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  Talitha rolls her eyes at me, but as usual, she gives in. “Fine, but let’s get this over with and get the hell out of here. I’m jumping out of my skin.”

  I lead the way to the pool’s edge. “Your PEST is going live in ten seconds,” I tell her, then step away as I blink to switch my iEye to Streaming mode. She takes a deep breath and shifts her body from a slouching, insecure Wastelander into her bubbly party-girl parody persona. I don’t know how she does it. It’s almost as if she shifts her center of gravity upward and unhinges her shoulders and hips. She’s looser, more graceful, and infinitely more fun when she becomes her alter ego, NayRay DeDumpingCart.

  I give her a slight nod. She launches her PEST. My left iEye dilates to black so I can watch her Stream. On my TouchCuff, I open up my hacking page.

  “Hey, guys! It’s me,” she squees in her best CelebriStream imitation. “Tonight we’re at an exclusive event in the fabled Pink Palace! How much do you love this new Kinematic Jumpsuit I’ve got on?” She spins, strikes a pose, does a little dance to the tune on our HearEars that I’ve diverted to our Stream so our followers can feel like they’re here, too. “Looks like every lovely lady is wearing one tonight!”

  She flicks the PEST several inches back to widen the shot so our followers can see her standing in a sea of tessellated-triangle-clad Yoobies mingling by the pool. Then I start my real job of the night—hijacking product links for the jumpsuits from D’Cart’s virtual warehouse while Talitha talks up the sales. It’s not hard, but I have to work fast. I’ve already created a backdoor in D’Cart’s site so I can slip in and divert our followers’ click-thrus to a mirror landing page.

  “This jumpsuit is super comfy!” Talitha lies. “It moves with you as you move because it’s printed to your exact measurements. Click the link to order now!”

  On my cuff screen, I watch as orders roll in and payments are processed. Talitha knows the game—she has to keep talking until the program I created can make the money trail disappear but keep the orders in the D’Cart queue so they’re filled. Everything seems to be going smoothly, so I scan the area for other D’Cart products we can hijack.

  I spot the perfect setup on the pool deck. FlipChairs, behind you, I text to Talitha’s iEye lens. She sees the message and nods.

  She turns and gasps. “Oh, look at this!” She rushes over to a row of empty deck chairs. “D’Cart’s Foldable FlipChair Deluxe Model 6 with built-in sunbrellas, moonbeam collectors, cup holders, water vapor fan, and decorative solar lights.” She plops down, crosses her legs, and sighs as if she’s in heaven. The PEST zooms in close. “Don’t you just love it? Foldable FlipChair, a chair other chairs want to sit in!”

  I embed a link, and orders for the chairs pour in. Our followers might love it when Talitha makes fun of D’Cart, but they want the products just the same as everybody else who streams.

  Then Talitha’s up again. “Hey, look! Here’s something fun!” She points to a couple of CelebriStreamers at the far end of the deck, and I know she’s hit a jackpot. “It’s everybody’s fave TFTers—Lil Cutie Wootie and her pal Squeegee Bop!”

  The PEST pans over to this week’s “It” girl of the D’Cart TouchyFeelyTech world. She’s a few years older than we are, with skin the color of a goldfish and hair dyed two-tone pink. Her enormously long false eyelashes graze her cheeks when she blinks. At the mention of Lil Cutie Wootie, more followers jump into our Stream to get a look. I use my TouchCuff to augment Cutie Wootie with a pink tutu, piggy nose, and pointy ears, then I add little piglet angels circling her head. I augment Squeegee Bop with rainbows farting from his butt in rhythm to the music on the Stream. In a stroke of luck, Lil Cutie Wootie calls out her massively popular catchphrase of the week, “Well, slap my ass and call me Jimmy, I’m happy as poop on a stick!”

  Within seconds, the rivulet I created has caught on. An InstaMeme is born. Our NayRay parody Stream is inundated with followers farting rainbows and dancing like little pigs while clicking on our stolen product links. I’m so caught up in keeping everything moving smoothly that I don’t notice what’s happening until Talitha grabs my arm.

  Over the piercing noise of a siren, she shouts, “Run! We’re busted!”

