SuperMoon Page 4

“Indentured servants with chips in our heads, fixing lame robots?” Castor scoffs. “No way. I like my brain the way it is and the freedom to come and go as I please. And if this hack goes well, we’ll have enough to live off for months.”

  I groan. I know he’s right. We need the money, and I don’t want to work for D’Cart any more than he does. “But if we get caught—”

  “We won’t.” He reaches out and puts both hands on my shoulders. We are still exactly the same height. Eye to eye. Nose to nose. He is the mirror image of me. “It’ll be okay. Meprosi!”

  “You can’t promise anything,” I grumble, “but fine, I’ll do it.” I squelch my fears and worries like I’ve done over and over with my brother. I always give in to his questionable ideas, like creating a D’Cart parody Stream, sneaking into AlphaZonia to live, selling what we scavenge, and now, hacking the biggest CelebriStreamer event there is. “Everything we do is risky, so what’s one more ten-minute hack?” I ask.

  “Now you’re talking!”

  I look down at the jumpsuit in my hands. “How do I put this on?”

  “Step through the back, duh,” he says.

  I move behind a screen of branches and strip down to my tank top and undies, then toss Castor my clothes. He wads them up and shoves them inside his knapsack while I slide my legs into the lower tubes of the jumpsuit. I tug and jump to get the thing up over my hips, then I reach into the arm tubes and yank so that the whole outfit snaps into place, precisely conforming to the dimensions of my body.

  “I feel like a fish caught in a net!” I say as I walk out to join him in the clearing.

  “Do something with your hair.”

  “You do something with your hair,” I snap at him.

  He rubs his hand across his scalp. “There,” he says. “Done.”

  “You have it so easy.”

  “So shave your head.”

  “I just might.”

  He plunges his hand into his knapsack and pulls out a small solar-powered razor. “Here you go.”

  I grab for the razor, but he snatches it away.

  “Would you really?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say. “It might be nice not to mess with so much hair.”

  “Not tonight, though.” He pushes the razor down inside his bag of tricks. “Tonight you have to fit in to Yoobie culture, and the girls love their long, flowing locks!”

  “Blech!” I’ve never been the kind of girl who defines myself by what other people choose to see. Still, I know he’s right. If I want to pass, I have to play the game, so I sweep my hair on top of my head. “Why are you carrying around a razor, anyway?”

  “Found it,” he says, and hands me two pins to secure my updo. “Thought it might come in handy someday.” He reaches out to rearrange my hair, but I duck.

  “Stop it,” I say.

  “No, you stop it,” he says back, like we’re three again.

  We smack at each other, half laughing like toddlers, but all the tussling frees a few strands to hang around my face, and he says, “There! That’s better. Now you look just like a Yoobie.”

  “I thought that was a rude word.”

  “It is,” he insists. “But the real question is whether you can act like one when I Stream you.”

  “In my sleep,” I say, because the truth is, I like the challenge of morphing into someone else. I step back, widen my eyes, and smile big as I run a hand up my arm. “Can you feel the tiny tessellated triangles of extruded microplastics digging into your skin?” I parrot D’Cart’s breathy delivery when she launches a new product.

  Castor laughs. I’ve always been a good mimic. From the time I was little, I could perfectly imitate the lilt, the head tilt, and the wide-eyed innocent blink of CelebriStreamers beckoning to their followers. But I was always best at D’Cart, which is why our parody Stream was born.

  I draw my arm under my nose from elbow to my wrist, exaggerating a huge sniff. “Aaaaah! Can you smell the newly printed materials off-gassing into the night air?” I lick my arm. “Mmmm, can you taste that? The sweet sweat of complete and total discomfort.”

  “Brilliant!” Castor laughs. “Our followers are going to love this. Streaming from inside a D’Cart party, live from the Pink Palace! We’ll have a deluge. Now, give me your headset. I have Wearables for you.”

  I sigh and dutifully trade my old beat-up device for a neatly wrapped packet of stolen Wearables.

  “Yuck.” Castor drops my device in his bag. “I don’t know why you hang on to this thing.”

