When they awoke together in the morning, they did so with the feeling that something had changed. It was not a bad sensation. In fact, Layme told Milo later, it was as if the click they had both felt had been locked in place. They sat on his bed through breakfast again; chocolate chip pancakes this time, but with the same weak drink, which she learned was called a Mellow, and gel-bead of medicine to push back the impending hangovers. He gave her a plain white shirt to wear in lieu of regular clothes, and she accepted it gratefully, relishing the way his scent would drift from the fabric when she least expected it. Layme had been afraid, in the disconnected moments before sleep had stolen her, that the tension that had stretched between them may have turned to awkwardness, but it seemed to have done the opposite. They talked in a steady stream about everything from music to school to the Dorm to the night they had just come from. The time flew by with no impact on them. The light slid across Milo’s window as they shared bits and pieces of each other’s lives in between the trivial chatter of the young.
She was brought back to awareness of normal life by a stinging in her eyes. She had fallen asleep with her conscreens in, and her eyes, as tolerant to her intrusive technology and odd makeup as they normally were, had reached their limit.
“What's up?” Milo asked, seeing her flinch.
“Fell asleep with my cons in—ouch!” She rubbed her eyes, annoyed, as another jolt of pain shot through them. “Can I req some saline and take them out?”
“Go for it,” Milo agreed, gesturing towards the req panel on the wall. Layme got up and punched in her call number and a request for a bottle of micro-saline.
“I’m going to take these out,” she told Milo over her shoulder as she moved into his bathroom. “I kind of need to get my shit together for a minute.”
Milo chuckled. “No problem. I’ll be here.”
Layme took out her conscreens and set them gingerly on the edge of the sink, hoping that she’d remember to put them in the case when the saline arrived. If she did, she’d be able to put them back in after an hour or two in the saline solution. If she forgot, she'd have to req another pair from the city, and it would take a week or more to get them. She wasn't sure she could handle that long of a stretch without portable drive access.
Glancing at her reflection, Layme saw that the makeup around her eyes had faded to bruise-like shadows, and her hair stuck up in too many directions to count. Her eyes were red from playing host to her technology for too long, and there was a network of burst veins on the side of her neck. She touched the hickey gingerly, trying to remember when it had happened, but she couldn’t, not quite. Judging from its size and they way it hurt when she touched it, she had a sneaking suspicion that perhaps Milo hadn’t done it on purpose, but had lost his common sense at some point and bitten down on her neck. Or perhaps not. There seemed to have been countless times where she had felt his lips and teeth on the sides of her neck, but she couldn't remember anything that would have caused the mark.
Shaking her head a little to clear it, Layme realized she could still feel the low-key, lingering buzz of alcohol as a sort of underlying constant to her thoughts. The feeling had become so familiar in the past thirty-six hours that she hadn't even noticed it until that moment. Of course, the fact that she had had a glass and a half of the Mellow while she and Milo were talking had helped keep it there, but still, she hadn't been sober since the start of the party two nights ago. She hadn't checked her blips since then either, she remembered, except to open the high-priority one from Milo the day before. The thought was a disorienting one. Normally, she spent more time on her drive than off of it. Even now, recognizing the fact that she had no idea what was happening in that part of her life, she had no desire to check it. What did it matter? Who did she have to talk to there? Tessa? Tessa would wait until she, Layme, sobered up enough to focus on things.
But what if that never happens? A small, uncertain voice asked. But that was ridiculous, wasn't it? There couldn't be a pulse every night, and even if there was, she wouldn't be drinking at all of them. The idea was ludicrous! Still, there was a nagging feeling in her now, the same feeling that had always kept her from drinking when her acquaintances from school would ask her to come drink with them—the feeling of needing to have complete control over herself, and not to relinquish that control for anything.
You're being an idiot, she chided herself as she ran some water and soap over her face, erasing the bruised remnants of her makeup, and attempted to tame the wild scramble of her hair. You had complete control over yourself. You still do. You asked him to wait last night, remember? You couldn't have done that if you weren't in control.
She did remember, and she was glad for that. She couldn't remember everything that had happened, but she had a feeling it would have been the same way even if she had been sober. There was just too much to take in all at once. What she did remember, however, gave her chills that raised goosebumps on her arms...
As if he had been called in by her her thoughts, Milo knocked on the door frame of the bathroom then. She turned and saw he held a case for her conscreens and a bottle of micro-saline, and she took them from him gratefully.
