Authors: Susan Juby
“Come on, Bright!” Fon yelled. “The House of It is waiting and we can’t be late! We’re coming and we’re bringing a light-altered favour, which is, like, proprietary to the House of It! Don’t worry about them.” She jerked a thumb at the
bodies strewn about the room. “They’ll all be back better than ever at some point!”
Suddenly, the girl was practically as strong as a badak, the sturdily built horned creatures famous on H51 for using the Mothers’ pyramids to test the astonishing strength of their shoulders. The constant ramming of the leathery grey brutes into the pyramids made them the bane of many a Mother’s existence.
Bright grabbed the helmet and turned to stare at Grassly, as though waiting for him to ask for it again. He decided she might need it.
“Briiiiight,” came Fon’s voice from the hallway. “I can’t do this on my own
forever
!”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Be safe.”
“So there’s no chance the light in the helmet will alter us?” Bright said at last.
“You appear to be immune.”
She made a noise that sounded like
pffft.
But she stuffed the helmet into her parachute bag and rushed out of the room. Music crawled out of the speakers, and the fun pipes hung uselessly from the walls, emitting faint hissing noises and giving off intermittent whiffs of mind-altering gases.
Grassly looked around at the carnage. Sleek, slender favours lay half in and half out of their settle chairs. The pair of PS officers sprawled on the floor like a single black-limbed creature. At this rate, there wouldn’t be any ancestors left to save, enlightened or otherwise.
“So awesome!” said Bright as they carried Slater past the greeter at the door. She was a different girl than the one who’d welcomed them on arrival.
“Best time!” added Fon, unwilling to let Bright sound more positive.
“Thanks!” they said together as they pushed through the door without slowing.
The greeter took two steps toward them, but they were gone before she could say anything.
Outside, Bright gulped the soft, quiet air. She wasn’t high anymore. Too bad. High was quite a bit better than scared and grossed out. Not to mention worried. She was pretty sure she was worried, too.
Worst mind alter ever. If their room wasn’t so full of bodies, she might have been tempted to ask for her credits back.
She was distracted from those unhappy thoughts by other unhappy thoughts about her cart. It was small. Slater was not. He was as broad across the shoulders as Bright and Fon combined. His legs were long and sculpted. His feet, clad in bright blue flip-flops, appeared too big to fit in
the available space in the floor well of the cart. Though he seemed increasingly able to stand on his own, she didn’t see how they were going to get him inside. “He won’t fit,” said Bright.
Fon craned her head around Slater’s broad chest to look at her. “We haven’t even tried.”
“Fine. You get him in there, then.” Bright was aware that she sounded unpleasant, but she wasn’t sorry.
“Rude,” grumbled Fon.
Favours were trained to compete with each other, but they were also trained to appear to get along. Bright was surprised by how good it felt to snipe openly.
Slater’s head lolled, but Bright could feel his arm, warm and heavy across her back, and his fingers wrapped around her shoulder.
“Slater?” she said, pushing herself out from under him so she could look into his face.
“No time for talk,” said Fon. She ducked out from under Slater’s other arm. He swayed on the sidewalk. Before he could fall, Fon used her excellent client management skills to get the cart door open and began shoving him inside, headfirst, like an overstuffed prize from Gaming.
“Not so hard!” said Bright. “You’ll hurt him. He’ll hit his head.”
“As if
that
would make a difference,” said Fon. She pushed Slater’s shoulder past the spot where he’d gotten stuck between the two rounded seats.
Some instinct made Bright look down the street. Two PS officers marched toward them. The turtlenecked figures
were about a block and a half away and moving fast. Both had their releasers out.
“More PS officers are coming!” Bright yelled.
“They probably want to make sure I’m okay,” said Fon.
At Bright’s look, she corrected herself.
“Sorry. I was being how I am. Correcting course now. Check! Ten-four!” At points of high excitement, Fon tended to lapse into antique trucker talk, which she’d learned while playing Big Rig, a transport truck stop game in which the player drove for hours along a virtual highway while talking to other gamers.
