CHAPTER ELEVEN

Others

All I wanted to do in the cafeteria was sink into the sludge in my lunch container and hide for another three hundred years. Too bad the odds of that happening were almost as slim as me waking up from a bad dream. They’d assigned me a “buddy” to show me around the lunchroom, but she disappeared once she found her friends.

Some welcome.

“Hey, Jennifer.” Maxim sat across from me, whipping out a container that held a soy sausage. He bit into the end. “Whatcha got?”

I opened my container, afraid to say my adopted mom made my lunch for me. I might as well have dressed like Tiny Tim and begged for friends. “Looks like some green goo, yellow fuzz, and pink water.”

He laughed. “That’s strawberry kiwi mineral water. My mom buys it all the time.”

“Yeah, but what’s the rest of this?” I held up the container so the green goo slopped down the other side.

“Hmmmm…looks like veggie mix. The yellow stuff is probably banana-flavored protein pudding.”

“Oh.” I took out my spork, opened the lid, and swished it around in the sludge.

“Different from a turkey sandwich, huh?”

My eyes flicked up. Finally, someone spoke English. “I used to eat turkey sandwiches all the time. They’re my favorite.”

“Really?” He looked genuinely interested, which made me feel more at home than I had all day.

I laughed, noticing how his tunic shirt molded to his upper biceps. “Yeah, with mayo.”

“Mayonnaise. I bet it tasted cyberlicious.” His eyes sparkled with envy. The expression looked good on him. So far, every expression did.

“Better than the leprechaun pancakes I had for breakfast.”

“You didn’t coat them in sappy sauce?”

I shook my head, feeling ashamed. Pell had even offered me an extra helping. “No.”

“Cyberhell, Jennifer. You’re missing out. Next time, go for the sappy sauce all the way.”

I nodded seriously and smiled at the same time. “Got it.” Was I flirting? I certainly hoped not. I couldn’t even keep track of my own skyscraper, never mind stalk a new crush. Plus, Angela wasn’t here to bounce ideas off of. I couldn’t daydream about guys without her.

“Talking to Rip Van Winkle?” Exara slid into a seat beside Maxim and gave me a cruel smile. “Where’s your beard?”

“I shaved it off, along with the hair on my back.” I stuck my spork into the sludge, pretending it was her face.

Her beautiful features twisted in disgust and Maxim laughed. “Jennifer ate real turkey sandwiches.”

“I bet she stepped in real animal poo, too.”

Maxim stared at me with interest. “Did you?”

I shrugged. “I had a horse named Thunderbolt. I used to ride every day after school.” I smacked myself in the face in my mind. Why did I just say that? It would only give Exara more material to pick on me with.

“A horse? That’s so last century.” Exara turned to Maxim. “Come on, let’s talk about something interesting. Current. Like the annual Autumn Ball.” She twirled the fabric of his tunic around her index finger. “What should we dress like this year?”

Maxim shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know. Maybe green like Jennifer’s lunch.”

Exara clearly didn’t appreciate the reference to me. She sniffed her perfect button nose and turned directly toward him, leaving me out of the conversation. I couldn’t hear what she whispered to him or his answer.

After another five minutes of eating sludge and being ignored, lunch was over, at least for me. I slipped the smaller containers back into the large one, making sure I didn’t forget the spork, even though it was plastic. It didn’t look like they threw anything away here. There weren’t any garbage cans, only small circular openings in the middle of the tables. I wasn’t about to break the recycling chute rules on my very first day by stuffing something illegal down one. Len would just have to sort out my lunch when I got back home.

“Leaving so soon?” Maxim glanced up from his conversation with Exara.

“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of studying to do.” That was a blatant lie. I had no idea what any of my classes were about, except art, and even that one was a little strange with everything done digitally and no paint. Think about it—art with no paint. That was like kindergarten with no glue.

“Take it easy. See you tomorrow in homeroom.” He smiled.

My heart melted. I scooped it up off the floor, trying to keep some amount of dignity. “Yeah, see ya.”

Exara ran her hand through Maxim’s hair, messing it up, temporarily, before it fell back into a perfect swirl. “I’ll ask my great-grandma if she wants a friend. You two can live it up, talking about horses and turkey sandwiches.” Each syllable came out awkward on her tongue, like me saying Plymouth Plantation and breeches.

I narrowed my eyes. “Thanks, Exara. You’re too kind.”

She batted her enormously long black eyelashes, which had to be implants. “I do my best.”

I walked away steaming. It was only en route to my next class I realized that Exara had just given me the best idea I’d had since I woke up.

What if there were others like me?

People frozen around 2012 and awoken this year.

My cancer wasn’t all that uncommon, and the chances of someone else being healed from the same thing when the cure came out had to be pretty good. At least I’d have a friend who understood what I was going through.

I zombied through the rest of the day, waiting for the moment I could get home and do a wallscreen search on my own. Sorry, Angela. No one can ever replace you. But Ridgewood Prep was worse than World War IV, and I needed to find a substitute best friend.

When the final set of techno music played, signaling the end of school, relief washed over me. I’d gotten through my first day with my ego bruised, but alive. The hoverbus hung on the same platform where it had dropped me off, and I boarded it, taking a seat in the back by myself.

I watched for Pell’s stop, eager to see her again. The hoverbus came to a halt, and an older woman got on. No Pell. Panic rose, crushing my chest and throat. What if I’d taken the wrong bus? What if I couldn’t find my way back home?

The older woman took the seat next to mine, and I nudged her arm to get her attention. She gave me a tired, uninterested look in return.

“Where are all the kids?”

Her hair had gray roots, and her tunic was frayed at the edges. I wondered what job she had at Pell’s school. “They got out an hour earlier.”

