PART TWO

THE FLESH

halloween

Where the fuck was I?

Hunting, that’s right. Out by the lake with the unburned trees, looking to thin the cottontail population—I eat rabbits for breakfast—when a jittery feeling snuck up on me. Watched, perhaps? Something there?

I turned but saw no eyes upon me, which reassured me not at all. I glanced at my watch to see a bump in my message counter. Pandora, again, which I decided not to play, much less answer. Better not to contribute to lost causes. She’s a sweet girl, but she feeds on false hope, and I’ve given her too much of it over the years. There’s always the chance that I’m missing out on something I’ll later regret, but whenever I talk to her, I get lost in a past I’d rather not hold on to. And I hold her back, which is almost as bad.

When I looked up from the watch, I heard a guttural growl. Bobcat maybe? I’ve seen one here before. Not a bobcat. Bigger. Wider. It was a more temperamental beast, one that sported my colors. One of those moments where you doubt your senses and wonder if you might be hallucinating. I wasn’t. Low to the ground and half-camouflaged by the tall weeds, a tiger crept toward me, its hunger apparent, its eyes almost mesmerizing.

My pulse ratcheted up, a sharp but pleasant feeling as fear suffused me, life and death tottering in the balance. Yes, I thought. Let’s tangle, kitty, because on this unexpected safari it was him or me and better him than me, of that I was sure. I brought the rifle to my shoulder, sighted up, and held my breath. How did it get here? From one of the zoos, I supposed. Decades ago when Black Ep was gobbling up the zookeepers, not everyone euthanized their animals. Some they released into the wild. I’d noticed a family of South African springbok gazelles doing quite well here, but never a Bengali tiger before. Tigers in Michigan, who knew?

It stared darkly at me, contemplating an attack, then padded slowly to my left, circling. I followed it with my rifle, a white flash of sunlight reflecting off the gunmetal.

“Killed by a man-eating tiger,” I told the cat in my sights, “is quite a nasty epitaph. Are you up to it?”

Years ago, I might have lowered the rifle and dared it to pounce, but I’m not quite as eager to die these days, and I have responsibilities besides.

I didn’t particularly want to kill the thing, so I dropped my aim a bit, considering the low shot, which dredged up that old joke about the three-legged dog in the Wild West. The one where the dog moseys into the saloon, sidles up to the bar and drawls, “I’m lookin’ for the feller who shot my paw.”

penny

Entry #306: The Princess and the Squeezers

-open-

They tried to squeeze me, the squeezers. Both of them. I underestimated their greed. Stupid miscalculation and it’ll cost me.

Pandora showed up with the cousins and we took them on the tour—same drill as last year, except it took twice as long thanks to Sloane’s broken leg and whatever malfunction this Haji cripple has. So there we are showing the porcelain room when Haji begs off and so does Sloane, so the group thins out, Tomi taking Haji one way, Brigit and Sloane going the other. I slip away too because Nature’s calling, and that’s when they intercept me.

“It’s your lucky day,” they tell me. “We thought it over and the answer’s yes,” but before I can say boo they slap me right in the face by saying they want five times what I promised them. I’m all “Twenty-five thousand?” and Sloane actually has the audacity to flash teeth and say, “No, Penny, twenty-five thousand each.”

That’s a ridiculous amount of money—even for a princess of my means—and they don’t care, Brigit saying, “We figured if you’d pay ten thou you’d also pay fifty.” Bloodsuckers!

My head’s buzzing with anger flies, these stupid, irrational thoughts—visualizations, really—where I’m plotting the exact trajectory of my spit, and wondering if it might catch the sunlight coming in from the window before splattering in the center of Brigit’s dumbstruck face—or anticipating what it might sound like to kick Sloane’s crutches out from under her (would it go clatter, trip, bang, scream or more like clatter, scream, trip, bang?)—but I’m calming everything down by thinking don’t sink to their level over and over again. And I’m smiling because maybe they’re kidding me, just testing to see if I can take a joke. And if they’re not kidding, maybe they’re just negotiating. And if they’re negotiating, maybe I can go as high as twenty thousand, tops, if they let me pay them over time. But they’re not kidding, not negotiating, and they want all the money up front, the dirty witches, and they keep saying, “Do you want us to help you or not?” and don’t believe me when I tell them I don’t have that kind of money. Moms pay us for good grades, good attitudes and good behavior (and fine us for the lack thereof ), and with me being the lucky girl that I am, that’s a lucrative trifecta for me—so I’m no stranger to cash—and while Brigit and Sloane must realize that I make a lot, they’ve obviously overestimated how much. I bet they’re so far behind me money’s lost all meaning, like I’m some mythical El Dorado for them to plunder. Hey, let’s rob Penny, we’ll be rich!

Even if I could pay them what they wanted, there’s obviously no trusting them. They’d probably just make a big show of being nice to me in public, but still cut me down with the things they say behind my back. They’re liars and cheaters and what can you expect from people like that?

So I tell them, “No deal,” which surprises them because they expected me to cave, and they look at each other like they don’t know what to do. Just as I’m thinking they’re about to come down in price, they go the other way and tell me I’d better pay them or they’ll make things worse for me than they’ve ever been. Extortion, can you believe it? I’m way too mad to be intimidated, so I turn it around and say I’ll go tell moms if they even look at me funny, and Sloane calls me snitch and rat, and Brigit says I’ve cried wolf so often that moms won’t even believe me these days.

Now my attitude is if I’m going to do anything, I’m going to be the best at it, and if that means being the best snitch, so be it. “Just try it and I’ll tell moms about your little secret,” I tell them, and they’re all

“What secret?” so I tap my fingers to my lips and puff. They stop and look at me like I just cut the grass right under their feet, which of course is exactly what I did.

We all go into town from time to time to get supplies, but there’s certain things we can take and certain things we can’t. Like cigarettes, those are a big no-no, and I happen to know Brigit and Sloane have a whole stash of them. I wasn’t going to say anything about it because I’m definitely pro-lung cancer where they’re concerned, but if they’re going to push me I’ll push back any way I can. My threat worked because they practically had a fit, calling me all kinds of things, “how dare you” this and “you’d better not” that, then gave into their fear and slunk away like weasels with measles. Satisfying to see the back of them, but the whole experience got on my nerves, and the sad part of it is what might have been.

The bright side? While this nasty business may have set me back to square one, square two breezed in sweet as all get-out. I caught up with Izzy and Lulu at the end of the tour, and we all compared notes on the cousins, and while they were discussing what going to Egypt would be like, I told them how I’d like to get to know Pandora better, but how she’s a little leery of me, and then we talked about how hard it is to make up for bad first impressions. The great thing is I didn’t even have to ask—they said they’d be happy to build me up to Pandora. And money never even came up, so I don’t think I’ll have to pay them!

That means I can spread my cash on the other girls, and try to build up a consensus, so if the gruesome twosome try to slander me, Pandora will say, “Oh, that’s just Brigit and Sloane being Brigit and Sloane.”

If I’m careful, I might be able to pull this off.

Lock, stock and barrel.

Entry #306: The Princess and the Squeezers

-locked-

haji

The table is long, the chairs high-backed, but ergonomically designed and thus comfortable. Beneath us, a black-and-white-checkered marble floor. Grand arches of white and gold lead up to a stucco fresco on the ceiling. I am lost in all the details. It is a mythological scene with a swirling pattern of chariots, clouds, rainbows, and gods with thunder-bolts clenched tightly in their fists. Everything is immaculate and exquisitely set. This is anything but casual. I am used to dining with more simplicity.

We usually eat buffet style, Champagne says, but in honor of your visit, we thought we’d make this special.

Simply being here is a special occasion, I assure them.

I look around the table to smile graciously at my cousins. I have found nicknames for the ones with whom I am less familiar. There is Zoë the giggler, Isabelle the elbow-grabber, Luzia the inadvertent toe-stomper, Penelope the silent starer, Sloane in the cast, and Katrina the cherubic little girl. These are but temporary nicknames. I hope to replace them with more telling descriptors of their personalities once I come to know them as well as Brigit, Olivia and Tomi.

Tomi returns my gaze, friendly as ever, but with little hint of what we shared. At Champagne’s signal, Isabelle and Zoë rise up from the table to serve the dinner. I am learning how a regimented system of chores and responsibilities informs every aspect of my cousins’ waking hours. In fact, every minute is accounted for. My siblings and I are unfamiliar with this kind of lifestyle. My father believes in personal freedom and consideration for others. When something needs doing, we do it. We’ve prepared a special Egyptian meal, Champagne announces. The recipe comes from a pharaoh’s tomb.

Proudly, she indicates a dish I know well. Melokhia soup, spicy with garlic and coriander, warm enough to thaw out the chill that has insidiously crept into me since our arrival. But as a steaming bowl is placed before me I am struck by the pungency of a dubious vegetable. What floats with the melokhia leaves?

Spinach? Kale? Try as I might, I cannot identify it.

How kind of you to honor us, Ngozi says, once all the places have been served. Shall we take a moment to reflect? Vashti asks.

I do not take her meaning at first, but then I realize that by reflect she means pray. Only if you would do so normally, I reply.

A moment of silence, she decides, despite my answer. She makes a point of bowing her head and closing her eyes, and I can see the ghost of a smile on her face. Our cousins follow suit, and soon so do we. At home we frequently pray but never at mealtime. We often sing while cooking and my father considers that both a blessing upon the meal and a form of prayer in itself.

So this is new as well.

There, Vashti says.

Medicine, Pandora prompts. We have already taken ours for the day, I explain, but it seems our cousins have not. Tiny capsules of every conceivable color are consumed. They take more pills than we do, I note, even though they are healthier.

This accomplished, we hungrily turn our attention to the soup.

I feel many eyes upon me as I dip my spoon into the broth and take a taste. It is an altogether unfamiliar and unpleasant flavor, lingering on the tongue like wet wool. I take another sip just to test the theory. At last I can confirm that it is a truly horrible concoction.

We gathered the vegetables from our garden, Katrina proudly proclaims. Do you like it?

That you would go through so much trouble for us is truly touching, I tell her. I think I know what killed Hessa, Ngozi whispers to me after his third bite. Sadly, the best praise I can think to give the meal is that there is no meat in it. Dalila was under the mistaken impression that our German relatives are meat eaters, but they are as strict vegetarians as we. I eat as much as I can to avoid seeming rude. For me the experience underscores how different we are. Appetites vary wildly among species. I would not eat a pregnant scorpion, though a desert fox would. Or perhaps my cousins find the soup as disgusting as we do, but have simply joined our conspiracy to praise it.

I am thrilled when dessert is a bowl of fruit.

pandora

After dinner and the washing up, the kids go to the ballroom to play music and games, and Champagne and I tag along to keep an eye on them. We sit at a low glass table in the corner and drink ourselves silly, talking about old times and cheering whenever someone wins at laser shuffle-board.

“They’re getting along so well,” Champagne notes. “Like little ambassadors.”

“Yes, what’s not to like?”

“We’ve done right by them.”

“Sure, you guys are great parents, all three of you.”

“Four!”

“Oh, come on, I haven’t done anything,” I protest. “They’re your kids.”

“Don’t be so modest,” Champagne says, eyes shining from the cherry brandy.“You have more influence on them than you think. Which reminds me, there’s a question of which one you’re going to take under your wing.”

“Because I’m running myself ragged?”

“Vashti and I both think you could use a little help, that’s all. And the kids are finally old enough to pitch in.”

“I have Rashid working for me right now.”

“Rashid? Interesting. He liked the IVR so much we almost couldn’t get him to leave. Does he have a knack for the technical side of it?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Is he dependable? It’s not always a good idea to have the kid who loves doughnuts working at the bakery.”

“That’s true. It’s so easy to get lost in there.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.” She grins. “You need someone who’s focused on more than just having fun. What about Penelope? She’s tech-savvy, follows directions, very determined.”

I glance over. The girl has an intent look on her face and a cue in her hand, pushing a colorful disc of light. When she sticks the shot, knocking Ngozi’s disc off, there’s a telltale flash of wildfire in her eyes, a look that’s competitive and hungry, the kind of hunger that can never be filled.

