The Lost Code (6 page)

“My neck?”

“Yeah, can you find me during elective time today? I’ll be guarding free swim.”

“Sure, okay,” I said.

“Cool.” She smiled. “Hey, until then”—she nodded over my shoulder—“mum’s the word with
them
, okay?”

I glanced back at the infirmary. “Oh, yeah. Right.”

“And listen, if you get any strange urges,” said Lilly, “just go with it.”

Strange urges—
what was she talking about? But I just nodded. “All right.”

“Good.” Lilly hurried back to her group. I looked down at my arm, where her fingers had been. I could almost feel little heat impressions there.

I turned and headed to the infirmary, thinking about what Lilly had just said. We were going to talk. She knew something about what had happened to me. It was already killing me not to know what.

Inside, I found the office door and Paul’s both closed. I could hear a low, muffled voice in Paul’s office, like he was speaking to someone. I hurried over to the open infirmary door.

As I walked in, I heard the strained sound of vomiting. I found Dr. Maria in one of the exam rooms, sitting on the bed beside a little Panda girl who was bent over a plastic basin, her face red. Strands of her black bangs had gotten stuck by the corner of her mouth. There was brown goo on her pink teddy bear T-shirt.

“It’s okay, Colleen,” said Dr. Maria gently.

“It hurts,” Colleen whispered, her voice hoarse.

“I know. Just try to breathe and it will be over soon.” She rubbed the little girl’s back, then glanced at the computer pad lying beside her. She looked worried.

“Hey, Dr. Maria,” I said.

She looked up. “Oh, Owen, hi. How are you—”

Colleen lurched over and barfed again, the liquid splattering into the basin. She coughed a little, then looked up, staring off into space. Vomit dripped from her nostrils.

“Is it over?” Dr. Maria asked gently.

Colleen exhaled hard and nodded. “I think so.”

“Okay.” Dr. Maria helped Colleen lie back on the bed.

Without really meaning to, I glanced into the basin, and looked away fast. But I’d seen that the vomit had red swirls of blood in it. I backed away and stayed by the door.

Dr. Maria pulled the covers over Colleen. She moved quickly over to the counter, and returned to Colleen holding a little gun-shaped tool with a needle at the end and a clear glass vial mounted on top. “I’m going to take a quick blood sample. Just look toward the window and you’ll feel a slight sting.”

Colleen turned away. Dr. Maria stuck the needle in her arm, and blood splashed into the vial. “Okay, that’s it. Just rest for a bit, sweetie. I’ll be back to check on you soon, okay?”

Colleen nodded, her eyes already drifting closed.

Dr. Maria put the syringe back on the counter, grabbed her pad, and tapped the glass a few times. She put that down and picked up the vomit basin. “Just a second, Owen.” She hurried around the bed into the little bathroom. There was a sound of pouring and flushing.

“Now let’s take a look at you.” Dr. Maria smiled at me as she walked around the bed, but she also glanced worriedly back at Colleen.

We crossed the hall to another room.

“She seems pretty sick,” I said. I’d been thinking about my incident the night before, throwing up some blood, too. Was something going around? Did Colleen have the same condition I did? But her neck had looked fine.

Dr. Maria sighed. “Yeah, the poor kid. Could be some minor food poisoning. I think she just needs to rest.” But Dr. Maria sounded more worried than that.

I sat on the bed, and Dr. Maria snapped on new rubber gloves. She sat down on a rolling stool, untaped my bandages, and started unwrapping them. The attention caused fresh itching. “Things any better with your cabin today?” she asked. She was looking at me with a smile that felt genuine, like she cared.

“I guess,” I said, thinking,
Not really
. But they hadn’t gotten any worse.

She pulled off the last layer. The fabric stuck again and caused a fresh throb of pain. She threw out the bandages and returned with a small exam light. “And how are these doing?”

“Fine,” I said. “They itch, but less today. They—” I paused, thinking of my talk with Lilly. It was almost like she knew something about these wounds. And even though Dr. Maria seemed like someone I could trust, too, I wanted to talk to Lilly first. “They just get kinda sore,” I finished.

Dr. Maria leaned in and ran her finger gently over the wounds, but didn’t try to separate them like I had. “Well,” she said, squinting, “they are looking a little better.” She rolled to the counter and got a little square towel that she used to wipe gently around the wound edges. “There’s some blood here, but not as much. Do you remember any more about getting these?”

“I don’t,” I said, a truth, but I also felt the weight of the unspoken lie, about being under for ten minutes, and now I’d added to it by not telling her about the shower.