  UMA JEMISON

  MOON UTILITARIAN SURVIVAL COLONY

  INSIDE A TRAVELATOR capsule with Kepler, I brace myself against the wall. As soon as we start to move inward on the station, I’m woozy. The Coriolis effect is exponentially worse for me since my Earthling inner ears aren’t finely tuned to the changes of induced gravity on MUSC.

  When we stop, my feet begin to lift. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I grapple for something to hang on to, swallowing down the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Ready?” Kepler says. Then the airlock hisses open and the capsule doors slide apart. My whole body rises, but I grip the side of the capsule to keep myself from floating into the large open space in front of us.

  “We’re in the core!” I yell.

  “I know!” Kepler shouts, and tumbles past me into the gravity-less space of the stationary center on our ever-rotating station.

  “How do you have the code to get in here?” I ask, still clinging to the wall like a bug because I’m too scared to let go.

  “I’m very tricky,” he says, and zooms by me in midair.

  “You stole it from your mom, didn’t you?”

  “Yep! Watch this!” He runs up a wall, over my head, and turns slow somersaults in midair. “Come on! Give it a try.” He tugs on my legs.

  “Noooooo!” I yell, but my grip loosens, and I float into the center of the room. Underneath the floor far below us, the core continues down to the base of the station. Most of that space is taken up with storage and machinery, but here in the emptiness, MUSCie kids can come to play. Once I’m airborne, I start to relax. “I haven’t been here for years.”

  “Didn’t every kid in our cohort have a birthday party here when we turned ten?”

  “Not me!”

  “Where was yours?”

  I turn over and stare up at Kep. “I didn’t have a party that year,” I remind him.

  He thinks back and then visibly reddens. “Sorry,” he says. “That’s the year your father died.”

  I nod.

  “I’m sorry I forgot, Oom.”

  “That’s all right,” I tell him, shutting down the conversation, because it’s not one I want to have. “It was a long time ago to remember.”

  “Come up here, to the top!” he calls.

  “Why?”

  “Just come on!” he insists. “You’re going to like this.”

  I swim after him, kicking my legs and paddling my arms as if I’m in water. When I reach him, I see we are hovering beneath one big round window at the very top of the MUSC core—the only place here that looks out into the universe but doesn’t spin.

  “No way,” I say as I press my hands against the window to shade my eyes so I can see outside better. Kepler does the same. From this vantage point, the sky is still, and I feel at ease. Pinpricks of stars populate the perpetual night instead of speeding past in a blur. In the distance a blue and white hump hangs in space—the Earth in half shadow rising over the lunar horizon.

  I push off the window and float aimlessly, not wanting to look at the place where I’m not going.

  Kep swims toward me. “Why don’t you come down to the surface with me? There’s a bunch of people going. Gemini and Fermi and Cassio. We leave tomorrow night.”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “We can ditch the others and have fun,” he offers. “Or just hang out with Gemini. He’s not so bad. Kind of fun, once you get to know him.”

  I shake my head.

  “You have to do something during Sol.”

  “Why?” I ask, feeling hopeless as I float. “No matter what, in twenty-eight days, I’m going to get my LWA and then life is over.”

  We start to drift apart, so Kep reaches for my hand. “Maybe we’ll end up in the same lab.” He squeezes my fingers. “W
e’re both really good at immunology, so—”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I squeeze back.

  My feelings for Kepler have always been difficult to grasp or explain. Most of the time, he’s my best friend, plain and simple. More of a brother. But then there are moments like this when I think he might want more than friendship. When his emotions seem to morph into something stronger than I feel. I try to imagine whether my usual urge to punch him playfully or say something stupid to make him laugh could shift to wanting to hug him tight or press my mouth against his, but that thought makes my stomach churn with uncertainty. I’m not sure why. Maybe because we’re so close.

  We kissed once. Two years ago. It was unexpected and strange. It was late at night. We were both punchy from studying but too revved up to go to bed, so we turned on an old 2-D Earth movie about a boy and girl. She had a lung disease. He had cancer. One of them was going to die. I got caught up in the emotion of that story, and it must have affected Kepler the same way, because even though people here consider it a weakness to be swayed by art (no tears for beautiful sonatas, no swooning over the strokes of a master’s brush), before we knew it, our mouths were pressed together, our tongues doing some kind of strange tango, as if we needed to experience for ourselves what we were seeing on the screen.

