Hungry (5 page)

“People used to have more than one kid all the time,” I say.

“And we all know where that got us,” Yaz says. “Anyway, Miyuki is freaking out. She’s like, ‘Am I not good enough? Why do you need a second?’ And what if her parents die and she has to take care of the second and pay for all its Synthamils and inocs for the rest of its life?”

“I’m sure they have enough money, and they’re not going to die soon,” I say.

“Oh please, my mother said childbirth nearly killed her,” says Yaz. “I don’t know why anyone ever gets pregnant anyway.” She turns around and scrolls through the list Jilly has generated of the people from Yaz’s circle who are plugged in.

“Um, propagation of species,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, but you get fat, then it hurts like hell, and as a reward you have to take care of a squalling baby.”

“They add Arousatrol to your Synthamil when you enter the Procreation Pool. It adjusts your hormones so you want to, you know…” I blush a little. “Plus, once you give birth, your body naturally produces stuff like prolactin and vasopressin and oxytocin so you attach to the kid.”

“Paging Dr. Apple,” Yaz says and shoots me a withering glance, which means I’m being too geeky for my own social good. “I can think of fifty horrible things I’d rather do than have a kid.”

“Really?” I ask, wrenching my body around until I’m facing the same direction as she is. “You never want to enter the Procreation Pool?” When Yaz and I were little, we thought it was an actual pool where grown-ups swam around, looking for a mate.

“I didn’t say that,” she says. “I want the Arousatrol so I can fall in love, but I’m definitely requesting birth control.” She glances over her shoulder at me. “Do you want a kid?”

“Not right away. Mom and Dad want me to wait to enter the Procreation Pool until my late twenties, after I’m done with all my coursework and I have a good job. But, I’m the last Apple. If I don’t have a kid, there won’t be any more of us on Earth.”

“There are plenty of people in the world,” says Yaz. “And most of them are online right now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, uninterested.

“Remember our motto,” says Yaz in a mock serious voice, “‘One World, One Big Human Family.’”

I laugh. “You’d never take a shot at One World that way if your HoverCam was on.”

“Of course not,” she says. “I wouldn’t get any product placements if I was a smart-ass on-screen.”

“But you’d be so much more entertaining that way.”

“Only to you,” she says with a shrug and turns away.

*   *   *

I don’t blink on to the PlugIn network like everyone else at 42 has done. Instead, I use my Gizmo to find a stealth server, which takes me into the system through a back door some other Dynasaur has left open for people like me. Now I can hack around manually without the system recognizing my voice or tracking my preferences via Astrid while I lurk around legit One World sites for a while. After a half hour of cruising games, scrolling through movie rooms, and my half-assed attempt at joining a virtual DiaLogOn under the name Xerxes about whether the letter
X
should be eliminated from English (to which I post, “Excising the letter X would exacerbate the inexorable extinction of text!” but no one finds it funny except me), I’ve had enough.

I have no idea why every night thousands of kids my age sit around PlugIns in every population center around the world, doing the same dumb things—making avatars and playing games and chatting about the insular little worlds we’ve created—but never really interacting. Grandma says humans are not much different than herd animals.
Give them some grass,
she says,
and they’ll graze
.

I hack into the Relics archive and search for videos of herd animals to see what they were like. I find old footage of sheep, fluffy white critters with kind black eyes, huddled together on a thick carpet of green. They contentedly snack on the grass, chomping away, no cares or thoughts about what’s going on around them, and for a moment, I think it might be nice every once in a while to put my head down and be part of the flock. But then out of the left corner of the screen, another animal zips into view. It’s a black-and-white dog running low, which startles the sheep. They charge, cloudlike down the side of the hill with the dog zigzagging behind them. And I think,
I don’t want to be part of that herd. I want to be that dog.
And that gives me an idea.

Quickly, I hack around until I find the PlugIn admin pass and crack the security code with a program I wrote. It’s illegal to use programs like these to play games for free or download proprietary content without paying, but I have no intention of stealing. As my dad says,
OW owns the content not the conduit,
and anyone can use the conduit, if they can find a way in. So what I’m about to do isn’t technically illegal. I’m simply exercising my right to free speech. Or so I tell myself.

