Control

Control Control - 1 by Lydia Kang

For Bernie

CHAPTER 1

MAYBE IF I MOVE A LITTLE SLOWER, I can prevent the inevitable. Time will freeze and it’ll be easy to pretend we’re not moving again. I don’t want to budge from the roof of this cruddy building.

The door to the stairwell creaks open. Dad sees the lump of me at the edge of the roof, unmoving. Dark clothes, dark frizzled hair. I am depression personified.

“Here you are, Zelia. I told you to stay off the roof,” Dad says, his voice scratchy with fatigue.

I jerk to my feet. “Sorry.”

“Traffic is about to get bad. Let’s go.”

“Okay.” I cross the gravel roof quickly, trying to catch his shadow slipping down the stairwell to our apartment. Our old apartment. This place is nothing to me anymore. Dust bunnies lurk in the angles of the hallways, kicked around by the maelstrom of moving activity. Inside my small bedroom, I push my duffel bag to the door. Just one bag, crammed to the brim. It’s not much. After years of moving every ten months, you give up amassing anything larger than your fist. Basically, heart-sized or smaller is all I can take.

Around the empty room, remnants of the past haunt the surfaces. Rings from juice bottles cover the desk; pictoscreens glow in big white rectangles where photographs have been deleted. I still had eight weeks of rental left on those images—the latest telescope images of the M-16 nebula, beaches and mountains from the twentieth century untouched by humans. So pretty. So gone.

Down the hallway, I smell my little sister walk by. This month, it’s Persian freesia. Dad says nothing about her pricey scent downloads. He also hasn’t commented on the string of boys popping up with alarming regularity on her holo. Unlike me, he’s not bothered by Dylia’s flourishing teenage hormonal nirvana. In fact, she’s chatting up one of her undeserving male friends as she skips down the stairs.

The glowing green screen hovers at an angle in front of her, a projected image from an earring stud that everyone wears. It’s practically impossible to live without our holos. They’re like a sixth sense, with limitless connections and information. Dyl got her first holo stud six months ago when she turned thirteen and barely turns it off now. Within the green rectangle, a boy’s face is shadowed under a hoodie and he’s wearing an oily smile.

I follow her downstairs and join Dad in front of our dilapidated townhouse. I tell myself I won’t miss the building’s crunchy gravel roof, or even the ancient ion oven that always zapped our food too much on the crispy side. There’s no point in getting attached to the good or bad of wherever we live.

Dad punches in an order for a magpod on one of the metal cones decorating each street corner. I drop the bag from my tired shoulder and massage my neck, looking up. Out here, the sky isn’t sky but one continuous sheet of painted blue, as if the whole town were built underneath a gigantic, endless table. In Neia—what used to be Nebraska and Iowa—we get the fake blue underside of the agriplane; up above it’s got grain fields of burnished gold and a sun so bright, it doesn’t look real.

Moving from State to State sucks. In history class, we read about a unified nation hundreds of years ago where you could live wherever you wanted, with any lifestyle you chose. No intense border scrutiny and screening tests; no pledges to adhere to the morals and dress code mandated by each State. But after the country couldn’t agree on religion or politics or how to wipe your butt the right way, they divided into clustered States. Alms, Ilmo, Neia, Okks . . . each stewing in their happy ideals, all of them unified under a federal government weaker than my left pinkie.

Dad thought Neia would be a unique place to live. Of all the States we’ve lived in, I almost looked forward to this one. He said we’d go up to the agriplane and have a picnic someday, but the picnic never happened. Now when I stare up at that false sky held aloft by synthetic, spidery supports and blockish buildings, I don’t want to go up there anymore. They say it used to be sunny and bright here, but now the agriplane steals it from everyone. There’s never a moon to look forward to, or a dawn. At least it’ll be a change to see the sun again, which reminds me . . .

“What State are we moving to?” I ask. Dad doesn’t answer until Dyl pokes him, hard, on the shoulder.

“We’re . . . I’m . . . maybe Alaska.”

“Alaska’s another country, remember? It seceded four years ago,” Dyl points out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t actually know. He breathes and sleeps work. No matter the little consequences of State politics or geothermal catastrophes in what’s left of California.

“Right, right,” he mutters. We both watch him suspiciously. Usually we have one week’s notice and a detailed to-do list for the move. This time, it was twelve hours, and Dad’s more scatter-brained than usual.

“Well, as soon as we know, I’ll see what labs I can work in,” I say brightly. Four years ago, Dad decided I should take a holo molecular bio course. I was going through a poetry phase and balked. But as usual, he knew me best. I love my lab work now. He pulls strings to find me after-school work in each new town. I’ve spent all my free time running protocols alongside post-docs and grad students, learning all I could. Hungry for it. There have only been three constancies in my life—Dad, Dyl, and lab work.

“No more lab work,” he snaps.

My body shrinks into a smaller space. “What?”

“You’re too unbalanced. Life isn’t about plasmid vectors and bio-accelerants. It’s about dealing with people. You’re going to take States history and political science courses. I’ll reprogram your holo channels when we get settled.”

History? Politics? Is he kidding? I wish I could argue, but Dad’s face is stony and confident. My gram of rebellion combusts like pure magnesium. Well, he’s probably right. He always knows what I like, even before I know myself. I thought I wouldn’t like molecular bio, but it’s a second language for me now. Or at least, it was.

“Okay,” I mumble. I wait to see if he has new classes in mind for Dyl, but he stays silent. She never needs any nudging or fixing, academically or otherwise. I’m the imperfect one.

“Anyway, there’s a worldwide excess of geeks,” Dyl adds, trying to unstiffen the air around us. “Why add to that?” The guy on her holo chortles on cue.

“And there’s a worldwide excess of brain-dead boys trying to get in your pants,” I counter.

Dyl cups her ear, and the holo image disappears. “Quinn is not like that!” she whispers. The guy on Dyl’s holo coughs. It’s the guiltiest-sounding cough I’ve ever heard.

I mope aggressively, but Dad is too busy studying the metal cone’s flashing display. With one touch, it accesses your info and account. Even if you can’t afford a magpod, a nasty public pod will come pick you up. If you’re a little kid, lost, a press of a finger brings a magpod that will take you to the police, your school, or home, depending on the time of day. They’re more reliable than the sun rising and setting. On cloudy days, even the sun lets you down.

It won’t be long before he confesses where we’re really going. Maybe it’ll be like Inky, where there’s a women’s uniform. Dyl will just love that to death. A neck-to-toe gray smock can’t be easy to accessorize.

Other magpods of varying size and luxury float by, hovering over the metal lines embedded in the road. A flashing 3-D sign across the street tells me I need the New and Improved SkinGuard to harden my soft self, in case any projectiles fly my way. If only I wanted to look like I was part insect.

I yank my no-slip (yeah, right) bra straps back onto my shoulders for the third time today. When there’s hardly anything up front to keep the bra in place, it defies the laws of gravity and rises up. Dyl, who’s younger by four years, is already my height and is destined to sprout a larger chest. Maybe by tomorrow.