No Life But This (13 page)

‘
Since when were you the optimist?’

Quin sighed, but he didn’t answer me. He continued not answering until the stass chemicals dragged us both into unconsciousness.

‘So you’re the EP kids. I always wanted to see one of you.’

Quin turned away from the window and raised an eyebrow at the boy. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to see an idiot. The good fairy must be in a mood for granting wishes.’

Kenji’s cheeks went red and he fidgeted in his seat. ‘Well, there’s no need to be rude about it.’

‘Oh, it’s no trouble,’ Quin said blithely.
‘My pleasure.’

This was going to be a fun trip.

Kenji and Moriko Zellwegger were exactly the kind of people who got on Quin’s nerves. They were the kind of people who got on my nerves, too, but I was considerably more tolerant than Quin about being ogled. I’d had more experience with reporters and scientists. You’ve never known ogling until you’ve been in a room with twenty neuro-medical students
who all had to take notes on your active brain waves for a graduate school class.

The twins were fourteen years old, and looked alike enough to be clones, though they were only fraternal twins. I suspected it was an affectation, because they seemed to do it deliberately. Their thick black hair was cut identically short. They were dressed in matching but colour-contrasting jumpsuits, similar to
the outfits Jamal wore when he wasn’t in school uniform. The girl’s was black and purple; the boy’s was black and blue. The two had accompanied their father up to the Jove Station to retrieve the four of us. Technically, the twins were Bren’s cousins, and I eyed them in the hopes of seeing some spark of the same clarity of thought that Bren possessed. No such luck. Their thoughts might have been
clear, but only because their heads appeared entirely empty.

Their father seemed a pretty straight thinker. Dr Zellwegger was a middle-aged Eurasian man who wore the Europan equivalent of overalls, and a set of grim lines glowered regimentally on his forehead. Apart from the stress lines, he looked a lot like Bren’s mom. I rather liked Mrs Sabah. I hoped I’d like this man, too.

Dr Zellwegger
was not a bioengineer, which lifted him highly in my estimation. He wasn’t a medical doctor, either, but he was working with one – a woman called Dr Shiva – who was well versed in my medical history. Dr Zellwegger was actually a scientist, with a PhD in steryochemistry, who had spent the last two years researching the natural intercellular signalling of the plankton. Not just the electro microbes,
but the inter-connectivity of the plankton as a whole. He didn’t talk much.

The Jovian docking station had been on a pass by Europa, so we didn’t have a very long flight down to the moon. When we got into the shuttle, Moriko and Kenji had suggested we take over one of the observation bubbles. The elder Zellweggers had declined, preferring the more comfortable inner lounge. There were four observation
bubbles along the sides of the ship, and while they were not as comfortable as the inner seats, I was told they would provide an excellent view.

To get to the bubble we had to climb through the floor and up to an angled dome. Once we climbed through, the gravity shifted, as the grav-mats tilted to make the side of the ship the floor. I rather liked the falling feeling as my centre shifted, but
Rose cried out and stumbled, her legs going weak. She was all right after a moment, but it drew looks from the twins.

All I saw when I got into the bubble was black sky and a tiny point of light that I assumed was the sun. It seemed painfully far away. As the shuttle undocked and spun, however, I was assaulted by the sight of the largest planet in our solar system.

Describing Jupiter is something
the greatest poets of our age still have trouble with. My own pitiful attempts at poetry can’t even begin to encompass it. It’s not just that Jupiter is a fiery, swirling mass of colour, gorgeous in its striations and awe-inspiring with its sheer beauty. It is all of that, whites and reds and oranges all layering over each other like a giant confection. That is what it looks like. But that isn’t
what it is.

Jupiter

is

HUGE.

There is simply no other way to describe it. I stared out of the window, and I simply couldn’t fathom it. My mind couldn’t stretch that far. I couldn’t absorb the sight of something that large, that close. My eyes kept playing tricks on me, turning it into a tiny rubber ball not centimetres before my face, or zooming the planet out across the cosmos so there was
nothing in my view except the colours, swirling and swirling, eternal storms of gas boiling in space.

Unfortunately, the twins were the jaded types who can’t hold awe for more than two seconds without chittering about it on their cells and drawing the attention back to themselves. Kenji’s somewhat racist icebreaker had been like a declaration of war to Quin. I could tell he had decided they were
the spawn of Satan’s imps, and therefore deserved a good taking down. Rose realized it too, and shifted away from the view (her artist’s sensibilities probably weeping with regret) to take an active part in the conversation, and hopefully bring it to polite terms. Rose and her old-fashioned customs. Had to love ’em.

