Kea's Migration

By Erika Hammerschmidt

Kea has been adapting to life on a planet. Sunshine and air, plants and animals... maybe even a breakthrough in her quest to solve the old mystery of Mara and the Fish Pond. But then the neighboring city of Arna ruins it all.

Arna's genetic weapons have shown up in Gaudi before. Animals that kill on command. Spies wearing the skin of clones. It was plenty of reason to build the protective dome. But now the dome is surrounded by a deadly symbiosis of plants and insects, engineered to trap them inside forever.

Kea's only hope is to ally with a resistance movement in the heart of Arna itself. And when a coded message appears in a simulation, that hope suddenly becomes real.

The trip to Arna is a journey into a whole new mystery. A complex world of foreign culture and politics, where nearly everything is alive... and a lot of it wants to kill her. And, like a fish gliding along just beneath the surface, the secret of Mara keeps following her as she goes...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erika Hammerschmidt
• Release date: Apr 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005378288

Erika Hammerschmidt

I am an autistic author, artist and speaker. I give speeches to schools and support groups, telling the story of how I grew up as an alien on earth.I was diagnosed with various neurological disorders around the age of 11, but labels aren't everything to me. We are all individuals, and a diagnosis is just one of humanity's flawed but natural attempts to arrange the world into categories that seem neat and orderly. It's language, and as much as I love language, it is not a perfect way of describing reality. There is no perfect way. No word's definition is universally agreed upon. No written definition can perfectly encompass the idea expressed by a word. And some ideas can't even be expressed by words in the first place.What I am can be described partially by the words "Autism," "Asperger Syndrome," and "Tourette Syndrome," with their definitions as printed in the 1992 edition of the DSM-IV, as they were interpreted by my childhood psychiatrist... but really, individual people all have their own unique mental conditions. Mine works for me right now, with or without labels. I see no need to change.

Book preview

1 Scattered Stories

MARA

It happened.

Over the next three weeks we wrote our story, passing it back and forth, alternating paragraphs... our own retelling of the story of the Little Mermaid.

I was the mermaid, falling in love with the prince from afar, rescuing him, seizing him from the wreckage of his ship and dragging him through the stormy surf to shore. He was the prince, enthralled by the alien song I sang to him, yearning to meet me again after I swam away to my ocean home.

But in this story it was the prince who went to a witch for help, and she gave him a magic potion that let him breathe underwater and swim like a fish below the sea.

In payment he let the witch cut off his hands, the hands that he would use for dragging a quill pen across parchment, the only way a man in that world could have the ability to write.

Luke wrote that part, substituting it for the mermaid's payment of her tongue and speech. To him, writing was as precious as singing and speaking were to the mermaid of the original story; the idea of giving it up for a lover must be his own version of the deepest, most touching sacrifice.

When we found each other in the sea, we secluded ourselves in a beautiful underwater cave, sparkling with crystals and glowing with phosphorescent corals.

We wrote the sex scene as best we could, guessing and working around the fact that we knew pretty much nothing of how human sexuality worked, rationalizing our inexperience by reminding ourselves this was a magic world and our imaginary bodies weren't quite human anyway.

I don't know what it felt like for him, reading and writing our intimacy in some other part of the ship, his body separated from me and unsatisfied.

I didn't feel anything in my own fake boy-parts, they never felt much of anything anyway. But my real-life girl parts—my mind and my heart—told me that arousal doesn't live only one place. The shivers on my skin and the burning in my chest were as real as anything my character in the story could feel below her scaly waist.

I tapped the screen for the next document in the folder.

The icon was grayed out. I'd reached the end.

But the next folder was waiting.

Today is a bad day. I can barely think.

The heat went out again, earlier this week.

Like that time years ago, when I got frostbite. Not quite as bad because this time I saw it coming soon enough to get to my sleeping area... it got cold pretty slowly and the lights never went out, so I didn't get lost. There was a blanket in my dresser drawer and I managed to get it out and cover myself with it. I still got painfully cold, but this time I didn't end up with any freezer burns.

When it warmed up again, there were announcements about how the heat failure was a sign of how old and worn-out the machinery on this ship is.

I know that's true, because of how we lost touch with Jesse, and because of so many other things. But I have no idea what to think of all the debates about the colonies that are already on the planet.

The people who want us to land near Ferudy said that we need their technology to help us. I have no idea if that's right. None of us know. The whole Fish Pond is full of fear and worry, and no real advice on what the hell to do.

I don't even know what I'd vote for if they let me. I don't feel like I have access to any of the information I'd need to make up my mind on it. How can I vote on whether we need Ferudy's help when I've never been to Ferudy or Arna, and no one on the ship has gotten any more than a couple little messages from them?

Which is worse: not voting, or voting without having the knowledge I need to make an informed decision?

I'm terrified of this ship, and I'm terrified of Ferudy, and I'm terrified of Arna, and I don't know which is the most terrifying. I don't think I'm going to try to vote, after all.

2 Still Writing

KEA

Draz!

Jostled by my voice, he nearly fell out of the armchair on the other side of the room, where he'd been doing something on his hand-comp. "Crabbits, you scared me. What, Kea?"

