After I had nibbled for a while in silence, Bren cleared his throat. “So how’s the day going?”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“I saw you get set on by the jackals.”
“Jackals?”
“Yeah, Soun and his cronies. Bunch of burning speds. Their parents are wannabe rich. They like to hook up with the real rich kids and milk them for presents. Sorry, I should have warned you about them this morning.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“No, I thought you’d be safe. We aren’t in their grade. I underestimated your fame.”
I shook my head. “I’m not famous.”
“I didn’t say you were an idol or anything, but absolutely everyone knows who you are.”
I sighed, unable to look at my barely touched tray any longer. I felt nauseated.
“Bren? Soun said to me . . . that I was already sucking up to the CEOs. What did that mean?”
Bren grinned, self- deprecatingly. “That’s just what they call us. It’s because of our families. My grandfather’s just one rung down the ladder from Guillory.
Executive CEO, not quite chairman, but really powerful. My dad’s on the board, about four steps down from that, and Mom’s head of research for the Central Graphics Department.” He started nodding to the other kids around the table. I noticed most of them had stopped talking the moment Bren opened his mouth. It reminded me a bit of the way people deferred to Daddy at company picnics. I wondered if Bren knew how powerful he was, or if he was oblivious. “Nabiki’s dad is the leader and creator of the Neuro- Linguistic Research Department.”
“My mom is vice president of Research, Development, and Human Factors,”
said one of the boys, a tall Nordic blond with a thick German accent. He had to be Wilhelm. “My father controls Uni Germany, back home.”
“My parents head up the Bio- Chem Agricultural Quality Control Team on Titan,” said the girl named Anastasia. She sounded so Russian I could barely understand her.
“And Jamal’s own half of Europa,” said the fiercely redheaded girl with the freckles.
Jamal threw back his dark head and laughed. “Only about a third.”
I gulped. “And you?” I asked the redhead.
“Molly,” she supplied, reminding me. She grinned through her freckles. “Me, I’m just a scholarship student. My parents were some of the first colonists on Callisto, which makes me kind of royalty there, but that doesn’t get me so much as a supper invite on Earth.”
“Don’t let her kid you,” Bren said. “It got her a scholar-ship. Besides, she’s got the most brilliant mind for fundamental economics. She’ll change the entire economic structure of the planet the second she gets out of college. My granddad’s already considering inviting her to board meetings.”
I felt rather uncomfortable. “I’m nothing so interesting,” I whispered.
Jamal and Wilhelm laughed as one. Tall as a mountain, Wilhelm had to bend down to peer into my eyes. “You own every one of us, Liebchen,” he said fondly.
I knew I had turned red again, but I whispered, “No, I don’t.”
“Might as well,” said Jamal. “ Particularly —” But whatever he had been about to say was cut off by Nabiki, who elbowed him in the ribs. Jamal threw a surreptitious glance toward the only one of the party who hadn’t spoken yet, and then he closed his mouth. I searched through the names Bren had rattled off. Otto, that was it.
I couldn’t see Otto’s face. He had long, shaggy black hair, which he did not keep pulled back as the other boys did. He hadn’t looked up from his plate. “So who’s Otto’s family?” I asked.
There was an uncomfortable silence. I didn’t understand it until Otto finally looked up at me. I froze. I had thought him either Asian or Caucasian, but he was neither. His eyes were yellow, and his skin, now that I looked at it more closely, was nearly blue. He was pleasant- enough looking, with a strong nose and a fine- featured face. But his coloring simply wasn’t human.
“Otto doesn’t talk,” said Nabiki. She smiled at Otto, whose face remained entirely expressionless. She touched his shoulder in a way that told me their relationship wasn’t entirely platonic. “He kind of doesn’t need to.”
“ Wh- what is he?” I realized as I said it that I was being rude, but I couldn’t help it. He unnerved me.
“Genetically modified from alien DNA found on Europa,” said Anastasia.
“Technically, you own him. And the technology as created him.”
It took me a moment for the words to make sense. Her accent was so thick, and the words were impossible. “Me?”