  Only, for me, it wasn’t what I had imagined when I watched the boy and dying girl in the movie because, as usual, the person I wanted most to kiss was the girl, not Kepler. I’ve tried to be more like the others here. To them, gender is no issue. You like who you like, plain and simple. But I’m different. I’ve only ever had crushes on girls. That night with Kep, I pulled away from our kiss and wiped my mouth, laughing nervously, barely able to look at him. We never talked about it again.

  My palm begins to sweat in his, and my heart gets fluttery. We’ve drifted farther apart, our arms outstretched between our floating bodies, fingers still loosely entwined. As close as I feel to Kepler, sometimes I wonder if we’ll always be tidally locked, like the Earth and Moon, at a safe distance and only able to see one side of each other.

  Slowly, I turn my head to face him. I want to say something. Something meaningful and kind. I want him to know how important his friendship has been to me. How I could have never survived my childhood on MUSC without him. How although I’m so sad that I’m not going back to Earth, it’ll be okay because he’ll be here. But, before I can find a way to say any of this, Kep’s cyber assistant, Mazie, projects and says, “Happy Leap Day, Kepler! You have five parties to attend.”

  We both startle and move apart.

  “Woohoo! Must be midnight. Let the parties begin!” Kep turns a somersault. “Want to come with me?”

  “No,” I say way too quickly.

  “Come on, Oom. Everybody is going. It’s what you do right before you leave for Sol.”

  “No, it’s what you and all the other Third Gens do. I was supposed to be on a flight about now, remember? I scheduled it that way on purpose.”

  A harsh buzzer sounds outside the core and startles both of us.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” Kepler grabs my hand, but this time his grip is tense and tight. “But I don’t want to find out. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  CASTOR NEVA

  ALPHAZONIA, EARTH

  TALITHA AND I clutch each other as the siren blares. I take off toward the wall. She runs for the Palace. We pull apart, then collide like two protons. The rhythmic thrum of tiny ’copter blades drowns out the music in our ears. We both know it’s too late to run, so my sister and I cower as a fleet of drones darkens the sky.

  “I told you!” she yells.

  “I’m sorry!” I yell back, still looking for a way to escape.

  Then I notice that all around us the Yoobies jump in time to the music and reach up to the sky. They aren’t concerned that something’s wrong. They’re excited for what’s coming.

  “Now, hear this!” a voice booms over a driving beat of music. Un-chh, un-chh, un-chh, un-chh. I look up, trying to understand what’s going on.

  The cyber voice answers my question. It’s a VirtuProduct Drop! the voice announces.

  The Yoobies scream with delight and begin to chant, “Things make us happy! Things make us happy! Things make us happy!”

  “Oh, my god!” I double over, laughing. “I thought we were goners!”

  “That scared me half to death,” Talitha yells, and bangs on my back with her fists.

  From the sky, glittering, glowing D’Cart product holos rain down on the crowd. Individually wrapped Strawberry ScrumCrumpets. Pappy’s Pineapple Papaya Elixir. Lightening Smile Teeth Whitening Wands. Diamond-Tipped ExfoliLasers. Torso Toner Compression T-shirts. Dragonfly Drones. Neat Meat Multi-Use Eating Tools.

  All around us, a scrum of bodies swipe at the air with their cuffs. They throw elbows, flail wildly, and stomp on one another’s toes to fill their VirtuCarts with as many falling hologram products as they can.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I shout.

  Talitha understands. She catches her breath, relaunches her PEST, and starts grabbing at the holos with her TouchCuff, while I work like crazy to embed links and sell the loot as quick as she can grab it.

  When the last of the VirtuProds are gone, the crowd disperses, chattering away to their followers, and the voice announces, And now … It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for! The highlight of the night! The stuff dreams are made of!

  An eerie hush falls over the grounds as all the Yoobies stop in their tracks.

  Please welcome, live and in person, the High Priestess of Product Placement, CelebriStreamer ExtraOrdinairre, Inventor of TouchyFeelyTech, and AlphaZonia CEO, the Queen herself …

  Two spotlights from the drones sweep across the great lawn. As if in slow motion, every person and their PEST on the lawn turns to face a twenty-foot hologram of bikini-clad D’Cart stepping out onto a second-floor balcony of the Palace overlooking the far end of the glimmering swimming pool.

