Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (18 page)

“What the heck is
tha
t?” asked Patrick, for the first time noticing the gleaming, gold-leafed Egyptian-style pyramid set in the obsidian-walled tub in the middle of the floor.

“An award fountain,” said Kempton. “Want to see it run?”

“Uh, sure,” said Patrick.

“Fountain on!” Kempton commanded. There was a humming noise as the capstone lifted into the air on a jet of water. Jade-green eyes—one on each of its four sides—opened and seemed to track the two boys as the piece slowly rotated.

“What the heck is it for?” said Patrick, fascinated.

“It's our YSS award for best test scores in the prefecture.”

“YSS?”

“Unified Society of Science,” said Kempton. “Don't tell me you don't have YSS on Earth?”

“Well,” said Patrick testily, “at least we don't have spy-cams in our locker rooms.”

“We don't have spy-cams in
our
locker rooms,” sputtered Kempton, “or in
any
private areas! In fact, we aren't even allowed to use our binkies in such places!”

“Well, la-di-da,” muttered Patrick; it was one of Eva's favorite retorts.

Kempton gave him a hateful look and crossed his arms.

Patrick closed his eyes, leaned his head against the wall, and concentrated on the throbbing in his bruised nose. A door creaked and he opened an eye to see Kempton leaping to his feet for another impassioned salute.

“Please come on in and sit,” said Provost Bostrel with all the exuberance of a telephone menu. Patrick followed Kempton into an office appointed in mahogany, velvet, and brass, illuminated by a single massive floor-to-ceiling window that looked out upon a vast field of amber grain in which, maybe a hundred yards distant, a green flag—the spider-and-stop-sign logo he'd seen on people's uniforms—fluttered atop a slender white pole.

From what Patrick had seen so far of the school and its surroundings—the trees, hills, winding streets, bleachers, and ball fields—this flat, sunny sea of wheat seemed out of place. He had an impulse to ask about it but stopped himself. It was his dream, after all, and, if things didn't make sense, there was nobody to blame but himself.

Following Kempton's lead, he sat in one of the wingback chairs across from the provost's stately, richly grained desk.

“Care to try my nuts?” asked the man, pushing an
inRi
-logoed snack bowl across the desk.

“Oooh!” said Kempton. “They're at the
height
of ripeness!”

Patrick's stomach did a little flip-flop. He'd never much cared for nuts but there was something especially creepy about these ones. They were big as Brazils but paler, and fleshy-looking. He shook his head.

“Are they from the new hydroponic facility in Farmington?” asked Kempton.

“Umm, yes,” replied the big-nosed man, preoccupied with his binky.

Kempton grabbed a handful and—before stuffing them into his mouth—explained, “Farmington has one of the most advanced agricultural laboratories in the world—this new strain of water chestnuts is one of the very latest cultivars. Our gen techs are amazing!”

“Jentex?” asked Patrick.

“The
gen
etic
tech
nicians in the Bureau of Comestibles,” said Kempton.

“Oh,” said Patrick. “I thought you told me one of your rules was you aren't supposed to do genetic stuff?”

“Ha!” snorted Kempton. “At least here on Ith, water chestnuts come from
plants
, which are
not
creatures. So, no, we have absolutely no prohibitions about genetically altering plants. Nor, for that matter, are there any issues with harvesting or
eating
them.”

“Just no meat or fish?” asked Patrick.

“Nor other vertebrates, invertebrates, protists, or motile bacteria.”

“What about mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms—fungi—are not considered creatures, either. Do you consider them so on Earth?”

Patrick shook his head. “So, like, you're all basically vegetarians.”

Provost Bostrel looked up from his binky and raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, you don't eat any meat,” explained Patrick.

Bostrel returned his eyebrow and turned his attention back to his screen.

“Most of us,” said Kempton, “consume—in various forms—all manner of unfertilized eggs, dairy products, fungi, vegetables, fruits, saps, cotyledons, and endosperm.”

“Okay,” said Patrick, and then, though he instantly regretted having done so, asked, “And what's endo—umm—sperm?”

“Um, the nutritive part of a
seed
,” said Kempton.

“And what was the thing you said before that?” asked Patrick.

“Cotyledons are the ‘seed-leaves' of a nut or seed. Sometimes, as in walnuts, they are even the dominant caloric feature.”

“And you don't eat meat because it's against the law to harm animals?”

“Yes—what, are you
obsessed
with Tenet Ten? Also, eating meat is highly inefficient. To say nothing of the cruelty involved, the energy and resource requirements to develop a kilogram of meat are tens or even hundreds of times what is required to generate a kilogram of equally nutritive plant-based product.”

“Oh,” said Patrick. He wondered what kind of reaction he might get for admitting he'd eaten beef, lamb, ham, chicken, turkey, and—once, memorably on account of how his face had swelled up like a balloon and he'd been taken to the emergency room—a fried clam (that vacation day on Cape Cod having been the day his shellfish allergy had been discovered).

On the whole, he was just glad this was a dream because he'd surely miss his two favorite foods—bacon and cheeseburgers—very, very much if he had to live forever in a world in which they were forbidden.

Another thought struck him: “What about the eyeball in the camera?”

“What do you mean?” asked Kempton.

“I mean that was a real eyeball—don't you kind of have to hurt something in order to take its eye and stick it in a camera?”

Kempton started to laugh but the provost once again looked up from his binky.

“Vitrogenics,” said the provost.

