When We Wake (7 page)

I wanted to remember them as they were. Not discover who they had become after time had worked on them and passed me by.

Anyway, it took me about a week to climb a decent way up the computer learning curve, and that was just one thing. For most of you, all the stuff that you do every day, you learned how to do without thinking much about it—buying books or music or movies, cooking, putting out the garbage, doing laundry, taking showers. I had to relearn all that in two weeks, concentrating hard the whole time.

I bet you wouldn’t be laughing if you’d had to deal with computers from my time. You’d have loved the showers, though. No auto timers to cut the water off, no need to account for every drop in the weekly ecobudget. Future showers are depressing, though I know Alex and Dalmar would have approved.

They would have approved of the toilets even more.

In the base, where they were trying to limit my culture shock, I’d had a bathroom like one from my time, with a flushable toilet and warm water to wash my hands. But Marie’s toilet
was a box bench built into the wall, with a seat, and a hole, and some sort of container positioned under the hole. There was no cistern. There was no flush button.

The first time I went to use it, I had no idea how to.

While I was still staring, Marie knocked on the door.

“I forgot to say,” she said when I opened it, “humanure wasn’t widely adopted in your time, was it?”

“No,” I said, then, “I’ve heard of it, though.” Dalmar had once enthusiastically explained the concept, but the idea of using my own poo as compost had made my face curdle, and he’d changed the subject fast.

But there was no escape from Marie’s ten-minute lecture on how to use the hole toilet. To my relief, Marie didn’t keep a garden. Instead she put the collection container on the curb every week with the food scraps, and it was taken away, mixed with everyone else’s manure and food scraps, and turned into compost for the big farms on the city outskirts. Marie got a tax deduction, and we all got to eat food grown in human poo.

Culture shock. It’s the little things.

It was pretty cool, though, once I got over the shock. Dalmar would have been thrilled to know that something so practical and Earth-friendly was in widespread use, and it made me happier to think that some part of the future he’d been working so hard for had actually happened. Alex would have been more pleased about the social changes that meant that people could
basically marry anyone who consented and love whoever they loved without fear.

I so badly wanted both of them there to see what they’d helped bring about.

Anyway. Sentimentality aside, I got used to the house computer responding to verbal commands and stopped groping for light switches whenever I entered a room. I even worked out how to watch things. Marie had a huge archive of documentaries and old movies.

But her music archive was nonexistent. She had some tracks, sure, but they were all called things like “Rain on Summer River” or “Windy Evening.” I thought they might have been nature songs, but they were exactly what they said: the noise of rain hitting flowing water, the sound of air moving through branches. There was even one called “Long Train Trip.”

When I asked Marie about it, she looked embarrassed. “I like to listen to white noise while I work,” she said. “I find music distracting.”

“You don’t listen to music for fun?” I asked.

“I used to, before I moved to this house.” She smiled. “Perhaps you can reintroduce me to the pleasure. I’ll set up a monthly allowance for you on my account. Shall we make it eight hundred?”

I did a rough conversion in my head—inflation was another thing to get used to. That was about fifty dollars, or what I could easily spend on music in a couple of weeks.

“Sixteen hundred?” Marie guessed, watching my face. “The amount doesn’t matter. I just have to tell the store something.”

“Sixteen hundred is fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

I blew it all twenty minutes later. Well, I had to. On top of the new music I wanted to try out, the complete Beatles catalog was supercheap, and there were three extra John tracks that John and Yoko’s estate had released after I’d died.

When Marie knocked on my bedroom door that evening to tell me she was going to the supermarket to pick up a few things she’d forgotten on the weekly order, I tore myself away from the White Album and told her I’d go, too.

“I can, right?” I said.

“Oh, certainly,” she said, and touched her EarRing. That was another thing I had to get used to, mobile phones as jewelry. Look, just assume I didn’t know anything, okay?

“Tegan will be coming with me,” she said to the person on the other end, and then cut the call. “Zaneisha will discreetly escort us there and wait in the car,” she explained.

Sergeant Zaneisha Washington was one of the two soldiers assigned to my protection detail. I was pretty sure I would like her, if I could get over the embarrassment of having my very own bodyguards. I didn’t want to be discreetly escorted. But I really wanted to get out of the house, so I kept my mouth shut and nodded.

If I’d ever thought about food in the future, I’d imagined that it might be, like, pills and potions and stuff, but food was still food. I didn’t know many of the brands in the supermarket, and
I didn’t recognize a few ready-to-heat dishes, but the only real difference was that there was absolutely no meat for sale.

There were plenty of vegetables and breads and even a small fish section. That was pretty much what Marie had been feeding me, and it’s not like I objected to fish and lots of fresh, tasty veggies—but when I saw the lack of meat at the supermarket, I realized it wasn’t a choice.

“Can you buy meat?” I asked.

