Bright's Light (25 page)

Overhead, the sky—for that’s what it was—was a bright blue. When her eyes finally adjusted to the surplus of illumination,
she looked around in astonishment at the lush grasses and trees and shrubs and flowers. It was like a setting for one of the old-timey games where you sent in drones to capture the enemy and put up buildings and forts and killed stuff. Only this was real.

She stood and stared up, stunned. Was she still inside the Store?

She finally made out the telltale gleam of the ceiling skin overhead. It appeared to be much higher here than it was over the other zones, perhaps because it had not been painted black or tinted a sick yellow. The air had the same unhealthy thickness as in the Productive Zone, but it smelled different here—fuller, somehow.

She heard a short burst of music, and then something flew in front of her. She jumped back and then stood in awe. A flying thing! She rose to her tiptoes, trying to see it better. She thought of the sensitive they’d encountered in the Gaming Dictrict—if only he knew how close he really was to live birds! Wonder danced inside her: this was far out, indeed.

Bright blinked. Her eyes were already tired from focusing in the unaccustomed light. She put a hand over the brim of her helmet to create more shade on her face and closed her eyes to rest them for a moment. With her eyes closed, her ears seemed to open. Suddenly she registered the sounds all around her, sounds she had never heard before. Several different types of birds called, and the leaves of the plants fluttered and whispered.

Bright wanted to sit down. No, lie down. She wanted the sky overhead to stop moving and the trees to stop
shifting, just for a minute, so she could catch her breath. But she thought that if she sat down, or lay down, she would never get up again.

Instead, she walked. The stone path underfoot was golden. Tiny plants had forced their way between the rocks and pushed them out of place, so a few times Bright stumbled. There was only the one path. Chairs and benches had been placed along it, and they were covered in litter from the plants—plants were messy. She picked up a leaf and it crumbled in her hand. No wonder there were none in the Entertainment and Productive zones. They weren’t very sturdy! But the environment in the Headquarters had to be special, because this was where the Deciders lived and made decisions about how the Store should function.

What would she say to the Deciders when she saw them? She tried to guess how many there would be. Twelve, she thought. Twelve would be cool. There was that song called “Twelve Kinds of Terrific.” Maybe she would sing that song to impress them. Maybe they could give her some answers to her many questions. In her opinion, the Deciders had some explaining to do. Maybe from this day on, they’d be called the Explainers. The idea made her giggle again.

The golden path wound its way through a grove of trees, and as she came around a final bend, a building appeared ahead of her. It was rounded and silver and had mirrored poles that held up the roof, which curved over it and extended far out in front. The poles were dark and smooth, and her reflection wrapped around them as she approached.

Bright straightened up and looked herself over in one of the poles. She still wore the coarse pants she had taken from the sensitive and a PS officer’s black turtleneck, and she had added a tool belt for comfort on her way out of the House of Gear. The Deciders would take one look at her in her strange get-up and they would … her imagination quit, then restarted. Fix things. Yes, that’s what they would do. They had to fix things, because things were most definitely broken.

She paused under the overhang until her eyes got used to the deep shadow under the roof. Then she approached the door and knocked. No one answered. Bright pulled the door open.

Inside, the building was dim, and the air was damp and cool. The room she found herself in was huge, twice the size of the Choosing Room in the House of Gear, though it narrowed toward one end. Beginning halfway down the length of the dark room, banks of screens covered the walls and reached almost to the soaring ceiling. The screens weren’t full of advermercials, and they weren’t dark. Instead, they displayed rotating images of streets and games and houses and mind alter rooms, stilled equipment, empty classrooms. Every corner of the Store was represented. The screens, like the maintenance rooms, must be plugged into a backup power source.

Hesitantly, Bright stepped farther inside. Her mind tried to process the odour. It was like a great quantity of nutri had been spilled and not cleaned up.

