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Most people in Pompey didn’t think that little Bobby would survive the near-drowning in Mirror Lake. Creesha Sumachile sure didn’t, not at first. A way long time ago, Creesha was a medical assistant at the clinic over in Forsythe, about 20 miles away. She knew more about doctoring than anybody around. There was a hard-bitten side to her, but she wasn’t mean.
After gangrene set into three of Bobby’s frostbitten toes, Creesha managed to amputate them with the help of the kid’s mother, Mistee. And it looked like Bobby was going to live.
The whole sitch was a bunch of plus and minus signs for me. For starters, I became a true hero in Pompey for rescuing the kid. Gram called me a “damned fool,” all prideful and admiring. So those two things were on the plus. But on the minus: old Felicity was a goner. So subtracting that out made me half a hero.
Then there was another plus: I didn’t need to have anything sliced off like Bobby. But on the minus: I was in bed with pneumony, one doozy of a headache and frostbite prickles in my ears, fingers, and feet. Creesha was trying to take care of all that with healing plasters and a tea that tasted like the old reeds on the sax that Papa used to play. But they didn’t seem to be doing a good goddamn.
Gram gave me a bosomy hug before heading off to the grocery store one morning, three days into what Creesha called my “convalescence period.” It was the first day that the pressure in my head eased up a hair.
“Now, don’t you move a muscle unless you got to use the turlit or fix yourself more of that nasty tea,” the old woman said, voice lilting with love.
“Yes, ma’am,” I rasped.
As soon as she banged out the front door and headed to the grocery, I grabbed my mobile ear stud on the nightstand. As soon as I swiped the invisible trackpad, my Lamadoo fantasy pet, Pedro, sprang into view.
“Wo-wo, girly dawg dawg,” he twittered.
“Wo-wo. Let’s do Stump the Warthog.” I hacked out a bad cough.
The trivia game wasn’t my favorite. But I’d played Nightmare Gold Rush and Puddle Petunias so many times lately that it made my eyes cross just thinking about them. There weren’t a lot of game choices on the BaseNet, which was the section of the Internet that peeps in Pompey could pick up on their mobiles.
A big media company, Nuhope, had handed out the mobiles a long time ago. People in uniforms had turned up in a big ole truck and passed them around to every living soul.
“You hear there’s a new game? Bash the Sperm Killers,” Pedro said.
“That sounds stupid.” The military games with U.A. soldiers clobbering sperm terrorists were getting crazy common. I thought the violent stuff was boring. Pedro never got that part about me, but I loved him to bits anyway.
“Wait’ll you see how fun the Bash game is!” he said. “Sparks and Julio are doing it right now.” Hmmm. I did miss those guys. It would be fun to find them on the BaseNet and join in.
I was about to give in when Pedro was pushed to the side of the air screen by the hologram of a jowly, square-faced man with long, glittery ringlets. I just about jumped out of my pajamas. I’d never seen anybody barge onto a screen like that.
“Luscious Melada?” he said.
“Y-yes.”
This guy had to be a Yellarskin, with all that glittering blonde hair and gold skin. Plus, he had the broadcast-breath voice of somebody who told the news.
I was suddenly aware of my holey-kneed jammies, and tufts of my hair were springing out every-which-way. My face went furnace hot. Here I was, speaking with an Elite for the very first time—the very kind of person I wanted to be around—and I looked like this? I tried to say something, but a hacking cough came out.
“Well, well, well! That certainly doesn’t sound good. I’m Guy Styvel. You know, the Nuhope news correspondent?”
I choked out an “Oh.”
“I heard about that ahh-mazing rescue of yours. And I want to know so much more. That’s why I broke through the wall.”
“The-the BaseNet wall?”
“Why, yes.”
I was shocked into a state of stupid, learning that people could do that. There was this wall that separated the BaseNet from the OuterNet. Yellarskins could access a gazillion types of stuff on the OuterNet. It was just for wealthy people. There wasn’t nothing they couldn’t do or see. But Chav could only get things on the BaseNet.