“There’s something about her I don’t trust.” I shrug, pouring each of us another drink.

“Give her a chance, she might surprise you.”

“She might. I just think she has a little growing up to do.”

“Don’t we all?” Champagne smiles. “Say, why don’t you stay longer and hang out with us girls? Isaac won’t mind if you’re a couple of days late with the exchange.”

“I can’t,” I tell her. “I’m heading south tomorrow, then west.”

“West,” she says. “Peru?”

“Idlewild.”

“You’re really serious?”

“He might need me.”

I have to try and ignore the look of pity she’s throwing at me.

“You’re in complete denial if that’s what you think. God, Pandora, he doesn’t need you. He doesn’t need anyone. Don’t you think he’s proved that? How can you be so loyal to someone who’s turned his back on everyone?”

“He hasn’t turned his back on me,” I insist.

“Yes, he has,” she snorts. “He’s just been taking years to do it. I’m not saying he doesn’t have some feelings for you, but come on—when he keeps putting more time between conversations, can’t you see what he’s doing?”

“What?”

“He’s weaning you off him. Trying to let you down slow and easy. Or maybe he’s weaning himself off you. Either way, you don’t need this, no one does.”

I just drink. It’s easier than admitting she’s right.

“Am I right?” she asks, folding her arms across her chest.

“You don’t know how much he’s suffered.”

“Oh, boo hoo,” she says. “He’s not the only one who lost someone. When Mercutio murdered the love of my life, did I have a tantrum and curl up in a little ball? No, I grieved, and pulled through it, and got on with my life. Because I saw the big picture of bringing these kids to life and making the world a better place.”

“Yeah, well, you saw it, he didn’t. That’s who he is.”

“Yeah, that’s who he is,” she says, derisively, draining her glass. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”

“Frankly, Champagne, it doesn’t amaze me that Hal’s done what he’s done. The amazing thing is that we haven’t. After all we’ve lost, our friends, our innocence, the world itself?”

“Hooray for us? We’re so exceptional, we should cut Hal a break? No, he doesn’t get off that easily.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Not ‘the pass’ again.”

“Absolutely, he gets a pass because we owe him!” I say, and I have to take a moment to control myself because my voice gets louder when I drink. I don’t want to worry the kids, especially Isaac’s kids, who keep looking over at me for reassurance. “It’s really very simple. He put a stop to Mercutio. He killed him. He saved us from him. Without Hal, you and I would be dead or wishing we were dead. So he gets a pass.”

She sighs.“I won’t tell you I’m not grateful for what he did.”

“You can’t.”

“That’s right, I can’t—because he did what needed to be done at the time. But now it’s time for him to grow up.”

She goes to the kitchen for coffee, leaving me to think about what she said. When she returns with the carafe, she’s not alone, and I can tell from the look on Vashti’s face that our conversation has been relayed.

“You really, really, really have to stop this,” she says, taking my hand.

“Oh, Vash, what is this, an intervention?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Champagne says.

They both care about me—I recognize that. And appreciate it. But there are two agendas at work. There are Champagne’s feelings about her first love, Tyler, and about her second love, Isaac. And with Vashti, there is a visceral hatred for Hal—picking him apart has always been a sport for her. With a squeeze of my hand, Vash says, “Don’t you realize he drove Simone to suicide?”

“It wasn’t suicide, she overdosed.”

“Semantics,” she says.

“And he didn’t drive her to it.”

“I’m not so sure. Not everyone is as willing to take him at his word as you are. And psychologically it’s interesting—he pushes the woman he loves over the edge, and now he’s trying to do it with the woman who loves him.”

“I don’t think I’m drunk enough for this,” I tell her.

“Listen, I’m all for you being in love,” she says. “No one would deny you that. But at least let it be on equal terms.”

“That’s right,” Champagne chimes in. “He’s the one calling all the shots.”

“Don’t infantilize me, thank you. You know what I think whenever we get on this topic, whenever you back me into a corner? I think here I am talking with bitterheart number one and bitterheart number two.”

“What do I have to be bitter about?” Champagne scoffs.

“Isaac, what else? The path not taken, and all that might have been. And you,” I say, my eyes lighting upon Vashti, “always sabotaged everyone’s relationships back in school, because if you weren’t happy why should anyone else be? Or was it because you wanted all the girls to yourself?”

“Funny how your mind works,” Vashti smirks, unfazed. “So telling people the truth is ‘sabotaging relationships’? That’s a curious interpretation of events.”

“And for the record, I’m not carrying a torch for Isaac,” Champagne protests. “It’s just complicated with him, that’s all.”

Vashti arches an eyebrow. “Not too complicated, I hope. I hate to think of either of you being distracted when there’s so much work to be done.”

“The work has to come first,” I admit—and then wonder if I’m kidding myself. No matter, because I’ve had enough of being under the microscope tonight, and grab at the chance to change the subject. After all, this is something we’re going to disagree on forever.

“To the work,” Champagne offers, her coffee cup raised.

“To the work,” Vashti and I agree.

haji

We are warming to this place.

The girls have embraced Dalila, particularly Katrina, the littlest. She follows like a happy shadow. Ngozi has found an earthly paradise among jinn, playing games with Olivia, games he is only too happy to lose because every win she flashes her hazel eyes from behind thick lashes and his heart falls more in love with her. I watch them flirt over a game of Go and think he has made a wise choice. It can only go so far, but still.

Since Hessa’s death I have missed the sounds of girlish laughter. It thrills me to hear Dalila burst with such joyful freedom, her cries provoking her cousins to follow, like the call-and-response language of birds.

The girls are uniformly beautiful, white even teeth, strong healthy lithe bodies. Not a defect among them. If a baby with flaws such as mine were to be born into this family, would it be allowed to live? I imagine not. For this I say a blessing to my father. For the gift of life.

One of the older girls, Sloane, wears a transparent cast from her hip to her toes. At first I could not see it except for the pins in her ankle, but the outline became clear when I spotted the decorations and autographs gaily floating around its side. They call it a glasscast, though it is not really glass, but rather composed of tiny nanites that stiffen and relax as needed. Sloane showed me how it not only keeps her leg immobile but also secretes a topical painkiller. I wonder if I should ask Aunt Vashti to look at my condition. Or is my physiology too alien? My father specializes in human beings, while Vashti specializes in Waterbabies. There is a fairly substantial difference. And while gene therapy might fix my limp, it might also put my immune system at risk.

Brigit, Olivia and Tomi have all been good to us. Last year they were as shocked as we when they heard the news of Hessa’s death. And though they did not know her well they mourned her passing with us. In our fashion. But the other girls were here when the tragedy struck. It is their insight I crave. What did they see? I have never been wholly satisfied with the explanation of how my sister departed from the earth. I carry so many questions and they must have knowledge I lack. It is all I can do not to let this friendly gathering spur me into an investigation of how Hessa died.

Instead I am teaching Zoë the basics of kite making. She has seen the ones I made last year for her sisters and now wants one for herself. I tell her Aunt Champagne has asked me to give a demonstration in front of the art class, but Zoë laments that she will not be here to see it, as she is replacing Sloane on the other half of this exchange. So I teach her all I can.

After a time she asks if this is what I want to do.

Do?

For a living, she says. Will you be a kite maker?

I will do whatever needs to be done, I tell her.

She does not understand at first. Then she giggles and calls me a utility player. Which I suppose I am. But so are we all, really. Why limit yourself to just one thing?

No, they see things differently here. There are areas of specialty. Vocations. Roles. She wants very much to be an ecologist, she says, and to help plan a future that keeps us far afield from the kind of damage our ancestors did to the environment. She is lobbying her mothers for that position, but they have not yet made up their minds.

Zoë tells me how the world, no longer choked by carbon emissions and overpopulation, has been steadily returning to a more natural state. But civilization has already done so much to put it out of balance. Take the plants, she says. Centuries ago, we made the mistake of introducing invasive species like purple loosestrife, black locust and kudzu all around the world, and now they’re spreading unchecked. And take the animals, all the new shifts in the food chain. What new shifts?

Think of the cows, she says, excited to have someone to teach. We kept so many as livestock, artificially inflating their populations, but we made them dependent on us to survive. We bred cows to be so big and beefy, most couldn’t calve on their own. So those breeds died out while the hardiest breeds (longhorns, for example) took over. And without humans to eat them, their numbers have been sky-rocketing. They have other predators, of course, but nothing kills cattle faster than man. So in the years since the plague, the growing herds have been overgrazing. Now they’re beginning to starve, dropping dead, their carcasses serving to nourish the soil.

And from that soil new grass will grow, I say, getting it. The cows tried to eat all the grass, but now the grass is eating the cows.

It is then that I see Dalila surrounded by girls, all inviting her to demonstrate the sema. She is suddenly shy and on her face I see her fight with herself. She loves to move but knows Hessa came before her. Can she measure up to her elder sister’s masterful command of the whirling-dervish dance?

Yes, I tell her. Yes, because she is a magnificent dancer, and because Hessa will be guiding her every step. I am rewarded by a huge smile and she runs off to change into her camel’s felt hat and the wide white skirt Hessa helped her sew.

No, I cannot dance, I explain to Zoë, begging off, but Tomi has seen me try and says I am selling myself short. I know all the steps, I admit, I simply lack the range of motion to do it well. When she returns, my little sister commands attention as the girls form a circle around her. With great aplomb she explains that the dance is sacred to the Sufi path. It is performed to embrace all creation and so reach a higher plane of enlightenment.

She folds her arms into herself to form a one. To signify the unity of God. Then her skirt rustles as she turns about, arms outstretched, her hands positioned carefully. Katrina asks why it is necessary to keep your hands a certain way when you dance with your feet. Dalila explains that the right hand is elevated palm up to receive divine energy while the left is held palm down to channel that energy into the earth. Sloane says, oh, of course, divine energy. Some of the girls react and Dalila must wait until their nervous laughter dies down.Though she is smiling as well.With great dignity she moves to the center of the circle and tells her cousins that Sufis dance as the worlds dance. Which is to say we revolve. Right now there is revolution inside our atoms, revolution in our blood, and revolution in our planet’s path around the sun. Everything is connected. The excitement builds and my sister frog, I realize, wields a flair for the dramatic that would make Hessa proud.

She tells the girls one foot never leaves the ground while twirling. And they may go as fast or slow as they please. Either way they will receive new awareness if they embrace the dance with a pure heart. She will chant there is no God but God. But the others can chant whatever they like. She invites them to join in when they’re ready and soon my sister is a whirling ball of energy, her skirt fluttering around her legs. Her form perfect. A transcendent look on her face as she chants. Her cousins join in, twirling about her in orbit. What they lack in grace they try to make up for in exuberance. Katrina rises up on her toes, joyfully announcing that she is a ballerina. Brigit snaps her fingers as she spins.

Before long, Penelope’s hand falls on my arm. Aren’t you going to stop this? she asks. It is as much as she has said to me since our arrival.

Why should I put a stop to it?

She gives me a reproachful look. Can’t I see they’re making fun? Look, she says, look at Sloane. I follow her index finger to watch Sloane hopping on her good foot, arms akimbo, her injured leg flung out in front of her.

Isn’t this a sacred dance? she asks.

Yes, I admit, it’s true.

Well, look at Brigit and Sloane hopping around like kangaroos.

I see what she means. My sister frog is performing with exact and lovely footwork, her hands in perfect position and her chant strong and true. While around her some of the smaller girls have gotten dizzy and flopped to the floor where they are rolling and giggling hysterically. The older ones still on their feet are indeed hopping around like kangaroos. But is it mockery? Or just high-spirited fun?

Raucous laughter fills the room and Penelope is off like a firecracker, silencing the music and stepping into the circle. She positions herself directly between Dalila and Brigit, arms spread as if to defend my sister from the older girl. It is a touching gesture, though perhaps misplaced. Dalila and Brigit get along famously. So I believe. They did last year, and I cannot guess what could have changed. With controlled anger, Penelope rebukes Brigit and Sloane for making my sister the butt of their stupid jokes. I move to Dalila. She has stopped dancing and has begun to look about the room, confused, as if awakening from a long sleep.

