Hungry (6 page)

“Sorry!” I call. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He scrambles away, kicking himself loose from the stool, then gets to his feet and almost crouches behind the table as if he’s ready to spring. “I saw the light, and there was this smell and…”

“What do you want?” he barks. His eyes are as dark as his hair, and he’s dressed all in greens and browns like a tree.

“Nothing. I mean, I was just taking a walk and…” On the table between us, I see books, real books with paper pages. Some are fanned open. Others are stacked four or five high.

“Who are you with?” he asks, still eyeing me suspiciously, hands clenched into fists.

“No one,” I say, and for the first time I feel scared. Could there still be the kind of dangerous people my grandma told me about? I slip my hand into my Gizmo holder.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

I pull out my Gizmo so he knows I can call for help.

“Don’t!” he yells, pointing at the Gizmo in my hand. Then he softens. “Please.”

“Then stop yelling at me!” I tell him.

He runs a hand through his messy hair, making it fall in soft curls around his ears. “You just surprised me, that’s all. Nobody ever comes down here.” Then he looks at me for a few seconds. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“I followed a smell,” I tell him. “It smelled so good that I had to find it.” I hang my head, embarrassed, but when I look up and see that he looks relieved, I get curious. “What are you doing here? What’s the smell? Who are you?”

He licks his lips like he’s nervous and says, “My name’s Basil.”

“Basil?” I can’t help but laugh a little. “Basil what?”

He shakes the hair away from his eyes and says, “Just Basil. What’s your name?”

“Tha—” I start to say, but then I decide to play his game, and I say, “Apple.”

“Apple?” He lifts his eyebrows. “Apple what?”

“Just Apple,” I say with a little smirk, and I think he nearly smiles.

I glance down at the table of books between us and see pictures of food. Some of it I recognize like the green, red, and yellow fruits and vegetables from old-timey children’s books, the deep glossy brown of cooked meat from ancient advertisements at the Relics, and photos of puffy golden loaves of bread, like the ones Grandma showed me when I was little. Suddenly my mouth is full of saliva and my stomach goes ballistic, like that singing cartoon cat in the alley. I’m half afraid Basil will throw a boot at me. Embarrassed, I press my hands over my mouth to stop the torrent of noise coming from my insides, but Basil comes around the table and touches my arm. We stare at each other, and I shiver when he whispers, “You, too?”

*   *   *

Basil and I sit next to each other at the table. Between us are a stack of books and a little whirring device connected by a thin coil of hose to boxy stainless steel cabinets lining the wall.

“So I’m not the only one?” I ask and feel the kind of relief that I imagine survivors coming out of bunkers after bombings must have felt during the wars.

He nods.

“How long has it been happening to you?”

“A while,” is all he says.

“And are there others?”

Again he nods.

I struggle to grasp that there are other people walking around with yowling bellies just like me. I wonder who they are, where they are, and what they do when it happens to them. But my biggest question is why.

“My mom’s a researcher,” I tell him. “She says my metabolism probably shifted.” I lift the back of my shirt. “She’s collecting data on me right now.”

He winces when I show him the patch. “I would never let someone put that on me,” he says, and I assure him it doesn’t hurt. “That’s not what I mean. You shouldn’t be made to feel abnormal, like you’re the one who needs to change.” He sounds aggravated.

I lower my shirt. “But there has to be an explanation. Don’t you want to know why?”

“I know why,” he says.

“You do?” I lean closer, ready to be wowed by the answer. “Tell me.”

“Because we’re human.”

“Oh that,” I say, unimpressed. I pick up the funny little machine on the table. It’s boxy with slats on the top and some kind of scanner thingy on the bottom but no screen anywhere. “What’s this?”

Basil grabs it from me and puts it on his lap out of sight. “Just a thing.”

I pull a book closer. “Where did you get all these?” I flip the heavy glossy pages. Not only are there pictures of food, most of which I’ve never seen before, but also instructions for how to make everything. “Half cup minced onion,” I read. “One clove garlic. One green pepper.” I laugh. “Sounds like a magic potion.”

Basil reaches over and slams the book closed.

