Beat (4 page)

“Hey,” I said.

“Mr. Nikolas.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mr. Brenkolas.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Bren laughed.

“No. It’s ri-brenkolas.”

We both burst into laughter. “Good one,” Bren said.

“As usual.”

“So,” Bren said after a minute. “I didn’t ask earlier. How was your paste?”

“Pastey. Paste-olas?” He knew I hated the stuff.

“Let it go, Nik.” Bren’s laughter came through his fake anger. “You ever wonder what an apple tastes like?”

“Every day.”

“Frag it. I wonder what sweet stuff tastes like,” Bren said. A light click sounded. “Pol, any guess what sweet stuff tastes like?”

I waited for Pol to respond. He was one of the group of Pushers and probably the smartest person I’d ever met. Only silence came over the EarCom.

“Must be fiddling around on that work table of his,” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe even took out his EarCom so he wouldn’t be interrupted,” Bren said. Another click sounded and I heard Bren whisper Koner’s name. Then, “Koner, you there?”

“Yup.” Koner’s quiet voice slid into my ear. “Is anyone else pretty much always hungry?”

Bren and I broke out in laughter again. Koner never thought about anything but food. The poor kid never got enough. He even snuck other kids’ protein paste sometimes. “That’s what we were talking about,” Bren said.

“Yeah,” I said. “What do you think sweet stuff tastes like?”

“Who cares? We have a word for something we don’t have anymore, so it’s stupid and I need something to eat.”

Through his laughter, Bren shot back, “You could always eat your parents.”

“Bren, that’s disgusting,” I said.

The three of us chatted a little more, me venting at them about my transition from cool Rojer to Foolish Fil. After a while, we ran out of things to talk about. Besides, 22:30 was coming fast. Our EarComs went silent, but we all knew we would see each other later tonight.

Bren was the first person I’d told about Pushing. How I’d been late, pushed my heart rate to 135 and kept it there, and how I’d felt afterward.

So Pushing had been born. Some of my friends and I, along with others who sometimes showed up, met every couple of days between school and our shifts in the domes. We would push our heart rates, laughing when somebody got the knockout and hit the rough oxi-grass.

I checked the time on my Papa. My homework was done, so I still had a few hours to kill. Grabbing my zip from the chair, I dug into the pocket, found my old glue wad, and squeezed it between my Papa and my wrist. For a lot of reasons, I didn’t want the 22:30 knockout that everyone in New Frisko got. If I got the knockout, I’d for sure sleep through the meet-up tonight. Also, I hadn’t had the nightly knockout for—what was it?—months, I figured. Once I’d figured out that glue would absorb the tiny injection and I could stay up as late as I wanted, I hadn’t used the nightly knockout at all. It was a little victory, but I’d take it.

I lay on my bed, flicked my left wrist, and cued up a preloaded holo, projecting from my Papa. I tapped a spot on the Papa’s band and slid my vid-goggles back on. A holo-image appeared about twenty centimeters away from the goggles, nearly on my chest. I lifted my hands to the holo-image and fired the game up. 

The meet-up was still a few hours off, so I played the cycle racing game and let my thoughts wander.

My heart pumped at a steady seventy-five beats per minute. A little high, but I had it under control.

The clock on my nightstand told me it was time: 01:00. The entire city would be asleep now. Well, not quite.

I took a slow breath and sat up, pulling out the skinny glue wad between my wrist daddy and my skin. I’d be putting the new one in at the meet-up.

I imagined everyone in New Frisko falling asleep at the exact same time every night. Like programmed sheep. Sure, it was convenient and everybody got plenty of rest, but it felt like just another way the New Chapter controlled us. Pointless control, too. I hated that.

My glue wad gave me back some control. A little while after my fourteenth birthday, I’d figured out how to stop the nightly knockout without the Admins finding out. It had been a matter of sliding something skin-like between the Papa and my wrist so that the tiny needle didn’t break the skin of my wrist. I had used a thin wad of glue that first time. I’d experimented with lots of other things since then, like flattened bread and even cloth. The bread just crumbled, and the cloth wasn’t skin-like enough and had gotten me sent to the Dumps for a week. The glue worked best because it absorbed the tiny injection.

The fun didn’t last long since I was the only one I knew who was awake until late. So I had started trying to figure out how to block the tracker in my Papa. I’d never seen the tracker, but everyone knew it was in there since Enforsers could find you anywhere you went and identify you.

I dug the shallow plasteel cup out from under my bed, slid it over the top of the Papa’s face and pushed it down until it was snug. The tracker had to be using a radio frequency, so it had been a matter of lots of experiments to find the correct polymer mix of plasteel and charge its exactly right to block the signal.

This would work. I’d made one for Bren and the others who had agreed to meet me tonight. We could get out of our houses, do the experiment, and get home—all without anyone knowing we were gone. As far as the Admins would know, our signals would have faded out for a little while. That had to happen all the time due to interference.