Sloane suggests a new place for her crutch. Voices are raised. I think to play peacemaker, but Tomi catches my eye. She shakes her head no. Do not get involved. So I turn my attention back to my sister, who has come to the verge of tears. They’re not making fun of me, Haji, they’re my friends, she insists. Thankfully, the adults come to restore order to the situation, but not before Dalila has rushed from the room. Ngozi is quick to pursue her and I hobble along as best I can. With a last glance over my shoulder, I see Pandora stepping in to separate Penelope from her sisters. Always ready to settle a dispute, Pandora.

In the anteroom outside the ballroom, my brother and I calm Dalila down. It is not so much that she feels the dance was spoiled, as it is her hating to see family in conflict. It reminds her too much of the bad blood between Mu’tazz and Rashid.

Later that evening, I take Penelope aside and thank her for defending my sister’s honor. She tells me to just call her Penny. Her older sisters are bullies, she says. Especially when they are together. I should be on my watch for their cruelty.

I tell her my eyes did not catch the nuances of what was happening, but if they were indeed mocking her I appreciate the actions she took.

I’m happy to help, she says.

penny

Entry #307: The Princess and the Seven-

Course Feast -open-

Dinner was even more nauseating than usual. I’m still sick from it. Some kind of nasty Egyptian soup moms forced us to eat because they wanted our cousins to feel more at home. What’s next, sand on the floor? They should have kept that recipe in whatever tomb they found it. I can’t believe that’s the kind of food they like over there.

Moms have always taught that my cousins are “different” as in “not better or worse, just different.”

Multicultural tolerance and all that good stuff—fine, I can get behind that if I have to—I just can’t help feeling sorry for them. They’re weighed down with all these silly traditions and spout “wisdom” from people I’ve never heard of. Technologically, they’re not that far behind us, but Uncle Isaac must not put much stock in conveniences, because it’s ooh and aah time whenever they get exposed to anything remotely fun. Lulu calls them “acoustics” because they’ve never been plugged Inside. And biologically speaking, let’s not forget they’re Humanity 1.0, which is clearly not just different but worse. But Pandora must really love them. I’ve been swiping glances at her since she got here and every time they go to her she lights up. My theory is she feels even sorrier than I do about how retarded they are. Like the way you love a pet because it’s innocent and uncomplicated. So from her perspective, my cousins might actually carry more influence than anyone else. Useful then. Aces on my side. The little girl was dancing because she loved God so damn much, and Brigit and Sloane were acting like asses, so I did my good deed for the day. I defended the weak against the strong. A stunt for Pandora’s benefit, I admit, a demonstration of character, and a recruitment ploy for my cousins’ hearts and minds. I don’t mean this cynically. I like helping people, I do. I just believe in helping myself first. If I don’t look out for my best interests, who will?

Not Izzy certainly. Today she stabbed me. It felt like she was stabbing me. Maybe I deserved it. I can feel her words like a weight against my heart. Izzy is not my friend anymore, which means that when I feel like confiding in someone Lulu and this journal will have to pick up the slack. What happened was full-blown stupid. Remember how I slapped Brigit and Sloane down by threatening to reveal their stash? Well, Izzy fed me that information, and it was confidential. When I made my threat I exposed her as the one who told me. Like I said, Brigit isn’t completely stupid— she traced it to Izzy and Izzy admitted it.

So there was a whole lot of shrieking and recriminations and gnashing of teeth, and Brigit and Sloane gave her an ultimatum—be friends with them or friends with me—and Izzy, who always wanted to be friends with everyone, who said she never wanted to choose sides, finally took one and it wasn’t mine. Okay, I’m partly to blame here. Why deny it? I just didn’t think.That’s what I did.That’s my big, terrible crime. I needed something to put those girls back in their place and it’s all I had to work with. I didn’t realize it would cause such a problem. But I’m not the only one at fault. If the gruesome twosome didn’t want anyone to know about their smoking, they should have done everyone a favor and sewn their lips shut. Like the Thomas Edison quote Pandora loves so much, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” And let’s not take honest Izzy off the hook—she could have simply played dumb and denied ever telling me.They would’ve had to prove it, and how could they? They’d just have thought maybe I’d been spying on them. Or maybe Brigit would think Sloane told me and vice versa. Who knows?

But no, instead we’ve got idiocy all around. A seven-course feast of stupid. An orgy of it. And my friendship with Izzy is dead like seeds on hard stone.

Haikubot: scan and summarize.

Words carelessly said

Little tragedies of youth

I miss my good friend

God, you’re useless, Haikubot.

Lock this puppy.

Entry #307: The Princess and the Seven-

Course Feast -locked-

haji

After breakfast and Pandora’s rushed goodbye, we call home and then try the links Aunt Vashti installed behind our ears. I say Ngozi’s name from another room and the palace’s communication system puts us in direct conversation. A successful test. The technology is likely to give us headaches, but these have yet to materialize. All I feel is a slight sting.

How bad do you think the headaches will get? Ngozi asks.

Vashti says they will fade over time.

Why do we need these things anyway?

They want to keep track of us. New safety procedures because of Hessa. Have you seen the bathrooms? he asks. He tells me how the toilets analyze all waste and transfers the data to Vashti’s console. He links Dalila into our conversation and tells her as well, just to hear her amused, semidisgusted reaction.

Between all their precautions, we should be safe, I tell them.

Piggybacked on the communication link is a neural link, the prerequisite for entering the IVR. I have begun to think of it as a device that makes one more susceptible to hypnosis. It amplifies the computer’s signals to such a degree that we begin to perceive that stimuli as reality. Father must have one, Ngozi says.

Had.

He extracted it? Why?

I suppose he has no more use for it, I say.

Half an hour to another world, Dalila muses. The one Rashid loves so much. She cannot wait. Neither can Ngozi.

Fifteen minutes later, I take a call from Malachi. He asks me how I am feeling. He offers to be my tour guide on the Inside. There is so much for me to see.

I am grateful, of course. And I assume that he means to do the same with my siblings. But when I link the news to them, they tell me that he has not contacted them at all. And when I ask Tomi about it, she says Malachi never does this sort of thing. He stays well away from her and well away from her sisters. So what does he want with me?

pandora

Today is day no for me. I’ve got my yes days and no days, and this one’s definitely a no. I oversleep but that’s hardly worth mentioning. The kids aren’t ready to go but that’s not a big deal either. I leave my ankh behind and have to double back to get it because it’s an exact replica of the one Hal gave me back in IVR, but let’s leave that out of it as well. Never mind that it takes me twenty minutes to get my copter to start. Never mind how Zoë, Izzy and Lulu spend the whole flight singing. Never mind Malachi reporting that Rashid accidentally broke my autoclean. Even Isaac being in a strange mood when I arrive with the kids isn’t so bad because he’s not the kind of person who can function well on no sleep, and he stayed up all night arguing with Mu’tazz. None of that makes this day no. I take my leave from Isaac because I’m ready to fly west. Because I can’t wait any longer—I have to find out what happened to Hal.

Day no comes from a grainy, blurry image. “If you’re going west, you might want to make it Peru,” my eye in the sky tells me. “Not Idlewild.”

“Oh, not you too, Malachi. You can’t talk me out of this.”

“Pandora, I have a satellite photo of Halloween.”

And as I watch numbly, he shows me an image of a man standing outside Gedaechtnis HQ in Idlewild, Michigan. A bearded man with orange hair, strong and thin and wild, a cold look in his midnight eyes.

“He’s alive,” I say, flooding with relief that curdles as soon as I realize that he’s not injured in any way, which means he’s simply not answering my calls. Why is he pushing me away? Does he mean to cut me off completely? I can’t decide if I’m more hurt than angry or the other way. It’s not worth figuring out, really—there’s plenty to go around.

I put my feelings into words and send them to him, knowing he won’t reply to this message either. Goddamn it, Hal, what are you doing? I’m your only friend.

So what can I do but get back out of my copter and tell Isaac what’s happened. He promises me a shoulder to cry on when he’s got his nieces settled. He says he’ll go to Peru with me. I can always depend on him—but somehow his reliability just makes me feel that much more alone.

“We’ll make it a field trip for the kids,” he says. “We’ll have fun.”

“Fun,” I say, my mind thousands of miles away in a day yes that may never come. “Sure, fun, I could use some of that. Let’s go get us a monkey.”

haji

It is less like dreaming and more like daydreaming, but with clarity that rivals what I experience in the waking world. It is a realm of enormous possibility and endless convenience. There is nothing ungodly about it. Not as far as I can tell.

This domain is called Telescope. I stand in a pastel suburban neighborhood, rows of empty houses spanning as far as my eyes can see, while overhead a meteor shower bombards the atmosphere beneath constellations heretofore unknown to me. All simulation, but there is something delightful about it. I do not see it as a mockery of all God’s creation as Mu’tazz once termed it, nor do I understand why my father has kept me from it for so long, though I am sure he has his reasons. A tutorial teaches me how to exchange this environment for a mountain canyon at sunset, brilliant red rock walls towering over me and sagebrush at my feet. I experiment with things, purchasing a temporal effect called Strobe. Soon, the sun is whipping through the sky, rising and setting like a fiery cannonball. Another sunrise, and another, and I cannot dismiss it as high-speed photography, because I am there. I can feel its heat and absence thereof, off and on, off and on, like a child playing with heaven’s thermostat. A year of sunrises whooshes over me in just minutes, and a stubborn part of me wants to believe that I am in fact a year older, if not a year wiser.

I know nothing about economics. What has monetary value anymore? There are only a handful of us here now, and with all the world’s treasures there is surely more than enough to share. And yet, Inside, everything is monetized. A floating window the size of a picture frame displays my ledger in deep luminous green.

I am treating it as a game. I will happily accept whatever they give me, but it has no relevance to my life in the real world.

I can purchase something called a Nanny but this is expensive and I must conserve my funds until I understand the value of things.

Malachi materializes (so to speak, because I do not believe he is made of any material but light) before me, craning his neck up to observe the sun’s rapid flight through the sky. Tempus fugit, he notes with a smile. Stacks of newspapers spring into being about me, each stack chest high, and so many that I feel like a maze is forming with myself at the center. I thank him but wonder aloud how I will find the time to read them all. Just read the headlines, he suggests. And I will, I assure him, though I do not put much emphasis on birthdays and cannot see the point in learning what happened only on the dates that coincide with the day of my birth. Would the newspapers from the most pivotal days in history not make for more illuminating reading? I am one human being out of billions, surely my birthday cannot be all that important.

Malachi’s special interest in me is baffling, but apparently harmless enough, so I count myself lucky to have him as my guide. He takes me by the hand to lead me on a whirlwind tour of places real and fictional, with no logic to his choices that I can discern. At each stop he asks me my opinion, genuinely curious about what I think. We visit parts of Liverpool, Los Angeles, Middle Earth, Metropolis, Beijing, Tokyo and Oz. As we travel, I begin to understand the pricing. If an experience can be termed educational, it is inexpensive, but the more escapist the locale, the higher the price. Anything with salacious content carries an exorbitant tax, pushing the total well beyond the funds my aunts have given me.

With each new step on the journey, I sense Malachi’s mood darkening, as if my presence is growing increasingly offensive to him. As if I am disappointing him with word or deed, or perhaps there is something I should be doing that I am not, despite my appreciation and enthusiasm. When I ask him if anything has gone wrong, he gives me a resigned look and tells me yes. Yes, but there is nothing to be done about it. Memes don’t nest in the double helix. It’s not your problem, he says. Don’t ever make it your problem.

I have no idea what he is talking about.

Never mind, he says. I’m a moody thing, Haji, pay no attention to me. Though the encounter with Malachi leaves me unsettled, the rest of my time Inside fares much better. Ngozi and Dalila are having the time of their lives and I am happy to learn that Rashid is Inside as well, plugged into the system from Pandora’s console in Athens. He has modeled his domain after a Monte Carlo casino resort, and populated it with well-dressed aristocrats and graceful debutantes. It is so strange seeing people in such number, even if they are unreal. I feel like we are being haunted. It takes some getting used to, Rashid admits, but you can do anything here. The only limits are your imagination and your bank account. Steak?

