Pills and Starships (10 page)

This one was to a snorkeltank.

It was like a guided tour, and other people went with us—other people in what I gather is LaTessa’s official group, because a bunch of survivors were there, including Xing. Luckily, LaTessa herself didn’t come with us. A little LaTessa goes a long way.

She may even know this.

When early afternoon rolled around we put on our swimsuits underneath our clothes and trooped out to the front of the hotel, where they loaded us into an all-terrain e-buggy—this open-air, mostly bamboo bus contraption that runs off a solar battery. It’s got a really wide roof that hangs pretty far off the sides to give a lot of shade and has solar collectors on top. And it goes really slow.

We went uphill then, away from the ocean and toward the volcano. We passed some lava, all black and curved and crinkly. The guide announced that the volcano still erupts now and then so there are cracks and holes, some places with hot, orange-red magma showing through, and if you’re on foot you have to be careful where you step.

Sam was beside me on the seat. He leaned over and whispered in my ear that he wished LaTessa were with us after all, so he could push her in.

“That’s not very
forgiving
, Sam,” I whispered back after a minute. “How can she hold your abundant
angriness
if she’s
being
all
shrieking
and
screaming
in a
limb-removing
burning?”

Sam guffawed.

I was glad, maybe a little proud of myself, because he hardly ever laughs. Or even smiles. He’s Mister Serious.

Mostly though we were quiet and watched the scenery, keeping our childish
venting
to ourselves. Sam pointed out that his masseur was along for the ride, still wearing his same beige robe. He and two others sat next to the tour guide, up at the front with the bus driver.

“They don’t wear name tags, did you notice?” Sam whispered to me. “That’s because they’re local support staff. Like, contractors, not corp employees. So the corps don’t like to
individuate
them. That’s what they call it. They’re supposed to remain
anonymous
. Basically so the corps can easily change them out and no one will notice.”

“How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

“I did my homework. Before we left. I needed to know the details.”

A bit paranoid, maybe, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I’m leery of Sam’s conclusions sometimes but I trust him for the raw data. He knows things, and I for one am glad he does. Even if my browsing mostly goes in different ways from his.

After the best part of an hour we got to the tank location. It’s sunk into the ground, so when you come up to it—after you get off the bus and walk through some jungly vegetation—it just looks like a big natural pond, except there are a few small decks built into the sides and stairs made out of rock. They handed out snorkel masks and tubes and fins and we messed around for a while making sure we had the right sizes of everything. You didn’t need a wet suit, they keep the water a nice warm temperature, so we just slipped our regular clothes off and our gear on and we were ready. My parents and Sam and I lined up along the deck for our turn.

Xing was standing right behind us, looking like some kind of elegant little duck with those big black flippers on her feet. Two cute old people, who I assumed were her parents, waited quietly at her side; the mother was tiny, the father was very tall. I noticed they were way older than my own parents, probably past the century mark.

While we were waiting there, watching other families slip into the water ahead of us and seeing their snorkel tubes spread out like miniature periscopes on the surface of the water, my father pointed up into the waxy green tree canopy. There were bright-colored birds there, parrots or something. But one thing struck me, and I could barely believe it hadn’t struck me before.

“Where’s the Invisinet?” I asked, squinting. “I just realized! It hasn’t been on any of the gardens. Ever since we got here!”

“Maybe it’s too high up to see,” suggested Sam.

“Oh no, dears,” said my mother. “They don’t use the Invisinet here. Because the islands are so far out in the middle of the ocean, you see.”

“No need,” nodded my father, smiling beatifically. “The invasions they’re most afraid of have already happened. Damage already done—in terms of wildlife that flies through the air, anyway. There aren’t too many long-distance migrant birds left, so the residual risk is pretty low. Most of the invasive parasites that still show up are insects, and they actually come off passenger boats just like the one we sailed in on. After all, we’re thousands of miles from nowhere.”

It was bizarre—animals walking around, or flying, whatever they were doing, just on the loose, completely open to the sky.

When we finally went in it was great, better than the tank I’d once been in back home, which was strictly an indoor setup. They had real saltwater plants growing, and you could touch them. And there were the usual fake corals, but they looked really real, and along with the robot fish they had some live ones—you could tell because when you swam close to them they flitted away faster than the robots were able to. You’re not supposed to touch robot wildlife because it can wreck them, but their sensors aren’t always perfect and they tend to move sluggishly.

It was wild down there, the light shining through the water, the creatures swimming beneath, and my parents seemed happier than they’d been in a long time.

When we got out after our half-hour ended, and were sitting stretched out on one of the decks drying off while my mother went to use the outdoor “convenience station,” Sam took my dad aside. The masseur dude with no name tag was standing nearby, handing out drywipes and putting away people’s masks and fins.

“You could have more of this,” he said. “Isn’t it great? You could have more of all the things you love. Dad,
really
. Come on. You don’t have to do it.”

