Glitch (15 page)

She snorted. “I’ll be sure to tell you.” She floated past him. “Dork.”

* * *

Because of Agent Nable, the rest of the afternoon was wrecked for her. She told her mother she was tired. She whisked herself over the treetops and returned to Uncle Pic’s cabin. He’d left her tablet on a table. She could do homework—well, read at least, while all her exams were to be given orally—so she used the energy at her finger tips to scroll through her week’s assignments, knowing there would be hell to pay at some point for everything she’d missed. The battery still had another two or three weeks worth of charge on it before someone would have to refill it.

The cabin was calm at this late afternoon hour. Uncle Pic worked in his garden, his humming a soft sound in the background. He had cut green peppers and laid them on his cutting board, the smell of them lingering in the air like an organic perfume. The diffused light made her think of what it was like living before the electric revolution, which spawned the computer revolution, which spawned the social revolution called the Rupture. That was simplistic, and in their history class she was supposed to be reading about all the other elements that went into making machines smart and self-replicating, making humans better, making the impossible happen.

She looked around at the small space and paused at the desk under the loft. It held stacks of old-fashioned analog books, many of them dog-eared and marked up. Uncle Pic liked leaving ballpoint pens or lead pencils in them so that the spines were always warped. He even still wrote on loose-leaf paper.

Everywhere you looked you saw anachronisms. A cast-iron wood-burning stove with a flue reached to the ceiling. Nearby sat a squat kettle. He even hauled all his water from a well out back. There was a marble-top counter with all his cooking utensils. She had overheard him arguing with her father, and most of their conversations consisted of Uncle Pic giving him a hard time for being a ghost and her father doing the same for Uncle Pic’s insistence on using outdated technology. “You like it too much, Skip,” Uncle Pic said more than once, the very same thing Agent Nable had just said to her.

She heard Uncle Pic returning from the garden, now whistling. The floor boards creaked. He walked up on his porch, making enough noise you’d think he was hard of hearing. He kicked open his door.

“Howdy, little ghost.”

His arms were covered up to his elbows in Georgia red clay. He wore an old T-shirt with a picture of some muscle-bound glad-fighter from the past, plus a pair of shorts that were much too small for his old-man legs. He wasn’t shriveled and frail, but the wrinkles were proof he hadn’t kept up with his senescence treatments.

“Come on out and chat,” he said. “I had a feeling you were in here.” She floated into the late afternoon sunshine, imagining it to warm a body on a chill day, and followed him around the side, where he kept an open shed full of tools. He stopped at an aluminum tub of his daily water he used for washing. He began scrubbing down his arms.

“My back is hurting more than normal. I may have to go get some help.” He snapped up at her. “Your father didn’t ask you to come back so soon, did he, and get on my case about growing old?”

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

He returned to splashing water on his arms. “If it has to do with the wonders of staying young, no. Anything else is fair game.”

She enjoyed how direct he was. Everyone else was always so guarded, as if God above was listening and judging. “What’s wrong with liking having an entity, or being a ghost?”

He stopped with his arms dipped up to his elbows. The water was muddy. This was his wash for the day. He’d make himself another tub tomorrow, but she wondered when the last time he’d soaked himself from head to toe.

“What’s wrong with it? Look at you.” He pulled his arms out and let them drip.

She raised her hands and looked at their digital likenesses. She was a bunch of ones and zeros somehow given life in Realspace. Her dad said he thought it was tied to her “genosoul,” whatever that was. He said, the fact she had her “geno-pheno” copied and stored in a Rejuv Facility meant she wasn’t dead. She existed. Her “essence” existed. The explanations were all too much for her. Besides, the philosophy was dull. She refused to listen to her father and uncle when they’d spend an hour or two together each night on the porch, arguing.

“I’m a ghost, so what?” she heard herself ask, knowing that there was a lot of
what
to the situation.

“Simone, I got me a good bunch of okra over there. When’s the last time you had fried okra?” He screwed up his old man face full of dirt and wrinkles and too much sun. “Oh, wait, most people don’t eat that anyway. Okay, when’s the last time you had watermelon? I had some last night, alone, on the porch. Didn’t offer any to you or your dad. Why? ‘cause you cain’t eat. Two things there that are important: the food we eat and the eating together. You don’t even miss either, do you?”

She did miss eating all her favorite foods like cream-filled chocolate éclairs, red velvet cupcakes, gourmet vanilla yogurt. Eating together was fun, too, but she often ate and read at the same time and usually had to be called to come to the dinner table. She also missed feeling a warm bed, or even getting a hug when you were down. But not sleeping?
Hello
,
way cool
. And being able to pass through walls and float where you wanted was even cooler.
 

“I guess,” she said.

He took a towel to his arms and regarded her as if she were as dumb as the post-hole digger hanging from the shed wall next to her.

“I told Skippard he always went too far,” he said. “He knows it, too. Your oldest brother, Jonen ...” He paused, as if he’d said too much.

Jonen had died before she was born. Her father, mother, and her dead brother had all joined the struggle when the first incursions happened. Her mother never talked about him now and neither did Rigon, who was old enough to remember him.

“Your family is so wrapped up in it, and I just don’t want to see you lost.”

“Am I lost, Uncle Pic?”

“Too early to tell.” He tossed the towel on a wall-peg, barely cleaner than he’d been before. “If you could get your body back right now, would you take it?”

“Sure!” she said, without thought.

Well ...

“Let’s see how you feel tomorrow, after it gets to do its thing.” He looked at her as if she’d farted and denied it. “You make sure it heads north up into those hills. That’s some empty national forest acreage. They keep people out these days, unless you got a license. Should be empty. The hills are steep with plenty of gullies and even some crags. That should keep it busy.” He looked around, maybe realizing he’d been talking and he’d met his quota for the day. “I got some vegetables to cut up.”

