Company Town (9 page)

“You listen to music while you make dinner?”

“Django Reinhardt.”

“Who?”

He smiled ruefully. “What I'm saying is, you're the last of a dying breed.”

Hwa thought of the stain running down her body, the flaw he couldn't see. He had no idea. “Thank you?”

“You're a black swan,” he said. “A wild card. Something unpredictable. Like getting into the trunk of that ride this morning.”

Hwa shrugged. “Anybody could have done that. I couldn't just let Hanna go. She needed my help.”

“You could have called the police. You could have called
me
. But you didn't. You took the risk yourself.”

She frowned. “Are you pissed off? Is that what this is about? Because you're the one who—”

Síofra hissed. He shook his head softly. With his gaze, he brought her attention to the eyes at the corners of the elevator where the eyes probably were.

“I just want you to know something about me,” he said, after a moment. “Something that isn't in my halo.”

She smiled. “Well, thanks.”

“Not a lot of other people know this, about me.”

“Well, it is kind of weird.” She stretched up, then hinged down at the waist until her vertebrae popped their stiffness loose. She pressed her fingers into the floor and looked up at him from her rag doll position. “I mean, you are only ten years old, right? You can't even drink.”

He rolled his eyes. “Here it comes.”

She stood. “Or vote. Or even have your own place. Does your landlord know about this?”

He pointed at the view of the city outside the elevator. “My landlord is your landlord.”

The elevator doors chimed open. They were on the school floor. Hwa had fifteen minutes to shower and put on her uniform before she met Joel.

“Hey, if you're not too busy? I kind of didn't do the last question on my physics homework. So I might need some help with that. Before I hand it in.”

“I think something can be arranged.”

She stood in the door. It chimed insistently. She leaned on it harder. “Did you ever go to school? After you woke up, I mean? Or are you just winging it?”

“I know what a man my age needs to know,” Síofra said. “Be seeing you.”

 

5

Silent Seizure

“I hate these things,” Hwa said.

“They're the latest model. And perfect for someone without other augments.”

“They're…” Hwa wiggled her fingers in front of her specs. As she did, the device scanned the scars on her knuckles and filed them away in some silvery somewhere that was probably just a data-barge rusting off the coast of one former Eastern bloc nation or another.
DAMAGED
, the glasses said, and pointed helpful blinking arrows at her fingers and wrists and shins and feet and anywhere else she looked.
DAMAGED
. Like she didn't know that much already.

“They're loud,” she said, finally.

“They're the quietest on the market.”
Síofra actually sounded a little hurt. Like he'd gone to the trouble of picking out something great and fucked it up instead. Which was exactly what had happened.

“Don't worry. I'll get used to it.” Hwa scanned the main entrance. The specs told her where every little camera and microphone was. They lit up snitch-yellow on the map. She could pick out the angry kids (red halos), the sad ones (blue), the baselines (green), and the ones who were making out with each other (grinding columns of deep purple).

“We should have gotten them for you sooner. But for someone like you, someone who's lived for so long without…”
He sounded uncomfortable. Like he didn't know how to finish. Hwa stared out at the uniform perfection of her fellow students. They were all mainstream: mainstream height, mainstream weight, mainstream ability, mainstream health. Technically editing skin colour or hair texture qualified as a kind of hate crime, but Hwa had her suspicions. The world was what it was, and she knew there were parents on the rig who wanted more for their children, even if it meant putting some English on the ball.

“Without any augments,” Hwa said for him. “Without any help.”

“Most of these devices are designed to work alongside other services, other technologies. But you're different.”

If by “different,” he meant “poor,” then he was onto something. It wasn't that Hwa had some moral or aesthetic commitment to living free of augmentation. But Sunny had never found money for that kind of thing. At least, not when it came to Hwa. Hwa was a bad investment. The lasers that were supposed to fix the stain running down her face had only made things worse. Why throw good money after bad? The only good thing about that was that it finally got Hwa off the hook for dance lessons. After that—after Sunny knew she'd be ugly forever—Hwa got to do tae kwon do with Tae-kyung.

“The good thing is, now I can see what you see.”

Hwa snorted. “You know I'll be shutting these off when I'm in the girls' locker room, right?”

“Could you say that a little louder, please? I'm not sure the PTA heard you.”

“Oh, come on,” Hwa said. “You're not worried about the PTA. You work for Lynch, and Lynch pays the wages. They'd offer you a two-fer on the Lindgren twins, if they could.”

She directed her gaze to a pair of blond girls wearing varsity volleyball jackets over their uniforms. They reclined against the opposite wall, chests out, knees up, all shiny hair and white teeth and laughter. They were everybody's number-one fantasy. If you didn't want to fuck them, you wanted to be them. Their parents had so liked the prediction their genetic counselor gave them, they ordered two.

“Not interested.”

“Liar.”

“Can we not discuss this, please? We're being recorded, you know. For quality assurance purposes.”

Hwa examined the floor. Her tights had a run in them down her good leg. She inspected the damage idly, twisting her leg this way and that, but her specs had nothing to say about it.

“Much better.”

“I still can't believe I let you con me into coming back to this place.”

“Better late than never. We were lucky to find a candidate for this position who lacked both a diploma and a prison record.”

“Yeah, that's some luck, all right.”

Across town, Síofra laughed. Hwa felt it as a tickle across her skull that skittered all the way to the base of her spine as sure as if someone had run a finger down there. She twitched against the wall.

“Hwa?”

Hwa opened her eyes to see Joel standing in front of her, blazer laid neatly across one arm, school tie in a tight little knot she couldn't help but want to mess up. Christ, he was even wearing the Krakens logo tie pin.
The tie pin.
Like he didn't already look enough like the skinniest little Tory ever.