‘You’re Bren’s cousins,’ Rose said. ‘He’s a friend of ours.’

‘I kn
o
w,’ Moriko
said, with a squeal in her voice I was sure I didn’t like. ‘We’re
so
lucky to be related to him. It makes us kind of like stars by proxy.’ Moriko unhooked her seat harness and hopped over to me, grinning all over her face. ‘I couldn’t believe it when they said you were coming!’ she said. ‘It’s all over the moon, you know. All over the Jovian system! The EP kids! I’m so glad I get to meet you!’
She grabbed at my hand as if she wanted to wring it off.

I snatched it away so fast it looked like I was trying to hit her.

She slapped both hands to her mouth in what I suspected to be mock embarrassment. ‘Oh, coit, I did it, didn’t I. You don’t like to be touched, do you.’ I didn’t buy it. She had to have known this before she’d tried to touch me. After all, she hadn’t come over trying to
grab at Quin.

Quin wasn’t buying it, either. ‘No coiting kidding,’ he snapped from the other side of the dome. He had his eyes fixed on the storm-torn gas giant. ‘Got that from the frantic attempt to escape, did you? Brilliant.’

Moriko hunched her shoulders, a gesture halfway between obsequiousness and chagrin, and she went back to her seat near Kenji, who was lounging casually in his seat,
his feet up on another one.

‘What did you mean, stars by proxy?’ Rose asked.

‘Well … You’re celebrities up here, you knew that, right? People follow you, like holostars.’

I blinked. I hadn’t known that. Neither had Quin from the look of distaste on his face. ‘Follow what?’

‘Oh, everything,’ Moriko said. ‘What your favourite bands are, how you’re doing in lessons, who’s dating who.’

Kenji
nodded at Quin. ‘You’re 50, of course? So you must be … 76?’

‘Otto,’ Quin said firmly, ignoring that he even got my number wrong. ‘His name, even though no one actually wants to hear your nasal little whine say it, is Otto.’

‘And he’s Quin,’ Moriko said.

‘I can say my own name, thanks,’ Quin said sarcastically.

‘No, wait, he’s 86,’ Kenji said, pointing at me. ‘They lost track of him, remember?’

‘Yeah, he’s the one that went to that school. The one with the girlfriend! Wait a minute. Are you still dating?’

‘No,’ Quin said, with a smirk that made me want to slap him. I shook my head, confirming the news.

‘Aww!’ Moriko said, her face falling. ‘It was
so
romantic! That was Nabiki Sato, right? She’s my mother’s second cousin, once removed. I think.’

I snorted quietly, but it didn’t surprise
me. ComUnity was pretty small. The idea that one powerful UniCorp family had married into another powerful UniCorp family wasn’t surprising in the least. Nabiki, however, was clever. These two kids, no matter how intelligent, were vacant. I didn’t even need to touch them to know that.

‘Nabiki was
never
romantic,’ Quin added.

‘How would you know?’

Quin blinked at her as if she was stupid – which
wasn’t a surprise, really. ‘Well …’ he began. I tisked my tongue and I eyed him, daring him to spread tales about my love life – or, well, Nabiki’s love life, because technically it wasn’t mine anymore – to these two vapid children. Quin regarded me with a considering eye before he opened his mouth. ‘Well, we’re all in that school now,’ he said instead.

‘I
know!
’ Moriko complained. ‘It’s been
months without a legitimate update. Right now it’s all bootlegs and rumours. It’s driving the EP forums
mad!
’

‘What?’
I signed.

‘Oh, I know that one, I know that one!’ Moriko said with eagerness. ‘That one’s, ahm …
“what”,
right? Am I right?’

‘If you recognize the sign, you should realize he just asked you a question,’ Quin pointed out through clenched teeth. This was a bad sign. ‘Unless you
haven’t gotten to that level yet in basic language.’

‘I just mean the followers on the EP forums,’ Moriko said.

‘Would you,’ Quin said, ‘care to elaborate on what that means for us Europan laymen?’

‘The geneticists on the
Minos
have been monitoring your progress,’ Kenji told us. ‘They got updates once a week. The forward was eventually made public, as there were so many scientists on board.
And once it was public, everyone wanted to see what was happening.’

‘It’s so much fun!’ Moriko said. ‘You want to see an episode?’