She walked forward, her gaze fixed on the screens, and nearly fell into a pool in the floor. To her horror, her foot
was wet and touching something soft. Bright shrieked, and the sound echoed around the vast hall. Jerking her foot back, she stood teetering beside the pool. In a gesture that had become automatic, she flicked on her helmet light. The pool was rectangular and set flush with the floor. An array of tubes was faintly visible between its glass walls. Instead of water, it seemed to be filled with nutri. Almost all of the space inside was taken up by a … something. No, a someone.

Bright resisted the urge to run away. Instead, she inched closer, adjusting the beam to get a better look. The creature in the pool was at least five times larger than the biggest person she’d ever seen. Most of that size was a thick, wobbling layer of gelatinous fat.

Bright gagged. What was this creature, and why did the Board of Deciders allow it to exist? What could it possibly do that was productive?

Its hand, which looked like a swollen pink balloon animal, held a plastic pointer. And at the side of the glass pool was a row of large buttons labelled Decisions.

Bright straightened and looked around the room. There was a glass pool cut into the stone floor every ten feet or so, and in each pool was a mound of pink and white flesh. Thin strands of white hair waved lazily in the baths of nutri.

These blobs were the Deciders!

She looked back at the one closest to her, the one she’d nearly fallen on top of. Its eyes were buried in fat, but one swollen hand was slowly moving the plastic stick toward the buttons. It might have been pushing through hardening
plastic rather than liquid. Just as the wand came within touching distance of a red button, there came a sound like many doors closing. The screens went blank and the nearly indistinguishable background noise of liquid being pumped in and out of the tanks ceased.

Gurgles and soft, belching sighs rose all over the room, and Bright thought she heard bubbles rise in the tanks and pop at the surfaces. Then all was silence but for her breath and thumping heartbeat. In shock, Bright realized that the Deciders, barely alive when she arrived, had just died almost instantly when the backup power failed. She had been the only witness to the death of a roomful of bloated floaters. For that’s what they were. The people for whom she’d been working so hard. The people she never questioned. The Deciders. They were all just bloated floaters. In that instant, she no longer felt bad about her tendency to disobey. She’d been right to think for herself sometimes. The Deciders were blobs who decided nothing.

Now she was alone and unsupported, except for a clumsy bot, an annoying dressing-mate, and a strange man with nice eyes, and she was fine. Fine-ish, anyway.

She gave thanks for her light as she stepped carefully around the pools and headed toward the far wall, where she thought she’d seen a panel of switches. She tried not to imagine herself plunging into one of the pools, ending up buried in the wet flab of a dead Decider.

The beam from her pink helmet cut a narrow cylinder of light through the heavy darkness, and she nodded her head to illuminate the floor, then her goal: the panel of switches. It
was obviously a remnant from a time before the Deciders got so huge they couldn’t support their own weight.

Bright wondered where the Deciders’ bots were. The Deciders had clearly been unable to care for themselves. Perhaps the bots had fallen into disrepair and the Deciders, unable to hoist their vast, quivering bulk from their watery beds, had simply given up.

When she reached the panel, Bright threw back her shoulders. She wished there was someone around to see her flip the switch. It would be a remarkable moment, requiring all of her fierce courage and determination, not unlike when a seemingly impossible new dance was introduced. But there was no audience for this. There would be no applause. It was just her. Doing the right thing. Alone. Which was really sort of a letdown.

She examined the panel. All the switches were black, except for a single, inch-wide switch that was red.

Grassly had said to flip switches until one worked.

She wiped a finger under the brim of her helmet, where sweat had collected, ignored the ache in her lungs, and reached for the first switch. She moved it from right to left.

Nothing happened.

Panic leapt in her and she jerked the switch back to the right.

She tried the next switch. Again nothing happened.

She really didn’t want to try the red one.

Bright flipped the third switch and the world started up again. Lights burst on in the great hall, and the screens popped on, one at a time. Dazed, she looked up at them and
scanned the images of the Partytainment District. The House of Gear, the House of Splash, Office, Boards, Bends …

Where was the House of It? The place every favour longed to be. She examined the screens again. All of the Partytainment houses were either deserted or littered with dead favours and disabled bots. But the final screen was different: it showed nothing but an empty room. Not a recently vacated, luxurious, fun room, but an unfinished one with bare walls and wires hanging from the ceiling.