Draz. Read this. I sat up in bed, unstrapping my own hand-comp from my wrist and holding it out to him.

Okay, okay, I'm coming. He got up and plodded to my side.

While he started to read the diary entry, I got up and swung myself into the seat at the desk, opening up the video chat program on the desktop terminal. Beep, are you there?

Beep materialized on the screen, lounging face up on his couch, with Rover curled up on top of his chest.

What? he grumbled.

Beep, where did you get that last bunch of diary entries you sent me?

Same online folder you originally found 'em all in. Why? He yawned. Rover, awakened by the noise and motion, reached her face over to lick at his open mouth.

You've been checking that folder for new diary entries? I said. "And they've kept appearing? After the time when we found the original batch?"

He pushed Rover's muzzle out of his face. "Well, they were. For a while after you found it. But there ain't been any new ones since landing. Are you even reading 'em in the right order?"

I'm reading them in the order they were in when you sent them. Just started the latest batch.

Beep tapped a few windows open on his hand-comp. Whoops. Forgot to rename 'em after I decoded 'em that time. You arranging them alphabetically by filename? You gotta re-sort them by date revised. The way my method works, that'll get 'em into chronological order.

Okay. So this one comes later, and I read it out of order. Whatever. But, all the entries in this new folder— they were in the same directory where the first ones originally appeared?

That's what I said, ain't it?

My heart accelerated. Mara, the vanished writer whose hidden trove of journal entries I'd been analyzing one at a time for months, trying to unravel the enigma of her disappearance— had lived past the age of twenty-one.

Mara had lived at least until the day the ship's heat had gone out, before the vote that had decided where on the planet we would land.

She'd kept making new entries in her diary, even after Draz and I had stumbled on the directory that contained the first one.

The one that began with If you're reading this, I'm dead.

I needed an explanation.

Monarch! I shouted, then remembered that Monarch's voice was out of service. Its identity was being disconnected from all the things it used to control, trapping it inside the old hardware, where it couldn't even hear me now.

Damn it! I pounded my fist on the desk, hard enough to rattle the monitor.

It was the last straw: being reminded, in the midst of this, that Monarch, our Optimizing Computer, was still at the mercy of Ferudy and the bizarre anti-AI prejudice that stuck out of their otherwise permissive culture like a cactus in a cornfield. Even now that they had scrutinized and evaluated and finally approved Monarch, grudgingly agreed to help repair it… they still had its voice silenced for now, its secrets locked away, until the repair was complete.

Draz set down the hand-comp. There were no more entries added after the landing? he asked.

No, Beep and I said in unison. My voice sounded defeated, to my own ears, as anger gave way to exhaustion.

The people who died during landing, I added, after a moment. Their names are public record, aren't they? No privacy laws against going through them to see if Mara's one of them?

No. We can do that. But even if we find her name there, it wouldn't explain the death record saying she died earlier.

I sighed. There was already so much unexplained about that death record— so brief and devoid of information, so fake-looking, with the date formats not even matching. If it weren't for the name and date, I could easily have thought it was the death record of the twin Mara had mentioned. Born with sirenomelia, like her, the legs fused together. Surgically corrected, but only one twin had survived the process…

Someone, I supposed, could have altered a copy of the twin's record to fake Mara's. But who? And why? And where was Mara now? Like it or not, that short little record was all the official information we had.

Well, we'll just have to keep looking until we find something that does explain that, I said. "And if her name isn't among the dead from landing, we've got to figure out why she quit writing. If we can't search the assisted living facility for nonverbal rems whose hand-comps have stopped working, then we can make a freaking public announcement over the radio and video news broadcasts: If you have any information on an individual named Mara or an online forum called the Fish Pond, please come to the city hall as soon as possible."

I dunno, said Draz. That could be taken more as a threat to Mara than an attempt to help her.

I sighed. Yeah, you're right. Plus, it feels like violating her privacy... even though the words wouldn't mean anything to someone who didn't already know.

In fact, just having read the diary was now feeling even more like a violation of privacy. It had seemed right in the beginning, with Mara claiming that she was dead and that she wanted others to read her diary as a way of keeping her memory alive. But now there was increasing evidence that she might not be dead… and also that she and her Fish Pond group had distrusted our government, and had wanted their secrets kept from us. Knowing all this felt more and more wrong, the more I knew.

"Shit. I want to help her, if she's lost the ability to talk to her friends. But I just don't know what to do."

I just finished looking at the list of landing casualties, Draz said. And yeah, she's not on it. We… we might have enough evidence to launch an investigation of the assisted living facility.

He scrolled through the text on his screen. This entry proves that the system we have for helping disabled citizens isn't working as well as we thought. She says here that she lost touch with Jesse because of… I guess some type of malfunction. Other entries might say more about it. We can make a pretty convincing case for needing to put more effort and time into commodications. Commucidations. Com…munication accommodations.

On the screen, Beep smirked at Draz. "You need communication accommodations."

Draz made a face at him. No I don't. Yeah, my words are scrambled salad sometimes—but you still understand me, right?

More or less. 'Bout the same as you understand me. I don't get the weird-ass way you pronounce 'salad,' though.

In spite of everything, I stifled a laugh. Draz had pronounced it the normal way. Beep had pronounced it with a long a, like say-lad.