Bren looked annoyed. “It was one of Guillory’s pet projects. They banned most genetic modification just after the Dark Times, but Guillory’s been lobbying for eases in the restrictions his whole life. Otto here is one of a hundred human embryos who were implanted with the Europa microbe DNA. Only thirty- four of them survived full gestation. Only a dozen survived past puberty, and of those, only four seem to function with adult minds. It was carnage. Otto is the biggest success, but he doesn’t talk.”
“Why not?”
Otto opened his mouth, with a hint of a smile edging the corners of his lips. A strange noise erupted from his mouth, as if someone were screaming by sucking in breath rather than exhaling. It was very quiet, and it sounded more dolphin than human.
I jumped, and everyone at the table laughed. “He loves teasing people,” Nabiki said. She nudged him. “Otto, come on —be nice. She’s almost as weird as you.”
Otto seemed to think for a long moment, then slowly held out one long fingered bluish hand. I blinked at it. Nabiki looked annoyed. “Go on, take it!” she hissed.
I gingerly put my fingers on his palm, and with great gentleness, Otto’s fingers wrapped around my own.
“Good afternoon, Princess,” I thought in a voice that wasn’t really my own. “I am Otto Sextus.” The name came to me as 86 at first, and I knew, without explanation, that he and all the others had for some reason been named as numerals. Another thought came to me that wasn’t as clear. It was almost, for lack of a better term, inaudible. Treat us well, treat us well, treat us well. It was a plea, accidental, a background drone of a thought. For a brief second, I saw Otto, and three other blue- skinned teenagers, with a background shadow of half a dozen half- formed figures.
I gasped. Those words and images had been my thoughts, but they hadn’t come from me.
“Shh,” was the word I thought, but the feeling connected to it was something along the lines of, Don’t worry, fear me not.
My thoughts seemed to drift for a moment, until I wasn’t sure what I was thinking about. “Your heart is troubled.Your experience . . . interrupted. . . .”
The first real expression I had seen flashed over Otto’s peculiar face. I felt a blast of disconnected fear. “I am sorry, dear Princess,” he thought at me. “Your troubles are greater even than my own.”
He pulled his hand away rather quickly and stared at me for a moment before he looked back to his tray.
Everyone was staring at me as if they’d just seen an alien. Which was ironic, considering the circumstances. Nabiki’s eyes shot sparks. “What did you say to him?” she demanded.
I was trembling from the experience. I understood hardly any of what just happened. “I said nothing.”
Nabiki frowned and then gently put her hand on the back of Otto’s neck. He sighed, and the troubled look faded a bit from his eyes. Nabiki frowned again, but this time more chagrined. “Sorry,” she said to me. “I thought you’d been rude to him.”
I shook my head. “Never,” I said earnestly. His circum-stances horrified me, but he didn’t.
I tried to find what I needed to say. “If what you say is true, and somehow I’ve inherited you and your family . . .” I hesitated a moment and took a breath. It was so horrific a thought, akin to human slavery. “I swear to you, the moment I come into my inheritance, I’ ll — I don’t know —give you back to yourself or something. Sign the rights over. I don’t know how it works. But I’m so sorry.”
Nabiki smiled. “He says thank you. It isn’t your fault.” She hesitated, her brow furrowing. “He’s sorry about this. But, ah, if you don’t mind, he doesn’t plan on touching you again.” She turned to Otto, confused. “Really?” she asked. Otto slightly lifted one hand, either a shrug or a signal to go on.
Nabiki tossed her head. “Okay.” She turned back to me. “He says there are too many . . . ‘gaps’ in your mind. Too much space. He nearly got lost.” She shrugged. “ Sorry—what he thinks doesn’t always translate perfectly into language. What does he mean by gaps?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, but I was afraid I did. Stass had been a series of breaks in my life. I stared at Nabiki. She seemed like a perfectly ordinary girl, Japanese descent, expensive earrings, fashionable haircut, but whatever relationship she had with this strange semi- alien- being spoke of a hidden depth to her. “Are you two . . . ?”
“Together?” Nabiki said, indulgently embarrassed. “Well, yeah.”
Otto turned his head deliberately to her and flashed his hint of a smile.
“What are you . . . ?” I realized Otto wouldn’t answer. “What is he doing when he . . . does that?”
