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It was totally bugnuts. I really had become invisible in the arms of a spy and moved right through a mess of cars while everybody was going cray-cray outside Nuhope.
It was hard to stop thinking about the spy’s “opposites.” He looked like he was over 30 and kind of corroded around the edges, with ragged hair and the weathered face of someone who’s been through a lot. And he was excited by me, but furious too, at what I was.
I could relate to the yin-yang, being all opposites too. Sixteen years old but artificially matured into the age of 21. Still feeling what it was like to be so ugly no guy would think of kissing me, and then so hot they couldn’t think of anything but that.
This Jarat guy was like an itch under the skin, not only because he was a damned spy, but because he made it seem like I should kill off my friendship with Rico. If the spook was telling the truth, then I’d been a damned fool not to do it, in a state of total denial, as a ... what did he call it? Charis-something-or-other.
Sitting on the bench, I looked across the street at all the freaked-out peeps outside Nuhope and rehashed some things. Sure, I’d already stopped thinking that Elites were like gods. Ever since that school in Atlanta, it was clear they weren’t any better than Chav on a basic scale of do-gooders and dirtbags. And a mess of them was flat-out greedy and spoiled. And sure, Nuhope was using me for commercials and to influence certain people into doing things, but wasn’t that just the way of the worl’? It had to be worth it, because pretty soon I was going to be a space tumbler, just like I’d always wanted.
So I had told myself. Just like I’d decided that my ears hadn’t heard things right on a certain summer afternoon in Pompey—looking at Rico and Dove through the screen door, fingers frozen by the glasses of spiked lemonade.
Dove had reminded Rico about something he’d done—accused him, really. Something about hiring a private bot militia to attack some guy. But the guy killed himself before Rico got to him.
“Fuck me to fucking death,” Rico had said. “Why the hell did I ever tell you that? If you ever tell anybody –”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m in too deep for that, as we both know.”
If my memory of that convo was right, and Dove was in too deep, then I must be too.
When I combined that with what the spy had just told me, it seemed like there was only one thing to believe now. All my changes were made possible because of someone’s death—not just anyone, but a genius scientist. Not exactly a father figure, but a creator. My re-creator.
I hated Rico now.
Hell, why stop at him? Maybe Dove should be hated, too, for being some kind of accomplice. Not yet. Gunning down one friendship was terrible enough, and it didn’t sound like Dove had killed anybody. He’d just benefited from things, like me.
Who was the scientist that came up with the ... Juice, that’s what that Jarat called the chems. And why the hell was the spy setting off these awful sounds around Nuhope without doing any damage? He was behind them. I was sure of it.
Fuck a goddamned duck!
I tested out my ankle by standing up, then plopped back down, breathing hard. The pain was ridic. Laughter pushed out of me at how absurd it all was. That was another one of my new words, “absurd,” and it seemed to cover a lot of ground these days.
At least five minutes had gone by since the last blast. Maybe it was over. Nuhope had been pranked. But why?
BAM. This one was more ear-busting than the others. The bigwigs outside Nuhope practically jumped out of their skin. Then the circle of gigantic holographic promotions surrounding Nuhope kind of stuttered. One of them, a 30-foot holo of Elgo Hunter, this egomaniac news anchor, sizzled into nothing. Then up popped a hologram of a really skinny Chav boy. He looked so thin he wasn’t more than a skeleton with skin draped over, and he was digging a grave. There was a dead woman on the ground beside him. Fat flies sipped the liquid from her milky-marble eyes. The whole thing was sickening, worse than anything I’d seen back in Pompey. The word “Nebraska” sliced the air beneath the holo.
Just about everybody went crazy mad, saying stuff like: “Oh for God’s sake.” “Show some respect!” “This is an anniversary!”
POW. Another huge holo—this one of a cute model decked out in some threads from the designer Maundy—exploded into nothingness. Two seconds later, a wallscape of a tired woman wearing a dirty, torn dress popped up with the word “Arkansas” blazing beneath her.
There was an ugly black growth on the side of the woman’s face. The people in front of Nuhope were so disgusted. They didn’t see the dignity in her deep eyes, or how it had wrung out her heart when she closed down that boarded-up grocery store behind her. I could feel it.
My throat closed up, and I tried hard not to cry. It could have been my Gram. I wanted to go back to Pompey and hug her right then and there, make sure she was okay.
“Hey!” Dove strode toward me with a bewildered look, two bodyguards in his wake. “What are you doing way over here, kiddo?”
“I can’t walk very well. Tripped. Somebody helped me get to this bench.”
“Anybody I know?”
“I doubt it.”
He read my face carefully, waiting for me to go on. But I couldn’t tell him anything, not yet. This wasn’t the time to ask him how much more he knew about the dead scientist.
