Freelancer (2 page)

A rock formation in front of her exploded into pieces as the mech revealed itself once again. Kari sighed and jumped backward off the cliff.
I’m glad we don’t have cliffs like this in North Carolina . . .
Her stomach sank as she fell toward the ground, but she ignored the feeling, focusing completely on refining the device that would save her digital life.

She loaded it into the simulation as she dropped toward the ground, noting that the device was now too big and heavy to be used practically, but she liked the concept of it anyway. The air-bag device activated and encompassed Kari in air, preventing her body from moving in the slightest as it held her safely during impact. The sudden deceleration was an unforgiving experience, even while she was locked tightly inside the air-bag device. In real life, a single drop like that would leave her bruised and sore for weeks.

A moment after the crash, the air bags deflated, and Kari was eased slowly to the ground. The only problem with her invention was that now she was trapped under the multitude of deflated air bags. Rather than addressing the issue by redesigning the device and jumping off the cliff again in order to test it, Kari simply deleted the air-bag device from the simulation.

Jumping off a cliff twice in a single day is enough for me, thank you very much.

Kari slowly got to her feet and started to dust off her simulated clothes before deciding to load in a new set of clothes instead. Her new clothes were a digital copy of the clothes she had been wearing that day. Although comfortable, they were hardly appropriate for the desert. She replaced those clothes with the only proper desert attire she could think of off the top of her head. She added a mirror to the simulation and laughed out loud at her authentic African safari outfit.

Remind me to look up what people wear in the desert these days.

“Kari?” She heard the cautious voice of her mother coming from the door to her bedroom. Kari exited her simulation and returned her full attention to the real world. The chip connected to her brain stopped overriding her senses, and she blinked several times as she traded the bright, digital sun for her poorly lit room.

“Yeah, Ma?” Kari said.

“You ready for dinner?”

“Dinner?” Kari was confused but then remembered it was Thursday. Ever since she had started high school three years ago, her parents had insisted on spending the night before end-of-week class together as a family. “Oh yeah, of course.”

“I wasn’t interrupting your homework, was I? Because we can eat later if we need to.”

“Oh no . . . I was just hanging out on the networks.”

“Well, good . . . I mean, it’s good that I wasn’t interrupting your schoolwork. Your homework is done already, then?”

“Knocked it out last night, Mom.”

Kari’s mom smiled wearily but sincerely, which caused Kari to feel a twinge of guilt about the lie.

Her mom continued. “Sorry I’m so late, but the office has been overloaded since the news broke.”

“It’s OK, Mom. We don’t have to do anything tonight if you just want to rest.” Kari sat up on her bed. Her mom looked exhausted as she peered through the door at where Kari had been relaxing.

“No. No, it’ll take more than the promise of a civil war to keep me from having dinner with my daughter on a Thursday night.”

Kari smiled in response, but truthfully, she’d much rather spend the night in a simulation. In fact, there were many ways Kari would rather put off her homework, but these Thursday-night dinners meant too much to her mother for Kari to say so.

“I was thinking. After dinner, we could watch one of those retro superhero movies you love so much,” her mom said.

“That sounds great!” Kari said, trying her best to sound enthusiastic. It wasn’t her first choice, but watching a movie with her mom wasn’t the worst way to spend an evening. Besides, Kari would be moving out in thirty-eight weeks, and then her Thursday nights would be completely her own.

“I knew you’d like that.”

“Well, what can I say, Mom? You know me.”

Except you have no idea who I really am.

Kari looked out the window of the auto-auto as it hopelessly rolled down the street toward school. She felt as if the downpour were life, trying to find a way to make her day even worse. It was working.
Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven more times I have to leave my house to go to school.
The number was much smaller than it had been last year, but it was still too large to make her feel any better about the situation.

Zulu, a boy a few grades behind Kari, twitched slightly in the seat next to hers—a sign that he was playing a game or in some sort of simulation. Kari had never found a reason not to like Zulu, which meant she liked him more than she liked most people her age.

The other person in the auto-auto was another story. Her name was Sarah, but Kari liked to refer to her by distinctly more creative names. Sarah was a senior as well, which meant that Kari had been enduring Sarah for well over a decade at end-of-week classes. Kari stared across the auto-auto at her, thankful that Sarah wasn’t paying enough attention to reality to realize that Kari was sitting in the same self-driving car as her.
I’ll miss school more than I’ll miss you, and that’s saying something
.

Sarah was wearing some brightly colored, tight-fitting debacle that reminded Kari more of a rodeo clown than anything else. Sarah’s long, blonde hair, which Kari sincerely doubted was natural, only served to accent the obnoxious colors she was wearing. Clothes that hurt the natural eye seemed to be the trend these days—a trend Kari was all too happy not to participate in. The fad would fade in a few days, and everyone would rush to print themselves new clothes in the latest style.

Kari could afford to print the latest designs every day if she wanted to. She could afford to print just about anything, but that was a fact she didn’t care to flaunt in the form of unwarranted, visually offensive, neon jogger pants. She didn’t want the people at high school to have a hint of who she really was.
Thirty-seven days.
Rather than following the insane fashion trends, she wore loose-fitting clothes she had designed herself. Her clothes were covered with references and quotes from her favorite movies, most of which were from classic films that had ceased to be popular long before she had even been born.

Sarah and her clique had been particularly nasty regarding Kari’s fashion choices—or lack thereof—a few years ago. They had actually seemed more interested in actively hating Kari than they were in themselves, which was a feat in itself. Luckily, that hadn’t lasted, as their narcissistic love affair became more of a committed relationship, and they became far too self-obsessed to make more than a passing effort at trying to ruin Kari’s life. Or they had simply become bored with her. Kari hadn’t changed her style since her sophomore year. Most people switched up their style every few weeks—a side effect of the evolution of at-home clothing printers. Anyone could recycle and reprint their clothes every day if they felt so inclined.
Recycle, reuse, but never rewear.