“You sure?” Dr. Maria asked, and I worried that she was onto me, but when I looked over she was just tapping on her pad, like her question was routine.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, well, I’m going to put fresh bandages on your neck and then I’ll just need a quick blood sample. Does that sound all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Is that to check for an infection or something?”

“Oh, the blood?” Dr. Maria was turning away as she said it, getting bandages from a drawer. “Yeah, we just want to, basically, just keep an eye on things.”

“Okay.”

Her answer sounded vague, almost like I was a little kid who couldn’t understand the details. And then I wondered, were there unspoken lies on her side, too? I thought about little Colleen. Maybe.

Dr. Maria gently put on the bandages, then rolled over to get a new vial and needle for her syringe gun. She clipped them on and took my hand. “Just push up your sleeve.”

The needle stung, the blood leaped into the vial, and then it was over.

“Miss Maria?” It was little Colleen, calling weakly from across the hall.

Dr. Maria got up and put her supplies on the counter. “I should get back to her. See you tomorrow, same time?”

“Sure,” I said.

She rushed out.

As I left, I heard Colleen retching more, and I wondered again if our conditions were related. It would be Dr. Maria’s job to notice that, wouldn’t it? And she hadn’t said anything. Except we’d both had the blood samples taken. And what were those for?

More questions. I had to get to electives and talk to Lilly.

ELECTIVES WERE RIGHT AFTER LUNCH. ONLY AS WE
left the dining hall, Todd turned in the other direction. “It’s time for a special tradition,” he said.

“Oldest cabins get a tour of the Eagle Eye!” Leech finished for him, grinning big.

“This way,” muttered Todd.

And so instead of me seeing Lilly, we met up with the Arctic Foxes in a paved area with a security checkpoint, by a set of large metal double doors where I’d entered the dome two nights ago. I followed along in the back, so annoyed that I’d missed my date, well, not
date
, but meeting time. My neck started to itch more, almost like it agreed.

Leech, Noah, and Jalen started joking around with the Foxes. I hung back by the edge of the group, away from where the girls and boys were mixing.

“Good afternoon, kids.” We turned to see Paul approaching. He was wearing a black hat with the Eden corporate logo on it. Despite the shade that the brim cast over his face, his sunglasses were still on and as dark as ever. He didn’t slow down as he neared us, and we parted to let him by. “Right this way,” he said over his shoulder.

We followed him to a rectangular metal column, an elevator shaft stretching straight up until it was lost in the SafeSun glare. “Open,” he said, and the doors slid apart.

We all crowded inside the metal box. Elbows and shoulders jostled, and I found myself against the back wall, right behind Paige and two other Arctic Foxes. The doors slid closed. There were narrow windows in them. I had to get on my toes to see out.

The elevator shot up, the force pressing me into the floor. I saw other kids wobble.

“This is quite the privilege,” said Paul. “A look behind the curtain. It may feel like we are breaking the illusion here—some of you probably forgot you were even inside a dome—but knowing what really makes the insides of this living facility work is the true magic.”

I felt like there hadn’t been a single moment when I’d forgotten where I was. Maybe it was easier to accept Eden’s illusion if you’d always been here.

We watched the tiny cluster of wooden camp buildings shrink, getting lost among the treetops. The lake spread out away from us, sparkling, and in the distance I caught a brief glimpse of shining towers and glass, the EdenWest city, but then we were up into the first misty layer of SimClouds. You could see them being spun by little jets on the dome wall. I tried to keep my gaze out the window, but sometimes I had to stare at the floor. I’d never been up nearly this high in anything.

The elevator came to a stop and there was a series of clicks. The car stayed vertical, but shook slightly and began ascending at an angle, following the curve of the wall. I stumbled a little and brushed against Paige’s back. She turned around, her magenta-streaked ponytail flipping over her shoulder. She was chewing a thick piece of gum. It smelled like the Citrus Blast bug juice and combined with a soapy clean smell that always seemed to be around the Arctic Foxes. She was tall and glanced slightly downward at me.

“Sorry,” I said immediately.

The two girls to her right were looking back at me, too. Pairs of eyes ringed by thick blue and lavender makeup.

Paige spoke in between chews. “It’s all right.” She squinted at me, almost like she was trying to figure out what I was. “What happened to your neck, anyway?” She kind of scowled when she said it, like my wounds were a bad fashion choice.

“It’s from when I drowned,” I said quietly, thinking that I shouldn’t feel embarrassed but then feeling that way anyway.