Still, Draz said. Aside from your inability to grasp phonetic rules…

Beep grunted. "The rule is, double consonants after short vowels, single consonants after long vowels. At least that's what my phonics textbook says. Ain't seen no actual evidence of it, though."

Well, more exceptions than rules, as Kea always says. Draz glanced at me. In any case, forget your language eccentricities, and mine. People like Mara are who we should be focusing on right now.

I nodded. If there's a way to do it without showing more people the diary...

You could try another search on her birth name, Draz suggested. Maybe the first one was some kind of glitch.

"I'd have to wait to do that. Monarch can't answer any questions right now."

I wish we could ask Di, he said distantly.

But we can't, I said, scowling. Di Campbell was the one person in my circle of friends who I knew had actually talked to Mara… and just days after I'd discovered that, she had packed her bags and moved to Ferudy. She'd sent a brief message of goodbye, and no information on how to contact her. I hadn't even gotten a chance to have a conversation with her about the whole thing. And I still had no goddamn idea why.

Draz nodded acknowledgement, but the look on his face was still blank. Then ask security for a background check on Mara's name. That's within your rights as Optimizer. I'm sure Lefty and Blaro will oblige.

As much as that, too, felt like an invasion of privacy… the scales were beginning to tip in my mind, from the desire for noninterference to the desire to help her.

Maybe Jan from the assisted living facility was right, and I wasn't some kind of a savior whose help everyone else needed. But I couldn't ignore the fact that some people really did need help. And, as one of the most powerful people in this society, I was among the few who had the ability to give it.

I tapped the screen. Sorry, Beep, I'm gonna make you disappear now.

Whatever. His image faded, replaced by a window to contact the security department.

3 Missing People

KEA

Blaro appeared on the screen, beaming from a friendly face that looked both familiar and unfamiliar.

She'd always had the sort of smile that made me want to smile along with it. That, and her place in the history of Gaudi's founding, seemed to be her main qualifications for becoming the face of the security department, writing emails and greeting people through video chat when they made inquiries.

But her friendliness had taken on another quality now, some hint of forcedness that I wasn't sure I liked. The residue of too many smiles faked for people she didn't feel like smiling at.

Hello, Optimizer. What can I do for you today?

I wondered if we were growing apart. Maybe I wasn't very good at maintaining friendships. She'd been busy these past months, but I knew so little about the details. Did she like her job? Or was she wishing for a more active security role? She'd probably make a good detective if she chose to try.

You can call me Kea, I said, smiling back.

Sure! No problem. Well, Kea, what's up?

I set aside the tense feeling, and posed my question. Could you run a background check on the name 'Jacob Dewey Zimmern,' student ID MWN5608?

She blinked, looking confused. Um... are you looking for general information, or anything specific?

Whatever you have. Even general information would help. I really knew very little of what would be in Mara's official records.

Blaro nodded. Well... I don't know if you knew this, but... you remember our last update about the Gabria Laud missing person case? And how we mentioned that we were looking into some other missing person reports from the same time period?

I took a sharp breath. That was one of them?

Yup. Jacob Zimmern? Nonspeaking rem in a wheelchair? Last seen on a security camera four days after the last known sightings of Gabria Laud and Stacy Baker. Cameras show him leaving the assisted living facility, passing the hospital... and then no more views of him, not after he passed out of sight of the hospital camera. No more eyewitness reports either. The hospital and surrounding area were searched, but no sign of anything. The last to see him were two nurses, who didn't think there was anything strange about him leaving the facility. Apparently Jacob needed help with a lot of things, but he could communicate a bit and knew his way around, and he had always come back before.

I frowned in thought, and also partly in discomfort. Blaro, would you mind... could you please call her Mara?

Her? Mara?

Her face underwent a transformation as she figured out where she remembered that name from.

Mara... Whoa! Are you saying Jacob Zimmern was the one who wrote those diary entries? The ones you found way back on the ship? Lefty told me about those!

Yeah. I mean, Mara wrote them. But Jacob was her assigned name. Her dead name. She's transgender… it's a long story... We need to get together and catch up on this.

I know! Wow. I am so curious about the diary. It might help us reopen that cold case.

I pressed my lips together, still wondering if solving the case was worth showing Mara's diary to more people. If her life was at stake, then of course it was worth it... but was the diary absolutely vital to saving her life? Vital enough to be worth such a display of her secrets?

Do you think it was connected to the other disappearances? I asked. Gabria and Stacy?

No evidence for that, Blaro said. "We've looked, and can't find any sign of a connection. But none of those three have had much evidence of any kind come up."

I chewed my lip. How likely is it that so many people would go missing at once, just by chance?

Pretty likely. Blaro shrugged. "We've got a whole town here, you know. And it's a town that's had a twenty-two-year epidemic of cabin fever. At the time they vanished, we had just dropped this ship full of cooped-up people onto a whole wonderful planet, and then told them that they had to stay within a few square kilometers of it. And we hadn't even started the dome yet."

I nodded. The builders had just finished the dome in the last few days, and I wasn't quite over my awe at the speed of Ferudy's construction techniques. For weeks I could go indoors for a meal or a meeting, come out half an hour later, and find that I was now standing under a new part of the dome, when previously I'd just been under the sky.