Nabiki shrugged. “No one really knows all of it. Somehow he’s able to manipulate the electronic impulses in your brain so you can think what he wants you to think. He can’t control your actions or feelings or anything, though. It only touches surface thoughts. Apparently those little microbes on Europa have some kind of rudimentary communication via electro impulse, probably for breeding purposes. It came out in Otto like this.”
“Can all your family do that?” I asked.
Otto shook his head slightly, then glanced at Nabiki, who took his hand again.
“Only one other of the . . .” She seemed to find the sub-ject dif ficult, too. “The four,” she finished. “And then three of the simple ones, but they don’t think very clearly, so it’s pretty useless.” She glanced at Otto’s expressionless face. “It breaks his heart.”
“All right, that’s enough drama,” said Bren. “Speaking of which, Ani, you doing drama this year?”
I was too shaken by my encounter with Otto to concen-trate. I tried for a few more bites of my meal before the tone sounded to send me back to class. As everyone stood up from the table, I caught Otto staring at me. I had the unnerving sensation that he was staring right through me, as if I were some magical creature made of glass. He blinked when he caught me looking back at him, and then he hurried to catch up to Nabiki.
What had he seen in my mind that scared him so?
My first afternoon at school went no better than the morning. Elementary astrophysics might as well have been graduate- school advanced theories, for all the sense it made to me. An hour later I trudged into my math class, and an hour after that I scurried out as fast as I could, unable to make head nor tails of it.
Then came history. My teacher began a brief overview of the first twenty years I had missed, and I was suddenly glad I’d been stassed through it.
The Dark Times came less than two years after I went into stass. I had assumed it was some kind of economic depression, which it was, to an extent.
But the biggest problems had not been with the money.
I spent the class tying the facts that Ms. Holland was telling me —population statistics and weather patterns and economic fluctuations — to the events of my elongated childhood. It was quite gruesome, and I couldn’t help but feel that I — or at least the structure of my parents’ corporate society —had been deeply responsible for much of it. Likely, this class was intended as a warning to the children of the high echelons to avoid the mistakes of the past. But to me it still felt like the present — my time, my generation’s mistakes. Revulsion and guilt stabbed through me the entire hour.
The first factor that lead to the Dark Times was a steady population increase, which had been building for two hundred years. I’d seen that. There wasn’t space for anyone when I was young. Even the wealthy had to abandon the concept of vast estates and settle into controlled gated communities, like ComUnity and Unicorn.
The next was an economic boom leading to widening gaps between the rich and the poor. I’d noticed that, too. The poor starved, while my family bought me designer mink coats when I was three and had a private state-of-the-art stass tube for me, worth the whole of Unicorn Estates together.
Some years before I was stassed, there had been a few seasons of dif ficult weather, due to a climate shift instigated by some volcanoes. This was no one’s fault, exactly. There was a food shortage, which did result in a lot of deaths, I recalled, but mostly in marginalized countries. It hadn’t touched our family.
The first sign that things were really going wrong was the resurgence of tuberculosis. It had begun in prisons, where inmates’ health had not been carefully monitored. A resistant strain had developed in one prison in the South, and the habits of prisoner transfers and recidivism was such that before long, most of the prisons in half the countries in the world were riddled with TB. Countries with a high percentage of prisoners were particularly vulnerable.
The disease wasn’t caught before many prisoners had been released into the general population without adequate health care.
It spread. Newborns, the poor who suffered from malnutrition, all those with reduced immunity were susceptible. This included any HIV victims who hadn’t received the vaccine in time, which meant half of Africa. It also included many of the affluent, among them millions who had been promised an extended life by having their organs regrown from stem cells and transplanted. TB spread unchecked for a few years before anyone noticed what was going on. Most people didn’t realize when they had a cough that it was anything serious, and some of the carriers showed no symptoms at all.
They were instigating a series of mandatory TB status clinics all around the planet when I was put into stass. They seemed to have the tuberculosis under control when the next plague hit.
It really was the next plague, and not just a figure of speech. Bubonic plague resurfaced, in New York, two years after I was stassed. I was already cringing in horror from hearing of the TB deaths in Africa when Ms. Holland brought in the effects of this next plague on top of it, and I swear my heart stopped. When the tone sounded, Ms. Holland told us that the rest of the over-view of the Dark Times would have to wait until next class.
I was not looking forward to it.