I glance over at the dark and smoking slab on his plate and pass on the offer. Then how about some baccarat?

Gambling, brother?

Harmless fun. You play for chips, Haji, nothing real. You don’t put your prosperity at risk. You can’t mortgage your immortal soul.

I have no fear for my immortal soul.

He opens his hands as if to ask, Then what am I waiting for?

I sigh. Are there not better things for us to do?

You might actually be good at it, he tells me, dissecting his meal with a knife and fork. You have the temperament. Quick mind, don’t care if you win or lose. And deep down, you know everything is a gamble. Every choice you make in life is a bet. You’re gambling right now with every breath. All right. If I play a few hands with you, will you take a gamble for me?

What kind?

The kind that really matters.

Oho, high stakes, he grins. I’m intrigued.

Rashid, I say, the longer I stay here the more convinced I become that our sister’s death was no accident.

He stares dumbly at me. What else could it be?

I stare back at him until he looks down at his steak, puzzled or troubled by what I have suggested. You have evidence?

Intuition, I tell him.

Well, I prize intuition as much as anyone, and your instincts have always been terrific, but I think you’re wrong on this. She got sick and died. Let it go.

Not until this feeling lets go of me.

Dad already investigated this. If it’s good enough for him . . .

Do you want to gamble or not, Rashid?

How? he says.

You know the Inside a lot better than I do. Can you make me a list of all the places Hessa visited before she died?

I don’t have that kind of access, though I suppose I could dig around a bit. There’s your gamble.

But what good would it do?

I shrug. No good, possibly. Or there might be a clue. I want to see what she saw and know what she knew.

Why don’t you just ask Vashti?

I am asking you.

Oh, you don’t trust her, he says.

I have no reason not to trust her.

Maybe, but you still don’t.

I tell him trust does not enter the equation at all. It is simply better to leave Vashti out of it. Better to leave out all the adults, because if I am being foolish there is no point in troubling them with my folly, and if I am not being foolish, if there is in fact evidence of foul play, then the adults may have reason to keep that evidence hidden.

For Hessa’s sake, my brother accedes.

Baccarat turns out to be more fun than I expect. I catch on after some initial confusion, and start winning once I try counting cards. Which seems devious, though Rashid assures me I am allowed to count. I quit when winning starts to matter to me. No good can come from that.

Moments later I am sprinting down a cobblestone path, my tatami sandals slapping the ground like rainfall as I rush headlong at my enemy. The sword I clutch in my hands carries with it a feeling of power, but also a sense of weakness. I am no warrior. In the real world this is a choice I would not make. With both hands I thunder the blade from high to low, the whistling sound pleasing me, despite how badly I miss, my balance lost, my imperfect legs lurching me well past my foe. Immediately he buries his sword between my shoulder blades, but I feel only pressure where I should feel pain, because the Inside has been nerfed.

Death before dishonor, I say.

That was a little of both, Tomi winces, promising to turn the difficulty down. Her domain is a poetic interpretation of twelfth-century Japan, decorated with cherry blossoms and paper lanterns, wooden bridges and koi ponds. I am dueling a kimono-clad samurai by a misty grove of flowering plum trees. With the difficulty reduced I am able to hold my own against him, parrying his thrusts and slashes until I can dispatch him with a long diagonal cut. Nice kiri gaeshi, she says, matching a name to my maneuver. Is that what I did?

Your form could use some work, but yes.

As I stare at the fallen warrior, his kimono split by my blade, Tomi reassures me that I have murdered nothing more than a lifeless simulation. I have spilled no blood and caused no pain. The opponent is not sentient the way Malachi is sentient.

Thank heavens for that, because I enjoyed it. First gambling and now violence, though in truth no harm was done. Still, I must watch myself and pay attention to why I do the things I do. Am I on a slippery slope? I must meditate on this later on.

Why is there no blood? I ask.

I can’t afford it, she explains, slightly embarrassed by this admission. My mothers have placed a high premium on blood and it will be some time before I can unlock it.

They disapprove of bloodshed?

They’d prefer I study. But they understand this is just a hobby of mine, and that they’re partly to blame for it by naming me what they did.

She tells me about her namesake, Tomoe Gozen, Japan’s most legendary female samurai. She squints her eyes, remembering, her expression beatific and impossibly far away. She says: Tomoe was especially beautiful, with white skin, long hair and charming features. She was also a remarkably strong archer, and as a swordswoman she was a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot. She handled unbroken horses with superb skill; she rode unscathed down perilous descents. Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka sent her out as his first captain, equipped with strong armor, an oversized sword and a mighty bow, and she performed more deeds of valor than any of his other warriors. It is a quote from The Tale of the Heike, she explains. I have not read it, and she offers to lend it to me once I have finished the other books.

What about you? I never thought to ask about your name.

I am named after no man, I explain. Haji simply means a person who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca, though it might also refer to a child who was born during that pilgrimage. The latter definition applies to me.

You were born in Mecca?

No, but the date of my birth coincides with the time of year one is meant to perform the Hajj. Okay, she says. Have you done it yet?

My father will take me one day.

There’s one in here, you know. A simulation.

I remember Mu’tazz telling me about it. The awe-inspiring sense of community and oneness, thousands of believers rapt in ecstatic fervor, all circling the Kaa’bah, drawn to the holy relic it contains. The Black Stone, focal point for prayer. Touch it and it can absorb your sins. Mu’tazz told me of his joy upon reaching it, a feeling of lightness throughout his soul, but the next day Hessa fell sick and he realized it had not cleansed him at all. It was simply an illusion, he said, a cruel mirage, glitter to distract him from the holy path. Still, I want to touch it. With the real Black Stone lost, a mirage might be the next best thing. I suppose on some level you won’t really be Haji until you do it, she says. And will you not really be Tomi until you can win battles like Tomoe Gozen?

I’ll never be that good, she shrugs.

But she is very good, graceful as a wisp of smoke, her mind and body working in harmony as she demonstrates her skill with the katana blade. With the difficulty raised, her foe is dangerous and quick, but she stops him in mid-slash with a strike to his chest.

Sen, she says, explaining. We both strike but mine is faster, she says. She steps away, settles back into a new stance, her left foot forward, her sword elevated high above her head. He watches her footwork, focused, ready. She dances in and I see his muscles tense, but before his blade can move, hers is a blur of motion, crashing down upon his brow. Sen no sen, she smiles. He commits to a strike, but I cut him down before he can. Again she steps back, this time keeping her sword low and away, blocking his view of it with her long legs. Cautiously, he inches forward. Closer still. She stands perfectly motionless. Then she pivots, sudden as a shooting star, clipping his neck before he can react at all.

Go no sen. He makes no strike. I stop his mind. I strike him before the thought is in his head. Quite a talent you have. I am thoroughly impressed.

No talent at all, she says. Just practice. Put in the time, you’ll be just as good. Perhaps, I shrug. But I am not sure I would find the art as you have. You have made poetry of it. It is poetry, she agrees, her pretty smile sweeping across her face with the same swiftness as her blade. That’s exactly how I see it.

She tells me of her forthcoming sequel to The Strength of Spiders, a collection called Frozen Flowers, and how dueling clears her mind to write. When I ask her where the title comes from and what it means, she tells me that it stems from research work she does for Vashti, but the subject saddens her and I do not press.

Is it lonely being a samurai? I ask.

Sometimes.

Does anyone ever challenge you and win?

Oh, you want to see a challenge, she says.

Soon I am standing in another time and place, dirty water splashing my legs as a wooden cart rolls by. A crowd of peasants race after the cart, and inside I can see the haggard faces of an aristocratic family, identical looks of resignation and fear in their eyes. I shiver not only because the temperature has dropped. I see Tomi and I have become anachronisms in our feudal Japanese garb, but Penny is at home here. It is her domain, a re-creation of the French Revolution as interpreted by a book I have not read: The Scarlet Pimpernel. Penny wears the raiment of a Jacobin with her black cloak and red cap of liberty, but I will learn that she is merely disguised as a revolutionary, so she might help the aristocrats, as she puts it, cheat Madame Guillotine.

You’re throwing down the glove? she asks.

An exhibition for Haji, Tomi says.

Why not? It’s been a while since you played Chauvelin to my Pimpernel. And I know just the place. Penny’s choice for a battlefield is the Louvre. Not the courtyard, but actually within the great museum, an Inside version of it at least, practically bursting with artwork from the ages, and treasures I have only seen in books.

V.C. won’t like this, Tomi says, which Penny brushes off with a shrug. We come to the famed Apollo Gallery, splendiferous and huge with its high arched ceiling, home to exquisite paintings, sculptures and tapestries, and staggering objets d’art. I feel like a magpie here, my eyes lighting upon so many glass-encased rarities that glitter, sparkle or shine, from 137-carat diamonds to the French Crown Jewels. When I am done browsing, I notice my cousins have taken positions at opposite ends of the hall.

Rules? Tomi asks.

Your katana against my cut-and-thrust saber, enhanced, seven kills, says Penny, making a strange gesture with her hand and pulling a backsword from nothingness.

You really want to spend the extra money for enhanced? Tomi asks.

After what I paid you, I think you can afford it, she pointedly replies, and Tomi acknowledges the comment with a tacit tilt of her head.

The girls salute each other, a reverence that strikes me as meaningful to Tomi and perfunctory to Penny. The battle is joined. I expect Tomi to advance swiftly but she does not, edging forward with glacial caution, holding her blade tightly with both hands. She has respect for her sister’s abilities but I am not convinced it is mutual.

Penny makes a game of dancing around the glass exhibits, snaking a lazy, circuitous path, and forcing Tomi to adjust her footing accordingly. The psychology of it interests me. There is a poetry in what she is doing, but it is not Tomi’s poetry.

Haji, how should I get my first kill? Penny calls. By pace, by force or by fraud?

I have a fair idea what force and fraud are. What do you mean by pace?

Superior speed, she says.

Go with that, I suggest, my words tickling her funny bone somehow.

Go with that, she giggles, freeing her hair from her cap, and tossing the covering not aside but at Tomi’s head. Instinctively, my first kiss raises her blade to block, which is all Penny needs to come in fast and low. The saber thrust is skillful and clean, and I watch as a ghostlike image of Tomi emerges with a harp in one hand and a stone tablet (carved with the number one) in the other. The angelic simulacrum rises up from her body, floating up through the ceiling and away. It is too cartoony to be moving, but I did not expect it and I find myself astonished.

Enhanced setting, Penny explains with a grin.

Touché, Tomi tells her, verbally conceding the kill.

That was superior speed? I ask.

Of course not, Penny laughs. That was an attack by fraud.

Illegal, then?

No, Tomi says, it’s perfectly legal. Let’s go, Penny. En garde. For the next few minutes, I watch Penny try to demonstrate a kill by superior speed. She has a reach advantage, I note, fighting one-handed with the saber while Tomi holds her katana in two. It lets Penny scuttle in, snipe with the saber and retreat before Tomi can counter. Hit and run. But Tomi parries everything, rarely even trying to counterattack, content to let her opponent hammer away at her guard. The logic of it escapes me. I see Tomi giving ground, backing up into a corner. She will run out of room eventually.

You can at least try and hit me, Penny taunts. But Tomi does not answer. It begins to dawn on me that Penny has two terrible enemies in the room with her, and neither of them are Tomi. The first is an enormous need to show off, to have her opponent and, perhaps even more important, her audience (me) appreciate how adroit and clever she is. This may be even more important than scoring the kill. The second enemy is frustration. She is no more patient than a starving animal, and though she tries to camouflage her emotions, the pinched and prickled expressions she makes show me she is deeply irritated by every strike she attempts that does not hit home. Tomi simply draws it out, making allies of these enemies, and before long Penny has overcommitted herself, rushing in with a wild and desperate slash that cuts only a painting in two. Tomi’s katana flashes in, slicing wickedly at an arm, the virtual wound not bloody but aglow with colorful light. Injured, Penny begins to tremble, not in fear, but in computerized simulation of what such a wound might do. She stumbles back, unable to defend herself, and Tomi dispatches her with a blow to the neck. When the ghostly image of Penny appears, I half expect it to sink down through the floor, but instead it follows the path Tomi’s first life blazed, rising up toward heaven.