“Thanks,” she said, slipping the lenses from the surface of the counter into the case and making sure they were covered in liquid before she snapped it shut. “I was just wondering when—” She had turned back around as she was speaking, and she saw that his eyes were blazing again. Suddenly embarrassed, she felt herself flush and looked down. The brightness bathroom lighting made Milo's shirt more translucent than usual. She bit her lip and looked up at him, and what happened afterward made her forget all about her sobriety—or her lack of it. There was only the two of them again for a while, and she found herself liking that concept even more the second time around.
They were laying on his bed once again a while later, Layme tracing random patterns on the palm of Milo's hand, occasionally straying up the inside of his wrist. She was thinking of nothing in particular when the alert came through the room's feed. It was the rapid, annoying sound of a high-priority blip. She heard Milo's small groan, and she laughed.
“We have to come back to reality at some point,” she pointed out, and he laughed, too.
“Yeah, I guess you're right,” he replied, already calling up his drive on the blank expanse of wall. He opened the high-prio, and Layme was surprised to see it was only text, and extremely brief. She was at a bad angle to read it, however, and she didn't particularly feel like moving.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“Zink again. I have no idea why—I told him yesterday I have no ideas, and the damn thing is months away.” Milo sounded annoyed.
“No idea for what? And I thought you and Zink didn't chill?”
“We don't,” Milo sighed, closing the blip and rolling onto his back as he had been before moving. “But he and his friends are the ones who does all the tech for pulses. The floors, the lights, the music, all that trag. They've even messed with the req system sometimes, I guess, for the few times when someone wanted some elaborate theme. Strange, since he doesn't usually go to them, but he's got some good ideas, I guess.” Layme noted that Milo's praise of Zink was rather reluctant, but he made no mention of ignoring the message. It was an intriguing contradiction.
“Why is he blipping you, then?”
“Eh, I have a pulse to plan for the end of September. It's my twenty-first, and I think the tragger kind of looks up to me or something.” Milo laughed, as if the idea of anyone viewing him as a role-model was entirely unheard of. “So he asked me a couple of weeks ago if I wanted to go out with a bang and plan something really ice. I told him sure, and he's already bothering me to come up with something. I've got nil, and I told him that yesterday, but he's being really jagging persistent.”
“When's your birthday?” Layme asked suspiciously.
“Twentieth of September,” Milo said. “Why?”
“Mine's the nineteenth!” Layme exclaimed, turning on her side to look at him in disbelief.
“You serious?”
“Completely!” Layme grinned. “Wicked. We can celebrate together.”
“I don't suppose you have any ideas for a spectacular pulse to throw for ourselves?” Milo asked, sounding doubtful.
“Not really...” Layme said, but she was thinking about it even as she answered.
“That's unfortunate,” Milo chuckled. “I guess I'll just have too—”
“Wait!” Layme said suddenly, sitting up. “I've got it! What about a masquerade?”
“A masquerade,” Milo repeated, propping himself up on his elbows, and she could see by the expression on his face that he already liked the idea. “Where did that come from?”
Layme shrugged one shoulder, the other occupied with supporting her weight. “I've always loved the concept, and it made me sad when I was younger that I'd never get to go to one.” She realized that he, with his histrionic quirks and flair for the old-fashioned and over-dramatic, would probably pull off a masquerade beautifully. A small seed of excitement grew in the pit of her stomach that was akin to the feeling that she'd have the morning of her birthday, waking up and wondering what her parents had gotten for her. Saying that the realization that masquerades were a thing of the long-ago past had made her sad was an understatement. After she head heard about them in one of her father's stories—had it been Cinderella? Perhaps, he'd always had a flair for adding little details to the old tales—she had fallen hopelessly in love with the idea of a party where everyone was hidden, talking to each other on the basis of culture and intelligence instead of looks. Now that a real masquerade was a possibility, however slight, she was alight with childish excitement.
“I love it,” Milo proclaimed finally, a smile breaking across his face, and she couldn't help herself—she squealed in excitement.
“Seriously?”
“Definitely! Do you want to go down and talk to Zink with me?” Milo offered. “I have a feeling that you've already got some ideas for this thing, and it's your birthday bash too now.”
“Yes!” Layme agreed, sitting up and throwing off the blanket. She was half way into her jeans before Milo even moved.