Our giant sapphire had formed as we watched, enclosing the city in a half-sphere of clear gemstone. Only four entryways, spaced evenly around the edges of the dome, each with two sets of doors like an airlock. Fastened with old-fashioned mechanical deadbolts, guarded at all times by cameras and a rotating team of human workers. They weren't the only openings… ventilation was a necessity, and so was channeling rainwater in. But Chris had made a paranoid examination of every crack where anything could possibly enter, and even he had deemed them acceptable risks…

An uneasy feeling crept around my insides as I thought about it. The reasons for the dome were clear enough to me. The spies from Arna with their trained killer birds, who had infiltrated our city to commit theft and murder. The whispers about war, overheard in more and more conversations these days. The dome was a vital defense for our newborn town of Gaudi, the least technologically advanced of the three cities on the planet. It was the only protection that Ferudy could offer us without escalating tensions even further with its rival.

But there were still times when it felt a bit too much like a cage.

And of course people wanted to go exploring, Blaro went on. Explore the woods, explore Ferudy, go all sorts of places where they could get lost. Back then there wasn't even the dome stopping them.

But the surveillance...

The surveillance wasn't perfect. You know how badly all the computers were breaking down. Most of the effort was focused on guarding the entrance to the trail, but even that footage has glitches and gaps in it. And the rest of the city's circumference was barely monitored at all. Cameras, but not enough to cover all of it, and the computers that responded to what they picked up were some of the buggiest and most unreliable. We had about a dozen missing person reports that same month, and nearly all of them were kids who had sneaked out into the woods.

So most of the missing person cases from that time were solved?

Oh yeah. It is really weird that Jacob—I mean Mara is an exception to that. She can't have gotten far in the woods. And an adult in a wheelchair can't exactly hide easily.

I wondered if Mara had gone to Ferudy. Thinking about it, it made sense. She had even more reason to run away there than Gabria. Free augmentations, gender transition, whatever she wanted.

But could she really have taken the trail all the way to Ferudy without our surveillance or any of our people noticing? And would they have accepted her there, and hidden her from us, even though she'd violated the temporary ban on travel between colonies?

If she was in Ferudy and they'd welcomed her, I really had no reason to worry for her anymore. If I wasn't worried about Gabria being there, Mara should be no more of a concern. But I was still fiercely curious about both of them, and Stacy Baker as well. Why would those three, out of all the disappearances, be the ones who had stayed missing?

Thanks, I said. If you have any questions about what's in the diary, I'll try to answer. But I'm not ready to give you the whole text of it just yet. It was a lot of very private stuff, and I'm not sure it's relevant to the case. Considering what she's been through, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that she somehow ran off to Ferudy. But... I sighed and adjusted my glasses. My head was beginning to ache a little. Let me know. The moment any new developments come up. The exact moment.

Even if you're asleep?

Even if I'm asleep, I wanna know.

4 Broken Border

LEFTY

Lefty didn't mind surveillance duty. It was like watching a movie—a very, very boring one. Just the way she liked it. The less her eyes had to pay attention, the more crafts she could work on while she watched.

She had been ambivalent on the subject of Blaro welding furniture in their home, but she'd found the jewelry interesting, even inspiring. When Blaro had begun creating welded pendants, rings and brooches, their walks in the cornfields together had turned into rock hunts. A surprising number of pretty stones were hiding just under the surface of the soil, from translucent blue-green pebbles to speckled jasper, from quartz points to little red geodes. There was no law against collecting them, since the fields didn't need them in order to grow their crops. Blaro was getting creative with them, and as time went on, Lefty had developed a craving to make some jewelry of her own.

Since Blaro's welding hobby had taken off, she and Lefty had saved up enough from furniture and jewelry sales to get a second machine, one that melted down scrap metal and stretched it out into wire. Welding was a bit too dangerous to appeal to Lefty's high-strung mind, but she liked making jewelry from the wire, wrapping it around stones and coiling the loose ends into spirals, cutting tiny lengths to twist into links and form delicate chains.

The dome had been in place for almost a week now. Border control was now both easier and more effective, since there were only four places where a person could plausibly go in or out. The computers and cameras that monitored those four places had been extensively repaired and worked much better now, but humans still supplemented them, both as guards scanning passports by the checkpoints, and as camera monitors like Lefty who sat in a quiet room in the security station with their eyes on the video feed.

Well, partly on it. She had enough of her peripheral vision on the screen that she would easily notice if any motion occurred. But until then, her central vision was on a large red-and-white agate pebble that she was wrapping in a tightly-woven coat of thin wire, the loops looking like little scales on its surface. Maybe she'd make a tail and fins out of thicker wire, and it would be a sculpture of a fish.

Remember, picnic dinner in the cornfield tonight!

Lefty blinked, and the words faded from her field of vision. Although her neural link with Blaro was designed for shared simulations, the two of them had fallen into the habit of sending each other text messages, written with the same brainwaves that the typing nodes used, appearing like an afterimage across the vision of the receiving partner.

I'm at work, she answered. Don't text, you distract me.

