Hungry (7 page)

“But where?”

“The address is there.”

“I don’t know where that is,” I tell him. “Which Loop is it in?”

“You’ll have to head west.”

“Can’t we just link Gizmos?” I reach for mine.

“I don’t have one.”

I almost drop the paper. “What do you mean? How’s that possible? Everyone has a Gizmo.”

He raises one eyebrow. “Not everyone.”

As if in protest, my Gizmo pings and we both jump. “Sorry, probably my friend.” I fumble with the knit holder at my hip, cursing Yaz for interrupting me, but when I pull out my Gizmo, I see that my mom has sent me a text.

Where are you? Can’t reach you by vid and your vitals are all over the place. Locate now!

“Crap!” I say as I text back,
Taking a walk
. “I have to go,” I tell him and blush at the disappointment in my voice.

“Hey wait,” Basil says. He grabs the paper. “You can’t take that with you.”

“Why not?” I tug on it. “You gave it to me.”

He pulls harder. “Who are you really? And who’s pinging you?”

I yank the paper and we both stumble backward, half a sheet in each of our hands. “Oh no!” I look down at the torn paper and feel like I might cry. “We broke it!”

He sees how upset I am and puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, don’t worry.” Another one of those funny ripples goes through my body. “But I have to take this back.”

“Then why did you give it to me?” I ask, still clutching my half.

He thinks about this for a moment. “Because I wanted to, er, uh,… I thought maybe you might…” he stops, and I can see a red flush crawling up his neck. He shoves the other half of the paper at me. “You have to read it silently and commit the info to memory, then destroy it.”

I laugh. “Are you joking?”

He shakes his head, and I realize that he’s very serious.

“Okay,” I tell him. I smooth the halves on the countertop and fit them back together so I can read the words again. Then I pull out my Gizmo to give Astrid the info, but Basil reaches out and lays his hand on mine.

“No,” he says. “Don’t. You have to remember. It’s the only way.”

“Nobody can remember that much info.”

“People used to memorize entire books, whole maps, important dates, phone numbers for all their friends and family, all kinds of stuff,” he insists.

“When?”

“When they had to.”

I stare at the paper, rereading the lines over and over, trying to get them to stick inside my brain.

“You got it?”

“I think so.”

“If it’s important, you’ll remember,” he tells me.

I read it one more time. “Okay,” I tell him uncertainly.

He picks up both pieces of paper and rips them into pieces.

“Hey!” I yell.

“It’s the only way.” He tears and tears until only tiny shreds are left, then he opens the lid on a bucket of murky water and drops the pieces in. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll make a new piece later out of this.”

“You can do that?” I ask astonished.

“That was the original recycling.” He leads me out of the room, turning off the light as we go.

When we get into the first room, my Gizmo pings with another message from my mom demanding to know where I am. “Sorry,” I say. “I better go or my mother will have my Smaurto looking for me.” I head for the door, but then I turn around and look at Basil. “You’ll be there, right? At the meeting?”

He nods. “See you there?”

My cheeks grow warm and I have to take a deep breath. “Yes, see you there!” Then I turn and run outside into the night air.

*   *   *

I run blindly for a minute or two, turning corners and zipping up empty streets. I have no idea why I’m running. It’s not like I’m in danger or in a hurry. But meeting Basil and learning about other people like me makes me feel so good I have to move. It’s as if every muscle in my body is elated and about to explode, shooting me up into the air until I’m flying over the entire city, looking down at everyone far below me.
Hello! Hello!
I would call.
Look at meeeeee!
while I do loop-de-loops in the sky. My feet pound against the pavement as my heart pounds in my chest. The giddy, throbbing excitement propels me forward until I’m out of breath and panting while leaning against the side of an old building. I catch my breath and look for something familiar, but I’m lost and even that feels good because no matter how turned around I get out here, I know that I’m not alone.

I imagine wandering around this maze of streets until I bump into Basil again. His face floats up in my mind and my heart revs. I laugh out loud, sending my voice bouncing around the walls. Will Basil hear? Will he know it’s me? Thinking all these crazy thoughts makes my face grow hot, so I press my cheek against the cool metal wall behind me.