“See ya, Uncle Pic.”

But he was already rounding the back of the shed.

By now the cicadas were in full cacophonous play as late afternoon dwindled. The disappearing sun dipped behind slate-gray clouds that weighed heavy in the sky. A chill wind now blew that she couldn’t feel, but her memory was strong enough she imagined the bite.

Uncle Pic didn’t need much clothing, though. He’d said it was still warm enough to go swimming, but everyone at school was bringing coats already. The leaves kicking up in his front yard meant autumn was here. The trees were half-bare, but many were still colored a mottled bronze. It was enough of a beautiful wilderness you could get lost for days.

She hoped that didn’t happen. It wasn’t part of the deal.

Her father appeared out of dense foliage nearby. “Tonight’s the night?”

He looked as he always did, except he was muted, his usual choice of textured shades of crystal blue now a soft gray as if he had been blending in with the sky.

“Going to have some fun,” she said.

He stopped when he saw Uncle Pic at the chicken coop, working some wire back into place. “I guess you talked to your mother.”

“I did.”

“And your uncle.”

“I did.”

“You needed to hear them. I have too much enthusiasm sometimes.” He waved to her. “Walk with me.”

Walking
, of course, consisted of floating just a few inches above the ground, but her father had so perfected moving his legs he looked normal.

At first, he said nothing. She let him lead her into the woods. The failing light meant it would be dark soon, which mattered little to them—a definite perk. She realized she’d been keeping a list of pros and cons. Seeing in the dark was a definite pro. Every so often a branch smacked her in the arm, and sparks emitted in resplendent puffs of light, and she realized she liked that, too—like a caress, but a charged one, something no embodied person could understand.

“When I was a boy,” her father said, “growing up poor in these hills, my daddy used to beat me for reading too much. He was a tough man, Simone, but he loved me in his way. He died way too young. He missed the benefits of the Rupture.” She stuck close behind him. “I once read a book about a man who went to live in the woods by a pond. I think it was called Walden. It explained how to live a simplified life in nature. It spoke to my young mind. But I grew up and learned about engineering, and I realized creative man is natural man.” He stopped. “I’m boring you.”

She didn’t need this pep talk. “I get it, Dad. I agree with you. We’re better than we were.”

The gray disappeared, lines of blue swirling along his torso like living things. “I knew you would. But there are dangers.”

“I know.”

“No, Simone, I mean for us. The disembodied are vulnerable. It’s the body that makes us human. It’s the removal of the body that makes us—”

“—posthuman.”

“Yes!”

“Dad, I’m a teenager. I’m smarter than I look. But, what the heck?”

“When you let it loose tonight, you ... will become different. You may like it.”

“That’s a problem?”

“It could be when you return to—”

“—normal?”

He laughed, and she laughed. “
Normal
. You know, this is how I think of myself now.”

They began walking again. This time he listened as she talked about school and the other Alters and about what they were learning. He said it was all grand, what they were doing. He told her to listen to her mother’s instruction. He told her everything would be all right.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You know how to get back, right? Just float into the air, think of the cabin, and wait until you see the creek. Hard to get lost once you know the hills.”

He left her in a moonlit glen with tall trees on either side that swayed in the wind. The skies had cleared into a purple twilight. But it was colder out.

She began to dance, and she recognized that what she did would have been condemned through generations of human history as witchery. She imagined her feet kicking up pebbles, but she disturbed nothing, until her entity appeared, and an inhuman roar echoed through the hills of Southern Appalachia.

SIX

AN UNASSUMING MIDDLE-AGED MAN in a business suit exited a private car at a dirt-road entrance. It led to a sprawling expanse of farmland in central Alabama. The day was cloudless and bright, the horizon nothing but fields under a beautiful blue dome. The man walked to a makeshift table by the side of the road and presented his ID.

The farmhand who read the scanner wasn’t much more than a young boy. He was big for his age.
 

“Pickle me pink,” the boy said, looking up in surprise. “You cain’t be Gramgadon. No way in a cold heller.”

Gramgadon accepted the fact that the boy saw someone who might teach middle-grade math. Gramgadon was now as natural as they come, looks-wise, appearing to be an older man without the sense to get hair replacement treatment or to get the gobbler hanging below his chin taken care of.
 

“I’m just interested in the good matches. When they start?”

The boy looked over his tablet. Gramgadon extended his back and groaned, playing the part of the feeble human. He coughed a bit, and spit in the dirt. The boy glanced at him, as if he might get sick from being so close. He returned to his tablet.

“We got a bunch of nobodies this afternoon. Could be good, as good as good goes. Later, the ones of interest are ... well, hell, looky here. We got some Consortium-tagged high-school kids. These are Tranz Alters I heard about, my guess.”

Gramgadon leaned forward to see. He wanted to snatch that tablet out of the dimwit’s hands, but he’d been told by his bosses—who didn’t get these things wrong—that these students were his persons of interest. Gramgadon was to keep a low profile. It was very serious business, as far as business went, and he intended to fulfill his duty.

“You gambling?” the boy asked.

“Just here to scout.”

“Well, anytime—”

“Where’s the villa?”

The boy tapped the tablet. “I got ya a ride.”

Gramgadon scanned the area again, smelled the distinct aroma of shucked corn stalks, the tall kind that were twice the size of a man and produced three times the yield as normal corn. He saw a sky of silky filaments floating in the wind. This was the new bio-engineered America that his bosses were invested in controlling. This was the world they wanted to live in.