It wasn’t that the OuterNet was forbidden to the Chav, but they’d have to plunk down a lot of money to get past the paywall. It was what Gram referred to as a “Catch 22 situation.”
On the Chav side of the wall, the BaseNet, there was a helluva lot less stuff to look at. It had ads for things that Chavs might be able to afford, like artificial potato chips and soap, dumb shit like that. And on the OuterNet side of the wall, there were ads for rich people stuff—like really expensive vacations on satellites off Mars and the most amaz jewelry. Hellz, some Elite channels didn’t have ads at all! At least, that’s what I’d heard.
Guy Styvel’s wall-burst made my heart flippity-flop. A scaredy little voice in my brain was telling me to get rid of him as fast as I could ‘cause Gram wouldn’t like it if I talked to an Elite. But this was like a dream come true: a real live Elite to speak to.
Just then, Guy was pushed aside by a woman with a tall pile of blue hair held in place by long black sticks. “Luscious, sweetie. Nadia Kilawatro from Victory News here.”
Guy jabbed her with an elbow.
“How dare you touch my holo!” Nadia snapped
“You wait your turn.”
“She can talk to two people at once, can’t you, darling?”
“Go away! Go away!” Pedro squawked, so freaked out.
They didn’t pay him no mind. Five more Yellarskin newschasers barged into view. I couldn’t stop staring, ‘cause they were all celebrities. I wasn’t used to talking to people with clothes that looked so crisp, with really bright colors. Nothing was stained or mended, like what we all wore in Pompey.
Their questions came at me like bullets. “How sick are you?” “Why did you take the plunge?” “Did you think you were going to die?” “Is it true your Daddy caused an explosion that killed some school children?”
“No! He didn’t. Don’t you ever say that again!” I shouted as best I could.
They backed off about Monkey real fast.
“How about I get you a little more camera-ready?” Nadia asked.
“Sure!”
She couldn’t do nothing herself, because she was just transmitting a holo. But she gave me some advice as I brushed out my hair and picked out something else to wear: an old red dress. Then I found a little makeup that used to be Mama’s and did what I could with my lips and eyes.
I was just getting a little used to the excitement when something pinged against my bedroom window. I’d never seen a drone the size of a bug. I figured it had a camera on its back and was trying to see inside. Then there was another, and another, all bruzzling in crazy circles. Some of them found a crack in the window glass somewhere in the house and got inside. Before I knew it, they were flying around my room.
Guy pulled up a whole bank of air screen monitors so I could see how many news reports were showing me live, right then and there. They were all across the BaseNet and the OuterNet, as the newschasers asked me about the rescue.
The neighbs must have seen one of the reports and called Gram, because the old lady showed up and snatched away my mobile, snuffing out all the newschasers from view. Then she beat a couple of drones against the wall with a hammer, turning them into mush, which was kind of ridic. We were both so mad.
“Those newschasers are the most exciting thing in the worl’,” I croaked at her. “It coulda been my ticket into a whole new life!”
“Bull crap! The only ticket those people will ever give you is a chance to smell their exhaust fumes when they beat it back to where ever the hell they come from.” Gram grabbed my mobile stud and hid it. She could be so damned pissy.
Before the newschasers got driven off, Guy had explained that I was something called a “heroic human-interest story.” It turned out that Yellarskins got all hepped up about that sort of thing.
Kirsten Louise was so excited when she came by that night to whisper about the sitch. We talked real soft so Gram wouldn’t hear. “I figured out how they found you,” she said.
“How?”
“Well, little Bobby’s mama told some Yellarskins about how you saved him down at the recharging station. Lots of peeps in Chicago and New York Treasure Zones stop there. And one of ‘em must have been a newschaser.”
Kirsten rattled on and on to fill the space, ‘cause I was keeping quiet. She finally said, “What? You so famous now you can’t even talk to me?”
“No! Saving voice,” I rasped. “For when they come back.”
She went all slit-eyed. “Your Gram gonna whup you good if you steal back the mobile from wherever she hid it.”
I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Gram stop me. The next morning, the old lady shot me a stink eye when she left for work, but I looked as innocent as I could under the circumstances. It took me two hours to find the mobile stud, ‘cause I was kind of wobbly and not thinking straight from the ugly tea. She’d hid it down in the basement behind some dusty old pickle jars.