  “I like it!” I whine. “It’s more comfortable than this half robot stuff.” I dab the iEye contact lens into my right eye, then insert the HearEar bud into the canal of my ear. Next, I slip the TouchCuff onto my wrist.

  Castor hands me one more thing. “Behold, your Personal Ecosystem Streaming Tech device!”

  “I hate these PESTs.” I pluck the tiny silver insect from his upturned palm.

  “Nest it somewhere safe until you need it.”

  I snuggle the minuscule flying camera between the ridge on top of my left ear and the side of my head. After a few seconds, the devices all link up with the CPU I’ve slipped inside my shoe, and everything comes online. The full-color softness of the leaves and grass and flowers surrounding me is marred by an overlay of superimposed information on the iEye. The date. The time. My location. As if I’m a moron who has no sense of my existence without confirmation from the AlphaZonia Cloud. Then the HearEar starts to talk. Hello, there, it says in a soothing female voice. What’s your name?

  “Shut up,” I say, and the voice goes silent.

  “Rude,” says Castor.

  “It’s an algorithm. Not sentient.”

  “Yet,” he says, one eyebrow up. He takes off his hooded jacket to reveal a black and silver jumpsuit with mesh sleeves, just like the Yoobie guys wear. He shoves the jacket into his knapsack, then stashes the whole thing in a slight depression on the ground near the wall. He kicks leaves over it for cover.

  “Ready?” he asks as he heads for the Palace.

  “No,” I say, but he isn’t listening.

  UMA JEMISON

  MOON UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL COLONY

  I’M SO UPSET when I leave Dr. Fornax’s office that I nearly bump into a group of Second Gens on the AutoWalk. I fight hard to keep my tears in check. I don’t want to be on a transport with those goons staring at my red and watery eyes. And there’s no way I’m going to rejoin my cohort today. I don’t need Micra and her evil minions watching me fight back my Earthly emotions. I hop off the mover and scurry down a maintenance hall, head down, willing myself not to break.

  I slip around a corner out of sight of the others and look over my shoulder to make sure no one’s watching. I dig my device out of my pocket. Entry, I command. A floor-door slides open, and I disappear into the HabiTrails.

  As soon as my feet hit the ground and I know that I’m alone, I burst. My sobs echo down the empty, well-lit tube like neutrons zipping around the exterior of a spinning atom. I ping my mom again, but she still doesn’t answer.

  Do you wish to leave a message? Darshan asks, but I say no and disconnect. If I try to talk now, I’ll just blubber, and she’ll have no idea why I’m crying, which will make her worry. Instead, I keep walking through the HabiTrail.

  When we first moved here, the idea of popping up from the floor and climbing down from the ceiling was bizarre to me. It took a while to understand that there is no actual up and down because we’re in constant rotation around a stationary core and you’re moving either closer to the center or farther away. Travelator capsules are on an interior track. HabiTrails on the exterior. And right now, I want to be as far away from the heart of this place as possible. If there were an escape hatch nearby, I’d open it and willingly get sucked into the void of space.

  But of course, there’s not. The only choice is to trudge on home.

  Most MUSCies never use the HabiTrails because the g-force this far from the core makes their legs feel like iron. But for
my family, the rate of induced-gravity in these tubes running around the exterior of the station feels more like Earth, which my parents found comforting after a long day in the gravity-less Moon surface mines. When I was little, we came here every night after dinner for a walk, which is why I’m like a rat in a maze. I don’t have to see through my blur of tears to know exactly which tube to take from the work area to our domicile.

  I don’t bother to hide my blathering when I pop up the ladder into the empty hall. Since everyone is at work or at school, this is the one place on MUSC where no one will bother me.

  The door to Domicile 1235 automatically opens when I reach it. I enter our home and plod past everything: the hyper-efficient kitchen with our monthly allotment of prepackaged food and two backless stools attached to a small round table. Past the well-worn seating surfaces of the common room, where I pause in front of our family photo stream on the wall. I stop and watch the familiar pix of my parents. They made a funny pair. For every ounce of my mother’s lithe and sinewy muscle, my father was short, squat, and compact. She was the giraffe to his rhino, and she towered over him by nearly a foot. Her skin is darker than his was, but her hair is lighter. I inherited my curls from him. My big smile from her. Despite their differences, they were gorgeous together. Only no MUSCies can see that.

