by Mary Mascari
On my last day as a student of the Portero Nanobotanical Institute, I thought I knew what I’d be doing next: graduation, a good job as a nanobotanist with the Portero Corporation—basically the bright future that I’d been promised by my parents and teachers.
I arrived at the greenhouse, buzzing with excitement. I turned the corner to my tokonoma, the cubicle where I’d lived and worked for the past three years. On the wall outside, the photograph over my nameplate hardly looked like me anymore. The Britta Hammar in that picture wore makeup and fixed up her blonde hair in poofy curls. I hadn’t had time for that since, well, right after that photo was taken. Now I wore braids and coveralls, which made it harder to tell whether or not I’d slept or showered recently. “Good morning, Bebe!” I called out.
Bebe didn’t respond. She was a Campsis radicans porteris, a trumpet vine subspecies, owned by Portero Corporation, since they run the school. I made her, though, and spent the last two years of school cultivating her. Her vines climbed the back wall of my tokonoma, forming an aesthetically pleasing shape. Her orange-pink, trumpet shaped flowers were perfectly placed, not too many, not too few.
Well, maybe one too many. I pulled a pair of shears from my tool belt. I flipped my goggles down and set them to 10x magnification. The stem of the offending flower turned to a scaly dragon leg. I used my shears to disconnect the flower at the junction. It gave an electric pop when I pulled it out.
Tapping my goggles back to normal magnification, I popped open a panel in Bebe’s root pod and plugged my handheld in to get some readings. Oxygen levels were at 604, well over the minimum of 500. I tweaked the leaf color to be a bit bluer and programmed the tendrils in the top left segment to curl ten percent tighter. I disconnected my handheld, closed the panel, and stepped back to see how she looked.
Bebe was a nanobotanic plant, a combination of organic material and electronics. Without plants like her, we couldn’t live in space. She generated oxygen and consumed carbon dioxide without water or soil. But we nanobotanists had to do more than that. Masaki Nakamura, who invented the technology, insisted that our plants be beautiful as well as functional.
A jury, including Nakamura-sensei himself, was coming in five hours to inspect Bebe and decide if I would graduate. He might give me a recommendation for a job with Portero, the parent company for our entire space station. Yamada-sensei was sure I would get full marks, but I couldn’t be anything short of perfect.
I pulled on my gloves, changed my goggles to 5x magnification, and started my daily routine of checking each leaf and tendril. It usually took a full hour for a plant this size. Some students had smaller plants, little rhododendrons or even ferns, and there was some merit in a delicate plant, but I wasn’t going to settle for something that you could stick on a shelf. The only reason I didn’t do an evergreen was that Yamada-sensei already had two other students doing conifers, and she said I should showcase my skill at flowers.
I began at the root pod at the bottom, touching each leaf carefully. If I found any tears or spots, I would disconnect the leaf and grow a new one to replace it. It took about a minute. A full vine took about five. I could regenerate the leaves on the whole plant in about an hour if I really had to, but then I’d have to take another week to get them trimmed and colored properly.
It was monotonous work, so I tapped my earpiece to play some music. Tristan, my as of recently ex-boyfriend, had gotten some new tunes from Earth, and I bounced to the rhythm as I turned over each leaf.
But then I saw a bug.
I shut off the music. A shiny, black bug, about the size of my fingernail, was crawling on one of Bebe’s leaves. I pulled it off and inspected it. I didn’t see any tag or chop on its carapace, even when I looked at 20x magnification. That was weird; usually the bug hackers wanted you to know who they were. I carried the thing over to my workbench and dropped it into a plastic jar, then sealed it shut.
But when I went back to Bebe, I found another one. And then another. And then three, then five, then ten.
I had an infestation.
Inconvenient, but not a disaster. I knew how to handle this. I had memorized the Portero Institute’s entire list of approved treatments for infestation. I grabbed a can of foam from my workbench and sprayed it on a leaf that had three of the creatures chewing on it. The foam was thick and sticky, and was supposed to gum up their circuits. But as soon as I finished spraying, three little black heads poked out. They just crawled out of the foam and moved on to another leaf.
I was pretty sure that foam was becoming outdated, anyway. The bug hackers were always working around our defenses. But we at the institute still had some tricks up our sleeves.