Just as long as anybody monitoring the housing districts didn’t know we had left our houses. That was all that mattered.

Oh. And not dying from the Bug.

No. I’m not wrong.
I had to be right. I’d seen the signs of other people outside the city, traces left by people who I felt sure lived out there. Rumors of the Wanderers had always existed, and I knew I’d seen a trace or two of them. A piece of non-gray, non-ancient cloth hanging from a bush. The smell of a recent fire.

Wanderers didn’t have Papas. No Papa, no knockout. And without the knockout, there was no way they could survive if the Bug were still in the air.

I knew I was right. I felt the same way when I opened a piece of tek and could immediately figure out what each component did. The Bug had to be gone. The Admins, the Speekers, the Prime Administrator—they were all lying to us to keep us under control. To keep us from making the mistakes humans had made years ago.

I stretched, remembering my last experience with an unscheduled knockout. It still burned. Running in late and falling over the moment you got to class tended to make every kid in Level 6 laugh at you. And if you ended up with a long, red line on your forehead from where you’d hit the door on your way down, that didn’t help. I thought I could keep my heart rate under the 140 threshold, but lost focus as I got to the classroom door—the exact wrong moment. I woke up with a red line on my forehead with pain and embarrassment to match.

Stupid knockout.

Although that was also how I’d become friends with Bren. Until then, he’d just always been some kid in the same level as me. But that day I woke up and he was propping me up at my desk. “What are you doing?” I’d asked.

“Trying to help you not get another bruise like that,” Bren said, pointing at my forehead.

“Like what?”

Bren traced a line on his forehead. “Like the one that the doorway gave you when you hit it.” He was smiling but not laughing at me.

“Why?”

“Because two lines would make you look really, really stupid.” He raised his eyebrows, and his mouth quirked in a silly grin.

I had to laugh. “Stupider than getting hit by the knockout right when I was walking into the classroom?”

“Running. Okay, more like falling,” Bren corrected. “And yes.”

We both laughed. And became best friends. He had doubted the Bug was still around, but he wasn’t sure until I laid it all out: we lived a hundred years later, biotoxins couldn’t still be in the air after so long, everyone was pretty sure the Wanderers were real, and they didn’t have Papas to protect them.

I tossed the used wad of glue into the small trash chute next to my desk. Bren had pointed out the regular news reports about people still dying of the Bug. People who somehow avoided the knockout and “recklessly allowed their heart rates to pass the safe threshold.”

But I knew it had to be lies, and he had finally come around. And somehow, more people didn’t suspect that, didn’t hate life in New Frisko. All over the New Chapter, the surviving 10 percent of humanity lived in such fear—a hundred years later—that they just accepted what the Admins and the Papas said. I slid a finger under my Papa and yanked. Nope, stuck like always. Nobody I knew had ever gotten the thing off, but I’d heard that if you managed to get it off, the Enforsers would track you down and do something pretty awful to you.

I looked around my room, feeling the weight of the plasteel walls and grayness. I had to prove it was all lies. This life was so—
wrong
. More than wrong: fake. Artificial. No humans had ever lived like this ever, and we’d been fine. Yeah, up until the Bug had killed something like seven billion people, but the old way of living couldn’t have actually created the Bug. That didn’t make sense.

I sat up on my bed, the smart-fome firming up under me as my weight moved. Taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I breathed steadily, willing my heart to slow a little.

I was going to change things. If this worked—no,
when
this worked—I was going to be a hero.

I sat for a moment, wondering if I should have talked about tonight’s plan with my mom or dad.  If my plan went wrong, if me and my friends were totally wrong—No. I was right, but Mom and Dad toed the line. Happily. They might even report me to the Enforsers themselves. And if I died, my parents—could I do that to them? That would break my mom for sure.

My gut clenched. I had to do this. I had learned so much about the pre-Infektion world, knew I’d seen signs of the Wanderers, had studied the science of biotoxins and bacteria, and knew I was right.

I had to do this. Maybe when it worked, we could change things. Have music again. Or films.

I realized I was stalling, repeating myself. I gripped my bed and blew out a lungful of air. I slipped my feet into my shoes and stood, the loose smart-fabric tightening automatically all around my foot. Not too tight, but enough to provide support.

Grabbing my zip and pushing my arms through the sleeves, I crept to my door. I’d read that pre-Infektion houses had had windows that opened. If the windows in my room opened like those old ones, I could have slipped out the window and climbed down the tree next to our house. But no. Yet another restriction “in the interest of safety.” I cracked my door, stopping to listen for a few seconds. Total silence.

I pulled my zip closed and dropped the hood over my head while I crept down the hallway and stairs toward the front door. The gentle walking that the Fiz Ed teachers taught us from a young age helped—I’d been learning to walk quietly for years now, just like everyone else.

I pictured the metal car in the video clip I’d seen. Driving one of those everywhere must have been incredible.

