365 Days To Go
Mum drove slowly down a row of oak trees that pointed towards the centre of a green campus. At first I thought she'd drifted into the university just to turn around. Instead we went deeper and deeper. A glass wall separated the university from that Mahonyland development on the other side of the river.
'This isn't the airport. W-T-F?'
'Don't swear, angel.'
'I'm not swearing. If I was gonna swear I'd say "What the fuck" because what the ACTUAL FUCK are we doing at the university?'
Mumshine avoided looking at me. This couldn't be right. Mahonyland? The suburbs?! Me and my friends messaged a tonne of frowny faces to each other. It was disappointing as hell not to be hopping on a jet to Easter Island. God damn it. At least this place was close to home. The highway curled around the river, forming a noose around Mahonyland so it was kind of like an island, almost, except one corner where it connected to the highway. Or used to connect, anyway. Maybe the dome had closed off the bridge. You could hardly see anything cause the glassfield was tinted and on some angles you couldn't even tell there was glass at all. On our history field trip, Mr Mohamed had told us the place was named after some guy called Leopold Mahony who was, like, mayor yonks ago when apparently it was no big deal to have a weird-ass name that sounded like 'leper.'
I doubted Leper Mahony would've predicted today homeowners couldn't keep paying back the bank and a lot of them had better lives if they went inside a dome and let the mechs test Alzheimers cures and medical marijuana and beam weird messages into their heads to see if they could drive them schizo. So many people's lived had gotten fucked up since the Singularity. Except my family. And my friends' families. We were sweet.
Mum was in a parking lot in front of a building made of white stone. It looked fancy-as. I got a tingle of excitement deep in my belly and needed to pee real bad. I couldn't see my friends, though. Could there be some secret elevator inside? A bullet train to Guam?
'I'll hover. You come back out, if you want. Just – You'll need this – TAKE IT, Edie.' Mumshine was thrusting a bag at me. Inside I could see food wrapped in foil, bottles of water and that Swiss/cross sign they put on first aid kits.
'We're not allowed to take anything in 'cept our clothes, Mumshine. Didn't dad tell you?'
'Just a seedling, then.' Mumshine reached over, popped the glovebox open, pulled out a tiny stem with two leaves in a little pot of soil. 'It's a pear tree. You could start your own orchard! Everyone needs fruit.'
'No one who's normal eats raw fruit, Mum. Jesus Christ. Enough of the Boudica guerrilla living-off-the-land stuff. We're not fighting the Battle of Silicon Valley. We don't have to eat from people's orchards. Quit worrying.'
'I'm turning round, I won't let my daughter – I'll volunteer instead. I'll get a second job, I'll– '
'MUMSHINE! Chill. I'll. Be. Literally. Fine.'
I burst out the door and ran, got ten metres, stopped and turned around, sighed, leaned in the door and gave Mumshine a kiss. 'I got this, Mumshine. Honest. Just go. You're embarassing me.'
I slammed the door on her and ran.
*
The building's reception area was empty. No party. No cake. No banner.
Adam arrived just behind me, farewelled by his loser dad who had an Uber passenger to pick up. His moustache tickled Adam's face as the dad kissed his son and Adam scratched his cheek, pushing his dad away playfully.
I checked the messages on my Org. It was only, like, 7 o'clock and I was sleepwalking but amped at the same time.
Ø C U AT DA CAMPUS!!
Ø ZOMG WE GOT IN2 DA EXPERIMENT :O)
Ø EEW MY MA GAVE ME A BOX OF MUFFINS GROSS NOT EVEN PALEO
There was even a message from Mumshine, like a hard-out two page email she'd written. I parked it for later, took a breath and got ready for the best year ever.
The walls of the reception-y place were white and bare and glowing like inside an Apple store. The receptionist's desk was behind a clear plastic counter. The receptionist seemed to be studying my deets on a screen but she hardly even looked up.
'Eden Shepherd? You can go through if you like. Your compensation should be expected in 24 hours. Your parents have read the terms and conditions and signed as your guardians.'
'I'll bet you're just as excited as I!' Adam said cheerily, standing on his tip-toes.
'Shut up, dude. Gotta sort out this compensation thingy.' I cleared my throat, tried to sound like I wasn't about to explode with excitement. 'D'you seriously mean I get a million bucks tomorrow?'
She looked up at me and nodded. I noticed little diodes inside her skull flashing on and off. I could just see behind the desk where her torso merged directly into a cylindrical base with wheels on it. She'd been switched on in this room and had probably never had a break. Her hair and forehead and eyes looked Fleshie, though. Mechs are sneaky fuckers. Ever since Silicon Saturday they've replaced us one by one, taking all the stink jobs we didn't realise we valued, encircling us til we were trapped in our island of superiority.
'24 hours from now. Confirmed.'
'It sorta feels like a set-up. Like, you sure you've got my bank account number so I can get paid and stuff?'
'A bank account shan't be required. Move forward, please.' I walked with crystal, tense, worried legs towards the far end of the room, which sealed behind me and cut off outside noise just as Adam was about to blab some more annoyances. I followed a corridor edged in thick glass which only let me turn left then left again. I lost my bearings within a minute. The floors and ceiling were clean and white as a hospital. The glass became a skyway and I was walking on air on my own in a box, tilting. I couldn't see any joins in the walls of my glass tube as I began to tumble down it. The entire corridor was upending. I pressed the palms of my hands against the glass trying to grip like a gecko. I scrabbled, found nothing to grab onto. All I could do was keep my feet in front of me. Something soft and brown was coming up, with green spots – a giant frog? A hill? How far was I fal–
I tasted air, then smacked into a brown, foamy lake-looking surface. It shattered and swallowed me in a cold blanket. I kicked and flapped until the water fizzed white. My legs pumped, trying to connect with bicycle pedals that weren't there, and the river bottom churned up brown silt that seemed to suck me. When I started losing sight of the sky, I forced my arms to breaststroke, tried the bicycle kick again, finally hit the river bottom, pushed hard with my feet and powered to the surface. I gulped air, panting, hyperventilating. The body of water had to have been that river that separates Mahony from the freeway, just about turns Mahony into an… an island? THIS was our tropical island?