Once I’m in, I upload the video of the sheep onto the PlugIn server, which controls the ads being projected onto the ceiling and walls. Then from my Gizmo, I temporarily take over the PlugIn server, and I type, “Look Up!” The message appears on everyone’s screen simultaneously. People rear back like startled sheep and lift their eyes to the ceiling where the grazing herd is being chased by the dog.

People look at each other and back at their screens, which they smack and curse. They shout voice commands to stop the video that now appears on every screen in the room, but I’ve set it on a repeat loop with a classic Dynasaur quote scrolling across the bottom:

George Washington said, “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” Don’t be sheep!

Yaz glances over her shoulder at me and scowls.

“What?” I ask innocently as I disconnect and slide my Gizmo into my pouch.

She slips off one of her bright-pink Earz. “Someday you’re going to get caught and slapped with a big-ass fine.”

“Ewww, I’m scared,” I say.

“Laugh now, but I heard some kid got caught hacking at the EntertainArena, and his parents couldn’t pay his restitution so now he’s in jail.”

“Your honor, I did nothing but help people engage in meaningful real-time conversation,” I say in my imaginary defense as I point to all the people unplugging and talking to other people near them about what’s happening. I know the chaos will only last for a few minutes more before security dismantles my work. By that time I’ll be gone.

“You wouldn’t think it was so great if your family couldn’t pay and you got locked up,” Yaz says.

“But first they’d have to catch me. And good luck with that.”

On Yaz’s screen, I see that security has managed to freeze the video loop on the dog in mid-stride, tongue out, looking as happy as can be, which makes me laugh. “Guess they outsmarted you,” Yaz says when the dog is replaced by a spinning multicolored wheel in the center of the now black screen.

“Took them long enough.”

All around us, people slip their Earz on again and settle back down to resume their virtual lives, which is my cue to get the heck out.

“Are you leaving?” Yaz asks when I stand up.

“I’m going to walk around the hood a little,” I say then my stomach gurgles. I press my elbow into my gut to stifle the sounds escaping and echoing around the maze of metal in here.

Yaz blinks at me. “Was that you?”

“Was what me?” I ask, hoping to sound innocent.

“That noise. Did that come from you? Or is something wrong with these things?” She taps her Earz.

“I didn’t hear it,” I lie, but my cheeks flush. Forget about being caught for hacking. The worse thing I can imagine is everyone turning around to find the freak who’s yawping and yowling like some long-dead sea creature come back to life. But Yaz doesn’t seem too disturbed by the noise because she’s already busy trying to relaunch her minion into its death date. Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that the only thing to do in a situation like this is to cut out before my stomach acts up again.

“Have fun in hell,” I tell her.

“You, too!” she says and waves good-bye.

*   *   *

I love exploring little abandoned pockets in the city where there are no cameras and no screens. No twenty-four-hour newsfeeds and ads. Not even the whirl of Whisson Windmills disturbs the quiet. I head south and imagine what it used to be like when people walked down sidewalks with animals on leashes and stopped at cafés for something to drink. I look in the black dusty windows, hoping to find an old abandoned real-time shop filled with things I could pick up and touch. Usually these places have been looted, but every once in a while I stumble on something strangely preserved. Like the time I found a store called Pottery Barn that had no pottery or farm animals, just dusty couches, disintegrating baskets, and rotted wooden chairs. I was disappointed because I wanted to find an antique mug, like the old green ceramic cup Grandma keeps beside her bed. She used to drink something called coffee from it as part of her morning routine—
an empty ritual
, my mother would say.

Used to be, you could pick up all the things in the store and weigh them in your hand. Compare the different colors and shapes made by some hopeful person who had to guess what other people might want instead of having people decide exactly what they want before it’s produced. How funny and upside down the world used to be.
Wasteful,
my mother would say. That’s what led to all the trouble. Waste and inefficiency.