Touché, Penny grudgingly acknowledges, her illusory wounds healing as the system resets. For the rest of the duel Tomi dominates, feeding Penny’s frustrations and feasting on her mistakes. While Tomi scores a total of six kills, Penny is only able to get two, the second coming only after toppling one of the displays, the confetti of glass shards harmless to her boots, but treacherous to Tomi’s bare feet. Before a winner can be declared, an outraged voice puts a halt to their battles. Girls, excuse me? Excuse me! What on earth do you think you’re doing, she shouts, this is the Louvre, not a gymnasium!

This Champagne is positively striking, far more beautiful than the one I know. She is wearing her Inside face, the one Gedaechtnis scientists predicted her real face would grow into but never did.The resemblance is clear, but it is as if she has been touched with some minor magic now, a kind of glamour. Even in anger, there is a grace and a delicacy to her features, and in her yellow sunflower dress she makes quite a contrast to my dueling cousins in their masculine clothes. Relax, Mom, Penny says, there’s no harm done. She bends down to collect the two halves of the painting she slashed, a commemoration of one of the Twelve Labors of Hercules (I believe his ninth), and shakes them in such a way that the damage vanishes like an image from an Etch-A-Sketch. It looks whole again, as good as new. At the same time, Tomi spends a tiny sum to clean and reset the room, restoring everything to just how it was before the duel began.

That’s not the point, Champagne says. It’s about respect. I don’t care if it’s real or unreal, fixable or unfixable. Don’t you have any feeling for the amount of time and effort artists put into their craft? Look around. Take a look at truth and beauty, not stage props to be trampled underfoot!

She lectures them until I step forward. Apologies, but this is my fault, I tell her. They wanted a place to duel and I wanted to see the Louvre, so I convinced them to come here. They both expressed misgivings and I simply insisted.

She lectures me, and she fines me, as is the custom here, but it is money I am only too happy to pay. Kicked back out to the cold Parisian streets, I rub my hands together and slip them into my pockets. Where I notice something there. Something metallic and cool that was not present just minutes before. I reach in and take it. Tracing my thumb over the grooves and ridges, I hold it up to the fading sunlight. What’s that you have? Tomi asks.

penny

Entry #308: The Princess and the 0ff Chance

-open-

There’s nothing like a fencing match to get the blood pumping. Revitalizing, that’s what it is. Years ago there was a good stretch when my sister Tomi used to spar every day with me. Not so much these days, but today she showed up with Haji in tow and it was like old times again. Winning a duel against Tomi is like winning a snowball fight with a cat. It’s not much of a challenge, and when you’ve won it’s hard not to feel guilty. Still, it’s always more fun facing a real opponent than a simulation. How else can you know how good you are if you don’t face your peers? (Such as they are, ha-ha.)

I’m a brilliant fencer but this time—for Haji’s benefit—I decided to draw it out and make it sporting. Unfortunately, Champagne chased us off right when I was about to win, so we called it a draw. Then I gave Haji a tour of the premises but he had the nerve to say it reminded him of The Three Musketeers (fine, whatever) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (!) of all things, as if I’d really play at being some socialist bandit because how dare the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. God forbid the smart and the talented fare better than the masses. Hasn’t history shown us there are some people in the world who know what they’re doing and some who don’t, and the ones who don’t should shut up and follow the ones who do? Besides, Robin Hood is just a small-time philanthropist, stealing from King John’s tax revenue—big freaking deal—while my man Scarlet saves lives, and he does it cleverly, and with style. Anyway, I offered Haji my Scarlet Pimpernel books but he apparently has too much on his reading list already. No problem, my new opera, La légende immortelle du mouron rouge, happens to be on this very subject, and he’ll get a front-row ticket when it’s done.

And speaking of opera, I’m living one. Before she left for Egypt, my good friend Lulu—who said she’d help me for nothing—took one heck of a snack from the greed tree. She actually had the gall to say she wanted ten thousand big ones. Et tu, Lulu?

Someone must have told her how I was spending my cash, because she bellyached about me paying the others to do something she said she’d do freely. She stuck her bottom lip out and said it wasn’t fair, but it’s absolutely fair. She made a deal with me—maybe not such a great deal for her, but a deal—and then she reneged. What’s so hard to understand about that? And why? Why am I fated to have all my friends betray me? Is it me? Am I cursed? Brigit and Sloane used to be my best friends, once upon a time, and look how they turned out.

It doesn’t matter. If I can get what I want just this once, if Aunt Pandora sits me down, looks me square in the eye and says, “Yes, Penny, will you please learn from me, and take over when I’m gone?” then I’ll have the rest of my life locked and loaded. That’s the governing dynamic. Then I won’t just be the Queen of England, but Queen of the Inside, controller of that universe, and anyone who wants superior education or entertainment has to come to me, and only finds what she wants with my blessing. So forget Lulu. She can go back to being Luzia the loser. I hexed her and the ridiculous opera I’ve been helping her with. Nine arias about nine planets—how stupid is that? I don’t need her anyway. I’ve got Tomi (¤7,500.00), Zoë (¤5,000.00), Katrina (¤1,000.00) and now Olivia (¤6,000.00) in my pocket. And I know they’re doing right by me because Champagne said there’s been a lot of talk about me, and when I asked if it was good talk she said Pandora seemed to think so. The Sufis remain the unknown element. I sense money doesn’t mean much to them, so instead of paying them I’ve just been trying to be nice. The little girl doesn’t want much to do with me, but a smile at Ngozi seems to go a long way, and Haji finds me interesting. But then, he seems to find everything interesting, so who knows?

Olivia says there may be yet another piece on the chessboard.

I don’t talk about Olivia much because she’s pretty forgettable, but I’ll take all the help I can get. She is literally a train spotter. While I’ve been building an homage to a timeless work of fiction, all she’s done is collect trains and train stations—how nerdy is that?—and she’s hooked them all up together as a mechanism to go from domain to domain. So from Tomi’s domain you can hop on an elevated Japanese bullet train and by the time it reaches mine everything around you will have morphed into a French or British train, say the 300-kilometer-per-hour TGV or the Flying Scotsman. It’s a bit stupid, really, because why simulate a trip somewhere when you can go there instantly? Maybe it’s some kind of experimental art project, because Champagne seems to like it, but I don’t get it. Not my problem, thankfully, but what’s Olivia going to do with her life, be a travel agent? Good luck. I met her in her home of Grand Central Terminal, circa 1917, with soldiers and sailors saying goodbye to their loved ones. She had Ngozi on her arm and I dare say he’s smitten with her, apparently poisoned with hormones telling him to breed with her—again, good luck—but he got the hint and gave us some privacy, which gave me a chance to discreetly buy her support.

We boarded a train with red, white and blue bunting on the caboose and rode together past flag-waving crowds, and past anarchists in their shabby clothes with crudely painted signs that screamed, “American Boys Belong in America!” “No European Expansion!” and “Impeach Wilson!” Everyone wore hats back then—that’s a look I hope comes back in style.

Upon taking my money, Olivia said she’d do all she could, but that if I really wanted to win Pandora over I should get Malachi on my side.

“He’s just a program,” I said.

“So what if he is? Say you were a painter and you wanted to be van Gogh’s apprentice, what better endorsement could you get than from his finest brush?”

“Why not get all the programs, then? Einstein, Aristotle, Darwin, van Gogh, why not Genghis Khan? I can ask them all to speak on my behalf along with the conductor who took our tickets, but none of them are real. I’ll look silly— it won’t help my cause.”

She chewed that over and said, “You could try Halloween.”

I tried very hard not to laugh at her. “He’s dead.”

“As good as dead,” she said, suggesting a difference that I couldn’t see.

“Have you ever talked to him? I sure haven’t. Except for Pandora, no one’s heard from him in years. It’s like he doesn’t even exist.”

“That’s my point,” she said. “For us he doesn’t exist, but you better believe he does for her.”

“Lovelorn despair?”

“She’d do anything for him.”

“You’re exaggerating,” I said.

“Go to the shrines,” she told me. “Listen to how she talks about him. And then imagine if you could get him on your side. How could she say no?”

So I went. Picture a palatial temple atop Mount Olympus, white Corinthian columns holding up the lattice ceiling, and cerulean sky beyond. Completely empty, except for a circle of ceremonial urns—six of these—on raised platforms in the center. That’s the domain Pandora set up to honor our great pantheon’s dead and missing. We call it the shrines.

Four shadows—Lazarus, Tyler, Simone and Mercutio— assumed room temperature years before I was born, but the last two—Fantasia and Halloween—still live, presumably, though it’s an arguable point. No urn for Hessa yet, which I take as a good sign—that the shrines haven’t been updated just shows how busy Pandora’s been and how badly she needs a helping hand.

The way it works is you walk up and touch an urn and imagery pops all around you like a holoshow. They’re tributes, mostly, psychedelic and sentimental glimpses at who these aunts and uncles were, the things they cared about, the domains they made their own. You can watch it with music selections from their personal collections, or with commentary from a trio of audio tracks. First is Champagne’s because she always has to be first, Pandora’s comes second, and the last track is Vashti’s because she always has to have the last word—or maybe it’s just alphabetical, I’m not sure. I don’t come here much because—well, don’t get me wrong, I know these people had a lot to do with how we got here—but what effect on my life do they have now? They exist without any gravitational pull, and in my book that makes them shadows.

But maybe Halloween has some influence yet.

He’s one of the two murderers in my family. Mercutio’s the first, and then Halloween murdered him. Possibly I make three for giving Hessa the evil eye, but let’s not get into all that. My understanding of how things went is that Mercutio went crazy and killed Lazarus and Tyler, and maybe Simone, and then Halloween had to put him down like a rabid dog. I might have it wrong though. No one can agree as to exactly why Mercutio did what he did.

Champagne thinks he just went unhinged. He was always weak and couldn’t take the shock of what happened to the human race. When he discovered that he’d been lied to, that billions were dead and only a few still lived, his moral compass broke and he decided to settle old scores, starting with Lazarus, whom he always hated. And after your first murder, it gets easier—so I’ve heard—and when he found he had a taste for killing, he just couldn’t stop. The whole kid in a candy store thing. Pandora thinks it was a sex thing. Over the years, all the girls rejected his advances, so when he had the chance he murdered the boys. She says there’s that old expression, “Not if you were the last man on Earth,” and he only had to kill four people to test the theory. If he were the only boy left, the girls would have no other choice but to pick him to repopulate the Earth. But the joke was on him—it’s eighteen years later and still no one’s gotten pregnant, ’cause anti-Black Ep drugs are hell on the ovaries. Vashti remains unconvinced that Mercutio did it at all. It’s possible, she admits, but so much of what happened comes only from Halloween’s say-so, and she doesn’t trust him not to lie. If Mercutio is guilty after all, then Gedaechtnis is to blame—that’s the corporation that genetically engineered my moms’

generation. To combat Black Ep, they designed each of them with slight variations, and in some cases those variations backfired. Fantasia, for example, is purportedly schizophrenic. Vashti suspects that Mercutio lacked the empathy gene, and between that and runaway testosterone he was an accident waiting to happen. Completely treatable, she says, with proper medication— and that’s the tragedy of her generation, four people buried thanks to a genetic engineer’s slight miscalculation. Last year Rashid told us my uncle Isaac’s theory, but I think maybe Rashid was pulling our legs. He said Isaac and Mercutio had this weird friendship they kept from everyone else. Isaac was counseling him spiritually or something and knows Mercutio attacked the others but feels certain he never would have attacked him. Isaac thinks Mercutio was secretly in love with him, and was jealous of his best friend, Lazarus. So Mercutio murdered Lazarus, and when Halloween and Tyler started asking questions, he had to try to kill them too.