I set up little speakers around the tokonoma and hooked my tune player into them. I called “Noise!” to the students in the other cubicles and then put in earplugs. The sound coming from the speakers started off low, a rumble that shook the floor and my intestines, and worked its way up to a piercing wail, then back down again. Then the tones randomly jumped around, like some insane dance beat. Thirty seconds of that usually did the trick and fried their circuits. I let it go for a full minute. The other students on the floor could deal with it.
I turned the music off and checked Bebe again, expecting to see a bunch of little frozen bugs in a pile in the mulch on the floor. But they were still creeping around, destroying my beautiful Bebe. So these bugs were soundproof, too.
I flipped over another leaf and my stomach flipped along with it. The back was covered with eggs. The damned things were reproducing. I tried to scrape the eggs off, but they were fused to the leaf so tightly that I wound up scraping the outer skin of the leaf along with them.
The only way to deal with bug eggs was to disable them. And I had to do it quickly. Bebe’s oxygen levels were plummeting. Down to 598 already.
I spent the rest of the hour going through every single technique in the approved list: infrared light, every acid spray that wouldn’t also eat Bebe’s leaves, even some little EM pulses. And every time, those damn little bugs kept crawling around, oblivious to my impending doom.
I was out of options. Who the hell had made these things? My last resort was to shut Bebe down, set her into a dormant state, and cut off all the leaves. But there wasn’t time to shape and color the new leaves before the jury. I’d just as soon show up to my final exam naked.
∞
The Doolean IV space station where I lived was shaped like a series of mostaccioli noodles, each nested inside the other to make a cylinder. The noodles rotated around the middle to provide artificial gravity through centripetal force. That meant that the outer noodle was down, and the space in the middle, the axis, was at the top. In between were fifteen levels of housing, lab space, offices, and everything else, all floating in an orbit between Earth and Mars.
My school and house were on the second level in from the outside. Since my mom’s promotion, we were able to get a tunnel down to the outer level, so we could climb down and look out at space. We went to a party at her boss’s house once, on the outermost level, and they had a room where the whole floor was a window. It felt like you were walking on stars.
But now I needed to go inward and upward. I grabbed my specimen jar, stuck a few more bugs and some leaves into it, and ran out to catch the next zipsled up to the axis. Tristan would still be at work. I hoped he’d talk to me. I only had four hours left.
There weren’t any express zipsleds at this hour, so the ride took about twenty minutes with all the stops. After debating with myself for ten levels, I decided to call my sister, Solange. I hated to bother her, but I was desperate.
Solange had the job I wanted in a few years. Her official title was Senior Associate Nanobotanist, which doesn’t sound very prestigious, but Solange was the first person to ever make senior associate only two years out of school. I planned to be the second.
She answered right away. I knew she would. “Hey, little Sis. Ready for the jury?” She tried to sound perky, but I heard the fatigue in her voice. Her baby, my niece Thea, was five months old and still wasn’t sleeping through the night.
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
I told her about the bugs.
“Did you try foam?”
“Of course. And sound frequencies. And everything else on the list.” The bugs started to float in the jar. We were getting close to the axis.
Solange sighed. “I think you’re going to have to shut her down.”
“I’m on my way to talk to Tristan now.”
Solange breathed in through her teeth in a little hiss. “Is that a good idea?”
“Nakamura-sensei is going to be there at four.”
“Yeah.” Solange gave another sigh, which turned into a yawn. “Tell you what. Let me see what I can find here.”
“I’m not supposed to get help from Portero employees.”
“I don’t think anyone will mind if I do a little research. I mean, this bug you’ve got is worse than what most students have to deal with. Extreme measures are called for.”
“Thanks a million.”
“Anything for my little sister.”
The zipsled arrived at the station just as I hung up.
∞
Tristan was one of the few students at the institute from the poorer part of the station, the inner levels, but he was smarter and worked harder than those of us who were children of Portero executives. We were in the same year, up until last semester. He couldn’t get the oxygen levels on his barrel cactus, a Ferocactus pilosus porteris, over the minimum for his final exam. I told him it wasn’t a big deal, he could take the class over, but instead he quit the school entirely. We stayed together for a few months afterwards, but in the end I couldn’t watch him throw his talent away like that.
Now he worked in a factory that made some sort of medical equipment based on microscopic glass bubbles. He spent all day monitoring and fixing machines that made bubble after bubble. He kept saying he was going to start on a Pereskia aculeata one of these days, but I never saw it.