I'm at work too, but I'm bored. I want you to distract me. An animated winking smiling face appeared for a second.

I'd love to. Later. Tonight in the cornfield. Lefty smiled thinking of it, though she shook her head at Blaro's impulsiveness. Being the responsible side of the relationship wasn't always easy. Blaro would have gotten in trouble with the security chief a dozen times already if not for Lefty's rational influence.

The surveillance screen stirred, and her eyes darted to it. A couple of tall blond rems were approaching the exit, probably a boyfriend and girlfriend, hand in hand. They pulled their passports out of the pockets of their jeans and handed them to the guard (passports had to be checked both when leaving and when arriving, which Lefty found somewhat excessive).

A passport had been automatically issued to every person in Gaudi who requested one, as long as the person was willing to submit to a physical exam to prove that they hadn't been replaced with an Arna spy. Passport might be a misnomer, if one defined a passport as one of those little blue books from the movies. It was really just a flat plastic card with a microchip and a picture of the person it belonged to. An access card that could get you into Gaudi or Ferudy. The guard scanned them, scrutinized the couple's faces, nodded, and handed them back.

The woman pulled out a handful of coins, the artfully molded disks of metal that everyone could now receive when cashing out credits from their accounts. Lefty liked them, and so did most people; spending them was actually becoming more popular than making electronic transfers.

It might be distrust of the electronic system, or the novelty of the very concept of coins, which no one in Gaudi had ever seen outside of a book or movie. But the coins themselves were pretty, too. They came in eight denominations, numbered 1, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 (the name of the currency was still just credits, but there was talk of renaming it after something significant). The decorations were beautifully done. No human faces, though. The lower six each bore a picture of a chess piece on the front, from pawn up to king, and then the 500 was a lizard and the 1000 was a parrot.

The numeral representing the denomination was on the back, with a mysterious and highly intricate flower-like design around it. Its anti-counterfeit secret lay not only in the incredible detail of the molding, but also the fact that certain parts of the design were made of a different metal, beneath the surface plating, distinguishable only with a scanner. To know what parts they were and reproduce them, you'd have to take a coin apart to analyze it, and then you'd have to build a machine capable of replicating it faithfully enough. So far, nobody in Gaudi had anywhere near the resources to do that.

The woman on the screen seemed to have a lot of fives, a few twenty-fives and fifties, and a single hundred. In Gaudi, five was enough to buy a gourmet cookie from Dr. Stanton, twenty-five was enough to buy a liter of whiskey from Optimizing Assistant Garfield, and a hundred was Lefty's weekly wage. It was plenty for her, since it was only for buying luxuries, all necessities being provided by the government.

Lefty wasn't sure how long that system could be self-sustaining. For the moment, the government had all the resources necessary to make it work: the apartment buildings, the cornfields and farm buildings, the seeds and animal embryos and the machinery that grew them until they could produce food. And the labor of some human workers to help it along, and the money that was minted to give those workers an incentive to help.

All together, it was enough to keep the population fed and housed, and it was producing more plentiful goods all the time as the processes became more streamlined. The government was encouraging people to produce their own goods, as well, providing machines like the ones Blaro had bought, sometimes free of charge to people who had a good plan for a business but still lacked the capital. A healthy economy was forming around the production and sale of luxuries, while the state still supported the basic needs of everyone, even those who had no means of earning money on their own.

But would the population someday outgrow the government's ability to provide it with those necessities?

Maybe, maybe not. Even the dictatorship on Earth had produced enough resources to sustain its entire population quite comfortably if they had chosen to do so. Technology reduced the need for human labor, while increasing the resources available to support human life. In theory, they could have found a way to divide up those resources among the population so that each would have plenty. In theory, there were even ways to make it ecologically sustainable…

But of course the few billionaires who owned the technology had just hoarded the wealth it generated, and left everyone else miserably poor, often unable to find jobs because technologically advanced corporations needed so few employees.

Lefty wasn't an economist, but her scientific mind could visualize money and goods flowing through a society like matter in space, subject to the laws of physics and mathematics.

She didn't understand the idea that billionaire corporations could stimulate the economy, when their entire purpose was to make a profit: to suck more money out of the economy than they put into it. And when they hoarded that money away, useless, in ever-growing bank accounts, removing most of the society's wealth from circulation, the remaining populace couldn't be expected to gain that wealth for themselves through sheer hard work—not unless that hard work involved raiding the billionaire's hoard. Did supporters of Earth's dictatorship fail to understand the law of conservation of matter?

As a mathematically minded person, Lefty could understand the desire for wealth redistribution by means of taxes on the richest. As a socially challenged person, she had trouble understanding why so many others had found it unacceptable.

But it did seem to be more or less the solution that Gaudi had settled on. Not exactly the same, since money was just now becoming an issue... perhaps, under this system, the richest translated to the government itself, which had control of most of the resources. It remained to be seen how the increasing popularity of money was going to influence the way this system worked.

The guard on the screen was exchanging the woman's money right now, counting and stacking up her disorganized pile of coins and giving her neatly wrapped cylinders of Ferud coins in return. She was shoving them into her back pocket as fast as he could put them in her hands. At one point her curiosity overcame her, and she unwrapped a corner of one of the tubes, took out a few coins and showed them to her boyfriend. They both examined them, turning them over, making fascinated faces.

