Luca (2 page)

A vast ocean of tiny blue dots, the Voice floods her mind. It teems with anxiety, reaching down to her, long fingers extended, searching for an answer. Its deep resonance enfolds her like a blanket.

The girl’s eyes flip open.

The Voice echoes in her mind again, and this time, she opens her mouth. Dry words spill from trembling lips.

“My name is Luca. Who are you?”

No response. She tries again.

“You need something. What are you searching for?”

Silence.

A pinprick of red light begins to flash from a round sphere on the wall to her left, piercing the darkness of her peripheral vision.

The men in white uniforms will be here soon, but Luca doesn’t care.

The heavy smell of mold hangs in the air, rolling off the sides of her cell and mixing with the stench of urine from a plastic bucket in the corner. Behind her, in the long hall on the other side of the metal door, shrieks and cries begin to ring out, as they always do at night. But on this night, there are more of them and louder than usual.

The other girls, the ones who still try to hear, have noticed the Voice. They’ve spoken to it.

The same as Luca.

The men in white know. They always do. The little red light tells them when the girls talk to the voices. Then they come to make their rounds. To make the girls stop. To make them hurt.

Luca isn’t scared. The men will come and the men will leave. The voices will stay. And Luca will do what she always does.

Listen.

Maybe the big Voice will come back.

She searches the darkness for the familiar cracks in the wall beyond her feet. Following them up, her gaze comes to rest on two rectangular slits at the top, just below the ceiling. Three inches tall and ten times as long, the holes are like a pair of squinting eyes, her only visible connection to the world of voices beyond the Institution. Cool night air flows down through the openings, reminding her of the Voice in the sky.

She tries again to make contact and opens her mouth. The words come out at a slow and deliberate pace.

“My name is Luca.
Where
are you?”

The red light flashes again, faster, unrelenting, urgent.

She steels herself for the beating. Body still aching from the last one, she tries to forget the words of the men in the white uniforms as they bend over her, grinning, laughing.

Ignore the voices in your head so we don’t have to hurt you. When you stop talking to the voices, you can leave. You can be free. You can go home.

She had tried, once.

But not anymore.

Ignoring the voices, sealing her mind off from the world around her, is more painful than the cuts and bruises that follow when she lets the voices in and speaks back to them, making the red light flash.

A long time ago, Luca had already reached the only possible conclusion: it’s easier to ignore the men in white and the pain they bring. Embrace the voices. Embrace the connection with all of them.

With great effort, Luca closes her eyes and draws in a deep breath. She’s never felt a Voice so far away. There have been other voices in the sky—flocks of birds or the occasional air transport flying overhead. But nothing like the Voice that boomed out of the darkness.

Letting her breath slowly escape, she closes her eyes and casts her mind up and out farther than she ever has before, like a single point of light rising to join the stars and spreading out into a loose net to catch whatever might be there. A whisper of terror brushes past her like the fluttering of butterfly wings.

What will I find? What will it do when it finds me?

She chooses to ignore the fear.

All her senses open like a giant antennae.

When it blasts into her mind the third time, the Voice is like the low roar of the foghorn on the coast every night, an hour before dawn. The resonance of sound and color lingers as an afterimage on the back of her eyelids and in her brain. She is sure of one thing.

From out of the deep, the Voice is coming.

Luca lifts her body away from the futon to a sitting position. The men will be here soon. It’s best to be ready when they come.

The wind rages outside. She knows what it is. The tiny voices of animals and insects have been in her mind, telling her of the oncoming wall of a new storm.

Shrieks and cries in the hallway behind the door die down.

The men in white uniforms don’t like walking the hallways during storms. They go back to their rooms where it’s warm and dry and quiet. Good food and laughter and the Mesh. They always leave Luca and the others to face the storms alone.

The wind and rain will wash the air clean.

Lightning flashes. Rain descends in straight, diagonal lines that shoot through the two holes into her cell. The song of cicadas in the cool night air goes silent. Luca closes her eyes and feels the splashes on her face, each an explosion of ecstasy. Lifting her palms up, her whole body drinks in the sensation of falling droplets of water. And she listens.

But the Voice is silent.

Like the beating she will receive from the men, the rain is violent but short.

After the storm passes, the floor of Luca’s cell is a puddle that soaks her futon and moves under the steel door and into the hallway. The wind dies down, and the storm moves further inland, toward Tokyo.

Inside the Institution and outside the walls, the water awakens smells that only come alive in the humidity. The stench of dried feces and vomit mix with the aroma of fresh mud and cedar bark. Luca picks out the smells she likes and ignores the others. As the clouds part, brightness floods the night sky.

The buzz of cicadas returns.

Luca’s eyes float open and stare up through the holes at the full moon. She has tried to speak to it before, but it never answers. Two beams of light pierce the darkness and come to rest on the wall, misshapen rectangles floating in the dark.

Her eyes open wider. Her pulse quickens. Light is rare in her cell, and she must move quickly.

Without looking down, her fingers slide along the floor to a familiar place where they find the treasure under the futon, a small plastic box stolen from the trash weeks ago and hidden from the eyes of the white uniforms. She has carefully filled it with bits of dirt and sand pinched from the corners of her cell and scraped from under the door.

Her gaze goes to the box.

A slender white stem with a hint of green rises just above the rim, born from a precious seed that blew in through the window. Two delicate leaves, no bigger than the black beetles that swarm the walls, are frozen in time, half unfolded from a tiny pocket of green on the end of the stem.

Silently, she slides across the floor and raises the box in both hands until it is bathed in the beams of moonlight pouring down. Her upraised palms take on a silver glow.

The tiny plant awakens.