She turned away. The three Foxes ducked together and conferred. The girl next to Paige, her black hair striped with glittery teal and held up in a swirl by two sticks, shot a glance back at me again with her thin, dark eyes.

More huddling, then they all cracked up. I looked around for a place to move, but we were packed tight.

The girls turned back around. Paige looked me up and down while talking to the others. “I don’t know. . . .”

“What?” I asked.

“Mina thinks you have CP,” said Paige, cocking her head at the girl beside her. Other Arctic Foxes cracked up now. She looked me over again. “I guess it’s
possible
. . . .”

“Him?” Leech suddenly called from nearby. “That’s the Turtle!”

Paige whipped around to him. “You are so mean!” she snapped, but with a smile, and she punched him in the shoulder and then she and Leech were the center of the universe again, and I was alone in my slice of space against the back wall, having no idea what Paige had meant.

“CP means ‘Cute PoTENtial,’” said Xane from nearby.

“Oh,” I said.

“Lucky,” he added.

Knowing what that meant only made my nerves hum faster. I felt my face starting to burn. What did you do if you had CP? Were there ways you were supposed to act? Things you had to start saying? Was I now expected to work my way up to “real” cute? It felt like another thing I had no idea about and I wondered if I’d been better off when I thought I was invisible to the Arctic Foxes.

A blinding light speared through the windows, making us all squint. We were passing a bank of SafeSun lamps, ten enormous round bulbs. You could see the heat shimmering around them.

Above that, things got darker. The roof of the dome arced overhead, and now we could see the giant triangular panels and the crisscrossing girders. We were above the hazy atmosphere of the place. The ground was lost from sight. The light up here was pale and electric and almost reminded me of being back underground at Hub.

The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open and we stepped out into a metal-floored room. To our right were clear doors. We had just filed out when a tiny tram arrived. We boarded, and the tram shot ahead. Out the front window, I could see the little track, suspended in a steel superstructure that hung down from the dome roof.

“EdenWest was completed in 2056,” said Paul, extending his hand toward the window and sounding moderately bored. “It took fifteen years to build, a colossal effort, like we were the Egyptians building a pyramid. But, that’s what happens when you get enough people who want to save themselves”—Paul said this with more interest—“and a board of directors with a
vision.
”

“How big is the dome?” Noah asked.

“The base is six kilometers in diameter,” said Paul. “It’s home to two hundred thousand people, not including those currently enrolled in our Existential Services program.”

I wondered what this was. Then I heard Leech explaining it to Noah: “When you’re gonna die in Eden, you can opt to be frozen until we figure out how to cure diseases and live forever and stuff.”

I thought about back at Hub, where everybody got cremated when they died. People either had their ashes donated to the struggling gardens, or scattered off the caldera rim by full moon.

I’d heard that in the Edens, and up north in the Habitable Zone, life expectancy was still in the nineties, if you were born there. Out at Hub, it was down near fifty-five, and that was higher than the worldwide average, which was closer to forty-five. Those numbers were partly because nobody could get advanced treatment for cancers, partly because of infant deaths due to malnourishment or the toxic plumes that hit the water supply now and then, but also because every ten years or so, one of the new resistant plagues would sweep through and shave off the old and young and weak. There were no Existential Services when the plagues came.

We sped past a series of hanging cranes moving a new triangular dome panel into place. “As you can see,” Paul continued, his voice flattening out to a nearly sleep-inducing disinterest, “we are constantly upgrading the OzoneSim panels in response to atmospheric radiation levels.”

I vaguely remembered my view from the lake bottom, of the roof panels having burn marks. All the panels around us up here looked spotless and white, free of damage. I wondered if what I’d seen had been some trick that the water had played on me. Or maybe they worked harder to keep this part of the dome looking good for visitors like us.

“My parents are worried about the dome integrity,” said Sonja quietly.

“They make her wear one of those deflector helmets around town,” added Paige, half laughing.

Sonja’s face got red.

Paul shook his head, his tone like a weary teacher’s. “All your parents need to do is follow our standard protocol based on the DI Index. There’s no reason to worry.”

The tram kept speeding forward, then finally slowed down.

Ahead was the round Eagle Eye observatory. It hung down below the dome roof like the bottom half of a ball. Two rings of windows looked out over the whole of EdenWest. An enormous spiky antenna array extended down from beneath, its end brushing the tops of the SimClouds.

The doors whooshed open and we all filed out into a short hallway. “This,” said Paul, “is where we monitor every aspect of the Eden experience.”