The only thing worse than the popular clothing style was the makeup. Sarah’s face matched her clothes perfectly; the neon eye shadow matched her shirt, and her red-and-purple lipstick coordinated with her pants. Kari didn’t wear much makeup. It wasn’t that she disapproved of it; it just took too much time and effort and had no possible return on investment. As a freelancer, she always thought about what she got in return for her time—her most valuable asset. This was the primary reason behind her intolerance for school. It did her no good to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on about . . .
well, whatever they talk about in school.

The auto-auto slowed down gradually before coming to a standstill, and the green lights lit the interior as a loud beep signaled their arrival at school. Kari had already spent an hour pouring over the news this morning. The Middle States were expected to present their Declaration of Independence to the US Congress at some point today. The news had been a long time coming, but it still scared Kari. The world was changing, and she wasn’t sure how it was going to affect her. Right now, however, she had more pressing problems, such as making it through another school day.

Kari stepped out of the auto-auto as soon as the door slid open—she didn’t want to make eye contact with Sarah if she didn’t have to.
There will be plenty of time to be looked down on later.

The rain was still coming down just slowly enough to cause most students to jog awkwardly into the school building with their heads down. It also gave a few students the chance to draw attention to themselves as they shrieked and complained about the rain ruining their hair. Several of the more opportunistic boys rushed to cover the girls’ ill-fated hair or to help them into the building. Kari half walked, half jogged, unassisted, resenting the fact that she hadn’t just walked the entire way. But school was bad enough as it was. There was no need to make it worse by wearing damp clothing the entire day.

Kari settled into her typical chair toward the back of the room, as far away from the learning leader as possible. She hated that title, an opinion she attributed fully to her parents. Although they prided themselves on being forward thinking, her parents embraced only the traditional term of “teacher.”
I guess the title wouldn’t make a difference; I wouldn’t like them no matter what they called themselves.

Kari closed her eyes and went online, as she had no desire to join her classmates in any form of friendly conversation or forced pleasantries. Instantly, the small window, which had been lingering in the upper corner of her eye, grew and filled her vision with news and updates. Reality now appeared in a small window that lingered in the bottom corner of her overridden vision. She scanned through the screens and images, flicking through them mentally as she quickly lost interest in the stale news. Nothing had happened yet; it was as if the entire country were holding its breath, waiting for the Middle States to get their revolution started.

The networks were boring. Everyone she knew in real life was complaining about school, and her friends in the hacker community didn’t wake up this early. One last glance at the news told her that it was as stale as it had been seconds ago, so she loaded up her simulation from last night while she waited for class to start.

The sun somehow seemed even brighter than she remembered. It had been late when the movie had ended last night, and her mom had fallen asleep long before it was over. Kari hadn’t wanted to wake her mom up, so she hadn’t moved from her spot on the couch. She had worked on the simulation until she eventually fell asleep a few hours past midnight, which was earlier than when she usually called it a night.

The potential separation of the Union was causing all sorts of problems at the Social Security office where Kari’s mom worked. Her mother had been working overtime for weeks, and it was finally catching up to her.
Stupid Middle States, ruining everyone’s lives because they can’t deal.

After Kari successfully landed at the base of the cliff in the simulation, she spent a while trying to figure out how to evade the pesky gunship. Eventually, she solved the problem by using a stealth device she had invented for a client a few months back. The stealth device hid her heat signature so the gunship couldn’t locate her.

Once the gunship gave up its search, Kari started looking for the treasure. Sometimes, the treasure was a famous painting; other times, it was a sentimental item from her life. But no matter what the treasure was, its capture was the endgame of the simulation. After walking through the digital red desert long enough that her real feet began to ache, she eventually stumbled upon a desert fortress.

Kari huddled behind a small sand dune outside the heavily guarded encampment where she was confident the treasure was being hidden. She cautiously peered over the edge toward the camp in front of her. Cheetahs—catlike robots that were extremely fast, agile, and heavily armed—were circling the perimeter at high speeds. Behind them stood several mechs that were constantly scanning in every direction for potential threats. In the air above the camp floated several gunships. This was a wall-less desert fortress.

Kari painstakingly circled the base several times and found no virtual weakness in it. She knew she could drop in her own army to fight the guards, but that seemed like cheating. There was always a way to solve the situations creatively. After all, she had programmed the simulations to always have a back door—a secret way to win that wasn’t immediately obvious. She just had to find the key to unlocking this puzzle.

Kari had no idea how to beat this particular state of affairs. She loaded in the stealth device that she had used to evade the gunship and activated it. It was composed of headgear and a bracelet-like band for each appendage and made an audible humming as it blocked her heat signature from showing up on any of the guards’ sensors.
It’s not going to work, but the only way to learn the right way to solve this is to start by trying something—anything—even if trying something means I’m going to get reset over and over in violent ways.

Kari froze as everything suddenly went quiet. She twisted around in the simulation, searching for what had caused the sudden change. She slowly realized it was the classroom that had gone silent, not her simulated desert. She returned her vision and attention to the real world and looked around. David stood in the doorway, his blond hair was short, and everything about his appearance was well kept and sharp looking, especially when compared with the current male fashion, which was, in a word, loose.

David frowned as he looked around the unwelcoming room. People shook their heads and showcased their disapproval at him as they met his greenish eyes. His eyes passed over Kari, and she simply turned back around, unsure of what to else to do.

“And to think that I thought the Middle Staters were too good for our schools,” Rob jeered, causing the class to laugh. David brushed Kari’s desk slightly as he walked steadily toward his traditional seat at the front of the room.