  Although my mother is one of the most beautiful and smartest women I’ve ever met, she feels perpetually ugly and stupid here. The other cohort mothers have little to do with her. Only Kepler’s mom is friendly, and even that feels more like mercy than actual esteem.

  “I miss you,” I whisper when my father’s pix comes up. He stands on Earth with our dog next to a Joshua tree beneath the blazing sun, his smiling face in the shadow of a floppy hat. Next is the two of us standing hand in hand at an ocean pier where he taught me to swim. There is one of the three of us in front of the MUSC Shuttle, me, tiny on my father’s shoulders as he grips my legs and grins next to my mom. And last us on the Moon, both my parents in their protective mining gear, helmets in hand, looking serious and proud of the life they were making for me here at MUSC.

  There are no pix of where he is now. His body is forever wrapped in a shining silver sheath and tethered to the surface of the Moon. The dead are arranged like rows of strange metallic flowers sprouting in the darkness of the far side.

  When the slide show begins again, I walk to my room, where I slump at my desk and stare at my collection of petri dishes. These beautiful bacteria colonies sampled from Earth shuttles are my solace. I feed them, starve them, warm them, freeze them, add dyes to make them pretty as they organize themselves past obstacles I put in their paths and search for new avenues of exploration.

  I’ve watched them grow from a few lonely individuals into intricate societies. Once the dye is set, some look like vibrant magenta blooms with chartreuse fronds. Others twist and turn like bright green tendrils ending with lavender blossoms and deep red berries. Some are fancy dancing girls with giant purple fans.

  My favorite is Paenibacillus vortex, a gram-positive swarming bacteria that loves oxygen, hates the cold, and uses tiny flagella to colonize the dish in the shape of brilliant blue peacock feathers. But even my mini botanical garden can’t cheer me up today. Now it’s just a reminder of where I’m not going.

  I leave my desk and climb into my sleeping berth (affixed to the wall a requisite two meters above the floor) and slip beneath my blankets—one MUSC-issued ultra-thin, energy-efficient coverlet (white); the other pieced together from scraps of blue and green and brown fabrics my family brought to the Moon when we emigrated. (A piece of my father’s hand-knit woolen sweater. A strip from my mother’s soft flannel shirt. Patches from a baby blanket I hugged down to holes.) I snuggle into those fabrics searching for a smell lost in the olfactory synapses of my brain. Is it rain on rocks, or fresh-cut coconut, or ferns unfurling in the morning sun? Or an ocean breeze? I can’t remember anymore because every scent has been superseded by the strange MUSC smell of soap and metal.

  I was so homesick for Earth when we arrived here that Mom programmed my ceiling blue with fluffy white clouds. My wall screen projects images of Earth flora and fauna. Flamboyant pink hibiscus flowers. Purple and yellow hummingbirds. Whorls of green leaves on trees. An image of our dog, Mahati—his kind eyes asking why we left him behind. These are the last images I’ve seen every night when I go to sleep and the first ones I’ve seen every morning when I wake. For the past ten years, I’ve assumed I would see it all again someday in person. And now … there’s no chance. Never again. For the rest of my life, I’ll only catch fleeting glimpses of the Earth whizzing past our station 384,000 kilometers away. And that will make me nauseous.

  The only other images projected in my room are two calendars on the wall directly beside me. One from Earth that my mother prefers because she still likes knowing the date down there. The months each have names and distinct personalities according to her. January was barren. February dour. March had hope. April was volatile. May optimistic. June was sunny. July hot. August unbearable. The other is the thirteen-month fixed calendar we use on MUSC. The months proceed in numerical order. Each month has twenty-eight days divided into four seven-day weeks. Like the weather here, the days are perpetually the same. The only anomalies are the month of Sol, which falls between months six and seven, and the two extra Leap Days scheduled in to make up for lost time. Methodically, I’ve color-blocked in the days as they’ve passed. A countdown until I would leave. Leap Day of MUSC Year 94. June 18 on Earth. Less than ten hours away.