“Hey,” I say. “I was looking at that.”

He stacks all the books together and pushes them away from me. “Listen,” he says, nervously. “You should probably get out of here. Won’t someone be wondering where you are?” He points to my back. “They might come looking for you.”

I touch the patch through my clothes. “It doesn’t have a locator,” I tell him. “And I told my Gizmo to go to sleep. I hate people knowing where I am all the time. It’s an affront to my personal liberty.”

He barks an unexpected laugh.

“You think that’s funny?” I ask.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “You just took One World’s legal justification for everything they get away with and turned it against them.”

“‘Corporations are people, too!’” I quote OW’s favorite defense. “Most people don’t get that.” I smile shyly, wondering if he might secretly be a Dynasaur.

“Most people are stupid,” he says.

We grin at each other, but I have to look away and pull a book from the pile to stop myself from reaching out to touch him, which is what I suddenly feel like doing. It makes me nervous.

“Is this what you do when your body makes that noise?” I open the pages and stare at the pictures. “You look at these? Does that make it stop?”

Basil ducks his head and averts his eyes, but then he looks up at me through the soft curls across his forehead. “Sometimes it makes it worse.”

“Then why…”

“How long has it been happening to you?” he asks.

“A few weeks. Maybe more.” Then it’s my turn to be embarrassed. “It’s getting worse,” I nearly whisper.

“It’s been happening to me for longer than that,” he says.

“Maybe you need your Synthamil formula recalibrated.…”

He stares at me for a moment then shakes his head and says, “
Re
calibrated?” as if incredulous.

“Yeah, they can tweak your personal formula to optimize—”

“Believe me,” he says, turning away. “I’ve seen what they do to the others like us, and it’s not about calibrating optimal formulas. First you’ll bounce around from specialist to specialist who’ll claim they each have the answer, but nothing works. They’ll say it’s all in your mind. They lock you up. Drug you. Make you think you’re crazy. But we’re not crazy.” He stares at me defensively. “Being hungry is the most natural thing in the world.”

I flinch at the word
hungry,
my mother’s least favorite in the English language.

“But sometimes…” Basil trails off with almost a wild look in his eye. “Sometimes, it’s so bad that I have to do something. I just can’t help it.” Sheepishly, he pulls the little machine out and opens one of the books, which is different than all the others. This one has pictures of food, but underneath each photo an old-fashioned QR code has been pasted to the page. Delicately he turns the pages until he comes to a two-dimensional photograph of a tall round thing. It looks almost like a fancy white hat decorated with pink and purple flowers and curlicues.

“This is a cake,” he says. “People used to eat it to celebrate their birthdays.” He runs the machine over the QR code. The device whirs and clicks, then slowly a subtle scent floats out from the slats on top. I have to sniff several times to catch it. First it’s sweet. High in my head, almost like the smell of hologram flowers that are programmed too strong. But there’s something else in the smell. Something deeper, heavier. I don’t have any words for it, but it makes my mouth go moist.

“This is incredible!” I say and grab the book from him. “What else do you have in here?” I flip the pages until I come to a plump brown bird-shaped thing. “Is this a roasted chicken?” He nods, and I hold out my hand for the machine, but Basil won’t give it to me. “Come on,” I plead. “Please.”

He relents and hands it over. I do what he did, slowly scanning the QR code, then I close my eyes and wait while the smell is released. “Oh my god,” I moan. “It’s sort of salty, like the Simu-Sea at One World, Vacation World,” I say. “And smoky, maybe? Like it’s been over a fire.” I pull in a deep breath. “And there’s citrus and HoloGrass. And something else.” I sniff again, uncertain. “I don’t know how to say it, but it makes me think of my grandma’s hug. Like the smell of her warm neck when I’m sad.”

I open my eyes and see Basil watching me with a broad smile, which changes his face entirely. Instead of a heavy furrowed brow and brooding eyes under those dark curls, his eyes are wide and sparkling, and his smile flashes. A new feeling ripples deep in my stomach. Like going over a hill too fast in my Smaurto. I squirm a little.