A little bell rang as I skipped into the drab front office, my feet light in the low gravity. The office was in the innermost level. On the other side of the door was the axis, the gravity-free zone at the center of the whole station. Jenine, the receptionist, smiled at me, showing pink lipstick on her teeth. “Tristan’s still on shift,” she told me. She didn’t know that we’d broken up.
“It’s kind of an emergency.” Jenine’s desk was covered in little pictures of children on Earth, who I always guessed were her grandchildren. She wouldn’t be able to see them very often because of the way the orbits lined up. “I’ve got my final jury today and I need his help.”
She winked and picked up the phone. “Good luck, hon,” she said, then hit a button and announced, “Tristan Shea to reception, please. Tristan Shea.” She hung up. “He’ll be out in a second, hon. If you want, there’s juice in the fridge.”
I skipped over to a little couch and pulled myself onto it. There were straps you could use to tie yourself in if you wanted, but I just hooked a leg around the armrest. Even though I was from the Outer Levels, I knew how to handle myself in low gravity.
A hatch in the ceiling opened and Tristan’s legs appeared on the ladder, then the rest of him. He was wearing stained blue coveralls with his name embroidered over the Portero logo.
He hopped to the floor from halfway down the ladder. His black hair was messy from being in zero-g. I used to run my fingers through it, to try to neaten it.
He narrowed his eyes when he saw me. “What are you doing here?”
I showed him the specimen jar. “Bebe’s got bugs, and my jury’s today.”
Tristan’s blue eyes flicked down to the jar. I felt the receptionist watching us. “What do you want me to do?”
“I thought you might know… something?”
“You think because I live in the inner levels, I’ll know who all the hackers are, is that it?” He was still standing by the ladder, his work gloves still on.
“No,” I protested. “I thought…” but he was right.
“Failing a jury’s not the end of the world.”
“I know.” But it was for me. I felt my throat tighten and took a breath to release it. I held the jar out. “They’ve laid eggs.”
Tristan took a glove off and reached for the jar. He looked at the bugs, now happily munching on the leaves I’d put in.
“Jury’s at four?” he asked. His lips hardly moved.
I nodded, a tear floating away from my face in a shimmery blob. He hated it when I cried.
He kept looking at the bugs. The clock ticked on the wall like it was taunting me.
“Jenine, you got some paper?” The receptionist handed Tristan a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote something, tore off the page, and then handed it to me. “If you hurry, you can get there and back in time.”
It was an address, in Tristan’s neighborhood, and a name, Gilman.
∞
The first time Tristan took me to his house, I was a little disappointed. I’d expected the inner levels to be scary, dark, chaotic slums with tattooed gangs roaming the streets and some guy playing a plaintive saxophone on his balcony while sirens wailed.
The inner level neighborhoods weren’t that poetic. They were row after row of identical, plain buildings, all the same bland brown of recycled SoyPlas; down in the outer levels we got the freshly grown stuff in bright colors, but here those colors commingled into a hopeless hue. In front of each building, in the middle of the bare lawn, stood a single tree badly in need of maintenance. Their leaves, all the same dull green, were unevenly spaced, leaving wide bare patches of splaying branches. A few kids played outside, and I did see one guy with a tattoo, but he was just sitting on his front steps, drinking a soda. It wasn’t dangerous. It was drab, dirty, and soulless.
The address on the paper was a few blocks down from where Tristan lived, but the building was identical. I went to the second floor, found the right apartment, and paused. I was trusting Tristan with my life here. All for a plant. I could go home, call Yamada-sensei, ask for a deferral. I could flunk this semester and redo it.
And then wait another year and have to tell the people from Portero why I’d taken four and a half years to graduate. And I’d be twenty-two then.
My timepiece chimed in my ear. Two o’clock. I knocked on the door.
It creaked open and a young man with gleaming blond hair looked at me over the chain. He didn’t say hello or anything, just stared at me.
I was wearing my student uniform, which meant I was representing the institute, the Portero Corporation, and Nakamura-sensei himself. I stood tall. “I’m here to see Gilman,” I announced.
“You’re a Portero student,” the blond guy said.
“Obviously.”
Another silent stare. Was he expecting me to be afraid of him?
“Tristan Shea sent me.”
He closed the door, and for a second I thought he was closing it in my face. But he was unhooking the chain, and then he opened it again. “Come in,” he said.