I dreaded hearing what had happened to everyone I loved. My mother and father, my beloved Xavier. Knowing they were dead was one thing. Knowing the details was harder to stomach.
Fortunately, the school day was over. I climbed into the limoskiff that Mr.
Guillory had arranged for me. I rather wished I could have taken the public solarskimmer with Bren and a handful of others, but I didn’t want to scorn Mr.
Guillory’s offerings. He was my executor, after all. He should know what was best for me.
It took me some minutes to realize that my limoskiff had settled beside my condo. The skiff’s ride was so smooth that I hadn’t even noticed it had stopped.
I really liked these new hover boats. I was told that the technology was barely thirty years old, but it had already replaced pretty much every land vehicle on the planet. They had been designed to skim over the water, to be used in swampy areas, such as the Everglades, but those who had them thought them so wonderful they continued to use them on land. It saved wear on the roads, and without friction and drag wearing on the machine, it was cheap and easy to power them on solar energy.
Oddly, the hover boat companies were one business on which UniCorp had no monopoly. The corporation had tried buying out each of the manufacturers in turn, but the solar battery that ran the boats was public domain. It had been depatented during the Dark Times so that isolated areas could create their own renewable power. According to Guillory, it had proved dangerous to use NeoFusion to power the vehicles. NeoFusion™ reactors became very volatile when the protective casing was damaged. While it wasn’t radioactive or inherently deadly —NeoFusion being the “safe, clean alternative” to almost all power needs —if involved in a crash, it almost invariably resulted in a fire, due to massive amounts of lost heat. Using solar power on the skimmers made them in finitely safer, and they were so convenient and elegant that UniCorp hadn’t been able to bury them with competitors. Thus they were free from UniCorp’s intrigues.
The boats did have one flaw — also their strength —in that they could travel over anything. The transportation commission had to create magnetic barriers that prevented the boats from passing over roads and onto pedestrian areas.
All roads now had red- and- yellow magnetic curbs, and those UniCorp did have a monopoly on. Guillory had made a joke when he explained all this: “If you can’t beat ’em, box ’em.” UniCorp contained all their competition, one way or another.
I crawled my way out of the skiff, over the red- and- yellow curb. My limoskiff turned on its cushion of air and headed off to the garage. I dragged myself through the corridors to my condo. I pressed my hand to the antiquated fingerprint pad, and the door opened. I wondered if the old print pad still had a record of Xavier’s fingerprints, as it had had before I was stassed. Apparently most doors opened to retinal scan now.
When I opened the door, I heard a noise. Patty and Barry weren’t supposed to be home until after five: they both worked in the accounting department of the Uni Building. I swallowed. “Hello?” I called out. No response. My parents’
training of hypervigilance and paranoia burbled in the back of my mind, and I poked my head around the corner, prepared to run in the opposite direction if the noise proved to be a threat.
It was not. A leash tied to the door handle of my studio was attached to a dog.
And not just any dog. This was a tall, silky- furred Afghan, his hair the same soft blond as my own. He stood up when he saw me, wagging his tail. I fell to my knees, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. With a digni fied whine, the dog pushed his long nose to my cheeks and began to lick my face.
My stass- weakened eyes filled with tears, this time out of joy. It was the best feeling in the world to come home to something soft and friendly, something to love me unconditionally. And this wasn’t just a dog. He was an Afghan, the prince of dogs, the four- legged human! My fingers laced in his silky fur, and I felt a piece of paper hanging by a string from his collar. I lifted it up, wiping the tears from my eyes to read it. for rose on her first day of school.
I sniffed. It must have come from Mr. Guillory. Or maybe Patty and Barry had arranged to have him delivered. Mrs. Sabah? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
“You’re beautiful!” I told the dog. “The most beautiful dog in the world. So I’m giving you the most beautiful name: Zavier.”
Zavier panted and licked my face again. Even school didn’t seem like such an ordeal, not as long as I could have my Zavier waiting for me at home.
I’d always wanted a dog, ever since I was a kid. The closest I’d had wasn’t even mine. It was Xavier’s, and in truth, it wasn’t even a dog.
...
I was fourteen, and Xavier was my best friend. He’d asked me over to his condo to look at his new toy.