The other theory that gets floated around sometimes is something about angry computer programs on the Inside, and how their “emotions” spilled over into everyone’s brains, Mercutio getting the worst of it because he was oldest. I don’t fully understand that one, but my parents, aunts and uncles spent eighteen long years Inside without a break, and maybe when you spend that much time plugged in weird things can happen.

Who knows? Why do people do the things they do?

The guy deleted a huge amount of information before he got popped, so I expect his secret died with him. Anyhow, I think it’s wonderful Halloween killed him, because I probably wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t.

The funny thing is I think I appreciate or don’t appreciate my aunts and uncles based on their taste in music. Take Tyler, Champagne’s first love. The guy was really into shock bands like Witherstick, Killer Nurse, Max BSG and my personal favorite, Lung Butter. Champagne sometimes plays those bands when she gets sad, and it’s loud, energizing music I associate with her cheering up. So he’s okay in my book, better than, say, Simone, who had a yen for ancient Chinese folk music—talk about your atonal ear stabbers—or Mercutio, who had a thing for Mozart (I can’t stand Mozart)—but in fairness his tastes were pretty eclectic, and I like all the “Crimson and Clover” covers he’s got in his collection. And I can take or leave Fantasia’s jazz ragtime swing fusion or whatever you want to call it. Vashti once told me that musical taste is a reflection of scripting. Gedaechtnis apparently wanted a “living memory” of human history, so they scripted events in her generation’s childhoods to subtly push them to study specific time periods. So Fantasia’s interest in early-twentieth-century music stems from a larger interest in early-twentieth-century culture, one Gedaechtnis scientists thought she should have. Halloween got the late twentieth century, Vashti the Enlightenment, Champagne the Renaissance, Isaac the Ancient World, etc. Likewise, they wanted all the major religions to be represented, which is why my uncle Isaac’s a Muslim, but they wanted the most tolerant practice of Islam they could find, and that’s why he’s a Sufi.

I suppose I can understand why Gedaechtnis would do it, but honestly I think it’s hateful. To grow up and discover you like the things you like and believe what you believe in only because somebody tricked you? Champagne’s a fantastic artist, but every time she picks up a brush or grabs some clay, she must wonder if the only reason she’s doing it is because Gedaechtnis wanted an artist in the group. Aside from the jack-o’-lantern lithographs that embellish it, Halloween’s urn is too black for light to escape. When you touch it, you feel like a flock of birds are taking wing, but when you follow the sounds you see they aren’t birds but these pitch-dark demon things whipping around you too fast to see their faces. Then the lightning comes crashing down like a devil’s pitchfork, and you can make out a Gothic structure under a full moon, its roof pocked with gargoyles, grotesque and forbidding. And then there’s Halloween himself, shot after shot from his time Inside. There’s one where he’s striding through a pumpkin patch with a stubborn wind blowing in his face, tossing hair as orange as sunrise. I like that one. He doesn’t really look like a murderer to me. He just looks—I don’t know—lonely, mostly. Brooding. There’s something a little dangerous about him, but it’s a good dangerous, I think. I skipped over to Pandora’s commentary and listened. I’d never bothered with it before, but wow. Olivia’s right. It’s not so much what Pandora says about him, it’s how she says it. Like she’s falling and he’s the only one who can catch her. He owns her, that’s how much in love she is, and even though I made fun of it with Olivia, I think there’s something beautiful about it too. I can only wonder if I’ll ever feel that way about someone. On the one hand love sounds like a perfect way to ruin your life, but without it what do you really have? That catch-22 might be my favorite part of The Scarlet Pimpernel

—his relationship with Marguerite, his estranged wife.They despise each other, and the English nobles are always commenting on what a tragedy that is, and he just shakes his head and says no, the tragedy is that his love for her never stopped, that he’ll always love her no matter what she does, love her ’til her dying day.

So let’s see if Halloween wants to help me. I doubt he’ll respond, but like Olivia says—if he does, I’m golden.

Time to shoot him a letter. Just on the off chance.

Lock and load.

Entry #308: The Princess and the 0ff Chance

-locked-

haji

In one of Nymphenburg’s many butler pantries, we are snacking on fifty-year-old soy cheese and vitamin-enhanced whole-wheat crackers, my brother fox, sister frog and I. We would normally enjoy it, but after Inside fare like chocolate-covered cherries, almond croissants and black-olive pizza, this meal suffers by comparison, and the acrid, chalky taste of ultrapreservatives hits my tongue sharper than I have ever noticed before.

Does this taste different to you?

Ngozi nods as Dalila makes a sour face.

Maybe this is what Mu’tazz meant by glitter, Ngozi says. No more cheese and crackers for us. We share a smile, but the realization that our attitudes are changing hangs over us. Even as minor a change as this carries weight, for it is but symptomatic of something larger that we can feel but not quite define.

Ngozi decides he has had enough and forages about, returning with three spoons, a bowl of strawberries from Champagne’s garden and a carton of synthetic cream.

Dalila puts her elbows on the counter and a hand on her forehead, gingerly stroking the space between her eyes. I pass her the pain medication and her blue eyes flash with gratitude. The headaches we have been promised have arrived. Vashti has assured us that they will dissipate sooner rather than later. I remind Dalila of this as she takes the medication with a spoonful of cream. It isn’t just the headaches, I feel different somehow, she says.

Good different or bad different?

Don’t know yet, she says, and Ngozi nods, agreeing.

My siblings have been having a wonderful time here, but between the culture shock and exposure to the Inside they are starting to feel like strangers in their own skin. We said as much to our father this morning when we called him. This is to be expected, he replied, perfectly normal. And compared to his childhood, I suppose it is. I can scarcely imagine what a wrenching shock it was for him to discover that the world he knew and loved was only the Inside. How rich and populous that imaginal realm seems to us, and how bereft of life the real world must have seemed to him. To have come through that experience as unscathed as he has, and emerge even stronger for it, impresses me as a powerful testament to his resilience and virtue. Without his wisdom, where would we be?

I had a strange dream last night, Ngozi reports, almost a fever dream. I can’t remember much about it, just a feeling of distance.

Distance? Emotionally?

Like I was outside of myself, watching the dream even as I was dreaming it. I remember the sky. Pictures of the sky, I was taking them and I felt afraid. Real fear. And I’m never afraid, not like that. Crazy, huh?

Just a side effect of our first trip Inside, I suggest. We have seen so much in such a short time and our minds now struggle to make sense of it all.

Maybe the human brain isn’t meant for IVR, Ngozi says. Maybe it’s just for jinn. I ruminate. I feel breathless. I have spilled water on the counter and am now tracing a pattern in the drops with my straw. Rashid’s words echo in my memory. Your dreams will change, he said, though from his point of view, change is positive. Did I have dreamless sleep last night? I cannot remember. I wish my head hurt less.

My sister did dream, a disconnected fantasy about a tribe of people living beneath purple snowcapped mountains, all the men and women with brightly painted faces stretched into delighted smiles. Despite the smiles they took offense at everything they saw, particularly each other, which Dalila found strangely humorous. Not a nightmare, but certainly an odd dream. She says she told Katrina about it, and Katrina said she had one like that once, but different, and the more she described it, the more it sounded like Alice in Wonderland.

What are you drawing?

In the spill I have sketched a key, and on its face a numerical code. This is what I found in my Inside pocket. I tell my siblings this and they understand it no better than I. The more I think about it, the more I believe that it is a message. Someone wants to tell me something, and believe me I am listening. It may be a clue to how our sister died.

Dalila squints at me, searching my face. Hessa got sick, she says.

As simple as that? Why did she get sick? Why not Mu’tazz or Rashid? Why not us? Have we ever received a clear answer? Maybe the answer is in the code.

More likely someone playing a practical joke on you, Ngozi says. Olivia tells me sometimes they do that here.

I think practical jokes are neither, Dalila snorts.

Just then, a black-and-white football rolls into the room, and Penny breezes in after it, eager to invite us to a match. I’m trying to get enough people together to make it interesting, she says, and if you three come aboard I’m sure my sisters will follow.

Sure, I’m always up for a game, Ngozi agrees. Dalila uses her headache as an excuse to beg off, though I sense she might not play with Penny under the best of circumstances. As for me, last year I had a great time playing three-on-three matches against Brigit, Olivia and Tomi, so I am excited to play. I should warn you I’m pretty good, Penny tells us, showing off with a little keepy-uppy by bouncing the ball from knee to knee.

I doubt you’re as good as Haji, counters Dalila.

Goalkeeper is a position I play rather well, I admit, clarifying and downplaying my sister’s praise. My legs won’t let me run around for very long, but I like the game, so I’ve compensated by learning how to stop a kick.

Then between the two of us, we’ve got the unstoppable force against the immovable object, Penny smiles. Might be fun to see which wins out.

Right as she says this, she loses control of the ball, and it goes from keepy-uppy to smashy-bowly, scattering the strawberries and splashing us all with cream.

Oh, crapping hell, Penny frets, swiping a paper towel to blot up the mess. She dabs the table gingerly, as if she does not wish to get her hands dirty. Ngozi is collecting the ball and I am collecting shards of porcelain when Penny shoves the damp towel at me and asks if I will please gather up the strawberries as well.

They make me sick, she explains. I don’t even want to touch them.

So the children of Isaac wind up cleaning the bulk of her mess as she heads off with the ball, promising to find more players. But she never returns with any, leading my siblings to speculate that either she could not find any or she was too embarrassed after smashing the bowl to go through with the actual game. She’s probably not even allergic to strawberries, she just didn’t want to do any work, Dalila complains, and this may well be true but for now I am inclined to give Penny the benefit of the doubt. An hour later, Tomi links to me, and I find her out by the fountain with the swans. A rustling of feathers, and a little gosling pokes its head out from under its mother’s wing. I would stare at it longer but something in Tomi’s gaze pulls me to her and pushes all other thoughts aside. Come with me, she says.

I fall into step with her. I have a kite-making workshop starting in just minutes, and already I know I will be late for it. I have a faint inkling that I will not attend at all. Is this about the number?

She stays silent, but nods yes. We stop in front of a building in which I have never set foot before, and she presses the elevator button down. The doors open and I am not certain I want to enter. Does it have to do with Hessa’s death?

No, Haji, she says, it has to do with you.

pandora

Isaac and I are on wildlife control, establishing a safe perimeter for our camp by defacing the rainforest floor with an Argos security filament spray. The inky, ropy streaks we paint the foliage with look about as natural as a scorpion teaching yoga, but it’s biodegradable and we need it to keep the jaguars and boa constrictors away.

Manu, Peru. I’ve never been to this part of the Amazon before, either here in the big, wide world or in the IVR I maintain. It’s breathtaking, and I’d probably enjoy it as a vacation if I didn’t have a job to do, and if I wasn’t so light-headed and flushed with sweat. It isn’t the air or the heat that’s bothering me—it’s the sad fact that I’m closer to home than I’ve been in eighteen years. The proximity has my stomach in knots.

