Blood Zero Sky (16 page)

Thank God kids are taught by imager these days, I think. The thought of this person educating anyone gives me the creeps.

“All the way down. Last pod on the right, chamber fourteen twenty-one,” she says. “Rose is a wonderful child. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your visit.” She speaks with all the sincerity of a crow cackling, and I’m certain she has no idea who Rose is. Her little speech was just that: a speech she was trained to say. But I can’t really criticize her for it. I don’t know Rose, either.

A set of glass doors slides open, revealing a hallway painted with brightly colored stripes—red, yellow, green, orange, purple. On my left and my right I pass an endless parade of doors—wide, octagonal things outlined in black with small, round, porthole-like windows in them. The first dozen or so doors I pass without hesitation, but soon my curiosity gets the best of me, and I stop and cup my hands around one of the portholes. Inside is a little boy—or a little girl with short hair. Who can tell from the back? He sits dangling his legs off the end of a cot, staring at a three-walled imager. The scene is of a country road, shaded by an arch of high, windblown treetops. From somewhere up the picturesque dirt road, a set of numbers appear. They zip toward us, growing larger and larger, until they take up most of the screen.

7 x 3 =

I can’t hear the little boy’s answer through the glass—but the imager screen blinks in swirls of yellow and purple, and the answer flashes across the screen:

21, that’s right!

I walk on.

Perhaps a hundred yards down the seemingly endless hallway, I pause to look in another window. There, I see a nearly identical scene, except that it’s a little red-haired girl sitting on the bed, gazing at her imager. Words stream across the screen, and as they do the background image changes. When the story talks about a happy fish, there’s a smiling cartoon tuna. When it talks about an angry pelican, there he is, glowering down from a pastel sky. There might be audio, too, but the thick door muffles any sounds coming from the chambers, leaving the hallway eerily silent.

I walk on. By the time I’ve reached the end of the hall, I’ve gone so far my feet are aching. I stop and stare at the door, the number 1421, the little porthole . . .

And I turn and start to walk back the way I came. This is the most efficient way to raise kids, I remind myself. Not only is it cost effective, it gives them the most enriching environment possible. Complete safety. A perfect education. All the knowledge they need to be successful contributors to the Company. There’s only one thing could possibly mess up a kid from a high-level N-Academy like this: their parent.

Still, I might die—today, tomorrow, or next week. My mind isn’t completely made up yet about what I’m going to do when I reach the rebel camp, but there’s plenty of danger either way. If I betray the rebels as Jimmy Shaw told me to, they might kill me. If I join the rebels, the Company might kill me. Or they might show my picture on the imager screens in the schools: May Fields, the famous traitor. Shouldn’t my daughter meet me once in person before that happens?

I stop and stand completely still, staring down the endless hallway, gazing back the way I came. I swallow. I take a deep breath and exhale through my teeth, then turn around.

I have to meet her. Even if it’s just for curiosity’s sake. The minute I step forward there’s a beep and the octagon before me slides upward like a garage door. Before I can back up, before I can think, I force myself to step through the opening, into the chamber. The door hisses down again behind me.

I’m standing next to the bed, now. A little girl sits on it, cross-legged, in a perfectly clean and pressed blue dress, her shoulder-length hair a mess of curls, her eyes big and dark gray. There’s another little girl there, too. She wears a red plaid dress and has two blond pigtails and a sprinkling of freckles on her cheeks—except this second girl isn’t real. She’s on the imager screen.

“And so I learned it all and got all As,” the real girl on the bed tells the girl on the imager, before my entry cuts the conversation short.

Then, Rose turns to look at me, and all I see is her.

She has dimples. A perfect little nose. She gazes up at me demurely, as if I were a newly arrived guest at a tea party she’d been planning all along.

“Hello,” she says, her voice high and crystal clear.

“Hello,” I say. Compared to her, I sound like a chain-smoking fifty-year-old man.

“This is my best friend, Annie,” she says, gesturing to the girl on the imager.

“Hello, Annie,” I say.

The girl on the screen waves at me, and for the first time I notice that her movements are slightly unnatural. She’s not some real girl teleconferencing with my Rose; she’s just part of the N-Ed program. Lesson number 621: how to have friends.