I ducked my head in the low doorway and blinked in the darkness. The place smelled strange, like spices and bodies, but in a comfortable way. The room was crowded with furniture and stuff. Every surface was covered in something, and in most cases, about three or four somethings. There were shelves with gadgets, little statues on the floor, and ashtrays full of necklace charms and glass beads. The gaps in the pictures covering the walls were filled with lamp sconces or little bas-relief sculptures of odd creatures with two heads. There was a pile of pillows and blankets in the middle of the room that I finally recognized as a pair of couches. The low table between them held glass bowls, electric candles, and a loaf of bread.
The young man, who I guessed was a year or two ahead of me, led me toward the back of the room. I squinted to see in the shadows. The windows were shuttered closed, and the place was lit by candles and dim lamps. It couldn’t have been to save energy credits. Whoever lived here must have liked it that way.
He took me down the hallway to what would have been Tristan’s mother’s bedroom in his apartment. Here the door was painted red and had a picture of a saint nailed to it, her face upturned in ecstasy in a beam of light. The picture was slightly off-center.
The guy knocked.
“Come in,” someone said inside.
This room was just as dim and just as cluttered, but the clutter was different. The walls were lined with shelves holding metal tool boxes and ceramic jars. There was a work table in the middle covered with tools, and a white-haired woman behind it wearing a yellow apron.
But what stopped me in my tracks were the plants. There were Cycas revoluta palms in each corner, each well over six feet tall and with a microsporophyll the size of my arm. A Lobelia erinus, its flowers a brilliant violet, hung from a suspended basket, the vines drifting down to brush against the tile floor.
An orchid sat in the middle of the workbench, directly on the surface of the table, with no pot or soil. The orchid’s roots made a stand for it, their little LEDs glowing in pinpoints like a tiny, upside-down Christmas tree. “Is that a Cattleya portera?” I asked.
“Cattleya gilmani,” the woman said. She claimed the creation for herself, not for Portero. Of course. That’s what pirates did.
“It’s incredible,” I said, still gaping. “They’re all incredible.” I remembered my manners. “I’m sorry. You’re Gilman, right?”
“Glad to see my work appreciated.”
“You developed this?” I touched the orchid’s petal with a delicate finger. It felt like an angel’s cheek. Soft but firm. Perfect texture.
“I did.”
“You’re not… you don’t…” I tried to find words that weren’t rude. I couldn’t fathom that anyone outside the institute could do work like this. What was she doing here?
“I prefer to keep my own hours,” Gilman said. “I get to do my own work, what I like.”
“But how can you compete with Portero?” I asked.
“Portero doesn’t come this far in,” the blond guy said with a sneer.
I still couldn’t quite process what I was seeing. Here was a woman making incredible nanobotanics in her spare bedroom. She could be a millionaire with this stuff, live in a house in the outer levels with huge windows and a view of space. But this was kind of a dump. I wondered what was wrong with her.
“Speaking of which, Jeremy, what brings an institute student here?” Gilman asked.
“She knows Tristan,” Jeremy said.
I remembered my jar. “I’ve got some bugs that I don’t know how to kill.” Checking the seal for the millionth time, I put it on her workbench. “I found them this morning. And I need them gone right away. My jury’s today.” Three hours left.
“Wouldn’t want to fail that,” Gilman said. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. “Let’s have a look.” She pulled her goggles on—a very old pair that had silvery tape holding them together in more than one place—and flipped some lenses in front of her eyes. They weren’t even digital.
“No tags or chops,” I said. “And now they’ve laid eggs.”
Gilman nodded, staring into the jar. “Have you tried crushing one?”
I shook my head. Crushing bugs was something kids did, not a scientific method of troubleshooting.
Gilman moved her orchid to a counter by the wall. “Put one down in one of those dishes there,” she said.
I scanned the cluttered table and found a shallow metal pan. I placed it in the middle of the table and plunked a bug into it, careful to seal the jar back up. I would feel terrible if these bugs got onto any of her masterpieces.
Gilman came back with a tiny hammer. “Stand back,” she said, and then whacked the bug.
A huge bang shook the room. The lab filled with smoke. I fanned the air with my hand to clear it. “What happened?”
“Are you all right?” Jeremy ran over to Gilman, who had staggered back against the wall.