Bright ran around to the driver’s side, squeezed herself under Slater’s head and started the engine. She waited impatiently for Fon to get in, which took an agonizingly long time because, once again, Fon’s dress and halo got caught. Slater’s legs and feet extended far out the open passenger door.
“Hurry!” Bright urged.
Fon wrenched her beaded dress free and heaved herself on top of Slater’s prone body. Beads skittered all over the road and clattered onto the floor of the cart as Bright peeled away from the curb.
Bright was too frightened to look into the rear-view mirror, but panting and rapid footfalls told her the PS officers were nearly on them. And to think she used to want
more
PS staff around her!
She heard yelling and thudding as the officers stepped on the beads and went down like an old joke. Bright ground the pedal into the floor, and the cart shook with effort and
accelerated slightly until they were doing fifteen miles an hour, which was the top speed of a mid-credit cart. The sounds faded away.
They’d made it two blocks when Bright noticed a low groaning noise.
Slater.
She looked down. His clear blue eyes stared directly up at her from her lap.
“Bright,” he said.
“I’m here.” Her relief reminded her of the way she felt when she woke from surgery, all empty and new.
“Bright,” he repeated.
Splitting her focus between him and the road ahead, Bright repeated her assurances. Then she realized he wasn’t really looking at her. He was staring at something only he could see. Whatever that light did must feel so good. Why did she have to be immune? She would love to be as high as Slater. Maybe once she was promoted to It, the light would start to work on her. Maybe they would adjust it so she’d get some crawling-around time.
Her foot eased off the pedal at the thought.
“Hey, we’ve got one of the top Surf look guys in the cart, and it would be so cool if we could drive into the Natural Experience with a board or two,” said Fon. “Maybe we could borrow bikinis from the community bin at Slater’s house. That would totally blow everyone away.”
Slater’s head was very heavy. Bright worried about his neck. The edge of the steering wheel kept grazing his cheekbone.
“No,” protested Bright. “It’s not safe.”
“There are probably other favours being tested by It. There are probably other favours with lights and light-altered people heading to the Natural Experience right now,” said Fon. “We need the edge that only a fully developed look can give. If there’s one thing I know, and I know a lot of things, it’s success and competitive edges and stuff.”
They were only a few blocks from the Natural Experience, which lay at the edge of Mind Alter at the far western edge of the Store. The streets around the Natural Experience ran through a maze of empty lots that butted up against the membrane that divided the Experience from the rest of the Store. The low Mind Alter buildings lay behind them. No one wanted to build anything too close to the least fun area in the Entertainment Zone.
“Slater isn’t even all the way
in
the cart,” said Bright. “Don’t you think getting his feet inside matters more than trying to make our outfits match him?”
“No. I don’t think that. The best look would be Sun-Stroked Surf Kids. It would help explain why he’s lying down. But to pull it off, we need the boards.”
They were almost at the gates. The Natural Experience was the only gated area in the Entertainment Zone. A rubbery black membrane—the same material as the skin that covered the Store, but thinner—separated the Experience from the rest of the Store. It rose high into the air, almost to the roof. A thin strip of strange light glowed unhealthily at the top of the barrier. Bright felt sickness rise in her stomach and up her throat. The Natural Experience was like
a living thing behind that barrier, with its strange light and unsettling
naturalness
everywhere. No wonder no one ever willingly spent their credits there.
She pulled the cart up close behind four buses packed with children, heading into the Natural Experience for educational tours. The buses hid the cart from the view of anyone standing at the gate.
Bright edged the little cart around the side of a bus so she could get a look at the gate. At least four PS officers stood at the entrance. Several more surrounded the first bus in the lineup.
What had the strange PS officer said? They shouldn’t let anyone know they were from the House of Gear? Her sand cart’s adverpanels clearly said “House of Gear.” And she carried a parachute bag, which everyone knew was a popular accessory at the House of Gear right now.
She gritted her teeth, then put the cart in reverse, turned it around, and drove away as unobtrusively as possible considering the long pair of legs jutting out the open door.