Another set of doors opened to a wide, round room. There were three ringed levels, getting smaller and stepping down toward the center. Each level had banks of computer screens. Workers busied from one monitor to the next. It made me think of how I pictured the technicians inside me. Like EdenWest was a giant organism itself.

Paul looked over the bustling room. One of the workers stopped in front of us. She stood up straight and smiled big. “Oh, hello, Mr. Jacobsen, it’s nice to—”

Paul talked over her like he hadn’t even heard what she was saying. “Aaron Cane.”

“Oh, sure, right. Um . . .” The worker turned and began scanning the room, hopping up on her toes.

“Here!” Aaron was standing among a group of workers, surveying a set of monitor screens. “Now, does everyone understand that
this
is the readout for the humidity controls and
this
is the meter for vapor control, not the other way around? I’d appreciate it if we had a long and happy life of me
not
having to remind you of that and you
not
screwing it up anymore. Got it?”

The workers around him mumbled in agreement.

“Good,” Aaron said with a dramatic sigh. “Thank you.” He stepped away from them and walked up the steps to us.

“Aaron, I told you the guests would be here now,” said Paul. His tone was still ultra-calm, and yet there was maybe an annoyed edge to it.

“Right.” Aaron looked at us, fixing his glasses and rubbing his hands through his short black hair before shoving them into his pockets. “How could I forget the lovely children? It’s not as if I spend every waking minute of my day ensuring the operation of an entire living habitat.” I could see us all flinching at this, hating being called children, and also thrown off by the sarcasm, as if Aaron couldn’t have wanted less to do with us.

“Aaron,” said Paul, like a parent lecturing a child, “please show the campers around.”

“Right, okay.” Aaron glanced about. “Let’s see, what could your half-formed brains comprehend . . . ? Actually, probably not much less than my capable staff here.” Aaron said this just as two workers were walking by, maybe for exactly that reason. I saw them scowl to themselves once they were past him.

“Follow me, lemmings,” said Aaron. He led us down a set of steps and around the first ring of workstations.

I heard whispering and saw some Arctic Foxes pointing excitedly at the seated workers we were now passing. One was looking at a map of the entire complex, lit up with tiny green dots moving around. A close-up screen showed one of the mechanical butterflies. The woman typed in a command, then slid her finger on a touch pad, moving the creature around. Small windows displayed wobbly, curved views: what the butterflies were seeing. It made me wonder: were the butterflies a form of surveillance?

Beside her was a man doing the same with hummingbirds, then a woman who seemed to be configuring bat wake-up times. A falcon, a trio of deer. All fake. And all possibly keeping watch. With that many cameras, there wouldn’t be much that could escape Eden’s eye.

“Over here,” Aaron was saying up ahead, “is where we’re monitoring internal and external atmospheric conditions. You can see here, inside the dome it’s a comfy twenty-four degrees Celsius, and outside, a french frying thirty-eight. Humidity in here, sixty-eight percent; out there, nine percent.”

I was half listening, but the itching had started up in my neck again. I tapped my knuckles against the bandages.

“From here,” Aaron continued, “we control all the weather in the dome. Want to see it rain?”

“Totally,” said Leech.

This idea seemed to actually excite Aaron. “Okay.” He tapped at the monitor and slid a few bars up and down. He looked up and gestured with his chin. “Look out that window to the right, everyone. . . .”

We did, and saw a dark gray cloud start to spin itself into existence off in the distance. It grew, up and out, and then a blur of rain began to appear beneath it.

“And there we go,” said Aaron. “Just call me God.”

“Can you do lightning?” asked Leech.

“How about making the moon come up?” asked Paige.

Aaron smiled. “Of course I can do all those things, even reverse the constellations, or make new ones—”

“And yet I think we wouldn’t want to alarm the people far below,” said Paul from behind us.

Aaron’s face straightened back to normal. “Right.” He moved his fingers, and the rain cloud began to feather apart and dissipate.

“You should show them this,” Leech called, sounding like a know-it-all because of his previous visits. He had moved across the aisle and was pointing at another screen.

“Can you please”—Aaron rushed over and pushed Leech back from the consoles—“keep the greasy fingers off the equipment.”

Leech stumbled back and I saw him look at Paul, like he was hoping Paul would say something in his defense, much like he’d bragged about so many times. But Paul was quiet. “Jeez, watch it,” Leech mumbled, but it lacked his usual edge.

“Nothing broken or soiled,” Aaron was saying, looking over the console. “Sure, I suppose everyone can see this.”