My Gizmo pings and I jump. Just another message from my mom demanding that I come right home because she can see that my heart rate has skyrocketed and I’m using too much CO2. I breathe deeply, trying to calm down. There’s no way I’m calling her. The last thing I want to deal with are her questions. I turn on my locator, reconnect Astrid to my car, then send a quick text telling my mom that I’m heading home soon.

I feel like a different person retracing my steps back toward the PlugIn. Will Mom be able to see this shift on my face or hear it in my voice or read it in my vitals? How obvious is it that something interesting has happened? That I met someone, in person, who is so different from everyone else I know that he’s like me? And that I loved talking to him. It wasn’t awkward or weird. Even though we spent almost an hour together, there’s so much more to say! I can think of so many questions I wish I’d asked Basil. Like where he’s from and how old he is and if he’s in an ICM and whether he’s ever read a book that’s not about food and why he doesn’t have a Gizmo and a thousand more about the Analogs and the meeting. I can’t stop thinking about how he looked. How his eyes flashed when he was angry and how they glimmered when he was happy. How his mouth changed from a hard straight line to a soft lopsided curve when he smiled. It’s as if his image has been downloaded to my brain and is now a screensaver on the backs of my eyelids. Every time I blink, I see him in my mind.

I wonder if this is what it feels like when people find a dynamic interpersonal connection in the Procreation Pool. Except I’m only 17. Finding a person to love outside the Pool, without the help of algorithms and avatars, only happens in fiction when two people are so compatible that their desire to be together busts through the hormone barriers meant to save us from ourselves and keep the population in check. They have a word for this kind of thing in the movies. It’s called
romance
, and until today I thought it was a total crock of crap.

Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was fate that I stumbled into Flav-O-Rite on a night when Basil was mixing scents. And maybe it was kismet that allowed us to sit next to one another, look each other in the eye, and let our fingers graze one another’s skin. Maybe somewhere he is thinking all the same things about me. And if he is, could this be what the Procreation Pool system is meant to re-create with its algorithmic meet-ups and synthetic hormone boosters? That thing Grandma talks about when she talks about
love.
My skin tingles at the thought.

No, that’s not tingling. It’s my Gizmo buzzing in my hand, pulling me out of my reverie. Who needs a virtual life when you can have this heady feeling in reality? But the feeling is fleeting. It’s already skittered away into the night sky, leaving me staring down at the directions to my Smaurto that Astrid is showing me. I sigh then shoot a quick text to Yaz, telling her that my mother wants me home and I’ll see her tomorrow at our ICM.

I focus my attention on the map, which leads me back past vacant buildings I vaguely recognize and retraces my steps up the alleyway I remember. Everything around me is beginning to seem familiar, but I feel different. Like I’ve walked through a time warp, only I’m not sure I want to go back to my life. Part of me wants to stay in this old part of town, caught in the past while searching for my future. That’s silly, though. The future is unknown until you get there. But I won’t leave it to something as false as fate to ensure that mine includes Basil.

Basil? Could that really be his name? It dawns on me just then how little we really know about each other. I close my eyes and silently say the words he had written on the paper.

Analogs … Friday … 6:00 p.m.… 1601 South Halsted

*   *   *

The minute I walk in the door to our house, my mom is all over me. She’s standing, Gizmo in hand, firing questions before I even have my shoes off.

“Where were you? I couldn’t locate you! And what on Earth were you doing? Your vitals were all over the place. Heart rate up and down, your metabolism swinging, and your calorie burn skyrocketed!” She shoves her Gizmo in my face as if the graphs and numbers on the screen mean anything to me.

“God, Mom. I just walked in the door.” I push her Gizmo away and head into the living room, where Dad is engrossed in a 3-D historical docudrama about the invention of some old thing called an iPhone. “I was out with Yaz. We went to a new PlugIn. I was probably playing a game or something that got my heart rate up. Then I got bored and took a walk.” I feel a little bad for leaving out some of the truth, but not bad enough to tell her what really happened. I plop down on the sofa beside Dad. “How do you know that stupid patch is accurate, anyway?”