“Oh, I see.” I slumped back in my seat in embarrassment and relief. Pell was probably at home eating more of that sappy sauce. I didn’t have a bodyguard, but I could make it back if I could remember my building number.

The greenhouse we’d passed that morning flew by. The hoverbus was close. I sat on the edge of my seat, annoying the woman as I leaned over her to get a decent view of the buildings. Each one looked the same, a glassy front scattered with ledges for hovercrafts.

The platform where Pell and I had boarded jutted out with a familiar stripe of yellow and orange and I knew I was home free. Building 221863, section FFgGA. Okay. That would take some time to remember. For now I could get by on looks alone.

I buzzed the door to Valex and Len’s apartment, and the sides parted to reveal C-7 wearing an apron on his metal frame. “Hello, Jennifer.”

“Where are Valex and Len?”

“Your adoptive parents remain at work. They will return home at five forty-five and six fifteen respectively. I hope you had a nice day at school.”

“It was awful.” I snuck by him, careful not to brush up against his metal arms. Just thinking about touching him gave me the willies.

Pell jumped up from the couch. “Yay! My new big sis is home.” She ran around the living room to C-7 and stuck her tongue out. “I don’t need you anymore.”

“Very true, Pell.”

For a millisecond I felt bad for the robot as he lumbered to the kitchen, where I smelled more soyfood cooking.

“He cooks, too?”

“He does everything a human can, just not as good.” Pell muttered under her breath, watching him slink away. She took my hand. “Come on, I want to play more Pixie Swap.”

“Wait a second. I need you to help me with something first.”

She stared at me, almost pouting like nothing could be more important than Pixie Swap. “What is it?”

“I need to find some information on the Internet…is that what you still call it?”

“You mean the cybernet, bothead. Find out about what?”

“If there are people like me, people who woke up after a very long time.”

“Oh, all right.” Pell stomped over to the wallscreen and clicked it on. Her fingers flew over the buttons. I tried to pay attention, but she typed too fast. A search engine came up with a blinking cursor.

She looked over her shoulder. “What do you want me to say?”

“Search for cryogenic sleep subjects.”

Twenty minutes and several searches later, Pell huffed in frustration. All of her searches had ended up with blank blue pages. “I can’t do it. Nothing comes up.”

“Is there any other way?”

She shrugged. “You could ask C-7. He’s not supposed to use the cybernet, but he did once for me when I needed to find my dad’s miniscreen number.”

I glanced over my shoulder as he banged around in the kitchen. “I’m not sure I want his help.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s go play Pixie Swap.”

As much as I enjoyed watching a little kid kick my butt at math, I needed that information. “Hold on a minute.”

I walked into the kitchen just as C-7 turned on some sort of food processor, churning an orange liquid.

When he saw me come in, he pressed the button and the machine’s buzzing trailed off. “Jennifer, can I help you?”

I’d work my way up to asking him to break the rules to help me snoop around. “What’s for dinner?”

“Soyloaf with orange marmalade sauce.”

My stomach gurgled in protest. “Oh. When will it be ready?”

His head clicked as he tilted it. “Six thirty-four.”

“After Valex and Len get home?”

“Correct.”

The wallscreen read four-thirty. That gave me plenty of time for fishing. I stuck my hands on my sides, looking for pockets in my tunic that weren’t there. Awkwardly, I settled for leaning on the counter. “I was wondering if you could help me find something.”

“I am always at your service, Jennifer.”

“Great.” Also kind of stalkerish. I let that slip. I needed his help. “I’d like to find others like me, you know, people from my generation woken up hundreds of years later.”

Little gears in C-7’s neck turned like he was thinking. Did robots think? No, they computed. He must have been computing.

C-7 froze as if he’d come to a conclusion. “I am not allowed to use the cybernet to access information.”

“I know. Pell told me. But, I was thinking, just this once? I really need to find others like me. I feel so alone.”

C-7’s eyes stared, boring into me. How could a robot understand how it felt to be alone? Besides that, he wouldn’t even play Pixie Swap with Pell because it was beyond his programming.

I turned away, feeling sheepish for even asking. “Never mind.”

“The only subject I can find in our geographical area is Martha Maynard.”

“What?”

“She was born in nineteen-ninety-six, frozen in twenty-twenty, and awoken sixty-seven years ago.”

“You mean you searched from your head?”

“My central processor can connect wirelessly to the computer mainframe of this household.”

I shook my head, trying to absorb all the information. There was someone else like me, someone born in the nineteen-hundreds. Nineteen-ninety-six, to be exact—that would make her about my age. Except she lived longer than me by eight years, putting her in her twenties when she was frozen. My head wrapped around the math, making me yearn for Pixie Swap level three.

“You mean to tell me she’s around eighty years old?” I might as well go meet Exara’s great-grandmother.

“Yes, but she had a similar experience to yours, making her an adequate product of my search.”

“Is there anyone closer to my age?”

C-7 shook his head. “There are subjects awoken in their teens, but they were frozen many years later than you. The next closest patient is Cindy Lewis, born in twenty-thirty-four, frozen in twenty-forty-seven, and awoken in twenty-one-eighty-nine. Subject is no longer living and would, therefore, not prove useful to your purposes. Other subjects frozen around the same time as you didn’t survive or were awoken much earlier. Some, I’m afraid, are still in cryosleep, waiting for the doctors to find a cure.”

“Right.” Shivers went down my spine as I thought of those poor frozen people. Maybe I was lucky the doctors woke me up after all.

“My apologies, Jennifer.” Could C-7 feel my disappointment, my heartbreak? It certainly seemed like it.

“Don’t worry about it, C-7.”

The robot resumed work with the food processer, and the buzzing rang in my ears. All I wanted was to watch those videos of my previous life, but Pell waited for me. I’d have to settle for fairies on lily pads and equations that made my brain hurt.