‘An … episode?’ Quin said.

‘Yeah! I’ve got some reruns on my ECell. Wanna see?’ Without waiting for a reply, she jumped over to a control panel by the door of the dome and plugged her cell into the wall. The beautiful image of Jupiter was blanked out of one window
by a holofeed screen. Moriko flittered through files and finally accessed one labelled, ‘EP, 626’.

To the horror of both Quin and myself, a flash image of EP labs made an establishing shot. Then, with a painful juxtaposition of raucous electric music, quick cuts of me and Quin and Tristan and Penny doing various activities at the labs flittered through the holofeed. Tristan running a high jump.
Me at my notescreen (my cheeks flushed as I realized I was probably updating my journal in that shot). Penny signing to her tutor. Quin in the gym at a punching bag – how many shots did they have of
that
, I wondered. Then all four of us in the common room playing a game. Various names floated in the ether below our faces, both our embryonic numbers and the names of the editors who had spliced
the thing together. Then, with an artistic swirl, the words. ‘The EP Kids’ flashed over the screen, and settled under a group shot of all four of us.

Quin’s face was purple, and I was pretty damn sure he wasn’t feeling pure embarrassment, as I was. The first scene began. I realized this really was a rerun. It was from a point in my life just before I’d gotten my scholarship, and all four of us
were doing research on the best topic for our essays. The cameras at the labs hadn’t been equipped with sound, so the voices – or, well, Quin’s voice – was dubbed with someone else’s. Our sign was subtitled, and not always accurately. Quin and I sat in bemused disgust for a few more minutes. Then Quin walked through the hologram – his real body interrupting his projected one – and stabbed the programme
off. He perched gingerly on the edge of a seat, his fists clenched on his knees. ‘Are you telling me,’ he said quietly as the image of Jupiter reappeared in the window, ‘that our lives are watched up here like a holonovella?’

‘Well, you were,’ Kenji said glumly. ‘Until last spring. Now the updates are sketchy, and don’t make for as good viewing.’

That was when Rose had gotten Quin, Penny and
Tristan out of the lab and into the summer school programme at UniPrep. I had always known we were being monitored, and that most of our life was public record. But there were plenty more interesting things on Earth, and it had never occurred to any of us that the recordings of our lives would be made the subject of popular social media.

‘But we’re starting to get some holos from the school,’
Moriko said, and I stared at her in shock. The school wasn’t like the lab; it wasn’t riddled with cameras. Then I realized how stupid that was. Everyone had a cell, everyone had notescreens, there were even security feeds in the most public areas. Anyone with the access – and UniCorp staff had access to most of this – could easily download and search through to find enough images of us to splice
together
something
. Particularly if they didn’t care about narrative accuracy. ‘None of the daily stuff, but we just saw 32 at the track meet, remember?’

Kenji grinned. ‘Yeah, that was so sky!’

‘And
you
!’ Moriko gushed at Quin. ‘You’re such a hero! We have a copy of you pulling your brother from the pool! You should have heard the girls at school. I must have seen that feed at least a dozen
times.’

‘You saw …’ Quin’s face was dark and stiff. ‘Where did they get that?’

‘I don’t know. It looked like a security camera.’

‘You mean to say,’ Quin said, his voice crisp as a new iceberg lettuce, ‘that …
that …
sort of thing has been viewed as entertainment up here?’

‘Only the highlights,’ Moriko said. ‘They edit the records before they send them out.’

This was supposed to make it better?
They’d watched my seizures as if it were a scene from a holodrama, only a foil for Quin’s heroic rescue. How long had this show been going? Had our Dying Times been the subject of teenage net forums and saccharine montages? With a snarl of fury 42 came back into my mind again.
(What are we, fish in a tank? It was bad enough being monkeys in a lab!)

‘Let me get this straight,’ Quin said with a
poisonous smile, ‘because somehow I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.’ Moriko giggled, and I eyed Quin. She was missing the signs. Quin was about to lose it. ‘You’ve all been watching edited selections of our lives, regularly, once a week, and chatting about it as if we were actors in some reality holoshow?’

‘Well, aren’t you?’ Kenji asked.

I acted faster than Quin, fortunately, and I was
closer to him than he was to Kenji. I stood and slammed him back into his seat, my hand on his chest. Quin’s fist was clenched. Kenji had narrowly escaped a broken jaw.
‘They don’t understand!’
I signed at him with my left hand.