I turn a corner, down a narrow street hemmed on either side by tall buildings made of metal and glass that somehow went unscathed through all the bombings. Grandma told me once that it used to be unsafe to walk around alone at night. I thought she meant during the wars, but she said no, just in life.
Wild animals?
I asked, imagining big-fanged creatures prowling the streets for food. She laughed at that.
Not in the cities,
she said. The big animals died out fast. Rats lasted longer. Something called a cockroach sometimes still skitters in the darkest places.

Mostly it was other people that were the problem. They usually wanted money, she said, but sometimes other things. Sex. Or violence. For protection the government forced the citizens to pay for lots of police who were out in the open looking for criminals so they had to make up laws to keep themselves busy. You could get arrested for things other than violence or fraud, like selling drugs or parking in the wrong place.
What was the matter with people?
I asked when Grandma told me this. She struggled for an answer. Finally she just shook her head and said,
That was the human condition.

I turn another corner down an even smaller street between old brick buildings, what my father would call an alleyway. There are no big storefront windows back here, just doors, shut now, and old stairways and ladders called fire escapes zigzagging down from the roofs. Maybe these were apartments where people lived and in the summer they opened their windows and you could hear everybody talking, laughing, yelling, crying. You could smell what other people were cooking and see their laundry hanging out to dry. It would have been a big hot mess of humanity, as my mother would say, teeming with germs. Once I found an old cartoon at the Relics of a cat sitting on a trash can in an alley, singing under a full moon. A person got mad because the cat was interrupting his sleep, and he threw a boot at it from an open window. That was supposed to be funny back then.

I have no idea where I’m going, but I don’t want to go back to find Yaz yet. I’d much rather be alone, following a tug I feel inside of me that comes from the place where that yawning hollow spot is starting to wake up. It’s almost like I’m being pulled along by some invisible string. One time I found an abandoned house when I was snooping around an empty neighborhood in the South Loop. So much of the space was dedicated to eating. The place where they cooked with all its bulky gadgets and cupboards full of dishes. A separate room just for eating. Not to mention the toilet rooms. How primitive that big round open bowl seemed. Nothing like our sleek urinals of today. The thought of sitting there squeezing your insides out made me blush. Grandma told me that the hardest thing to get used to after the inocs and nutritional beverages was not using the toilet anymore. For the longest time, her body would think it needed to eliminate, but of course it didn’t. There is no more waste. Efficiency in everything.

The alleyway comes to a T. I look right and left. Both are vacant stretches of cement, brick, and metal. A few long-forgotten signs hang crooked from their rusted bolts—
SWANN DRY CLEANERS, FRIEDMAN’S FIXTURES, RUG DEPOT
. The left tugs at me harder, so I turn that way, happy to go farther into the abandonment. I slow down and lift my face. Something is in the air. A scent. At first it’s faint. I wonder if there’s a hologram park nearby, but the smell is not from synth trees or flowers. I sniff, letting my nose lead the way.

The smell gets stronger. I see a sliver of light sliding out from beneath a door on the right side of the street, which is odd. I didn’t think anybody lived down here anymore, and there’s certainly nothing retail. Above the door, I can make out a faded red sign that says
FLAV-O-RITE
. I suppose it could be a lab or a manufacturer, but why so far away from the industrial center? I tiptoe to the door, which is slightly ajar. The smell surrounds me now. It’s complicated with a light and flowery scent (like the elusive odor I was chasing in my dream), layered over a darker, heavier smell that pulls me forward. I want to get closer to it, find its source, put my face near it so I can drink it in. The urge is so strong that I slip my fingers in the crack of the door and pull it open. Light washes over me as I step inside the building. Then, my stomach makes the craziest, loudest, most heinous noise I’ve ever heard. It roars, it yowls, it groans, and it gurgles like a gigantic sinkhole pulling everything nearby into its depths. I double over and grab my belly to make it stop.

I hear a crash and something scrambling. “Is somebody there?” I call, mortified that someone may have heard me. I peer into what looks like a lab. In the center, a long stainless steel table separates me from a guy, about my age, who is tangled in the legs of an overturned stool. I’m dying. More embarrassed than I’ve ever been in my life. I literally knocked this guy over with my freakishness.