Suddenly she knew the truth: there was no House of It, and there never had been.

She’d been lost in thought for several minutes, staring at the screens, when she finally registered what she was seeing. She looked quickly from screen to screen. All over the Store, enlightened people were rising to their knees, spilling into the streets, and starting to crawl in the direction of the Natural Experience.

A screen in the top left corner captured her full attention. The image showed a tall figure sheathed in white standing outside a gate beside a smaller figure. Two bots scuttled anxiously back and forth between them. The white-clad figure had thrown his gloved hands up above his head, as though warding off punishing blows.

Grassly! The lights were hurting him!

Motion on another screen caught her eye. She recognized a road in the Productive Zone, filled with a crowd of at least a hundred PS staff, marching in unison toward … the gate of the Headquarters.

Bright turned and ran from the great hall of the Deciders.

There were small tears in the spacesuit. There were also larger rips, as well as thinned areas in the fabric that let through the lights, which felt like lasers hitting his skin.

Grassly tried not to whimper and moan, but the pain made it impossible.

All around him, the newborn lights pulsed their suggestions into the brains of the ancestors while he was burned alive.

“Are you okay? Your face is sort of squished up. Not good for your collagen,” said Fon.

In response, Grassly threw his arms up over his face and felt the elbow of the spacesuit rip open.

“Uh-oh,” said Fon, her voice fading as Grassly’s consciousness began to dim.

Another ripping noise sounded. The suit was failing, falling to shreds around him. Soon he would be gone. He would miss—

“Hold still,” said Fon. More tearing noises and then the pain in his elbow eased.

She was wrapping him in tape that Pinkie had tucked away in one of her compartments. Swaddling him in layer after layer of adhesive wrap.

Oh, blessed tape. Only …

He could barely hear the twitter of the bot question.

“What do you mean? He’s going to walk with his legs,” said Fon.

Another rapid burst of squeaks and dings.

“Ohhhh. I guess I did sort of tape them together.”

In his prison of tape and pain, Grassly tested his legs. They were bound together from thigh to knee.

“Only the top part, though. He can take small steps.”

Grassly was sweating heavily inside the glass helmet, and his ears rang with agony. Even so, he sensed Bright’s approach.

“Is he …?” Bright’s voice sounded different, he thought.

“I think he’s okay,” Fon replied. “But it seems like he doesn’t like those lights, so I got him taped up.”

The sound of marching boots seemed to rise through the concrete, and he tried to determine how far away the PS officers were.

“Let’s go,” said Bright.

“What’s the rush? The lights are on. Let’s just take stock of our faces for a minute. People can see us now. We have a responsibility to look good.”

“Fon!”

Grassly didn’t hear Fon’s reply. Unsupported seams along the joints of the cheap spacesuit gave way from the
pressure of his too-big body. He felt a searing sensation at his wrist and groaned.

Neither favour seemed to notice. They were moving him along, his steps small and shuffling, like his legs were in shackles.

The suit split across the top of his shoulders and the light surged in. The pain was like diving into a sun with open eyes. Every cell screamed in protest. He was burning up.

He went deep and the lights went out.

Favours were good at many things, but getting dressed was at the top of the list. After dancing and hair and makeup, of course.

When Bright realized that Grassly’s spacesuit was failing everywhere it wasn’t taped together, she leapt into action, aided by Fon, Peaches, and Pinkie. The speed at which she moved made her dash from the hall of the Deciders look like an underwater dance routine.

She slipped out of her turtleneck and taped it over the largest holes on the back of the spacesuit. Fon handed over her cardigan, and Bright cut it up and affixed the pieces to the remaining vulnerable areas. Then she and Fon used the rest of the tape to cover every inch of Grassly, leaving only the vent in his helmet for him to breathe through and a narrow space for him to see. He’d gone completely limp, and Bright refused to think about what that might mean.