“Want to smell something even better?” he asks, and I nod eagerly as he flips the pages. “This is called a chocolate brownie.” He passes the scanner over the code under a photo of a flattish brown rectangle.

I close my eyes and inhale. “Oh my god,” I say and move my face closer to the machine.

“I know,” he says.

I get even closer, pulling in the amazing smell, trying to find a way to describe what’s happening in my nose, my mouth, the pit of my stomach, but I have no words. No way to categorize it except to say that I want more. It starts to fade, and I shoot forward, wanting every last remnant of the scent. I lean closer and closer until Basil and I bump heads. We both fall back, rubbing our foreheads and laughing nervously. He reaches out and touches my scalp.

“You okay?”

His touch makes all the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Yeah,” I say quietly, biting my lip. “I’m okay. You?”

He takes his hand away and his fingers seem to tremble. “I’m fine.”

“That was incredible,” I say. “What was it called again?”

“A brownie. It was made with chocolate.”

“My grandmother told me about chocolate!” I say excitedly. “She said it was like nothing else.”

“Everything I’ve ever smelled with chocolate in it has been mind-blowing.”

I turn the little machine over to study how it might work. “Where did you get this thing?”

“I made it,” he says.

My mouth drops open. “You made it?” He nods. “How?”

“You really want to know?”

I nod eagerly.

Basil gets up and opens the door to one of the stainless steel cabinets mounted to the wall. Inside are hundreds of small upside-down brown bottles, stacked ten high and held in place by metal clamps. Tubes run from each bottle to a series of larger hoses, which all connect to the coil snaking out the bottom of the cabinet to the device on the table. “I think this was a food lab,” he tells me. “All of these bottles contain aroma compounds and flavorants that they used to create different smells and tastes.”

I stand beside him to get a better look at the labels on each bottle: diacetyl, benzaldehyde, limonene, ethylvanillin, ethyl maltol. “But how do you know which ones smell like what?”

“I found something called the SuperScent database at the Relics, which tells me exactly how much of each compound to use to create a specific scent, like chocolate. Then I collected all these old cook books with recipes and pictures of food, and I built this scanner and…”

“Oh I get it!” I say, holding the scanner in my palm. “You made a QR code for each picture, which tells the machine how much of each compound to release into the tube.…”

“Exactly!” he says. “So I just run the scanner over the code, and the machine mixes up the smell.”

“This is amazing!”

“Not really. Most of the smells probably aren’t right. I have to guess a lot.”

“Basil. I’m serious. This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. People would flock to this. It’s better than anything you can do at an EntertainArena or PlugIn! People could come here and put together an entire menu!”

“No,” he says and shuts the cabinet door. “This is not for the general public.” He unplugs the device and starts stacking up the books on the table.

“But why?” I grab the rest of the books and follow him through a door on the other side of the lab.

Basil ignores my question as he fiddles with a small key to unlock a cupboard. One by one, he slides the books carefully onto the shelf. I hand him my books, too. Then he takes the machine out of his pocket and locks it in a drawer. When everything is put away, he leans against the counter, crosses his arms, and stares at me with that dark, brooding look from earlier.

“Did you really just stumble in here?”

“Of course. How else would I have gotten here? It’s not like it’s on a map.”

He studies me for a moment, shaking his head. “I might be an idiot, but I think I believe you.”

“Good,” I say. “Because I’m not lying. Who do you think I am, anyway?”

He bites the side of his thumb. “I don’t know, but I don’t think you’re an Analog, are you?”

“A what-a-log? Is that anything like a Dynasaur?”

“What’s a Dynasaur?”

“Never mind,” I say, disappointed.

“Listen, there’s a group of us.…” He turns and opens another drawer then takes out what looks like an actual sheet of paper and an old wooden graphite pencil. “If you want to learn more about what we do…”

Excitement tingles over my skin at the thought of meeting more people like us.

He writes something down with his hand and gives it to me.

“Is this real?” I caress the smooth surface between my thumb and fingers. He nods. “What I am supposed to do with it?”

“Read it.”

I stare at the words printed on the page.

Analogs

Friday

6:00 p.m.

1601 South Halsted

“What’s it mean?” I ask.

“Information about a meeting.”