The guard was giving them an impatient look now. The inner door was open, waiting for them. They hastily put away the last of the coins and hurried through.

The inner door closed, and the outer door opened. The two of them ran off into the fresh air, bouncing like children. Soon they were out of the view of the camera, headed onto the trail to Ferudy. Lefty's eyes went back to her fish rock.

Then, too soon, motion came back into the camera's range.

Lefty's head jerked back up. The two of them had come running back from the trail, blond hair disheveled, hands scraping at their heads and sides and chests.

There was no sound in the video feed, but they were screaming.

Lefty's skin crawled. So did theirs. She could see tiny dark spots all over them, on their bare arms and faces, spots that moved, swarming like insects.

Now the two of them were leaning against the outer door, pounding at it. Lefty could see the shocked indecision on the guard's face. In the second that he delayed opening the door, the couple both fell onto the dirt and went into convulsions. A second later they stopped. No motion at all. Not even the rise and fall of breath. Watching them, the guard's face wrenched as if he was in pain.

Lefty tapped the button on her headset. Her finger left a blotch of sweat on it. She hadn't had any idea that she would have to use the protocol she had learned, so soon, under such horrible circumstances. Officer... Lefty Carlson... reporting a disturbance at Door 1. Her breath faltered.

A voice answered that was so calm Lefty knew beyond a doubt that nobody else had reported it yet. Officer Dana Burke responding. Describe the disturbance.

A couple of people left the dome and came back and they're just outside the door and... I think they're dead. Oh shit! Now Lefty could see the guard getting up, trembling, his motions fighting against each other, as if half of him wanted to go out and help, and half was terrified of it. Overcoming it. Opening the inner door. Closing it. Opening the outer door. Making a gesture Lefty vaguely remembered from a movie scene in a church.

No! Don't go out there! Of course he couldn't hear her.

What's happening now? said the voice in Lefty's ear.

The guard went out too. He's—oh shit, he's trying to resuscitate them. Lefty's stomach curled in on itself. The tiny dark spots were crawling up his arms as he shoved his palms against the young man's chest. His trembling intensified, turned into shaking, just this side of convulsing.

Is he doing it badly? Does he need assistance?

"No! Lefty screamed. Don't send anyone else out there!"

5 Behind in the Race

KEA

By the time the news reached me, it was nearly dinnertime.

I was hungry as I dragged myself into the meeting room alongside Draz, where we sat down at the table with Lefty, Blaro, Jake, Chris, Mark, and Optimizing Assistant Eli, all of whom looked as if they hadn't eaten or slept in days.

From the little I knew, though, that had to be an illusion. Whatever had happened, it had evidently begun today in the early afternoon. It must have been something awfully bad.

Where to begin, muttered Blaro, scrolling through her datapad, exhaling rhythmically through her nose over pursed lips.

Blaro's datapad was an advanced one that could connect to the network and project images onto walls. But it looked just like the one I had in my pocket, which was the simple kind, no more than a data storage drive with a screen and a couple scrolling buttons to see its contents.

Mine had the rest of Mara's diary entries on it, re-sorted into chronological order, ready to read as soon as I got some free time.

Blaro's pad clearly had something on it that was going to destroy any free time I might have.

There's no nice place to begin, Lefty said. Lots of news. All of it bad. Not sure what part is worst. Her eyes were so hollow and dark in her bald head that she looked like a skull. Her hand clenched and unclenched on the table. I could see that she was holding a ball of tangled-up wire, squashing it from one direction and then another.

It seemed to be offering some comfort. I found myself wishing I had a toy of my own to fidget with.

Let's start with the part you specifically asked to be notified about, Blaro said. News in the Gabria Laud and Stacy Baker cases. Their bodies have been found.

Bodies?

I felt as if the blood in my own body was all vanishing. My elbows on the table suddenly seemed to be the only thing holding me up in a sitting position.

Gabria.

I'd called myself her friend. And when she'd disappeared, months ago, I had trusted that she must know what she was doing… that if she'd wanted to leave us and run away to Ferudy, that was her right. Even while investigating her missing-person case, I'd kept telling myself that I would probably never find out, that she was good at covering her tracks and the reason she'd left was her own business… even if it hurt not to know why.

And now she— and randomly my old acquaintance Stacy Baker as well—

Dead?

Yes. Lefty rubbed the dark hollows around her eyes. Found a few meters into the trail to Ferudy.

Gabria, I murmured. Stacy. I was having trouble forming complete sentences. My hand tried to rub my own eyes, but found itself pressing at my glasses instead. Mara?

No sign of Mara, Blaro said softly. "Also, no info on where Gabria and Stacy had been, up until today. But today they were on the trail to Ferudy. Poisoned. A neurotoxin administered through the bites of engineered insects."

Insects. My fingers shoved my glasses against the bridge of my nose three times, compulsively. I wasn't sure I could make any other movement. My eyes went a little out of focus; things seemed farther away for a second.

I noticed Jake's strange stretched-out ears and cat-pupiled eyes across the table from me. It was always a little bit of a shock to see him, getting the overall first impression of his usual skin and hair and face shape, and then being struck by the small differences.