I hit IVR Brazil with some frequency, instinctively drawn to it the way a salmon feels the need to return to the stream of her birth. Rio is fun for a nice distraction, but São Paulo is my home. I spent the first five years of my life there, and nearly all my vacations and holidays. None of it’s real, but I feel safe there, cradled, carefree. Like Dorothy in the poppy field, without any wicked witch. My parents are there. My father, the crown prince in Grandpa’s kingdom, devoted to beautifying all the women of the world—he’s the kind of suave, sophisticated fashion plate who would have made a fine diplomat or spy.And my mother, his former patient, the model-turned-activist, living a life of dinner parties and protest marches, always focused on the next worthy cause. I like visiting them, even if we can’t talk about any of the important things, and even if they do still treat me as a teenager because no one at Gedaechtnis ever programmed them to interact with me as a full-grown adult. When I discovered they were AI programs, and recognized how calculated Gedaechtnis was in raising me— nourishing my teenage rebellion against the family business by subtly channeling it into traditional medicine—so many arguments with my father and grandfather about their vision, how I was damn sure going to save people’s lives, and not just prettify them—the whole thing left me with a rotten taste in my mouth, but I’ve moved past it and can appreciate my IVR family and friends for who and what they are. Are they based on real people? At eighteen I got the chance to find out, newly freed by Halloween and dropped fresh into the world. Once we divided the continents and I took South America, I had to go to São Paulo, the real São Paulo, not only because a Gedaechtnis lab was based there, but also because I had to see it with my eyes and compare it to the artificial city I hold dear. The São Paulo I know is warm laughter and piranha soup. It’s fun and freedom, with just a little splash of danger. In the real world, that city no longer exists. My São Paulo boasts a skyline dotted with endless skyscrapers. That São Paulo has been demolished, high building after high building pulverized to debris. Vast sections of the city have buckled and burned, crevasses in the earth gaping open like wounds. My São Paulo sports the beautiful Parque do Ibirapuera, where I played football poorly but enthusiastically as a child, and coached it cleverly as a teen. The real Parque do Ibirapuera has swallowed itself, its paths and roads engulfed by unchecked flora. It belongs to the rats now, and they belong to the lancehead vipers. My people are gone. So many dead, and I will never get used to seeing the skeletons of unburied children, the wreckage of boys and girls like the ones I grew up with, the ones I used to teach. The entire world feels haunted but not like this. Not like my home. Between the riots, Black Ep and a cataclysmic earthquake, the largest and best city in South America has become a hell to me. The Gedaechtnis lab there is a scarred mound of rubble someone could spend years picking through. But that someone won’t be me. I won’t ever go back. It’s too painful, seeing my homestead raped like that. I prefer the simulation. It’s now a kind of memorial for the real city. I can go there and light candles with my father in an IVR church, or with my mother in an IVR synagogue, and despite my agnosticism and their essential unreality, together we can pray for the souls of the dead. Isaac prayed with me once. In the real world, since he won’t set foot back in the IVR. I won’t go back to Brazil, he won’t go back to IVR, and Halloween won’t leave North America. I suppose it’s funny, all our little phobias. Only in their case I don’t think it’s fear that’s stopping them but principle.

“Ten o’clock,” says Isaac, pointing ahead and left, not to a pygmy marmoset, but to a giant anteater feasting on a nest of leaf cutter ants, his pink, sticky tongue catching several at a time. We make eye contact with the gray and toothless creature, and though it tenses with caution, it seems curious and affectionate to me, as if it would like nothing better than to become our domesticated pet. Before that can happen, we give it a wide berth, completing our security perimeter without seeing sign one of anything resembling a monkey.

They won’t be easy to spot. “They’re tiny things,” Isaac tells me, as he sweeps the horizon with an infrared lens. “Smallest monkeys known to man. Four ounces, maybe. You can fit one in the palm of your hand.”

“A shame they’re no bigger.”

“Bigger might be harder to bring down.”

“Let’s just hope they’re here.”

With the perimeter established, we return to my copter to let out the kids. We left my nieces working on Life History projects, homework downloads from StoryCorps, but now I find them in discourse with Mu’tazz, the three girls entreating him to be the cheerful sort they remember from the start of his visit last year, before Hessa died, and not the dour zealot he became after. And Mu’tazz is smiling, almost apologetically replying that if nothing else Hessa’s death proved that we aren’t safe from God’s wrath—He killed billions and still we don’t fear Him enough to obey His laws.

“I hate to break this up,” I say, “but we could really use your help out here.”

They grab supplies and hop out, excited to see Peru (“Amazons in the Amazon!” Izzy happily exclaims), and the urge to call the love of my life again strikes me with cyclone force, but I fight it off, and when I catch Isaac’s eyes I realize how similar in color they are to Halloween’s. He looks back at me, questioning, but then pixielike Zoë is clamoring for my attention, telling me how wonderful her sister Penny is, which strikes me as odd because Izzy and Lulu—Penny’s supposed best friends—have been bad-mouthing her all trip. I assure Zo that Penny’s on my short list of candidates for private instruction, which seems to satisfy her, but I feel a little insulted that Penny would send others to do her bidding instead of coming to me herself. I love all my nieces, but from Penny I always get a ruthless feeling, bad wishes behind the smile, fueled by what I’d guess is just plain loneliness. I don’t like it and I don’t see her improving. Still, she’s not a bad little IVR designer, and she can’t be any less disciplined than Rashid.

“Monkey!” Izzy shouts, and we snap into action, eagerly scanning the treetops, but it’s just a joke—the only monkeys are those of us who believed her.

haji

The elevator doors part to reveal a corporate drop. Wall-to-wall supplies. The multinationals established hideaways like this all over the world for prospective survivors such as we. Tomi leads me past products from Founder, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Ningworks, Argos, Sony, Smartin! and Nike. Her sunkissed legs take long, loping strides through the maze of consumables and I must struggle to catch up. Hurry, she says. We’re short on time and I want you to see this.

See what?

This way, she says, pushing open the far door to lead me down a cold gray hallway, the walls and ceiling reinforced with steel. To my right I see what may be a prep room for surgery, but I do not dawdle because Tomi has turned left, stopping abruptly at an impregnable-looking security door, which she opens via fingerprint lock. I follow her into a great cube of a room, in architectural style not that dissimilar from the ectogenesis lab I saw on the Nymphenburg tour, only here instead of the artificial wombs which bore my cousins, I see rows upon rows of upright plastic coffins.

Eighty-one bodies perfectly preserved. Dead now, but maybe death isn’t forever. This is what I do, Tomi says. I help Vashti maintain the cryonic suspension chambers. Popsicles are what she calls the people inside but that’s not how I think of them.

Frozen flowers, I say.

My garden, she agrees.

I ask her what this has to do with me, and as the question leaves my lips, the answer awakens in my head. So this is where I come from.

I knew that code looked familiar. It’s the type of code we use for the chambers and when you showed it to me I had to see which one it unlocked. And what I found was you, Tomi says. She brings me to a suspension chamber near the back. The man inside is older than me, vitrified, brain-dead, his skin and organs ravaged by disease. He is less of a man and more a collection of body parts. Still, I can see myself in him. This is where my DNA came from. He is my biological ancestor and I am his clone.

The marker reads Dr. James Hyoguchi.

Do you know who that is?

One of the Gedaechtnis scientists, I reply. My father has mentioned his name in the past, and always with reverence.

He’s one of the greats, she tells me. A pioneer in Immersive Virtual Reality. He and his team of programmers built the Inside as we know it.

I have wondered about my origin, and have asked my father about it many times. While he has offered to tell me if I insist upon it, I have not done so, and he has preferred to stay silent, cautioning that where I come from is not nearly as important as who I am and where I am going. I can see the wisdom in this, and so cannot help feeling like I have disobeyed him here. And yet, guilt cannot spoil my delight. I owe a debt to Tomi and to whoever put that key in my pocket. They have introduced me to a new member of my family, and answered a question that has plagued my imagination for so very long. Beneath the marker, I see a case with seven discs. I take the first and drop it into the accompanying player, my anticipation satisfied as a hologram appears. The image of Dr. Hyoguchi stands before us to talk about his life, biographical information spawning about him in luminous text. We learn about his family history, his formative years in the United Kingdom and Japan, and about his turbulent youth in the private schools. His professional repertoire is wonderful if dizzying, and I can scarcely imagine accomplishing but a small fraction of what he did. Last year and over the past few days, I have seen my cousins do Life History assignments and now this is my chance to cull meaning from someone’s experiences in the time before the plague.

It is like meeting another version of myself, one from a parallel universe. Where I have my faith, he carries a lifelong fascination with simulated reality, approximate humanity and altered states of consciousness. I begin to see him as a brilliant hedonist, stronger for his passions, but slave to them as well. I notice that Tomi is hugging herself. It occurs to me that the temperature is too cold in here for her, even with her fall blazer. I offer her all I am wearing but she refuses, regarding me with a level of concern I find mystifying.

There’s something else, she says when the Life History comes to an end. He wants to talk to you. He wants to talk to me?

Disc six, she says and I swap as she directs.

Okay, I laid out most of the tech specs on the last two discs, but as long as I’m recording here I want to talk to the man who’s saving my life. The man who shares my DNA, my twin, I want to talk to him personally.

Well, hello there, handsome stranger. Konnichiwa. If you can see this recording, then you exist. Which means, amazingly,all the pieces came together. Which means all this work we’ve been doing wasn’t in vain.

I wish I could meet you in person. Maybe I will, in a sense, in that midpoint when everything’s perfectly balanced. What will that be like? I wonder. Most of all, I want to say thank you. Seriously, you have no idea. I’d hug you if I could.

You don’t know how much I wish there was another way to do this. Ideally, I’d love to be thawed out and be that caveman you wake up from the glacier. If you can successfully warm me up, pump blood back into this tired body and get my heart and brain going again, I’ll be ecstatic. But the thawing process doesn’t look so good to all the experts here, because even minor fractures can make Swiss cheese of my organs, and then you have to fix the cells on a molecular level. We’ve got scientists working on the nanotechnology you’d want for that, but it’s slow going, especially with the kind of damage this horrible-as-fuck disease can do. That’s one big problem. The other problem is, according to Stasi, the only ones who have a chance at surviving Black Ep are kids who’ve been taking medicine their entire lives. So even if you did manage to resuscitate my body, the disease would probably just top me in a couple of days.

So we’re left with this. Retrieval.

Have you been to Arizona? Hot as hell, isn’t it? Beautiful though. There’s a city called Holbrook, near this park, this American national park where they have these terrific bad-lands.The hills are striped from bone white to chocolate brown, all natural, all sedimentary rock. They call it the Painted Desert. And the park itself is a petrified forest, all that wood fossilizing over time, dissolved minerals graduallyreplacing all the organic matter. It’s quite fascinating how it works, petrifaction. If you look at this procedure as a new kind of petrifaction, it might not seem so scary.

We’ve mapped my brain, and uploaded every neuron into electronic storage. That’s me, the real me with all my knowledge,instincts and quirks, truer than any simulation I’ve ever made. And with your help, if we’re lucky, out of storage I’ll come. In the animal trials it’s worked astoundingly well: disassembler nanites dissolving the organics, the assemblers replacing each vanished natural neuron with a new artificial neuron. In this case, my artificial neurons. So over time, one personality fades while a new one emerges. You’ll gradually forget you and come to remember me.

Now it has to be a clone with identical DNA or the body won’t work with the brain. And the clone has to come to adulthood first, so the brain can fully develop and reach a comparable size. The good news is the procedure is virtuallypainless, because the assemblers and disassemblers will be swapping out your neurons at a nearly imperceptible rate, and all the problems we’ve had with cephalic cybernetic implants, brain tumors and whatnot shouldn’t be a problem. It’s safe and it’s doable, even if it hasn’t been tested as much as we’d all like.

Now I’m sure this flies in the face of every survival instinct you have. And I know it’s unfair to ask it of you. Everyone deserves a chance at life. Without a doubt. But this is necessary. Your family needs me. I’m extremely well suitedfor the kind of challenges you’re facing. The fact that you’re even here to play this message is proof that my team and I have done a wonderful job. In short, I’m asking you to be a hero. Not just my hero, but also a hero for all humanity, willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good. So will you do it? Will you step up and download my soul?

Will you set me free?

I feel like there is no air in my lungs. I look to Tomi and see compassion swimming in her eyes but nothing more. There is nothing she can do.

I am startled by Vashti’s voice. She has been standing behind us, but I do not know for how long. What are you doing here? she asks.

It is an excellent question and I am unable to find words with which to answer. deuce

See? Do you see where he is? You pushed with your invisible hand and he just glided into place. Zing, right where you wanted him. Right there.

Slicker than a polar bear in a vat full of seal blubber, that’s what you are. Why, you’d be practically diabolical if you weren’t fighting for such a righteous cause.

Truth! Justice! Liberation! That’s the side of the angels and always will be. So if you want to shed a tear for the poor guy because he ate from the tree of knowledge, go ahead and let that bad boy roll off your cheek, because you get one tear, just one. But don’t you dare kid yourself about it—without the apple, Adam and Eve would have motherfucking starved.