  When I see those dates, so anticipated for so long, I’m overwhelmed with a wave of sadness. It sucks at me and carries me away. I take my device off and stash it beneath my pillow as I close my eyes and drift toward an abyss of sorrow. At least if I’m asleep, I can’t cry anymore.

  TALITHA NEVA

  ALPHAZONIA, EARTH

  I FOLLOW CASTOR up to the edge of the bush and peek through the branches at the line of AlphaZonian CelebriStreamers snaking from their AutoPods to the Palace portico, PESTs swarming around their heads. As with all of these events, a high-intensity viewing ensemble of Wastelanders hired for the day to act like fans adds frenzy to the air. The Yoobies strut through the HIVE, waving and blowing kisses, live-streaming every minute of their lives.

  “I can’t believe any of these dumdums have followers on their Streams,” I say.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” says Castor. “One Yoobie’s reality is everybody else’s entertainment.”

  “This is all so stupid. Why does D’Cart even have these parties? I thought the whole point of having a TouchyFeelyTech brain implant is that you didn’t have to go anywhere to have an experience. Can’t they all just stay home and feel everything their beloved D’Cart feels?”

  “They might be tech enabled, but they’re still human enough to be social creatures,” says Castor. “They want to be together. But also,” he says in his explainy voice, “Yoobies like to flaunt that only they can afford the TFT chips. I buy, therefore I am.”

  “As if consuming confirms their existence,” I say with a sneer.

  “Yep,” says Castor. “And everybody else in the world who wants to live the Yoobie life but can’t afford it watches their favorite Streamers endorse their favorite D’Cart products.”

  “Why live your own life, when you can live vicariously through someone else?”

  “Do you know what the real beauty and brilliance of this system is?” Castor asks me.

  “The real question is, do I care?” I say, but my brother ignores me and keeps talking.

  “D’Cart makes a product. Yoobies endorse that product. Streamers buy that product, and the money goes into the bank of D’Cart then gets redistributed as a universal basic income to the Yoobies. It’s a closed circle of profit with D’Cart at the center and the Yoobies orbiting around the edges.”

  “While the rest of us rot in the void beyond,” I add.

  “Except for me,” he says. “I intend to get a cut one way or an
other.”

  “Hmph” is all I can say. “No one in that line deserves to be here. Their only achievement is being born into families that bought into this city a long time ago and still have the money to live here.”

  “No shit, Talitha,” says Castor, looking me in the eye. “And nobody’s going to open the door for us, which is why we have to find a way through. So … are you coming or not?”

  “I’m coming,” I grumble. But, just as we’re about to step out of the bushes, I grab Castor’s arm and yank him back. “Oh, no! It’s Mundie.”

  I point across the lawn to the lanky guy slouched by a side entrance of the Palace. Mundie is unmistakable. He’s all legs, like a large wading bird, with spiky dark hair tinted silver on the ends. His face is so chiseled you could sharpen a blade against his cheekbones or open a bottle with his beaky nose. But he’s one of us. An urchin from the Wastelands originally. Though, unlike us, he’s legit. He came in as a ReConstruction worker and got in good with D’Cart when he repaired her broken ConstructiBots on the fly. Since then, he’s risen up the ranks to chief robot repairer at the Palace.

  “We can’t go in.” I back away. “If Mundie sees us, he’ll know we don’t belong.”

  “No, no, wait a sec.” Castor holds up a finger. “This could work in our favor. He’d never rat you out.”

  My cheeks flare up bright red. The last time I saw Mundie, Castor and I had just come home from scavenging at a Yoobie beach barbecue. Mundie was waiting in our driveway. When I stepped out of our hijacked AutoPod in a gauzy cover-up over a black bikini, he grabbed my arm and said, I almost didn’t recognize you, Tal. He looked me up and down. His leer felt like a small assault. You should dress like that more often. You look good.

  I yanked my arm away. It’s none of your business how I look.

  It was a compliment, he called after me. Most girls like compliments.

  I’m not most girls, I told him, and went inside to change my clothes.

  “I don’t want him thinking there’s a chance of something between us,” I tell Castor.