“I’ll leave you to talk with your guest, now. Bye, Rose,” Annie says, and just like that she pops like a bubble and, in a sparkle of holo-plasma light, disappears, leaving me alone with my daughter for the first time in either of our lives.

Rose looks at me from head to toe.

“You’re not in your uniform,” she observes. “Everyone who works here wears a uniform.”

“I don’t work here.”

The girl—Rose—my Rose—frowns.

“You must be a visitor, then,” she says. “Some of the children get visitors. It usually makes them cry.”

“It makes them cry?” I repeat.

She nods in an adorable boinging of curls.

“Why?”

“Because. It’s usually their parents, and they usually want to go home with them, but they can’t. So, they cry.” She says it so matter of factly, and with such maturity that I have to do some quick math in my head to confirm her age. Yep. She’s still only nine. So maybe there’s something to be said for the N-Ed Academy after all. Little Rose already seems to be smarter than I’ll ever be. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. . . .

“So,
are
you a visitor?” Rose asks me.

I take a slow breath, in through my nose, out through my mouth. When I speak, the voice doesn’t seem like my own: “Yes, Rose. I’m a visitor. I’m your mommy.”

She nods, but she doesn’t seem impressed.

“I know about you, you know,” she says. “You’re May Fields. You’re already a marketing executive. You’re going to be a Blackie. My grandpa is Jason Fields. He already is a Blackie. He’s the CEO of N-Corp. They teach you all that stuff in the lesson on ‘family.’”

I nod. “That’s right, honey. All true.”

She frowns again. “But—who’s my daddy?”

In a flashback, I see myself in that tunnel on that long ago Fourth of July, the squad member D on top of me, his sweat dripping down on me, his friends watching, laughing. Laughing . . .

“You don’t have a father, sweetie,” I say.

This really confuses Rose. “But I learned that everyone does.”

“You don’t, honey.” All I can think to do is lie. I can’t tell her the truth. I can barely stomach it myself.

Thankfully, she only shrugs. “What’s in the bag? Are you going on a trip?”

“Yes, I am,” I say. “I’m going far, far away.”

“To Australia Division?”

I nod. “Somewhere like that, yes.”

“Are you ever going to visit me again?”

I stare at her. All this time I’ve been standing a few feet from the bed, my feet frozen in place, but suddenly I want to go to her, to embrace her. Nine years she’s been alive and I’ve hated the idea of her existence. But now, now that she’s in front of me, something in my heart snaps. And I love her. I love her, just like that. And it hurts like hell.

“I don’t know if I’ll visit you again,” I say, tears clouding my vision. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

Rose nods. “It’s better if you don’t,” she says. “Children in here perform an average of eleven percent better when their parents don’t come visit.”

I glance around the room, as I wipe my eyes, trying to get myself together. For the first time, I notice how incredibly tiny it is. Five feet by seven feet, at the most.

“Is that what you want, Rose?” I ask her, my voice gravelly with emotion. “You want to do well in school?”

She nods. “Oh, yes!” she says. “I’m going to be just like you, Mommy! I’m going to be a high-credit-level executive, and I’m going to have a penthouse apartment and an N-Rolls car and N-Elita series clothes, and someday I’m going to be the CEO of the Company, just like my grandpa Jason Fields.”

I look at her and force a smile onto my face, while a gaping chasm of horror opens up beneath me. This is not a school. It’s a jail cell. It’s not an education; it’s efficient, effective brainwashing.

I stoop next to the bed. “Just remember this, Rose,” I say quietly. “Things are not always what they seem. There are things in life that are more important than credit. More important than work.”

From the expression on her face, I can see she’s confused, but I press on. “Someday Mommy might do something you don’t understand. People might tell you things about me that will confuse you. But I want you to know that—even though I just met you—I’m fighting for you. Everything I’m doing is for you. And . . . and . . . I love you.”

Tentatively, I reach out and put my large hand over her tiny one. She looks down at it, uncomfortable.

“You should go now, Mommy,” she says after a moment. “I don’t want to get behind on my studies.”

I gaze at her one last time, drinking her in, soaking up the sight of her, then nod.

“Okay, sweetie,” I smile through my tears, “Do your best. Make Mommy proud.”