I put on the red dress, slicked back my hair into a ponytail, turned on the mobile, and waited for Guy and the rest of them. Hours went by. I played a game of Warthog with Pedro, then another game, and another. Nobody broke through the wall. I just barely got the mobile back behind the pickle jars before Gram got home.
“You must be old news now,” Kirsten said when she dropped by that night. I was pretty sure that was true.
Later that night, I peered through the mirror at the crusty grey tint around my ears where the frostbite had set in. You’re about as exciting as dishwater that’s lost its suds, I told myself.
Gram must have found out that the newschasers were gone because she took pity and gave the mobile back to me without one sign she knew I’d been using it. Deep in the night, I trolled around the news channels on the BaseNet. Guy was doing a report up in Alaska on some Chav kid that had repaired an old violin. He played it like some kinda genius.
I was so damned jealous. There was more shit I could have told Guy. None of the other newschasers were around. They were probably on OuterNet channels I couldn’t see.
I was about to swipe off my mobile when a ragged spot flicked up on the edge of the air screen. It looked like it was made up of thousands of tiny swarming gnats.
“Freaking hell!” I figured that all the newschasers that popped through the wall must have given my machine some kind of virus. In a moment of pure impulse, I put my finger over the rust-colored blob. I scratched at the colored air like it was a sore. And the spot blossomed into a crimson light. I just about fell out of bed.
The red, fiery spot went wide, taking up a good five feet in my bedroom, and there was a sound like monster-sized flies bruzzling around. Then the screen went dead black.
“Fuck a goddamned duck!” It was insult on top of insult. No more Elites. And now no more mobile. How would I ever get my hands on a new one? No telling if-or-when that Nuhope truck would show up again. I put away the mobile stud and went to bed, keeping my tears under a big flat stone, just like Gram taught me.
But late in the night, I woke up thinking about the whole sitch. I listened to the trees outside, whishing back and forth in a black wet wind. Maybe the machine needed to rest up. Maybe if I turned it on, everything would be back to normal.
I grabbed my mobile ear stud off the teal chair and put it in. The air screen flashed red, then a sort of flat black, just like before. It made me so mad. But then there was this nasty sound, like when somebody blows on a horn when there’s spit inside. The screen was still dark, but now it seemed infinite, like the sky behind the clouds.
Thousands of channel buttons suddenly broke into view. Holy macaroni! It was beyond massive. All those newschasers must have opened up a permanent hole in my mobile’s web wall!
I swiped on one channel just to see what would happen, and this kid popped out. He was dancing with a dragon and singing in some kind of Asian language.
My mobile suddenly had a whole lot more smarts than it ever had before. It seemed to see the changes in my face. As soon as I started to get impatient with whatever was on the screen, it would switch to something else. And the more I used it, the more it figured out what I’d like to watch.
There were a ton of Vice President Zinder videos. He had this smile that showed his gums, and eyes that looked like he always got whatever shit he wanted.
There were some vids of the U.A. President, Shelli Lyoncliff, too, but not many. She was so old and seemed to have a lot of other peeps around her answering the big questions about what the U.A. government was doing.
I had never really paid attention to politics before, but now I got real interested, listening to Senators and Congresspeople talking about the sperm bank crises. As far as I could figure out, the whole thing all came down to fear. The Elites thought that it would shrink their population and make it impossible for some families to continue their bloodline.
Vice President Zinder claimed it was a massive plot cooked up by the Asian Commonwealth state of North Korea, ‘cause their sperm banks were completely okay—but other peeps talked about some rebels that lived in Antarctica, even though it was so damned cold. Zinder and a few of the Senators said the sperm attack was an act of war, and something had to be done about it.
There was one Senator that said war was just plum crazy. He was named Andrew Massot. He had this dark hair combed straight back and a long face that seemed too big for his body. His eyebrows were like tiny black brushes, and his dark eyes were curved down at the outside corners.