“You’re making the right decision,” said Fon. “Better to have no look than a half-finished one.”
Fon couldn’t have been comfortable sitting on Slater’s thighs with her legs pinned against the dash, but she appeared perfectly satisfied. “Don’t worry about being late,” she said. “We’ll make up for the lost time with cute accessories.”
When Grassly’s Mother had realized the extent of his interest in the ancestors, she’d told him that, yes, they were fine dancers and that, at one time, they were powerfully motivated by love, just like 51s. Unfortunately, their drive for material and emotional security and short-term gains had eradicated their compassion for one another. That, she said, was their great tragedy and the lesson for 51s, who’d been lucky enough to be given a second chance. The only words Grassly had heard were “second chance” and “dancers.”
Looking around the body-strewn VIP mind alter room after the three favours left, Grassly had started to second-guess himself. Perhaps, instead of focusing on light-induced migration, he should have learned how to trigger the ancestors’ love instincts. But once he’d begun the unpleasant chore of dragging the bodies into the supply closet, he quickly revised that opinion. Considering how easily they killed each other, it seemed impossible that the ancestors could be deeply influenced by anything so reasonable as love or compassion.
Now he stood in the midst of another gathering of PS staff, awaiting yet another update from the commander. This time, the commander had summoned the PS staff from the entire Partytainment District.
The assembled officers had begun to radiate thoughtless aggression. So many turtlenecks. Part of Grassly wished he’d gone undercover among the gamers. They got to wear those shiny shirts and fetching vests. Unfortunately, he was too tall and broad across the shoulders to pass as a gamer.
When the commander strode to the front of the room, he appeared even more puffed up than he had during the first meeting. Grassly read in the man’s posture, voice, and heart rate a deep agitation. He also noticed that the man’s left hand twitched spasmodically and that he kept it tucked behind his back, a gesture that made him look much older than his twenty or so years. He was trying to hide signs of biological degradation.
Grassly didn’t want to get caught studying the commander too closely, so he perused the room instead. They were in the Deep Sea Dance Bar in the House of Splash. The top half of the room was painted sky blue, and lights embedded in the ceiling directed wavy beams toward the floor, like sun penetrating water. The lower part of the room shaded toward darkest blue, and small projectors embedded in the walls sent images of deep-water creatures of the kind that used to inhabit Earth’s oceans (and that still swam in H51's clear, deep waters) swimming through the air so that they seemed to brush the dancers. It was
a marvellous effect. Grassly had spent many invigorating hours watching dancers in the Deep Sea Dance Bar. That was how he’d learned the riptide and injured a hamstring trying to do the bottom feeder scuttle.
Of course, there were no dancers in the Deep Sea Dance Bar right now. All House of Splash personnel had been confined to quarters while the PS staff met.
The commander’s voice was a croak, but none among the assembled seemed to notice.
“Two of the favours who worked the third shift at the House of Gear have disappeared. They have taken with them all the other favours in their leisure unit. We now consider all favours from the House of Gear, the House of Boards, the House of Splash, the House of Office, and the House of Bends potentially compromised. It is likely that favours in those houses have become carriers of the infection that has begun to spread across the Entertainment Zone.”
The PS officers, row upon row of them, stood in perfect silence.
Grassly could only imagine how stressful it was for the commander to stand in front of so many mirrored dataglasses, so many releasers, while displaying obvious signs of degeneration. No wonder the man’s heart raced.
“The Board of Deciders has asked me to use my discretion in this matter.”
Grassly had to stop himself from protesting. He had programmed the feed to alert him to any information issued from the Headquarters, and the Board had done no such thing. “I have decided—”
Grassly noted the choice of verb. Subtle, but effective. The commander was making a power play.
“—on the Board’s behalf that, since the House of Splash appears to have been the scene of more anomalous events than any other location, we will release all the favours in this house to be sure we’ve contained the problem.”
Grassly’s mind raced. He’d tried to spread his experiments around. Only one House of Splash favour had … reacted badly. The commander was lying again. Or his ability to add properly was profoundly impaired. There was no reason to kill everyone in this house!