Fucking hell, I thought. Not exactly Ibiza. There'd better be some decent clubs here.
I wrestled through bulrushes and clambered onto the riverbank. I bent over and pressed down on my cargo pants and tank top. I pushed the balloons of water on the sides of my pants and they squirted brown soup. I made my way over sand and duck poop onto neat, flat asphalt. I left a trail of drips then arrived on a sidewalk of paving stones. If I squinted and ignored the glassfield high above me with its fake-ass screensaver of blue sky and puffy white clouds, I could pretend I was just walking home from the swimming hole like an ordinary person. Pretend Mahonyland wasn't quiet as a mountaintop. Pretend the silence didn't make my spine wriggle with anxiousness.
'EDEN! HEY!'
My peehole clenched with fear. A muddy figure slapped the paving stones with brown sasquatch feet as it ran towards me. 'I knew it had to be you!'
'Adam. Okayyyyy… wow.' I did a huge sigh to insult him. 'You're here. Right behind me like Slenderman. Totally not creepy.'
'I was beginning to think they'd dropped me in here all by myself! Twelve million for me!'
'Found any others?'
'I'm pretty sure they dumped everyone in the river. Even Esther, which really makes you wonder–
'ES! Hey – people, right?! People up ahead, I see people! Is one of them in a chair? We gotta go find her. HURRY!'
I began sprinting and Adam dogged me. The dark shapes up ahead got larger, four of them, it seemed, and the shapes heard our muddy shoes slapping, and they turned to see who was catching up.
One of the mud-covered spectres had floppy black rockstair hair over his ears. Chanvatey Prach, thank God. Another shape wiped its face and revealed Eli Joshua's nostrils and cheeks and eyes.
I squinted to try and work out who the other two muddy, dripping people were. One stocky, one skinny, striking blue eyes and–
'KT and Kane. God, man, I honestly thought I was gonna get stuck with Limpet Boy all year.'
'Where's McDonalds at?' Kane went. 'Dude, I'll even do Burger King. Tell me where the VendBots are, I'll kick the glass in, get me some cookies. Man I could eat… who's got food on them? Anyone?' Kane was his usual wild self, in commando mode, always hungry and aggro. He had been patched into a Luddite clique, I'd heard. He was always looking for excuses to smash mechs. One time he even melted this Asimo teacher aide, like after school Kane and the boys tied it down and built a massive-ass pyre around it to melt the palladium in its central processor.
KT's smile broke through a muddy face. 'Eden, suuuup. Good to see you.' We shared a muddy air kiss and pushed our hair back behind our ears, where the river goo held it in place. 'How exciting was our entrance! You got chucked in the river too, right? It was like sooo refreshing. Talk about making a splash, eh?'
'How original,' Adam said, droll.
'Adz, hi, like, über-nice to see you.'
If Adam felt the sting of the Uber reference to his dad, he didn't show it. I guess Adam got dissed so many times every day that he kept all the hurt locked away in a basement inside himself. KT put her hands on Adam's shoulders, gave him air kisses on both cheeks, then took three steps back so she was further away from him than when she'd begun. 'We've been in for, like, an hour. There's a limo, by the way, you guys. Up by that park, that Samuel Miller park?'
The name of the park sounded familiar. I was pretty sure I'd been here for something before.
'Holy shit, man… a limo? Dude.'
'It doesn't even work, though,' Kane growled, 'Obviously I tried it. No gas in any of these stupid-ass cars. Spotted a BP a couple miles away, though.' Kane shoved his sister out of the way, curled his fingers into fists, flared the cords in his neck. 'Glad you're here, Rock-a-Bye Baby. I need me some entertainment.'
'You – you can't bully me in here?' Adam's voice was almost pleading. The little bit of inflection on the end made him sound like a total pussy, like he was asking Kane's permission.
I chased my friends into Samuel Miller Reserve, headed for some swings and bark chips, and a fort, and scrambled up the ladder, onto a ledge then up a second ladder. Finally it dropped into my head why the park sounded familiar. It was where Adam's Baby Incident happened. See, a couple years ago as a Social Studies project, we had to go outside into a nice suburban park and work alongside basic programmable heavy duty mechs for a day, the simple BigDog type that they have in every kindergarten that three year olds can programme to carry their bag for them. We were all landscaping and counting the number of crayfish and frogs and putting leaf litter in garbage bags and stuff when Sarmila told Rebecca told Jyoti told Dallas told KT told EVERYBODY that Sarmila had gone to empty her toilet belt in the lavatory, and she went inside a port-a-toilet because the door said Vacant and she had pulled that door open, and there was Adam Turing in a grotty gross toilet with his head in the BigDog's lap and he'd programmed it to SING ROCK A BYE BABY to him.
The memory got interrupted as my best friends clambered onto the fort with me and we got awesome views of our new world from the crow's nest at the top of the fort, storeys up.
A new world with acres for everybody.
I couldn't believe I had Chan almost all to myself for a year, couldn't believe I'd had Prom only last night. Couldn't believe that as soon as I got my million bucks, I was gonna be in paradise.