Focus. I had to focus. First, I had to make it out the talkative front door. There was a sensor in the doorframe that kept track of our comings and goings. Otherwise, the smart house wouldn’t know to greet us when we came in or say goodbye when we left. It had to be programmed to somehow recognize us when it was activated.

But I was smarter than the “smart” house. I’d found the sensor in the top hinge. When the door opened, a connection broke and the sensor activated. I didn’t know if there was a Supe or Admin in some office somewhere who monitored these sensors, but I did know that I didn’t want my idiot house to announce when I was leaving.

Luckily, whoever designed the sensor thought everyone was an idiot. Or it wasn’t meant to be security tek. Fooling the thing involved sliding a thin piece of self-adhering metal into the hinge so that when you opened the door, it didn’t fall out. That way, the connection never broke. The only problem was that my magnetic strip didn’t keep its magnetic properties very long.

I reached into my zip pocket, finding the thin strip. I held it to a lower hinge. Bug it; it didn’t stay on its own. I crept to the kitchen. I had to hurry; my friends would be waiting.

In the kitchen, I tiptoed to the Food-Jeni and held the metal strip against the side of its steel door, right next to the powered actuator. I felt the actuator’s gentle vibration in my fingers. I carefully slid the strip down, lifting it from the door and then sliding it down again. It made a soft rasping sound and I repeated the action several more times, hoping to speed up the work of the magnetic coil in the actuator.

After a couple of minutes, the strip stuck to the metal door on its own. A moment later, I slipped my sliver of magnetized metal into place in the top hinge of my house’s front door, making a mental note to grab it when I came back. I closed the door behind me and glanced around, seeking any sign of movement on the street or behind any windows. Pale blue streetlights lit the long street, making the leaves on the two trees in each yard look almost white and casting shadows everywhere. Every light in every identical house was out. I looked up but only saw a few stars.

I had to get to Hope Park. I glanced at the metal cup covering my Papa face. This would work.

Heading to my cycle, I felt like a faker. In my head, I knew the Bug was gone. I preached that to my Pusher friends, but what did brave old Nik Granjer do? I still used the knockout as insurance. Sure, I hadn’t needed it in months, but I had never deliberately blocked the knockout until my heart rate was down to 120. I’d never pushed my heart rate anywhere near 140 with the glue blocking the knockout. This would be the first time my safety net would be gone.

I swallowed hard and told myself to quit stalling. My cycle leaned in its slot to the right of the door, metal spokes on the wheels gleaming in the spill of light from the streetlamps. The cycle stand was on a concrete pad surrounded by the oxi-grass that covered the space in front of our house. I held my Papa close to the sensor on my cycle’s handlebars. A click sounded softly, unlocking the cycle. Good, the metal interference cup still let me use my Papa close up. Hopefully it blocked the signal from the trackers that we were sure the Papas had.

I spun the cycle around and pedaled down the road, headed east. I rode past several streets that branched off from mine. “Fox-ten. Fox-nine,” I whispered, naming the side streets as I zipped past them. My heart picked up the pace as I increased my speed. I was definitely in the mid-nineties now. Nerves made my stomach clench. I forced myself to relax. This would work. I wished I could chat with Bren through the EarCom.

Without looking at the Papa, I whispered, “Now.” The three-toned warning sounded muffled under the metal cup. It wanted me to spend more time warming up; my heart rate was rising too fast. I didn’t care. Besides, if I pushed the cycle a little harder, it would scream at me and the speed suppressor would automatically engage, keeping me to a “calmer” speed.

“Frag it.” I kept my voice down. “I should have done this before.” I stopped the cycle with a few thumb taps on the brake button. In one movement, I kicked the stand lever with my heel and jumped off. The pneumatic feet deployed swiftly and quietly. By the time they held the cycle up, I had nearly removed the external casing of the tiny box attached to the main stem of the cycle. Using my pinky nail, I poked around for a minute and then, finding the tiny chip, slid it slightly out of its slot with a well-practiced movement.

I jumped back on and got going, wanting to hit the hill and get up it without the cycle’s kinetic motor kicking in and helping me out. I urged my legs to move faster, enjoying the sensation of my ankle joints smoothly swiveling with each revolution of the pedals. I felt like a machine, unstoppable and tireless. I guessed I was going at least 20 kilometers per hour by the time I started up the low hill that marked the northeast end of Green Rez, the residential sector I lived in.

My Papa beeped again. One long beep and two short ones. This one meant my pulse had just hit 100. I ignored it, knowing I could make it up the small hill without pushing my heartbeat much faster than 120.

The alert came one more time before I crested the hill. That meant I’d hit 115 and was, according to my wrist-dad, approaching the danger zone. “Shut up,” I whispered, tapping the cycle to a halt at the top of the hill. I didn’t need a computer to tell me how to live. I didn’t even need it to tell me my pulse. Nobody I knew needed their Papas for that anymore. We had grown up with these things constantly alerting us, so we just had to stop and pay attention for a half-second and we could tell our pulse. It was—well—in our blood.