“I’m fine.” She pushed him away. Little black plastic bits were stuck in her hair and on her apron. “Your bug’s got a self-destruct on it. Whoever made it didn’t want anyone poking where they didn’t belong.”
“But I thought the bug hackers wanted people to know about them. It’s pride for them.”
“Then this wasn’t the hackers, was it?” She went over to the wall that was covered in jars and slid a creaky wooden ladder into place. “Someone made these bugs specifically to destroy plants,” she said, as she climbed up it. I watched the ladder sway and hurried over to steady it. “These bugs are made for combat.”
“Combat? Against plants?”
She looked down at me. “There’s a lot of competition among nanobotanists.”
That sounded ridiculous to me, although I was too polite to say that to an old lady. Why would nanobotanists compete? We all worked for the same company. But then I realized that I was standing in the workshop of a nanobotanist who had nothing to do with Portero. Of course, there would be others.
“So they sabotage each other?”
“They try.” Gilman had found a metal canister and was scooting it off the shelf. “Catch,” she said and let it drop.
I caught it just in time.
“Take it over to the table,” she instructed. I cleared a space for it and set it down.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You want those bugs gone, and fast, right?”
“I’ve got about an hour before I have to shut her down.”
“You willing to take a risk or two?” she asked.
“What kind of risk?”
Gilman unscrewed the canister lid. “This stuff will kill most nanoinsects known to man. It dissolves the circuitry into a fine dust.”
“But wouldn’t that burn the plant, too?”
Gilman shrugged. “That’s one of the risks.”
“What’s the other?”
She scooped some bluish powder out of the canister and into the pan that had recently held my offending bug. She nodded to my jar. I unscrewed the lid and dumped another bug and the remains of my leaf into the powder. The bug hissed and screamed as soon it made contact with the powder. It wiggled around and started jumping around like water in a frying pan. And then, with a pop, it whoofed into dust. The eggs were gone, too, but, to my great delight, the leaf was unharmed.
“That’s perfect!” I said.
Gilman reached into a drawer for a smaller canister. She dumped three scoops into it, then sealed it. Then she handed it to me. As I reached for it, she pulled it back again.
“There’s one more risk,” she said. “If Nakamura finds out you’ve used this, you’re done.”
“Done?”
“Do you think this is on the approved list?”
I shook my head. “Of course not. I tried everything on the approved list, but nothing worked.”
“And so you are expected to accept defeat gracefully,” she said.
“But this is a new bug. It hasn’t been seen before. Nothing on the approved list can kill it!”
“I agree with you,” Gilman said. “But your Nakamura-sensei doesn’t approve of people outside his corporation developing new technologies. He won’t even acknowledge us. His R&D people will come up with something in time, I’m sure. They probably have something in testing now.”
I looked at the metal canister. I’d never broken a rule in my life. “I’ll take it.”
“Don’t tell anyone where you got this,” Jeremy said.
“Of course,” I said. I held out my hand to Gilman, but she didn’t give me the canister.
“It’s not a gift,” she said.
I blushed. “Oh, yes. Of course.” I dug in my pocket and pulled out my money number.
Jeremy laughed. “You’re going to use your family’s money number to buy illegal bug powder?”
I put the card back in my pocket. “I don’t have anything else,” I said.
“The bugs,” Gilman said. “Leave these, and bring me ten more after the powder works.”
I handed her the jar.
“Collect them before you use the powder,” Jeremy said. I didn’t dignify that with a response.
“Pleasure doing business,” Gilman said. “Now you’d better get going.”
∞
Solange called during the zipsled ride back to the institute.
“Any luck?”
“Sort of,” I said. I wasn’t alone in the car. There was a couple in front of me, cuddling, and a guy in a work suit staring out the window. “I’ve got one more thing to try. I’m heading back to the institute now.”
“Tell you what,” Solange said. “I’ll meet you there.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I know you’re busy.”
“Never too busy for my little sister,” Solange said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
It was considered very bad form to hurry anywhere on the outer levels, and especially within the institute, but I ran at full speed to my tokonoma. When I saw Bebe, I gasped out loud. Her flowers were gone, and a whole section was covered with crawling black bugs. Gathering ten and putting them in a jar wasn’t hard. I grabbed a few leaves that were encrusted with eggs, too, just in case.