“Well, at least you didn’t damage the Dior,” he said, looking at my dress.
I smirked. His concern blew me away.
Dove knew what I was thinking. “C’mon. You know what I mean. Rico must have spent a fortune to get that little antique. Let’s get you to the limo.”
“I need to sit here for a bit.”
“Why?”
“To see what happens next.”
Dove stared at me like I’d just turned into an elephant, and the bodyguards looked pretty stunned. People always expected me to be frightened. Why were they always so scared?
BAM! BAM! BAM! Poor people popped up everywhere on the building—my people.
I gave Dove a “see what I mean?” look. But he didn’t care. “Listen to me, and listen good,” he said. “You are far too valuable to be hurt in a terrorist attack. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“I am not your child.”
“No, you’re a nitwit. And I’m supposed to take care of you.”
“You want some help, boss?” one of the guards asked.
“No. I got this.” Dove pulled me up and into his arms. The burst of pain in my ankle made me see white. I couldn’t hardly think.
Dove flashed an amazing grin at the low-flying cars zooming over the street, gesturing for them to fly higher so we could cross. They immediately sailed upward. He took me back to Nuhope with the guards just behind us.
Dang! Two men carrying me in less than an hour. He sat me down on a steel traffic bumper at the curb. “This’ll just take a minute.” He walked away, and I could tell he was sending orders to his limo to show up. It must be circling somewhere near.
The most scared people were already gone, but there was still plenty of hubbub around Nuhope. “Who the hell is doing this?” a woman’s voice cried. I turned around and saw that new CEO, Petra Cardinale, speaking with Rico.
His hair was sticking out all which-way. That only happened when he was way stressed out. “Easy, Cardinale. Just heard the perps’ car was shot out of the sky. Probably dead now.”
A piece of my hope caved in. Was that Jarat he was talking about? Was he dead?
Rico almost touched Petra Cardinale’s arm to reassure her, but she cringed in anger. If I’d seen that happen yesterday, I would have thought she was a fire-spitting bitch. But not now.
“I’m sorry,” Rico said, but he didn’t really mean it; I could tell. It looked like the boss lady could too. But instead of saying anything more to him, she turned to Alfonce Santiago, Nuhope’s security guard captain, who was in a private conversation with someone on his mobile. He had the tall, stick-like frame of a scarecrow with white hair billowing out and folded circles under his eyes.
“I don’t care how many men are on this! Find the bodies!” Alfonce barked, then swiped the air and took another call. “Lay it on me, Cin ... Shut the whole damned thing down. NOW.”
Stewart Silverman strode over, red face glaring like he was ready to murder. He demanded info from Rico, who oversaw Alfonce’s security department. It only made sense, given how much tech it used. “We’re still working on getting rid of the hack job. But they downed the getaway car,” Rico said.
“Who did the shooting?” Silverman asked.
“Girls and boys in Nuhope Security, along with Homeland.”
BLAST. The crowd gasped as a wallscape of Vice President Zinder shattered. In his place was the holo of a man—not diseased or disfigured, but handsome, with long streaked black and pewter hair, scruffy leather jacket. Fucking hell. That Jarat guy! This must be a recording. I felt like I was free-falling.
“Greetings,” the spy said. “I represent the underground group Theseus.”
A questioning murmur ran through the crowd. Theseus, the group I’d heard about on those OuterNet news reports.
Jarat continued on: “We’re celebrating Nuhope’s big day in our own way—by showing you pictures of the rotting scrap pile of humanity that makes up most of the population. And it’s growing larger by the day.”
“You’ll be a scrap pile when we get through with you,” somebody yelled.
Jarat continued on: “You may think you need to fear the Chav. Stands to reason, if you kick dirt in people’s faces long enough, they’re going to kick back, right? The Chav know the people in power believe—honestly believe—that anyone who can’t make enough money to climb out of poverty is a lazy bloodsucking leech on society’s back. It makes sense that the Chav might resent that.”
“Do something, Nuhope! Get rid of the asshole!” another person cried.
“Take him down!”
Jarat’s face on the wallscape grew larger. “That’s why I spent the last few weeks hacking into Nuhope’s intelligence. I wanted to find out what’s really going on.”
Silverman’s face was an even brighter rage of red. Alfonce was too far away to hear, but he looked like he wanted to leap inside his mobile and kill half a dozen people who couldn’t figure out how to shut down the spook’s speech.
“Some of you probably guessed that all those cheap mobiles that the government handed out to the Chav a few years back are programmed,” Jarat said. “The dreamisodes they create using Nuhope’s software is brainwashing them. They might think it’s just making their lives more interesting, or happy. But the mobiles are transmitting messages that become subliminal and work on the subconscious mind. Why do you think there’s been such an enormous surge in the number of young men and women enlisting in the armed forces? Why do you think that they don’t care that there is no government help for them if they lose a job or suffer a terrible health crisis?