Right then and there, Hwa decided she had to get the boy in some trouble before the trouble found him first.

“Hwa? Are you okay?”

The warning bell rang. Hwa shoved herself off the wall and teetered only a little. “I'm fine,” she said. “Let's get to physics.”

“Were you talking to Daniel?”

“Yeah.” She raised her voice slightly so her boss would be sure to hear it. “But he should be
working,
and we should be, uh …
learning,
I guess.”

*   *   *

There was a basic problem on the desk when they got to class. At least, Joel said it was pretty basic: “It's Moore's Law,” he said. “About exponential growth in computational ability. Didn't you cover exponents in grade eight algebra?”

Hwa tried to remember grade eight. She'd turned fourteen that year, and had a general memory of fourteen sucking worse than the other years for some reason. Oh, yeah: because her mother wouldn't shut up about how
her
first single had gone
platinum,
when
she
was fourteen. And then she'd talk about pink champagne and parties and music producers and how to fend them off, always making certain to end her stories with something like, <>

Hwa-jeon
. It was a dessert in Korea. When she was little, Hwa thought her nickname being a dessert meant she was sweet and special, a nice treat at the end of a nice person's day. Then she asked Sunny to make it for her.

<> Her mother had taken one look at Hwa's face and rolled her eyes. <>

“Hwa?”

“Huh?” Hwa blinked at Mr. Branch, who was peering at her with his head cocked. In the specs, his emotions didn't register like the students' did. Maybe the faculty all had theirs screened out. Not exactly sporting. “What? Sorry. Were you talking to me?”

“Yes. I was asking you where your homework was. I was calling the roll for missed assignments. Five hundred words on one problem you'd like science to solve?”

Hwa frowned. “What?”

“Just get me the assignment,” Branch said. He started calling off more names.

“You can have mine,” Joel whispered to her. “I wrote two.”

Of course he did. “Why would you do twice the homework?”

“I'd already written one, on faster-than-light travel,” Joel said, “but then I pinged him about it, just to show off, and he shot me down. Said he wasn't taking any biology questions in physics class.”

“So what'd you write about, instead?”

“How the ITER alternative reactor failed, in France.”

Hwa nodded. “That'd be good for science to figure out.”

“Science
has
figured it out.” A smirk tugged at the edges of Joel's lips. He lowered his voice still further. “That's why we're building another one.”

Hwa turned to him. “We?”

“Our company,” he said. “Well, the self-assemblers our company owns. They're building another experimental thermonuclear reactor, right here. Underwater.”

“Underwater.” Hwa pointed at the floor. “Under
this
water?”

Joel nodded. “Under the city.”

Hwa drew breath. “What the hell kind of James Bond villain bullshit—”

“You promised your father you wouldn't discuss this outside the family, Joel,”
Síofra said.
“Hwa signed a nondisclosure agreement, but you shouldn't make it difficult for her to adhere to it.”

“You're building a fucking
sun
under this town, and
I'm
the one you're worried—”

“Miss Go!”

Hwa's head snapped up. Branch did not look happy. Shit.

“Since you and Mr. Lynch have so many things to discuss, perhaps you'd like to discuss them in the hall. Eight bins of fetal pigs were just delivered for Miss Jarvis's biology class, and they're not getting any colder sitting out in the mail room. I'd like you to bring them from downstairs to the science lounge, and load them in the refrigerator.”

“Can we have the elevator pass?” Joel asked.

Branch smiled. “No.”

Hwa shrugged. She stood. “Come on.”

“But—”

“It'll be good for your arms. Let's go.”

*   *   *

“So, are you guys gonna disconnect the whole rig and fire everybody, or just wait until your science experiment explodes and kills us all?”

“It won't explode.” Joel grunted, lost control of his one bin, and set it down on the floor. “Why wouldn't they give us a dolly or a hand truck or something we could use to lift these things?” He flexed his fingers. “My hands hurt.”

They were barely out of the mail room off the main entrance. They'd been walking for all of two minutes, and hadn't even cleared the lobby yet. Even if the death threats against Joel were totally bogus, and Hwa was inclined to believe they were, she'd be damned if she didn't whip him into shape. The kid could barely lift twenty pounds.

“That's because you're using your hands and not your arms. And that's because you got no arms.”

Joel flapped his arms at his sides.

“No. I mean, you got no
arms
.” Hwa squatted to put her two bins down and straightened up. Her spine popped as she rose to her full height. She'd been slacking off on her vinyasas, and that was clearly a mistake. She stepped close to Joel and flexed her right arm. “Feel that.”

Joel poked her arm. His eyes widened. “Is that your
bicep
?”

“It's the mass of time plus discipline. That's all it is.”

Sheepish, Joel shuffled back to his bin and tried to lift it in a single mighty move. Hwa winced as his back sloped forward. He was trying to carry the thing on his nonexistent belly, like a fetus. Which was ironic, given the contents of the bin.

“Okay, lesson one,” Hwa said. “Put that thing down.”

“We have to get back to class.”

“Oh, please. Fuck that guy. Seriously. Besides, this is physics, too. Sort of. The physics of not fucking up your lumbar region.”

“I think that's kinesiology.”

“Whatever. Put that down. No, really, put it down. Now, watch me. See how my back is planked? It's a straight line, from the back of my head to the bottom of my spine. See?”

Joel cocked his head. “Okay.”

“Now, I squat down like I'm doing a clean lift. Because that's basically what this is, is a clean lift. I'll show you one later, in the weight room. And I lift
from the knees
—”