He said that any military action against Korea would force the whole Asian Commonwealth to come after America. And nobody had solid proof that the Koreans even unleashed the virus. We didn’t know enough about the Antarctic rebels’ actions either.
“We need to move forward with dignity and respect. Give Beijing a chance to investigate what happened, and let Antarctica react to the accusations.” Massot was so quiet and logical-like, but you could tell there was a lot of passion in his belly.
This Massot guy was mostly concerned about Chav people when he talked about war. And that’s what kept me listening, thinking about Sparks’ brother, Abe, who was missing in action down in Bolivia. Hellz. For all I knew, Sparks and Julio might be drafted soon, or sign up. Sparks had been thinking about that.
“We’ve already lost hundreds of thousands of Chavs—maybe a million—down in South America. It’s hard to get the U.A. Army to give us an accurate number. What happens if Asia starts sending troops to South America to help the rebels out at the same time they fight us in the Pacific? We’ll be pressed on two sides, in the East and the South.”
It all sounded terrible. “The people who control this country think that they can only stay in power by denying the lower class freedom of speech. They don’t want to give them the freedom to hear everything that’s being said, all the thoughts about how this country is run,” Massot said. “They deny the Chav a good education, insurance, and any aid when they grow sick or elderly. The people in power monitor the Chav actions—all our activities—so minutely out of fear that they will rise up.
“And they are right to fear that,” he went on. “The Chav will fight back; you can count on it. If you don’t want that to happen, stop treating them as little more than cannon fodder for whatever wars our government chooses to get into. Treat them with dignity instead of kicking them to the curb, harder and harder with each passing year.”
I didn’t understand everything Massot was saying, but that “kicking to the curb” bit kind of got to me. The BaseNet news channels hardly ever reported on what he had to say. And on the OuterNet, news peeps acted like they were reporting on a crazy person when they showed bits of his speeches. One called Massot a “warped cult leader.”
It was weird the way some days I could find a whole mess of Massot stories, and then he’d just kind of disappear off the OuterNet news sites like somebody had erased him.
There were a lot of things to keep my mind going in other directions. The dreamisodes I could create with Victory’s channels for Elites were really cool. There weren’t any embedded promos or much patriotic shit, and the visions seemed more real.
I plugged Monkey and Mama into most of my dreams, and we went all over the worl’ together. Most nights, we had on rich-people clothes and hung out with super glam friends in the mansions we owned.
And there was another channel that kind of made me dizzy-sick, at first. It gave a real-time look at the nearest Treasure Zone, New York, with all these gigantic buildings and tons of people everywhere. There were more peeps and cars zooming by in any one block than what I’d see in Pompey in year, almost. It was freakin’ scary. How could I ever live in a place like that? And yet I kept coming back, day after day, to see more of it—like getting into the tub when Gram made the water way too hot, but a few minutes later I could almost hear the angels sing, it felt so damned good.
Each new day, I felt stronger, and the tingling pain from the frostbite died down. But each new day, I got a little more pissed about what the Elites could see and do, and what we couldn’t—how I’d always be poor and live a life that was dull as dirt. I’d never, ever live in a place like New York. I walked around the house hog-tied to a lousy mood that got darker and darker.
There wasn’t no use telling anybody about the web hole because they might call the cops on me for cyber stealing or some fool thing. And then the connection would get blocked. I couldn’t even tell Kirsten Louise, ‘cause she couldn’t keep a secret.
“What the hell is going on?” Gram barked one morning when she came in to say good-bye. “Creesha give you some kind of ugly pill?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Don’t you get snippy with me.”
“I’m sorry, Gram.” I really was. Turning over on my bed pallet to face the wall, I wished to high hell I could tell the old lady about all the stuff Massot was saying. She’d like that dude if she heard more about him. What he said seemed to prove everything she thought about United America. But if I told her about what he was saying, it could all backfire. She might go ape shit—hide the mobile again or throw it in the trash out of pure orneriness, or the fear I would get in bad trouble.
Gram let out a harrumph. “You spendin’ too much time alone. Get your sorry behind out of that bed. It’s time for you to get back to work.”
That’s when everything started turning around.