“I found out something else that Nuhope’s dreamisodes do, too. When a person who’s been using dreamisodes tries to stop ordering them, their body goes into a state of high anxiety. It triggers a chemical in the brain that’s called cortisol. The only way of getting relief is—you guessed it—ordering up more dreamisodes.”
Silverman stormed into Nuhope with Alfonce just behind him. It was hard to tell which one was more desperate.
“Have you ever thought about how you might be programmed, too?” Jarat asked. “You think the sperm virus was bad? How long will it take some enemy of the U.A. to hack into the Nuhope propaganda machine and incite all the Elites and Middles to do something that doesn’t make sense? Which might be harmful to you and your loved ones?”
“He’s lying. He’s made everything up!” somebody yelled.
“Throw him in prison!”
“Prison? Hell, kill him.”
Jarat smiled gently down on everyone like he’d guessed what the reaction would be when his recording was played. “It doesn’t have to be that way. One man is running for President who has vowed to protect and uphold the freedom of every American. He wants to guard them against harmful forces both inside and outside the U.A.
Jarat’s face disappeared, and up sprang a holo recording of Andrew Massot—one I’d seen on the OuterNet about a week before. He was at a podium, giving a speech. “The Chav don’t need to pose a threat to Elites or even the Middles,” Massot said. “We just need to treat them fairly, give them a chance to have a decent life. If the Chav are stronger, our whole nation will be stronger.”
My heart got so big with hope. This was what needed to be done.
“What will our great-grandchildren see when they look back on this moment in time—a nation ruled by weak-minded despots motivated by greed? Or will they see a nation guided by leaders who stood up for what’s right—leaders that represent everyone, not just the overprivileged few. I’m Senator Andrew Massot. I’m running for President, and –”
CRASH. Massot vanished. The hacked message had been stopped. Cries of relief rose up from the crowd.
Sad anger set into me. The millions of fun moments I’d had in dreamisodes back in Pompey felt like poison now. Of course, I’d known there were promotions in the dreamisodes, but nothing like what I knew now. ‘Cause I had to believe that Jarat. It made sense, what he said. I wanted to go back to the village and rip out every mobile earpiece I could find.
Dove turned to me, jawline so rigid. “Okay. Let’s get you home. The limo will be here in a sec. Don’t worry. That Ellington bastard must be dead by now.”
I tried to look innocent. “Who?”
“The whacko on the screen.”
“You know who he is?”
“Facial recognition ID’ed him. Jarat Ellington, son of Evander Ellington.”
Evander Ellington—I’d heard of him.
Dove went on, “Ole Evander pretty much disinherited his son. Can’t say I blame him. Couldn’t even make it as a masseur. Must not have been too good at the sex part.”
Jarat as some kind of sex worker? That seemed weird. I kept up the innocent act. “Guess there’s all kinds of losers out there.”
Dove shot me a suspicious glance, but before he could ask anything, his limo floated down to the curb. A guard opened the door. I gritted my teeth at the pain as Dove picked me up and set me carefully on the seat. “See you around, kiddo. I’ve got some pain meds in there,” he said, gesturing toward a black upholstered cabinet. “You better pop a few. And make sure Jizelle’s bot gets that ankle fixed up.”
“Right.”
As the limo lifted into the sky, I downed some pills. My ankle started to numb in about 30 seconds. Thank you, Jesus.
Flipping through the OuterNet, it didn’t take long to find recorded news footage of the security military aircraft in the sky over Queens. They were pounding out cascades of hyper-targeted missiles toward an old Ford car where Jarat must have been. Black smoke spewed from its left side.
I stopped on a Nuhope news channel showing a drone camera’s view through the Ford car’s window. There was a slender man, pale and grim, working the controls. “Homeland Security has identified Luko Alvarez. Ellington was believed to be in the car as well,” said an announcer.
The news spot cut to a shot of the Ford exploding in flames as a missile hit it dead center. I didn’t realize I’d let out a cry until I heard: “Are you alright?” A big-headed limo bot attendant was looking at me from the front seat with a kind of spindly elegance. It had such a girly voice.
“Yeah. I guess so. Although the idea of becoming an alcoholic sure seems like a good idea.”
The bot didn’t have a sense of humor. Sadness welled up in my chest. Was Jarat dead now? How could I care about a terrorist? Because you know he cares, said a little voice in my head.
The attendant handed me a scotch on the rocks. “Tallisker. I believe this is your preferred choice,” it said.
I thought the drink would make things better, but it didn’t. Jarat must be dead, and the guy he was with, too. Just like the scientist who invented the Juice.
“Charismite,” I said, finally remembering the other word he’d used. “I’m a Charismite.”
Everything was splintering.