I dug a shaker out of the cabinet by my workbench and was about to start filling it with Gilman’s powder when Solange showed up. She’d been running, too, judging by her flushed face.
“Wait!” She grabbed my wrist. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“They will be here in twenty minutes,” I said. “This will kill the bugs. I tested it.”
“You don’t need to,” she said, panting. “They’re my bugs. Here.” Solange pulled out her handheld and typed something. The bugs and eggs, even the ones in my jar, all fell down dead.
I blinked at her. “What… Why did you—”
“No time. You have to fix Bebe.”
She was right. I dove for the root pod, sweeping away the bugs piled on top of it. “Can you do something about these damned things?”
“Sure,” Solange said, and started scooping up the dead bugs with her hands.
“There’s a dustpan in the cabinet.” I opened the panel door and plugged in my handheld. I set the sequences running to generate more leaves, change her color back to what it had been this morning, and restore her flowers.
Solange dumped the first panful of bugs into the bin. I kept my eyes focused on the oxygen levels. They were way down at four hundred.
“Add more leaves,” Solange said. “I’ll pay for the energy credits.”
“Damned right you will,” I said, and thickened the foliage on Bebe’s vines. Within ten minutes, the flowers were blooming and the new leaves were starting to unfold. I joined Solange in bug-cleanup duty, but I stopped every few seconds to check the oxygen monitor.
At 3:54 Bebe’s oxygen was at 468. Nakamura-sensei was never late. Solange dumped the last of the bugs and wiped her hands. “I’ll go out and meet them,” she said.
She ran out and I watched the monitors. 482. Almost there.
I noticed my specimen jar and Gilman’s powder were still on my workbench. I jumped up and stashed them in the cabinet, my heart pounding. That would have been bad.
The monitor said 493 when Nakamura-sensei came in, followed by Yamada-sensei. Both were wearing their green Portero Nanobotanical Institute blazers. The third jury member was Mrs. Caitlin Portero-Ross, the granddaughter of Portero’s CEO, wearing an actual synthfur stole that probably cost more than a year’s tuition at the institute.
Solange stood behind them, looking serene and professional. You’d never know that five minutes earlier she’d been on her knees, sweeping up dead bugs.
I gave the formal student bow, going down to the furthest level so I was nearly bent double, and held it for a three count before coming up. Nakamura-sensei nodded his head.
Yamada-sensei did the talking, of course. “This is Britta Hammar, sensei,” she said, and I bowed again, though not as deeply. “She has made a Campsis radicans porteris. She is an excellent student.”
Again, Nakamura-sensei nodded, and the three judges stepped onto the mulch to inspect Bebe. I unplugged my control panel and closed the door carefully, then stepped back and let them work.
I glanced down at the last oxygen reading: 504.
Bebe wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have time to trim back some foliage near the root pod, and I saw that they noticed that. That rankled. She’d been perfect this morning.
I looked over at Solange, then at the faulty leaves. She gave me an apologetic look. I pressed my lips together, all we need to talk, young lady, and turned my attention back to the jury.
They were inspecting every leaf. Nakamura-sensei had a tiny eyepiece that he held up to look at the junctures. Then he said something to Yamada-sensei in Japanese. She turned to me and said, “Stepstool.” He wanted to see the highest branches, but they were seven feet up.
The stepstool was inside the cabinet where the powder was. I opened the door as little as I could and tried to maneuver the little metal stool around the jar without anyone seeing. I figured they were still looking at Bebe, but maybe they were looking at me, wondering what was taking so long.
I pulled the stool out, and nearly made it. But the little leg caught the jar. Of course it did. And of course the powder went spilling all over the floor, hissing as it made contact with the scraps of mulch and bits of bug that were on the floor.
At first, I couldn’t move. I stood, the stepstool in my hand, staring at the fan of blue powder on my floor. When I finally did look up, the first person I saw was Nakamura-sensei.
“I had bugs, sensei,” I said. “I couldn’t kill them.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out an index card. He bent down, scooped up some of the blue powder, and sniffed it. Then he dropped the whole thing on the floor, wiped his hands, and walked out of the tokonoma. Mrs. Portero-Ross gave me a disapproving look, then followed him.
Yamada-sensei paused.
“I’m sorry, sensei.” I felt my throat tighten again. I looked at my sister. “Solange, tell her.”
But Solange seemed to have forgotten how to speak. Yamada-sensei shook her head and hurried to keep up with Nakamura-sensei.