Ten minutes later they sat with Zink in the living room that lay between the twisting staircase and the big room with its blacklights and its stronglite screen.
“A masquerade,” Zink repeated. “Interesting. Do you have ideas, or do you want me to kind of run with it.”
“I've, uhm, I've kind of got a lot of it planned out,” Layme said a little sheepishly. “If that's okay with you?”
Zink grinned. “You plan it, and I can make it happen. What have you got?”
Layme started describing details, some of which she had had in her mind since childhood, and Zink's fingers flew over the air in front of him as he typed them into his drive. Entirely engrossed in the images she saw in her head, she had left her conscreens in their case in Milo's bathroom. If she hadn't, she may have noticed a small glitch in her vis feed. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but she would have recognized it for what it was: someone had direct-hit her soft drive with some sort of coding.
As things were, she didn't even realize she wasn't wearing her screens.
National Standardized Placement review committee, Washington D.C. September 3. 2:01 PM New Eastern Standard Time.
“How's our little lab rat doing?”
“Dammit. How did you know I was checking her file?”
“Call it a lucky guess. If I've learned anything by working with you, I've learned you're too soft for your own good. The idea of Campus 21 running an experiment on test-outs has to be too much for you. You've been following up on her the whole time, right?”
“You got me pegged, I guess.”
“You bet I do. So, what have you found?”
“Not a lot. She fell in with the right crowd, apparently. The mole substance that the experimenters planted last year made its rounds through the kids pretty quickly, and while the informants they have planted in the Dorm say not everyone's into it, there's an estimated ninety-percent intake rate. She's a part of that ninety.”
“And it works on her the way it works on normal range test-outs?”
“Just about. They've got her year-start scores in here now, she took them last week, and apparently the results are making the campus people happy. They've dropped enough that an estimate says if she took her Standards when she took those tests, she would probably have only hit about 1,900.”
“Hah. Only 1,900. That's a laugh An improvement, though, I guess. So what brings her to the attention of your ever-bleeding heart today, compadre?”
“She was flagged, actually. Her data says that her soft drive activity was much higher before she relocated, which makes sense—that's one of the points of the mole. It picked back up a few days go, though, more similar to her old pattern, which set the experimenters' system on watch, and she came up flagged on our system just now. When I looked in to it, though, the alert had stopped. A glitch in the system, I guess.”
“Don't count on it... Our system isn't known for glitches. It's a shame she got req'd out for this experimenting shit. It's people like her that make this whole thing so reliable. Keep a manual watch on her softdrive stats. If you see anything abnormal, let me know.”
“Will do.”
“And do me a personal favor?”
“If I can, sure.”
“Don't get too attached. Something about this girl seems iffy, like she could combust at any second. She might end up neutralized if that happens.”
“At what, sixteen? Seventeen? You're joking.”
“Do I look like I'm joking? Don't forget, people like her have so much potential that they're usually snapped up by NCMSID before you can say boo. Do you really think that's just because they're supposed to be an asset to everyone else? Forget it. Do you know why the big guns really snag them? Because they're a danger to everyone else.”
“A danger?”
“Look at it this way, my friend. Our country is being run by wolves. For a while they wore sheep's clothing, but they don't bother with that too much anymore. They enjoy being wolves, and they enjoy having control over all the little sheep, because all sheep do for the most part is live and work and eat and fornicate and have more little sheep. They're easy to control, because they tend to just follow each other's lead. But every once and a while someone like her pops up. And you know what she is?”
“Not a sheep?”
“You're damn right she's not. She's a ram. She has horns. The whole point of the Standards is to find those horns, and the point of the Campus 21 experiment is to file down those horns. But that doesn't always work, and horns can grow back. If she ever starts using those horns, the wolves are going to run in, and do you know what they're going to do? They're going to try to turn her ram in wolves' clothing, instead.”
“What if they can't?”
“And I thought you might have caught on by now. It's pretty obvious.”
“Would you just cut the shit and get it over with?”
“Fine, fine. If they can't make her think she's a wolf, they're going to do what all wolves do.”
“And that would be what, exactly?”
“Why, they're going to kill her, of course, because in the end, that's the only way to get rid of an animal with sharp horns and a will to charge. They'll kill her, and if they get the chance, they'll eat her, and they'll try to get her little ram friends to come looking for revenge. So don't get too attached. She might be dinner some day, mi amigo.”
<< Part One, Post 4
No comments:
Post a Comment