My father just patted him softly on the shoulder.

“Son,” he responded, smiling his blissed-out pharmasmile, “much as we might like to, we can’t go out snorkeling.”

My parents don’t know it yet, but my brother’s gone AWOL.

That stands for Away Without Leave, in case you didn’t know. It’s an old army term they use when soldiers run off to get a break from the killing.

Sam’s may or may not be temporary. I’m worried.

And my parents don’t know about his disappearing act yet because we’re in the middle of Personal Time—they’re off at some kind of healing session—and meanwhile he took off and left me a note. It said he needed more Personal Time than the slots we were given; it said he’d try to be back by evening. But it didn’t promise.

You’re really, really not supposed to go off-plan. They make that clear in the training, and then they state it again and again inside the Coping Kit—how it’s all about a certain
pharmaflow
, a certain
time-shape of being
.

It’s weird to think I don’t know where he is. In all of our lives, it’s been incredibly rare that I didn’t know exactly what he was doing and his activity location. We always had our personal faces, with GPS trackers and all that, and we were good about updating so our parents wouldn’t worry.

Plus there was the fact that we were barely allowed outside the complex. Except for special occasions.

But here there’s no face, not for contracts, and so he’s just gone. He’s just somewhere out there.

He’s like the birds with no Invisinet.

When I woke up from my catnap the note was right there on my bed beside me, scrawled hastily on a page torn out of Sam’s own journal—the one they gave him that’s identical to this one I’m writing in. The first thing I did was beat a path to his room to make sure he wasn’t pranking. His journal was there on his bedside table, the opening Day Two page ripped out. Otherwise the notebook was completely blank.

But I did find, tucked into the back of it, a piece of write-fiber I didn’t recognize, which he’d probably brought from home. At first I ignored it; then, since I found absolutely nothing else in his room that would give me a single clue, I pored over it for a minute or two.

It contained neatly written lists of numbers—numbers and places. They were big numbers, and the places were countries or cities or regions. I’ll copy a piece of it here:

Guizhou Province | 500,000 | 3/3

Mali | 1,300,000 8/12 |

Uttar Pradesh | 8,000,000 | 9/10

Okay, so I have no earthly idea what this all means. But it goes on like that, a list of places—all somewhere in the poor parts—with big numbers for each, and then fractions, which also might be dates.

I just tucked it in an inside pocket of my skirt, in case it’s something private or important—in case my parents end up in here, looking to find out what Sam is up to.

I don’t know why I took it, actually. But I did.

And now they’re coming back in from their session.

Tonight it’s just the three of us at dinner.

My parents didn’t take Sam running off as hard as I thought they would—they didn’t freak out, didn’t cry or pace around or anything. Probably the pharma mood-level.

But what they
did
do was call the corp.

I asked them not to, I said Sam would be back soon, later tonight, probably, and could we just keep it in the family? I showed them the note he left me; I told a white lie and said he’d meant it for “all of us.” But they didn’t even consider my request to keep the whole thing quiet. I mean, not for a single second. They said smoothly that this kind of thing happens, the signs were all there in Sam’s
angriness
and his
rebelling feeling
—they actually quoted LaTessa to me.

And the key way to respond is, my dad said, “We just don’t panic, okay, honey? That’s what service is for.
Guiding, receiving, and streamlining
. We just need to keep them informed of all developments.”

His face looked plastic when he said that.

And then they called it in.

For some reason, this pissed me off more than other things have. Usually I’m not pissed off, I’m pretty chill most of the time even without the slow-down pharms. But this got to me. More than the decision to buy the contract in the first place, because, I mean, sooner or later their generation always does. But this was something else—it was going too far, I thought, going too far in sneaky increments, it was a piecemeal betrayal of us that had turned a corner, because now, undeniably, they were showing more loyalty to the corporation than to Sam and me.

It was like:
Are you guys corp robots?

I’ve been thinking about why, and it seems to me it’s plain old fear. They’re afraid of not doing everything the corp says to do in Final Weeks. They’re afraid if they don’t then something will go terribly wrong.

So here we are waiting for our dinner in the Twilight Lounge, and as my parents drink their cocktails and hold hands and smile, for once I’m the one sulking.

Sulking and writing in my journal.

Tonight’s show was called “To the Stars,” and it featured madeup vids of outer space and the life cycle of a star, from birth to supernova. They had facts rolling overhead: the number of stars in the galaxy, the number of galaxies in the universe, the number of years since the Big Bang. How even energy fades and dies—not really disappearing, the narrator said, but merely changing forms.

It was okay, but nothing like “Ancient Oceans.” The ancient oceans kicked way more ass.

One upside, though, was that tonight’s show didn’t make my parents cry. Not a bit.

The menu tonight is vegetable protein steaks and pan-fried root veggies.

I’m not too psyched, frankly.