It was a little black box. It looked a bit like a cell. It didn’t strike me as being anything that would cause Xavier’s green eyes to brighten with such enthusiasm, but he was showing it to me as proudly as if it were the doorway to enlightenment. “What is it?”
Xavier pressed a button on the side, and a Doberman suddenly appeared the middle of the room. “Here, boy!” Xavier said, snapping his fingers, and the dog obediently strode up to him and panted, his head to one side. “Isn’t it neat?” he said. “It’s a holographic dog. They had them at the computer expo. Call him; he’ll come to you. It has programmed reactions just like a real dog. It’ll react to everything you say, and it knows a thousand tricks. Speak, boy!”
The dog sat down obediently and barked twice.
“Why didn’t they program it to speak English?” I asked.
“Because then it wouldn’t be a dog,” Xavier said, as if it were obvious.
“It’s still not a dog. What’s the point of a dog if you can’t pet it?”
Xavier shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just cool. It has settings for more than a hundred different breeds, and the behavior modes for all of them.” Xavier was poking at the controls on the box. The Doberman switched to a Dalmatian and then to a dachshund. “What breed should I set it to?”
“An Afghan,” I said without hesitation. He poked at the controls until a regal, silky- furred Afghan stood in the middle of the room. It barked.
“There,” Xavier said. “I think I can figure out how to hack it into the touch pad for our door. I can get it to bark at anyone who enters.”
“A real dog would do that, too.”
“Yeah, but my mom’s allergic. Come on! You have to admit it’s a cool tech.”
I perched on a stool and snapped my fingers. The holo-graphic dog looked at me and then sauntered over, his ears pricked. “I will grant you that.” I passed my hand through its head and waved it at Xavier. “Still would be better if you could pet it.”
Xavier shook his head. “I don’t get you. I thought you liked dogs.”
“I love dogs. That’s how I know this isn’t one.”
“If you love dogs so much, how come you won’t get one of your own?”
It had been a bit of an issue in the past, when I’d picked up runaway dogs from other members of Unicorn and played with them for hours, keeping them from their owners. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
I sighed. My parents were scheduled to oversee the coordination of the Luna colony, and they were going to be gone for months. “You remember that gazelle I had when I was eight?”
Xavier shook his head. “I was two. How could I remember?”
“Oh. Well, anyway, I had this gazelle. The stables took care of it for me, but it died while Mom and Daddy were on vacation, and I wasn’t there. I felt awful about that. I’d hate to do that to a dog.”
“I could take care of it while you were sleeping,” Xavier said. “I’m sure my mom wouldn’t mind, not if it was Mr. Fitzroy’s.”
I shook my head. “No. I’d hate it if I ever had to really be away from Mom and Daddy, and that’s what I’d be doing. I wouldn’t want to pop in and out of a dog’s life like that. He wouldn’t understand.”
Xavier grunted. “Forget the dog —hell, I’m human. I barely understand, and you’re my best friend.”
I frowned at that. “Don’t you have friends at your school?”
“Of course I do, but they’re not you. Besides, they all tease me for having a name like Xavier, even the guys who say they’re my friends. They call me ‘ X-man’ and say things like, ‘Exactly, Xavier!’ and ‘Are you doing extra credit, Xavier?’ I don’t even pronounce the damned X, but they all do.”
“Well, Zavier,” I said, pronouncing it how he liked it. “Tell them to stop.”
He shrugged. “They’re guys. You can’t stop ’em. It doesn’t matter. You’d never do something like that. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to go to the same schools you do. You and I have always been best friends.”
It hadn’t occurred to me before. I’d always thought of him like a little brother, but now that our ages were pretty close together, he was much more like a friend. “You are my best friend,” I admitted. “Come to think of it, you’re my only friend.”
He scoffed. “Now, I know that’s not true.”
“It is, you know,” I said. I didn’t know why I didn’t feel sad about that. I got off my stool and joined Xavier at the table. I reached up to ruffle his hair. As long as I knew he’d be there in the next condo, tearing some computer apart, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have anyone else.
“Come on,” Xavier said, cringing away from my maternal tousle. “I’ll bet you’ve got lots of friends.”
“Not really. You know Mom doesn’t approve of any of the kids at school, and she doesn’t like me going out without her.” I frowned. “I’ve never had any other friends. Not since the caretaker’s daughter when I was little.”