He was sitting between his brother Chris and Optimizing Assistant Eli Garfield. Both were leaning a little bit away from him, as if they found his new augmentations too weird to be that close to. Everyone here looked uncomfortable. But then, this was not a comfortable day.

Lefty nodded, fluffing out the tangle of wire before squeezing it again. A young couple named Katy and Bill Hodgkins seem to have found the bodies first, on what was going to be a day trip to Ferudy. By the time they found them, the insects had begun to attack them too. They made it back to the door of the dome and collapsed, and Officer Cody Robb, the guard stationed there, saw them and went out to attempt resuscitation. But it didn't help.

He was poisoned too?

Yes. By the time others arrived, it was becoming clear what was going on. The next investigators went out in protective suits. On their return, they reported that the forest has become infested with a new species of tree. Lefty turned her eyes toward Blaro.

Blaro touched a button on her datapad, and it projected an scene onto the wall. A picture of the forest, taken from the trail.

In among the familiar trees, new young saplings had taken every available square centimeter of space. They were slender yellow-barked trees with pale green-gold leaves, crowding out every other form of small undergrowth, seeming to have sprung up overnight without giving anything a chance to grow out of their way. Rough-edged slabs of grassy soil leaned against their trunks, half-pulled from the ground.

The trees were in bloom. Each one was covered with hibiscus-like pink flowers, whose centers each contained nothing but a swollen purple sphere a few centimeters in diameter.

The trees and the bugs are the same organism, Lefty said. The bugs seem to be an engineered version of... pollen, or something. The trees produce them, anyway, whenever they sense people nearby. On the wall, the image changed to a close-up of one of the flowers. The central sphere was made up of inner petals fused together—a bud that had swelled up and become hollow instead of blooming. The pointed tips of the petals fit together like a little star. On this one their juncture had split open, and a line of tiny round beetles had begun to crawl out in single file, their carapaces glinting.

After taking these pictures, she continued, the investigation team collected all the bodies and brought them back. Our engineers had to improvise a way to spray a heavy-duty insecticide into the space between the inner and outer doors, while the investigators stood there with the bodies, to make sure all the insects were killed before any of them came inside. Her hand squeezed the ball of wire one last time— one squeeze too much. She winced as a couple strands of it broke and pricked her fingers.

My emotions still didn't know how to react to the thought that Gabria was dead. Feelings were shutting down, packing themselves away so that the Optimizer could do her job. An attack from Arna? I said, my voice almost a monotone now.

Pretty clearly. Here, we'll patch Ferud through. He can answer more questions about Arna than I can.

She nodded to Blaro, who changed the wall projection to a live video feed from the colony of Ferudy. Alexis Ferud was pacing, nervously tugging at the sleeves of his ever-present black jacket.

Kea. Thank goodness you're okay. Listen, I'm starting right now on a plan to exterminate the trees and bugs. But it'll take at least a couple months. Luckily it looks as if the dome will protect your city until then—

Why the hell would Arna do this? Chris shouted. Why wait until just after the dome was built? If they wanted to kill us they could have—

It seems pretty clear that Arna's goal isn't to kill us, at least not right now, Lefty interrupted. "The biology team examined these venomous bugs, and they're not engineered to spread and infest the inside of our dome. They can fly, but not very far. They don't even have reproductive systems, and their lifespan after leaving the tree seems to be only a few minutes. They're just designed to kill anyone who leaves our city."

These trees are all around the dome, Blaro added. In most places they're several meters out, and obscured by other trees and plants. But there's no gap. There's a solid ring of those trees around our city. Don't know how thick the ring is, but it's enough to stop anyone who tries to breach it. They seem to have grown up in the night. The goal is obviously to trap us.

"Okay. So why would Arna want to do that? Chris said, thumping his hand on the table. I mean, it's not like it'll even work. We've clearly got protective suits that keep the bugs out."

I'm not so sure about that, Blaro said, her fingers tapping in a complicated rhythm on the table. "By the time the suited investigators got back to the dome, the bugs had chewed almost through their suits. The gear we've currently got will only hold up for about ten minutes. Not even long enough to walk to Ferudy. Now, we can probably design something that will work a lot better, but it'll take time and resources."

I turned to the projection of Ferud. "So what's your opinion on why this was done?" I asked.

I'm not entirely sure, he answered. It could be to limit your interaction with Ferudy, and delay our efforts to help you improve your infrastructure. Arna may be afraid that our assistance is building you into a nation powerful enough to threaten them.

That's a reason they might want to attack us, I said. "That's not a reason they'd want to keep us alive. Any idea why they'd go to so much trouble to design a weapon that would trap us without killing us?"

Ferud shrugged. They seem to see you as a source of valuable genetic history. An organism that's alive contains more intact biological information than one that's dead.

Huh. I shivered. It was a creepy thought, Arna wanting to study us like lab rats, and it still seemed weird, in light of how superior they considered themselves. What do they think they can learn from analyzing our biology, anyway? They've spent generations perfecting their genes. They must think we're primitive. Why would they think we have anything valuable that they don't?