I meant, was it even
possible
to buy meat, but Marie looked really taken aback. “Are you a meat eater?” she asked. “Red meat?”

“I was,” I said, feeling embarrassed. I’d been happily eating her food all this time. It wouldn’t be a hardship to keep it up.

“We could get some meat,” she said, frowning. “But it’s taxed so heavily…. And I’m not sure there’s a supplier in our neighborhood. It might have to be a special treat, Tegan.”

“It’s not a problem,” I said quickly.

“And people do talk…. It’s—well, I don’t care about fashion, but the ethics of the time have changed. I should have covered this in more detail, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s okay! Honestly! I was thinking about giving up red meat, anyway.” This was mostly a lie. I’d thought about it, to the point of realizing it would probably be a good idea, but I had the disadvantage of a mother who did incredible things to steak.

“Oh, but I don’t want to increase the culture shock. If you’re used to it… let’s see. All right, it looks as if there’s a supplier two suburbs over. We could go past on the way home.”

I was shifting in my shoes, wondering how I could get her to
drop the topic. Most people weren’t paying us any attention, but a slim man with dark skin and reddish locks was giving me a disapproving look when his face suddenly changed. “Tegan!” he said. “Tegan Oglietti!”

And then everyone was looking at me. Marie’s hand shot up to her EarRing and then came down on my shoulder.

“I’m Carl Hurfest, Melbourne Media Collective,” Red Locks announced, stepping close to us. His bumblecam whizzed out of his jacket pocket and hovered by my face, right on the border of the sixty-centimeter legal boundary. “Tegan, just a few questions.”

“No comment,” Marie said. She’d abandoned our shopping basket, and we strode toward the exit.

“What’s your position on Australia’s No Migrant policy, and do you think it’s fair that the dead be given a loophole?”

“Tegan has no comment,” Marie repeated.

I hadn’t even heard of a No Migrant policy, so it was easy not to comment on that. The rest of the crowd was pressing around us, happy to let Hurfest ask the questions while they waited avidly for my replies.

“Do you think it’s right that the army paid so much for your revival while the families of civilian freezies still grieve for their loved ones?”

There was a murmur of disapproval from the crowd. I thought it was directed at Hurfest, and maybe his use of
freezies
, not at me, but I just wanted them all to go away and leave me alone.

Through the mass of bodies, I saw Zaneisha, a tall woman in
a casual suit that probably wasn’t fooling anyone. She’d pushed open the glass door of the supermarket and paused just inside, watching. One hand was out of sight, probably holding a sonic pistol. If she needed to down the crowd fast, she could, but packed in and shifting around as we were, she’d find it hard to pinpoint the shot. Marie and I could end up with ruptured eardrums and vertigo along with everyone else.

Besides, Hurfest wasn’t threatening me with anything but his tiny bumblecam, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

“Don’t you think you have an obligation to speak to the people of Australia, Tegan?” he said. “They paid a great deal for you with their tax dollars.”

That hit a nerve. “I’m a person, not property,” I snarled, and then, remembering, “No comment!”

Hurfest’s smile sharpened, like a shark scenting blood in the water. I’m a city girl, and I don’t know much about sea predators, but I could tell that smile was trouble.

“Your father was a soldier killed in action, wasn’t he? Do you think only the army should have this technology?”

“Leave the girl alone,” an older lady told him.

Hurfest ignored her. “What do you think about the allegations of the Inheritors of the Earth?”

“Never heard of them.” I knew I should shut up, but his voice was burrowing into my ears, and his horrible little camera kept buzzing around my face. There was no way to stop it from getting a good shot, short of smacking it out of the air. Which was assault on private property, Marie had explained to me, and not the kind of legal trouble I needed. “I mean, no comment.”

We’d reached the door. Zaneisha reached out, and Marie’s grip on me was replaced by a much stronger one. The bodyguard hustled me through the door and into the parking lot.

“They say you should commit suicide!” Hurfest shouted after us. “They say the real you is already dead and that what’s left is a soulless husk!”

I tried to turn, to yell something back at him—I wasn’t sure what—but Zaneisha forced my head down and shoved me into the back of the car. Marie scrambled in behind me, and the door slammed.

“What’s the Thingy of the Earth?” I asked.

“Do your seat belt up,” Marie said.

I did, scowling. “Don’t you think this should have come up before?”

“They’re a fringe group, nothing to worry about. They have extreme religious beliefs; a cult, really.” She tried to smile. “If it helps, Intelligence says they stress it would be sinful to murder you.”

“They just think I should kill myself.” I sank back into the seat. “Well, gee, thanks for keeping me informed.”

“It was impossible to cover ineffective cults with all the other things I’ve had to teach you,” she snapped back, and then winced. “I’m sorry, that was ungracious—”

“Ugh, whatever.” I snorted. “I’m sorry that your pet project isn’t house-trained. That’s what happens when you pick up strays.”