“Sorry?”

“Laboratory-based tissue generation. What do you call it on Earth?”

“You grow eyeballs in labs?” asked Patrick, his stomach flip-flopping some more.

“Well, we can't break the Twelve Tenets,” said the provost. “So of course we have to generate our own utility organs. Are you saying you don't have vitrogenic technology on Earth?”

Patrick was pretty sure he would have heard of people growing eyeballs in labs if that was a thing, and shook his head.

The provost's binky beeped for his attention and Kempton was already looking at his, so Patrick looked down at his own. He decided to look up the Twelve Tenets that people kept talking about.

Now that it was displaying in regular English, it was much easier to use.

The Twelve Tenets of Rex Abraham

  1. Promote order.

  2. Combat entropy.

  3. Shun the sickness of uncertainty.

  4. Resist the contagion of complacency.

  5. Conserve resources.

  6. Respect directives.

  7. Achieve measurable productivity in all tasks.

  8. Seek all actionable knowledge.

  9. Provide all actionable knowledge to your admins.

10. Do not harm the flesh of any living creature.

11. Do not alter the flesh of any living creature.

12. Disobey the Minder's emissaries in nothing.

“Patrick,” said the Provost abruptly, “I don't suppose you've had any recollection about your Hearer yet?”

Patrick shook his head.

“No,” said the man, squinting his eyes and looking back down at his screen.

“So, was that a
human
eye?” asked Patrick.

“What, in the camera?” asked Kempton, raising his binky in front of his face. “It's a modified
squid
eye. Probably
Onykia ingens
. Here, I'll do a rezref.” He read aloud from his binky, “‘Deep-water squid possess some of the most supreme light-gathering organs in the animal kingdom and, with appropriate modifications to the lens and the introduction of avian cone cells for red-spectrum and high-definition viewing, they make ideal—'”

“Thank you, Kempton,” sighed Provost Bostrel.

“‘The most impressive model currently in production,'” continued Kempton, “‘is the civic broadcast camera SBK43. It employs an
Architeuthis
vitroplant.'”

Patrick didn't know many scientific names but he at least recognized the single one his brother knew—
Architeuthis
, the giant squid. Patrick had been forced to watch more
Search for the Giant Squid
documentaries on TV than he could count. He didn't quite get the fascination—and it had always seemed pretty odd to him how there could be so many nature specials about an animal that had only once or twice been seen alive (and then by a robotic camera)—but he had to admit he preferred watching them to ESPN, which otherwise was Neil's top choice.

“You don't recall this technology from Earth, either?” asked the provost. “What about organ or limb replacement?”

“Limb replacement? You mean, if you lose an arm here, you can get a new one?”

“Yes,” said the provost. “Provided it was purely accidental and that the replacement is generated from your own Minder-decreed genetic map—and is in no way augmented or altered—a
replacement
is not an
alteration
of the flesh.”

“So the new arm couldn't be stronger or longer than the one you lost?” asked Patrick.

“Precisely right.”

“That's amazing,” said Patrick. “So people aren't in wheelchairs or anything?”

“Wheelchairs?”

“You don't have people who can't walk on Ith?”

“Can't walk?” asked Bostrel, as if he hadn't heard correctly.

“People they can't fix after an accident or that maybe were born without legs or something…”

“What's a wheelchair?” asked Kempton. “A chair with casters that you can roll around?”

“Never mind,” said Patrick. “What about blind people? And deaf people?”

“Accidental blindness or deafness,” explained the provost, “can be redressed.
Any
deficiency that comes about due to external influence can most always be reversed.”

“So you're saying that only if you are born with it—”

“Yes, and then only if it came about from
non-external
factors.”

“That's amazing,” said Patrick, thinking of all the people on Earth whose lives could be helped if this weren't all a dream and they could come here.

“Well,” said Provost Bostrel, looking up from a message he'd received on his binky. “It has been suggested we show you Rex's wikimentary.”

“What's a wikimentary?”

“
This
is a wikimentary,” said Bostrel, standing and moving to one side so that he wouldn't block the window, which Patrick now realized was rather part of the highest-resolution, most realistic-looking 3D display he'd ever seen in his whole life.

“Begin Rex Abraham: Edit twelve point seventeen,” said the Provost.

The flag and field disappeared, as did the entire office wall—and much of the ceiling and floor. Speakers pumped the room full of studio silence and the remains of the room descended into inky darkness.

 

CHAPTER 28

Sunshower

The Griffin and Tondorf-Schnittman twins stood at the mouth of the garage, staring into the damp gray woods past the driveway. A tiny slate-colored junco hopped among the leaves.

“Bird!” yelled Paul Griffin.

He took off in a purposeful if somewhat unsteady sprint. His three comrades laughingly followed. The sun was breaking through from the east and—had they not been so transfixed by Paul's chase—they might have noticed a rainbow arcing across the sky behind them.

The Griffin parents joked that their oldest son, Neil, was part Labrador for the way he chewed up his lacrosse mouthguards. Lately, they had also begun to joke that their youngest son, Paul, was part bird dog. The boy had chased birds since he'd been old enough to run. It was cute on most levels—and it certainly seemed to have helped him become a very fast little boy. But especially when a seagull was loitering across a parking lot, a crow was perched on the other side of a stream, a sparrow was hopping down the middle of the bike path, or a pigeon was strutting along the curb of a busy street, it could create stressful situations for his parents.