Before I leave, one last thought occurs to me, my father’s benediction. I turn back. “Rose. Don’t let the other kids give you crap about being different, okay?” I whisper.

Rose looks at me uncomprehendingly. “I’m not different, Mommy,” she says.

~~~

My journey out of the Headquarters district and out of the hub flits by now as nothing but a collection of surreal slideshow images:

Here, a little boy throws a fit on the sidewalk in front of an N-Toy store.

There, a woman jogs, her huge fake breasts bobbing in front of her and her eyes fixed on some indefinable point in the future when she’ll finally be thin enough to taste the happiness she’s been starving for.

Here, a lone tie-man walks past, fiercely talking business to someone through his IC. A vein on his forehead throbs as he gestures desperately. Was I him, just last week?

Above, great glass buildings surround me, reflecting disjointed pieces of the beautiful, purpling sky. I wonder what the sunrise would look like without man’s achievements cutting it to shreds.

Finally, I descend to a lonely subway stop where the air is stale and the concrete is worn and gray, but very clean. Even when I was a little girl, I remember when bums, unprofitables, used to haunt this place. The air in the train stop was pungent then with the smell of piss and echoed with harmonica and guitar music and raspy singing voices as strange street folk sang for their bread. Now, the stop is silent and I wonder where the homeless unprofitables have gone. Have they joined Ethan and his band of doomed rebels? Or did Jimmy Shaw wave his great God-wand and remake them into happy worker bees in the N-Corp hive? Either way, I grieve for them. When I was a child their dirty skin, haunted eyes, manic mirth, and unclean scents made me feel uneasy, but now I somehow miss them.

There’s a rush of air on my face as a train rattles up and squeaks to a halt.

Its door opens and I step through to the sound of a beep, and Eva’s ever-present voice, saying,
“Welcome, May Fields. A fifty-dollar transit fee has been added to your account.”

Only a few solitary men populate this train, for it leads to the industrial arc. The first shift out in the factories has already started, so these men must be the last few tardy stragglers. These days, even at the start of a shift, the trains on this route are only half full. Most industry has, by now, been shipped either to South America Division or to the new Africa Division factories, and the industrial arc is mostly ghost land.

I look around at my fellow riders, at their big, coarse hands and their downturned faces. Each of them keeps his own council. I take a seat near a window and watch the dark tunnel walls slide past faster and faster.

I fight not to think of Rose. Rose, who I don’t even know. Still, somehow, what I’m about to do is all for her.

The black walls blast by. The train rattles violently on its tracks. This is the feeling of exile—terrifying and intoxicating. Three, four, five stops come and go. I await the seventh.

When the train’s hisses and sighs give way and the doors finally open, Eva’s strange and familiar voice drones from the ceiling:
“Blue station: outer industrial arc. Please watch your step exiting the train. Enjoy N-Corp Cola; drink the N!”

After the voice cuts out in a staticky
click
, the quiet is so complete I almost have to hold my breath. I rise, one hand gripping the smudged steel rail above my head, and sling my pack over one shoulder.

Ahead of me, two riders lumber silently out of their seats and out the doors without the slightest glance at me. I follow them onto the platform, into a waft of canned, sterile-smelling air. The two men ride up the escalator a few steps apart, neither acknowledging the other, each staring at his feet in exhausted detachment.

Seeing them at a different time, perhaps only a few weeks from now, my mind might flood with questions: why are these two men strangers, who seem in every way as if they should be kindred spirits? Why are they not brothers, united by all their common bonds, instead of depleted, lonely souls blind to each other’s existence? Who erected the wall between them, and what would happen if that wall were to be torn down?

But this morning, no such thoughts enter my mind. This morning I think only of myself. And Rose.

The escalator whisks my fellow riders upward and away, and the train chimes and chimes, closes its doors and rattles off, leaving me alone. I stare down at my feet—they’ve always been an embarrassment to me, being large and awkward—and past them, to the inky puddle of my reflection in the polished tile floor. I hike up my skirt, revealing the pants beneath. I pull down the skirt and step out of the beige ring the discarded garment makes as it crumples to the floor. I kick it down onto the tracks, then stoop and unroll the bottoms of my pants.