You come from a time period that fascinates them, said Ferud. Of course, they don't have much specific knowledge of the dictatorship that ruled at the time you launched. But they've developed an admiration for it, based on the few legends that have survived. And... well, the Arna tend to assume that anything worth admiring is caused by really good genes. He kept pacing. Yes, they think you're primitive. But they also think that somewhere in that primitive genome are lost treasures from a time of glorious and powerful rulers who conquered all of Earth. Maybe they think that they can take you apart and find secrets that will help them conquer this whole planet.

You think they're going to launch some other attack later? To take us apart? Or... like... subdue us somehow, to make us easier to analyze?

I was visualizing another wave of insects, scarier ones with reproductive systems and longer lives, infiltrating and spreading, maybe biting us with a sedative this time, so that Arna scientists could come in and dissect our living, motionless bodies...

He shook his head. Maybe. I don't know. What I said about them wanting to analyze you... that's just my best guess. I'm not saying it makes sense. Their society is based more around idolizing ideals than forming rational views of reality.

I see. My hands still felt numb as I clenched them. There was a feeling in the bridge of my nose, a longing for pressure, but I fought the urge to shove my fingers at the center of my glasses again.

You said you can neutralize the trees, Draz reminded him, trying to bring the conversation back to a productive point.

Yes. Ferud nodded. I'll need to send my own suited-up investigators to take samples of them, and then analyze them to engineer viruses or nanomachines that can put them out of commission without destroying the surrounding plant and animal life. It'll take two months or so. I don't think you need to worry about any more attacks in the meantime. For now, Arna has accomplished its goal. They'll probably try something else, after they find out that we've undone what they did, but we'll deal with that when we come to it.

My body and mind seemed as if they were trying to bring up the sensations of anxiety but didn't have the energy to do it. My heart rate wouldn't accelerate; my breathing wouldn't quicken; my hands didn't want to make any motion except a futile stab at my glasses.

So we'll just keep repeating, I said. They keep attacking us, over and over, and we keep undoing their attacks, or having you undo them, forever. Or until they finally manage to dissect us.

Welcome to international politics, Ferud said. Yes. That's about it. The best you can hope for is that you eventually become like us, powerful enough that they don't dare do anything outright to harm you. Until then you just have to try your best to be prepared for whatever they'll do next.

How do we even prepare? I asked. "What other things can they do, and how do we know which thing they'll do next?"

Ferud stopped pacing and looked straight at us. Kea, Draz, everyone... I have to emphasize that what I'm going to say must not leave this room. He tugged his sleeve again. The room you're in, I mean. What I'm saying is, this is a state secret, and don't tell anyone.

I glanced around. All eyes were on him; all heads were nodding.

The best way to prepare for a hostile nation's attacks, Ferud began, is to have contact with someone on the inside. You've already expressed interest in meeting the Arna resistance.

Draz's eyes went wide and bright. Everyone sat up straighter. The room was utterly silent for a second.

Ferud leaned even closer to his camera. I've been in contact with a member of the Ache-Tree movement who has infiltrated the innermost circles of the Arna government. This is someone who has previously given me very valuable information that has led to the capture of Arna spies and the prevention of various acts of sabotage. This trusted agent, along with some other high-ranking resistance members, has expressed an interest in meeting with you. Specifically, Draz and Kea.

In person? I asked.

Yes. Unfortunately, my instructions were very specific. The Ache-Tree will only accept a personal meeting with Draz and Kea themselves, at one of their bases in Arna. It wasn't fully explained why. The only reason given was that Draz and Kea were the only ones 'whose identity they would be able to verify.' They refused to elaborate further.

Sounds like a trap, Chris pointed out.

It certainly does sound like it, Ferud admitted. Isolating the two leaders of Gaudi in a dangerous place far from their allies, leaving their country vulnerable without governance. I wouldn't fault you at all for turning down the meeting, based on how risky it sounds.

"Any reason not to turn it down?" said Chris.

Ferud held out his hands. I can only assure you that I have a long-standing secret alliance with this member of the resistance, and I find it very hard to believe that someone who has given up so many Arna agents and Arna plans to me would do anything to harm my allies. I trust this person. I admit that a trip to Arna does have many dangers, but the agent you'd be meeting is in a position of considerable power and can do a lot to protect you once you're there.

And what do the Ache-Tree hope to gain from the meeting? Jake asked.

The same thing anyone on this planet hopes to gain from meeting with your people. Information. About human history, about the past.

I recalled similar words from Ebba and Avery, the refugee migrants from Arna who had first introduced me to the concept of the Ache-Tree resistance. A little spike of fear tried to rise up in me at the thought of them. The danger of Arna, so dangerous that people like them were killed if they couldn't migrate to Ferudy…

For a bird, the term migration meant returning in the spring. For a human, it tended to mean something more permanent. Human migrants rarely got to return home.

How much chance of return would I have, if I dared to travel to Arna?

The echoes of Ebba and Avery continued, as Ferud went on speaking. Just like anyone, they have their own goals to strive for—in their case, the goal of someday overcoming their restrictive government and ushering in freedom for Arna. They hope that you may have insights and knowledge that will help them in that striving.

Chris rubbed his forehead. "How do we even know you're telling the truth