So that was it. I had failed.
Solange ran over, hopping over the powder, and hugged me. “I’m so sorry, Britta.” We weren’t really a hugging family, so the hug was stiff and awkward. She let go. “Tell you what. I’ll make some calls and I’ll bet we can get you an internship instead of retaking this class, so you don’t have to do the same course over again. And if you write a letter to Nakamura-sensei, you can push this onto Tristan, say he was the one who gave you the powder. By the end of your internship, you’ll be back in full graces.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I know this seems like a setback now, but really, this is the best time for it. People understand when you make a mistake this early in your career. You can come back from it. It’s almost better that you do.”
It sounded like she was giving a speech, like she’d practiced this. After all the stress of the day, now that it was over, my anger was cold and hard. “What’s going on, Solange?”
“We’ll fix this, Sis. We will.” We were standing in the corner, on a small triangle of floor between the wall, my workbench, and the spray of powder.
I shook my head. “No. You need to tell me why the hell you put bugs on my plant. Today of all days.”
Solange took a step back and hit my workbench. She looked down at it, and when she looked up, she had tears in her eyes. “They were supposed to be indestructible,” she said. “That was our spec. A bug that couldn’t be destroyed, except by us. But we could only test with the approved materials, and I knew that there was stuff out there that we didn’t have.” She pointed to the powder. “Does this stuff work?”
“Dissolves the circuitry.”
“See?” Solange hopped back over the powder. “We would never have known that. And then we’re putting out a product that isn’t top quality. I keep arguing that we need to be open to these inner level people, know what they’re doing, but I can’t get anyone to listen. ‘It’s not proper,’ they keep telling me. Well, we can be competitive, or we can be proper, you know?” She looked to me for confirmation, but I didn’t give it.
“So you sabotaged my graduation project.”
“I didn’t—”
“You ruined my career for your project.”
“One,” she said, “it’s not ruined, I told you that. And two, I’ve got a little more at stake than you have. I’ve got a husband and a daughter. Do you know they expect me to quit my job now that I have Thea? Throw everything away? They think I can’t handle it.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, like finally someone believed her.
My eye itched. I couldn’t scratch it; my hands were covered with this crazy powder, so I had to go wash my hands. And that thought brought me out of the moment, out of my argument with Solange, and into the bigger reality. I realized that I had a choice to make, right now.
I opened the cabinet door and took out a spade and a hatchet.
“What are you doing?” Solange asked. I walked over to Bebe. Beautiful Bebe, who had been my companion for the last six months. Now that I thought about it, I’d chosen her over Tristan. And all to follow in my sister’s footsteps.
First things first, though. I put down the spade and the hatchet and crouched over the imperfect foliage near the base. I pulled down my goggles, took my clippers, and carefully disconnected the offending branches. I stood back and inspected my work.
There. Now she was perfect.
I opened the root pod door and shut Bebe down. When the white LEDs in her roots blinked off, I picked the hatchet up and hacked all the branches off the pod. Some fell to the ground, others still hung on the wall of the tokonoma.
“Britta, stop!”
I ignored her. If I turned to her now, I’d lose my courage.
I picked up the spade and dug out Bebe’s root pod. It was about the size of a melon. I lifted it out of the mulch, disconnected the power, and stood up.
“What are you doing?” Solange was crying now.
“Graduating,” I said. Shifting the root pod to my hip, I pulled two of Bebe’s flowers off the wall. I tucked one behind my ear and gave the other to Solange.
She took it, shaking her head in confusion.
With my free hand, I picked up the specimen jar with the dead bugs I’d collected. I still owed Gilman.
“See you later, Sis,” I said. It turned out her footsteps didn’t lead anywhere I wanted to go. I was going to have to make my own.
∞
It took a few years to get established, but I didn’t starve, thanks to my sister, who felt guilty enough to give me the money and energy credits I needed to live on. I didn’t need all that much in the inner levels.
Last year I made enough to afford a larger apartment a few levels further out, but I like where I am. I’m on the top floor, where the gravity is a wee bit lower, although that might be my imagination. Every morning, I open my window and look outside at my street. The trees are now the perfect shade of green. Red and yellow rose bushes bloom in front of each porch. And when I look down, I can touch the leaves of Bebe, my Campsis radicans hammaris, covering the entire front surface of the building.