  Then the voice shouts, RayNay DeShoppingCart! and her name reverberates through the air.

  Yoobies rush past us to get closer to their leader, but Talitha and I stay put. My sister shakes her head wearily. I can see exhaustion settle over her as she slouches back into her fretful self. She stows her PEST and says, “Now can we get out of here?”

  “No way,” I tell her. “D’Cart is here IRL. We have to give this to our followers!”

  “Castor, no,” she hisses.

  “If you won’t do it, I will!” I slip away and run up a small hill to get a better shot with my iEye. In my HearEar, the music swells—all strings and woodwinds building up. The pool lights fade to pink as the spotlights from the drones swirl to the rhythm of the drums. The subtle aroma of jasmine fills the air.

  D’Cart works the moment like a pro. Her giant holo blinks—eyes as wide as windows. Lashes long as arms. She looks left, then makes an O with her mouth as if she’s really seeing all of her followers down below.

  “Hello, my LUVs. My shining stars. Each and every one of you is as perfect an individual as a star up in the sky.” I switch my iEye to the D’Cart stream and watch her reach up to pluck a virtual star from her augmented reality. She blows it into glittery holo dust over everyone’s heads. Then she licks her unnaturally plump lips covered in trademark pink candy gloss as she smiles to reveal white teeth straight as a wall.

  D’Cart laughs, bubbly. Tosses back her hair—smooth as paper, colored caramel with streaks of blond and strands of red today. “Are you ready?” she asks her followers. They scream for more. “Then let’s go! Dive in, everyone. Dive in!”

  I look past my iEye and see the real D’Cart in the flesh standing on the balcony. She runs on tiptoes toward the edge, then lifts off in a perfect swan. Her twenty-foot hologram image soars over the Yoobie crowd. They reach up as if to touch their CEO hero, then SPLASH! The crowd gasps as the real D’Cart hits the crystalline water below. All the TFT-chippers reflexively wipe their hands across their dry fac
es, pushing nonexistent water droplets away because they feel every sensation that D’Cart feels.

  When she emerges, mermaid-like, out of the water to settle on folded arms at the pool’s edge, she asks her TFT followers, “Aaaah! Can you feel the cool water against your skin? Smell the freshness of this glorious night?”

  “Yes we can!” her followers shout in unison.

  In one easy movement, she pushes out of the pool and walks over to a single crystalline bottle of D’Cart VitaJuv Lapis Lazuli Gem Water perfectly positioned on a poolside table close to where Talitha stands. My sister shrinks back, looking for a place to hide. At that exact moment, on D’Cart Streams all over the world, the image of that bottle fills people’s minds. Shining beads of water, blue as the pool, roll down the frosty glass. I watch in real time as D’Cart lifts it to her lips, tosses her head so her hair drips down her back, and takes a long, sultry draft.

  “Aaaaah! Can you taste that cool, refreshing water?” she asks her followers. “Feel the vitamins and minerals coursing through your veins, revitalizing your internal organs? Mmmmmm. Delicious, right?” She pauses for her followers to swallow as their TFT chips process the taste she tastes and feel the sensation of the water down their dry throats. She raises the bottle as if in a toast. “Get yours today!”

  All around us, DomestiBots fill the courtyard with trays of the VitaJuv Lapis Lazuli Gem Waters. The Yoobies converge. Each grabs a bottle, pops it open, and yammers away to their followers, hoping to get more product click-thrus to supplement their incomes. Just as I’m about to go, I see D’Cart hesitate on the pool deck. I could swear she catches sight of my sister half cowering in the shadows. A chill goes through my body, but then D’Cart turns away. There’s no way she saw. Or if she did, she’d think Talitha was just another TFTer from the city.

  I turn away and head toward a knot of people to claim a bottle of the Gem Water, then I hear my name. I spin in a circle. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a tussle. The crowd behind me parts, and two red SecuriBots roll up the grassy hill. Without thinking, I dodge one and shoulder slam the other, knocking it off balance. Before it rights itself, I take off in the opposite direction toward Talitha by the pool.