Mom stands in front of us, hands on hips. “Of course it’s accurate!” she says. “I invented it and your father made it.” My dad shifts so that he can see around my mom.

“If this is how you’re going to treat me…” I lift my shirt and try to rip the patch off my back. “Ouch!” I yell when it won’t come off.

“You have to wear it for the full twenty-four hours before it will release,” she says.

I slump back on the couch and mutter, “You might as well put a chip in my head.”

At this my dad perks up. “Actually…”

Mom shoots him a look, and he stops short of launching into his diatribe about singularity—his favorite topic.

“What?” I look from Mom to Dad and back to Mom. “Do I already have a chip in my head?”

“Not yet,” Dad says with a smile.

“Max,” Mom says, exasperation in her voice. “Could we talk about that another time?”

He shrugs and goes back to the docudrama.

Mom takes a deep breath and tries to reason with me. “I’m collecting this data for your own good. Your Synthamil formula has been precisely calculated, and any little shift—”

“You said you wouldn’t look at the data until tomorrow,” I point out.

“I wouldn’t have except there are built-in warning signals if a patient’s vitals suddenly go haywire.”

At this I feel myself turn pink. When did my signals go bonkers? When I met Basil? When we were using his device to smell roasted chicken and chocolate brownies? When I ran through the streets? I certainly don’t want my mother knowing any of that. I should have hacked the dumb patch. “I shouldn’t be made to feel abnormal,” I say, reciting Basil’s argument, but somehow it sounds ridiculous when I say it to my mother.

“I didn’t say you were abnormal.” She screws up her face like I’m babbling nonsense. “I think your metabolism is out of whack for some reason, so we might need to tweak your Synthamil formula.”

“Well,” I huff at her, “I’m not your test subject.”

“First of all, I’m not experimenting on you. Secondly, it’s a privilege to have a personal optimized formula. Not everyone gets that.”

“So I should be grateful?” I snipe.

She draws a long breath in through her nose, trying to stay calm. “Thalia, I only want to make sure that you’re okay.”

“I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Obviously, I’m all right.”

Dad looks over. “She’s got a point, Lil.”

Mom sighs and rubs her forehead. Finally she says, “Data doesn’t lie.”

“But daughters do?”

“I didn’t say that,” Mom says with her teeth gritted. We stare at one another for a few seconds until she says, “I just want to know that you’re safe and healthy.”

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” I tell her as I haul myself off the couch and stomp toward my room.

As I’m leaving, I hear her say to my dad, “She has no appreciation for the work I’ve done in my life. No appreciation at all!”

I can’t help but roll my eyes. How many times have I heard her speech? How if it weren’t for her and One World, all humankind would be dead. How her breakthrough in the lab helped refine the inocs so no one experiences hunger anymore or procreates without permission or gets horrible fatal diseases. And how without nutritional beverages like Synthamil, humans would still be starving and fighting. The thing is, I do appreciate it. Of course I do. I wouldn’t want to watch the people I love starve or kill each other for meager scraps of food. But I don’t like having it shoved down my throat all the time. Like I have to agree with everything she says just because she was instrumental in saving humanity. She’s still my mom and she can still be annoying.

*   *   *

The next night, Mom, Papa Peter, and Grandma Grace gather around the main screen in our living room to discuss my vitals, which Mom uploaded from the patch.

“Her insulin level is definitely spiking.” Grandma Grace points to a sharp line. “It should stabilize between her morning and evening ingestion of Synthamil.”

“And her glucose is falling too rapidly,” Papa Peter adds. “Which would explain the headaches and fatigue. But her hydration level is fine, so she’s getting enough water.”

“Look at her ketone level here,” Mom says. “It shouldn’t be that high.”

I sit on the couch, hugging a pillow, while they discuss me like I’m some sort of chemistry project.

“When was her last inoculation?” Grandma asks my mom.

“Three months ago,” Mom says. “So she’s not due for another three months.”

They flip through screen after screen showing how my body operated on an hourly basis for the past two days.

“That’s odd,” says Grandma Grace. “Her dopamine level shot up here. When was that? Zoom in.” Mom commands the chart to enlarge. “Friday night around eight p.m.”