In her mind, she hears a quiet stirring as the leaves absorb the light. She senses a high-pitched note, fainter than a whisper, octaves above any sound she’s ever heard with her ears. As she listens, the single note cascades down, breaking into fragments that trigger images of flowing colors. A tiny symphony of light plays in her mind, mixing with the melody of the cicadas.

Caught up in the rapture of oneness, Luca adds words to the harmony.

“Drink in the light, little one. Someday, you’ll grow tall and strong. Like the trees outside the wall.”

The sounds in her head pause for an instant and then explode into a chorus that brings a smile to Luca’s face.

The light flashes red on the wall. This time, it doesn’t stop.

Her body stiffens.

Footsteps race down the hall on the other side of the metal door.

A single teardrop draws a line down her cheek as she closes her eyes and stills her breathing. Her hands come down and carefully hide the plant under the corner of the futon.

The door bursts open behind her.

3

MOLECULE

The structure doesn’t make sense.

It’s never made sense.

Qaara shakes her head, staring at the holographic model of a complex molecule floating at eye level. The neon colors of each atom burn in the darkness like a 3-D constellation. The general helix shape of its core is familiar enough, but something isn’t right. On a whim, she reaches out a finger to the holo and moves one of the atoms to a new location. When she lets go, the words
Unstable Configuration
appear above, and the molecule slides back to its original position.

Always the same result.

Frank Mercer, the CEO of Genesis Corporation, whom she met only once, hired her six months ago to find the weakness in the molecule, to figure out how to break it apart, stop it, destroy it, kill it.

But the molecule cannot be tweaked, altered or reshaped. She has no idea what it does, but after months of futile experiments, one thing appears certain. The molecule’s configuration is indestructible.

Just like the wildly successful career and life she was born to, carefully designed and nurtured by her father and then forced upon her.

As the holo slowly rotates, she rubs her eyes, wincing at the sting, and wonders whether the sun has risen.

Time to rest.

The tip of her finger drops down and touches the slate in her hand. There’s a hum above her as an aperture in the ceiling opens, allowing soft light to pour down and illuminate her office. A single sheet of clear, programmable glass forms the outside window and curves across her line of vision like a massive lens, floor to ceiling. As its milky surface turns clear, it disappears from view, leaving the illusion of nothing between her and 250 floors of open space below.

Eyelids dropping down, Qaara pulls in a deep inhale and waits for the oxygen to flood her brain. With the rush of clarity, her eyes float open, and she stares out over the Manhattan skyline, the jewel of the East Coast, the capital of the New United States, at least the ever-shrinking parts of it hugging the Atlantic coast that haven’t been abandoned yet to the encroaching chaos. As always, her gaze is drawn to the seawall that stretches around Manhattan like a massive cellular membrane, holding the City and its inhabitants together, protecting them from what lies on the other side. Two meters thick and a hundred meters high, it’s made of billions of layers of microscopic graphene.

And it’s completely transparent. Like air.

People come from all over the civilized world to see and study it, to run their fingers across its delicate surface and marvel at the beauty of the humpbacks that, thanks to massively rising sea levels, gather on the other side for their daily feedings.

The
Wall
, as it’s called, is the most popular tourist attraction in the City, replacing the aquariums and zoos of yesteryear that are now outlawed. The streets next to the Wall are lined with luxury condos and businesses catering to the rich.

When Qaara looks at the Wall, all she thinks of are the countless hours she spent on the team that first developed graphene for industrial applications. She was an undergraduate at MIT when she made her discovery one night in the lab after everyone else had gone home.

She was barely twenty years old.

The team had engaged in months of research, without success. That night in the lab, the fog suddenly lifted in her brain, and the ideal molecular structure for the new material became clear in a flash of inspiration.

It was a major coup for someone so young.

The industrial machine took over. An exhaustive advertising campaign of endless promotion followed.

Now the entire planet knows about it. The new substance is made entirely of carbon pulled from the atmosphere and crystalized into a patented grid structure by nano-bots. It’s biodegradable and a hundred times stronger than steel.

They call it
Graff
.

The name wasn’t all that original but everything else about it was. Hailed around the world as the new miracle building material that would save humankind, the result was a dream come true for Qaara’s father. The daughter he programmed for success fulfilled her destiny. And his chemical company in Mumbai that funded the research was certain to get rich on the patent royalties.

Within days, Qaara’s father licensed the patent to Genesis Corporation, the company she works for now.

Years later, demand is still high for Graff. Every coastal city on the planet wants,
and needs
, their own Wall. And that’s just the beginning. With production in full swing, Graff is replacing steel and plastic in air and sea transports, automobiles, medical devices, heavy weapons. With each day, the list of potential uses expands.

And now, thanks to all the stories floating around on the Mesh, everyone knows about the gorgeous prodigy from India who found the path to rescue the world from itself.

People still stop her on the street and ask for a quick video shot. They drive her crazy, always pushing, touching, telling her how beautiful and smart she is. Would she like to join them for dinner? How about an interview? How about a weekend in Rio?

It’s been the same story her entire life. Thanks to the marvels of her heritage and the wonders of genetic engineering, as her father has patiently explained to her on countless occasions, she’s been blessed with an overabundance of the two things humans value most, after wealth: beauty and brains.

One or the other would have been more than enough. With both, she is more than human, treated as an object rather than an individual. Used as a tool to accomplish other people’s ends. Never given the space to pursue her own interests.

Grooming her from the time she was a child, her parents sent her out of the country and away from family to the only schools worthy of her intellect, schools that would guarantee her future success. She grew up mostly alone, craving human affection.

Even now, friends value her most for the status she gives them. Companionship is not part of the equation. She has countless daily interactions that leave her cold and lonely.