my room screen the next night is a worthless endeavor because I can’t focus on my assignment. I’ve tried every possible position—lying across my messy bed, sitting up at my desk, curling around a big pillow on the floor. But no matter what, my head aches, my stomach rumbles, and my mind keeps wandering to Basil. I’ve tried a dozen times to find more info about him or the Analogs, but every search comes up as empty as I feel. It’s as if there is no group called the Analogs and no one with the name Basil (first or last) has ever logged on to a OW site. No record at any EntertainArenas, PlugIns, TopiClubs, or ICMs. No purchase history. No birth records with that name from fifteen to twenty years ago, and there are no Basils in the Dynasaur chat logs. Either he’s more of a virtual ghost than I am, which sends a shiver of delight down my spine, or he lied to me about everything, which makes my grumbling stomach queasy.

To take my mind off Basil and my belly, I pull out my new Gizmo and try again to hack into the operating system. So far, everything I’ve tried has failed. In addition to cloaking this sucker, Dad’s team must have upgraded the firmware so none of the old Dynasaur programs I used before work this time. I’ve tried tweaking the old programs and even written half a dozen new ones since Dad handed me the device last night, all to no avail. After another half hour of failing to install my own operating system that will allow me to turn off my locator and make Astrid sleep on command, I throw the Gizmo across the room out of sheer frustration. It skids across the floor and slips into invisibility. I never thought I’d think this, but I miss my old Gizmo.

From her hiding place, Astrid shouts, “Your family genome map is due in an hour!”

“Oh, shush,” I shout back, but I glance at the clock on my main screen and see that she’s right, so I try to refocus on my assignment.

A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s swim in front of me as the program I wrote cranks through lines of code, looking for traits I share with my parents and grandparents. I’ve found all the easy physical features. The OCA2 SNiP that gives Grandma Apple and me our green eyes. My earlobe attachment from Mom and Grandma Grace. My inability to roll my tongue just like Papa Peter. And the more complicated multigene soups for personality traits where I can pinpoint my family’s propensity for intelligence and shyness and why none of us have perfect pitch. I’ve accounted for all the disease mutations that have been carried by my grandparents, treated in my parents, and altered in me. But, no matter how many times I run the data, I come up with a mutation on my chromosome 16 FTO gene that doesn’t make sense.

Someone knocks softly on my door. “Come in,” I call, assuming it’s Grandma Apple, but when the door slides open, my mom stands there.

She’s still in her lab coat and has her hair pulled back in a tight low bun, but she’s slipped off her shoes and pads into my room barefoot.

“You’re home early,” I say. “It’s only seven.”

“Easy day in the lab.” Mom drops down on the bed beside me. She reaches back to loosen her hair, letting it spill over her shoulders. She looks younger that way. And pretty. I try to imagine my parents falling in love. Did their hearts race when they thought about each other after they first met? I almost laugh out loud at the thought of my mother feeling as out of control as I do.

“Remember when we used to play spalon when you were little?” she says, lifting a lock of thick hair from her shoulder and examining it for split ends. “I’d look like a crazy person when you were done with me.”

“I can’t believe you’d sit there for that long and let me put braids and clips and ponytails all over your head.”

“I wasn’t very playful when you were little, was I?” Mom says with a sigh.

“I had Grandma Apple.”

“What are you working on?” She points to my screen.

I stiffen because I don’t want her to see my mistake. Chromosome 16 and its FTO gene were her first babies. The thing she loved more than anything until she had me. Her breakthrough in the lab tweaking this gene to create an ongoing satiety response in humans meant no one would ever feel the sensation of hunger again. Once no one felt the urge to eat anymore, Synthamil finally caught on. That made her a superstar scientist at One World.

“It’s our family’s comparative human genome map,” I tell her. “I’m almost done.” I start to close my screen, but I’m too late.

“Wait.” She stands up to get a better look at the line of code I’ve puzzled over for the past hour. “That’s odd.” She points to the questionable letter sequences. “Did you check the public genome databases for this mutation?”

“Of course, but I didn’t find anything. Maybe there was a glitch in the program I wrote.”

“I doubt it.” Mom stares at the code and shakes her head, bewildered. “Could be a spontaneous mutation.” She gathers her hair in her hands and twists it back into a bun.

“Can that still happen? I mean with the inocs continually fine-tuning DNA?”

She thinks this over, then she says, “It would explain a lot.…”

I’m not quite listening to her puzzle through the implications of what she’s seeing while I attach a footnote about the possibility of spontaneous mutation. “All I know is that I’m glad to have this done!” I hit send and submit my assignment. When I look up, Mom’s still deep in thought. “What’s wrong?” I say. “You’re looking at me weird.”

“Is your stomach still growling?”

I shrug, unwilling to admit the truth.

“Because if your FTO gene is flawed that could cause all the symptoms of hunger. And if you have it…” She paces around my room. “It could be present in a larger population. But what would be causing it?” She stares at the screen while biting the side of her mouth. “There must be a specialist I can take you to—”

“No way,” I say. “Leave me out of it.”

She whips her head around. “I can’t leave you out of it.” She jabs her finger at the screen. “You
are
it and I’m trying to help you.”

“By dragging me off to some
specialist
who wants to patent some new procedure?” I say. “I’m not going to be someone’s lab cat.”

“Lab cat?” Mom asks.

“Isn’t that what they used to experiment on?”

“Rats,” Mom says. “Lab rats.”

“Well, I don’t want to be one of those either.”

“Science is constantly evolving, Thalia. We have to be open to new advances. What if no one allowed me to do my work when I first started? Where would we be then?”

“Your work was for the greater good,” I argue. “Not for personal gain.”

She crosses her arms and raises her chin. “I’ve been paid well for my discovery.”

“But that’s not why you did it. The money came later. Right?”

She nods but then admits, “When I started out, there was still public money, from the government, for researchers, so I could at least get started on my work before I had corporate sponsorship. It’s harder now. Researchers have to find revenue streams however they can. I’m lucky to have One World behind my work, but there are still reputable people out there who put science over profit. I would only take you to someone who has your best interests at heart.” She cocks her head to the side and searches my face as if I’ve become temporarily unrecognizable. “Surely you know that I want what’s best for you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say, but even I’m not totally convinced anymore.

Mom looks over her shoulder at my screwy genome. “No,” she says looking back at me with pity. “Something’s not right here, and we have to find someone to fix it.”

*   *   *

It doesn’t take Mom long to find the specialist who might have the answer. In less than twenty-four hours, we’re sitting across from Dr. Darius Demeter who leans back in his sleek office chair and stares at us over his expansive faux-wood desk. He’s listened to Mom talk nonstop for fifteen minutes about my “symptoms.” My ketone, dopamine, and insuline levels. My height, weight, and metabolism. The optimal formula for my Synthamil. The hollow feeling I’ve described. My growling stomach. My irritability. I sit there, barely breathing, afraid that all the talk of hunger will trigger some crazy banshee screech from my insides.

Of course, she also marches out my messed-up genome sequence as further proof that something must be deeply wrong with me. Dr. Demeter nods, occasionally grunts, and jots down notes on his Gizmo as my mother yammers on. Now he pauses, gathers his thoughts, and finally launches into his interpretation of her data.