No one lives a lie while you’re on watch.

Years from now imagine it. This comrade-in-arms has become your dearest friend and the world is open and true. You sit with him and you drink together. And you talk the way people do. And you look at him. And you say how funny it is that things have changed. And he doesn’t understand, but he asks you to go on because he really wants to know. And you tell him it’s funny because you used to feel like such an abomination. You used to be so terribly empty, too frightened to think, an infant shadow lost in a world of fire. So many times you wanted to reach out to someone your age, to make a friend, and see yourself through new eyes. But you couldn’t. You’d panic every time you’d try. You’d retreat so deep into the fear, and feel around all zen-like for a sense of nothingness to hang on to, so you could pull yourself up and try again.

And your comrade-in-arms? He laughs. Not a cruel laugh, not a disparaging one, not the kind of humorless jagged vanguard to calling you pathetic, as has happened so many times already in your mind, but the kind of laugh best friends save for each other when they hear one hell of a joke. It’s funny. And when he sees you’re serious, he says he can’t believe it. You? Of all people, you were afraid?

You tell him that for years something was wrong with you. You tell him you would always imagine the worst and never the best. You would feel like you were sitting outside yourself, watching your hopes wither and rot. And you knew you had to do something. You had to level the playing field. You had to make a sword of the truth. And so even though what you did, you did for them, you had to do it for you. Or you would have never had the courage to introduce yourself.

And the confession comes with some shame, and you feel a pinprick of the old fear again because maybe he’ll reject you now, and call you pathetic, and blame you for exposing his old life as a poisonous lie. But he just smiles at you, and punches you on the chin with the force of a whisper, and hugs you without hesitation.

And he tells you that you must be joking because you saved him. You gave him the key. You brought him the light and let him see for the first time ever. He’s grateful to you. He always will be. That’s your best friend, Haji. Your buddy. The one who makes you feel like your own man, not a shadow, not a freak. Because he understands you.

But not like she does. Not like she will.

If you can win her heart.

Can you imagine that? Can you possibly imagine?

No time to get complacent. The first thunderbolt’s thrown. Time to dust the sparks off your fingers and grab the next.

haji

Why can’t I get a straight answer, Haji? Is it too much to ask for? Have I set my hopes too high? In the time it would take to get the truth out of you, I could probably beat a whale to death with a rolled-up newspaper.

I am not used to interrogations. I am finding that I do not particularly like them. Couldn’t I, she asks, pressing it, hungry for me to answer her hypothetical question, her eyes like winter and her voice like flowing silk. There is something agreeable in her tone that makes me want to answer truthfully, and I must remind myself that I have been nothing but truthful, and still she does not believe me. I go through it again for her. It comes pouring out of me. Halfway through my recountal, I notice that the chair behind her desk rests upon a raised platform while mine does not. Vashti has become taller while I have shrunk.

Yes, yes, fine, but who gave you the key?

I can only guess.

Haji, for good reason, the cryonics lab is off-limits. No kids allowed. Tomi is the singular exception to that rule, and she knows she’s not to take anyone there without my express permission. I don’t suppose she told you that before she took you?

Vashti suspects that I am trying to protect Tomi. That Tomi instigated the trespass all on her own and that I am now fabricating a story about a mysterious key in order to minimize her responsibility for this affair. You don’t want to get her in trouble, is that it?

She takes my silence as a yes, lets out a long sigh, and tells me how sweet and chivalrous I am. My loyalty to Tomi impresses her though she lectures me that I should never spin lies for someone else’s sake.

My expression does not waver. I remain in a black, faltering daze. I am not thinking about Tomi. I am not thinking about my siblings. I am not even thinking about God. I am, for the first time in living memory, thinking only about myself. Vashti must recognize this on some level, because she gets up from her desk to pour hot Assam tea into a silver filigree cup, and sweetens it with honey. Honey contains worker-bee enzymes, and never spoils. It can last forever. She passes me the cup, her eyes winter no longer. Along with the tea, she is offering me kindness and understanding. I have been through quite an ordeal after all. Would I like a mild sedative to calm me down?

No, I would not.

The tea is sweet and smooth and too hot to drink comfortably, though I drink it just the same. Vashti pours herself a cup and hops up on the edge of her desk, her legs dangling. She blows on her tea and sips, eyeing me throughout like a magpie on a perch.

So what are you going to do, Haji?

I shake my head.

I didn’t think I’d be having this conversation with you for a few years, but since you were so eager to break into cryonics, I suppose we’ll have it now. How old are you, anyway?

Fifteen.

So three years for you, a little less for Rashid and Mu’tazz. Yes, the brain grows until you’re eighteen or so, though certain synapses and neurotransmitters keep developing in complexity for some time after that. What about my brothers?

She hesitates and says, Well, naturally, their DNA comes from Gedaechtnis employees. Just like you. All Isaac’s children are Gedaechtnis clones.

Are we all sacrifices then?

Sacrifices is not a word I’m comfortable with. She frowns.

Do you have a better one?

She does not, and acknowledges the point with a small tilt of her head. In the silence between us I reflect how sacrifice in one form or another has always gone hand in hand with worship. I have read that for a beloved ideal no sacrifice can be too great. I have a great belief in sacrifice. I believe in purifying my soul, and sacrificing all that keeps me from knowing God.

These are the lessons of Isaac, the lessons that he has taught. I know they are true, but I wonder now why he has taught them. Never before have I felt this way. It is a terrible feeling, not to know your father’s heart.

Empty vessels, I say, answering my own question. Perhaps that is what we are. The phrase has a spiritual connotation, for it is said that the best teacher is merely an empty vessel, through whom God makes His presence felt. To learn a student must become like the teacher, unburdening, releasing, freeing, until he is empty as well. Teacher and student become no one, and in that empty space there is God. But I am not certain I mean it spiritually. My siblings and I are empty vessels, it would seem, in that the essence of who we are may as well be hollow, for we are to be obliterated and replaced with those who came before us.

I do not know how to feel.

Is this really what my father wants for me?

Vashti shrugs. I can’t speak for Isaac, she says. Wouldn’t presume. But it certainly looks that way to me. Listen, it’s no secret your father and I don’t agree on much. He must have told you about all those wonderful debates we had before you were born. We tried to work together, honestly we tried as hard as we could until we realized how different our values and methodologies were. Until we agreed to disagree. So I don’t know what he wants for you, but this is just the kind of thing he does that drives me crazy.

She falls silent, thinking. I watch her make perfectly controlled circles with her cup, quick, tight orbits to cool the tea inside. Do you mind if I speak candidly? she asks.

I make an open gesture with my hand.

Your father is a backward person, she says. That may be hard for you to hear, but it’s true. I look forward. He looks back. That’s why you’re human, Haji. Here we are fighting a war against Black Ep, and Isaac wants kids who are, forgive me, genetic liabilities. Here we have a chance to build a new and improved tomorrow, and he wants to set things back to the way they were. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be as strong and as healthy as my girls are. There’s no reason your sister should have died. With a decent immune system, Hessa would still be here today. The man clings to the past like a security blanket, and it’s the kind of mistake that costs. And it looks like you’re part of that cost, Haji, and I’m sorry.

penny

Entry #309: The Princess and the Unfinished

Entry -open-

Bad language can get expensive, and in more ways than one. First of all, you can’t swear in front of moms since they’ll fine you for it. Much better to do that in private. I try not to do it at all, because I don’t want to get in the habit. But it’s also expensive in that we’re not exposed to a lot of swears—everything Inside runs through a language filter, and if you want something unabridged it costs a lot more. So I only know a handful of dirty words—hell, damn, crap, ass, and a couple of Portuguese swears Pandora taught us once when she was drunk—but there have to be a lot more out there because I’ve seen the language filter block words that can’t be the ones I know. I’ve thought about combining them, but mostly they just sound silly. (Except for “crapping hell.” That’s fun to say when you bang your knee.)

Anyway, I bring it up because during study hall today Sloane thought no one was watching and went into a cursing fit over some stupid thing or other, but Champagne was right behind her, and the look on her face when—

Sorry, Vashti’s calling me. I’ll be back in a sec.

Lock for now.

Entry #309: The Princess and the Unfinished

Entry -locked-

haji

When I make the call, I can hear my cousins singing in the background. It is a song my father sang to me when I was small, a simple piece about finding joy in the smallest chore. I can see them gathering fruit from a towering, wildly twisting tree I have never seen before, its long hanging vines draping down to kiss the Peruvian rainforest floor. In the foreground, I can see my father. He is pleased to see me and says he wishes that I were there.

I learn they are gathering bait for a tiny monkey, which may or may not exist. He says the satellite photo is indistinct, and while the animal seen leaping from a branch may in fact be a pygmy marmoset, it is impossible to say with certainty.

Good luck, I say. Do you love me?

Of course I love you, Haji.

Really? What is it about me that you love?

Is something troubling you?

You once told me that no man loves his son so much as God loves those who walk in His path. Is that true?

You know that it is.

Then would it be fair to say you love me less than God?

It would be fair to say that we both walk in His path, that we both follow Him, and that the love He has for us is reflected in how we love each other.

I stare mutely at him, my feelings entwined like knots of tangled string. I think I know what this is about, he says.

Do you?

You’ve discovered a new way of life, the path your cousins walk, and you prefer it, or envy it, or feel confused by it, and you have questions, and perhaps you blame me for keeping you from it for so many years. If you feel this way, I may owe you an apology, but please know I protected you from Nymphenburg for as long as I have, not out of my own selfishness but because I thought you needed the tools to see it clearly, to make up your own mind about it without inescapably succumbing to its many lures.

I am not Mu’tazz. I am not Rashid. Coming here has made me wise. Leaving here will make me wiser. I do not blame you for keeping me from this place.

Then I have misread you, he says.

And perhaps I you, I reply.

Haji, please, speak plainly, he says, his jaw tightening, a fatherly look of concern settling into his eyes. I am frightened to speak. I must take a moment to breathe deeply and slow the scurry of words jackknifing in my mind.

Vashti told me not to let you do it, I hear myself say. She said you could not make me and I should stand up to you.

About what? What’s happening over there?

Will you tell me about James Hyoguchi?

A long-tailed macaw with bright red wings, the tips tinged with yellow and blue, swoops past to steal a treat from the growing stockpile of fruit. We ignore it. I search my father’s face. He reveals nothing. This is not how I wanted you to find out.

But I have.

And now you feel unsettled?

Unsettled?

Dr. Hyoguchi was a great man, and a visionary with many accomplishments to his name. But he’s simply the source of your genetic material. I certainly don’t want you to feel like you have to compete with him or worry about how you measure up. It’s much better for you to focus on your own accomplishments, your own future.

What possible future is that? Being a host for a dead man’s soul?

Now I see, he says, a glimmer of light in the obsidian of his eyes. You played all his discs. Oh, Haji, you’ve got the wrong idea.

Explain it to me then.

The scientists at Gedaechtnis are heroes of mine, he says.Without them, none of us would exist today. What better way to honor them than by using their DNA?

But on the disc, I cut in, the rest of my sentence faltering when my father points his index finger skyward. I am interrupting him. This is not something I normally do.

Before I took genetic samples, I wanted to know them, he says, so I watched their discs. Yes, a fraction of the scientists expressed an interest in being cloned, and yes, a fraction of that fraction wanted their clones to serve as boxes. Son, when a man knows he is dying and he has faith in God, there is peace in his heart, but when he lacks faith, in those final days what most commonly happens?

Despair becomes his bread and desperation his butter, I recite, which pleases him. Such was the case with Dr. Hyoguchi, he says. But consider me. I am not a despairing man, and these are not desperate times.

His words have weight and I feel increasingly foolish for jumping to conclusions. So I am not a sacrifice?

No more so than anyone else. He smiles.

I did not understand. I thought I had learned my true purpose.

Your true purpose is the same as ever. To follow God and accept whatever plan He has for you. I say, But what if this is God’s plan? What if the world is better off with Hyoguchi instead of me?

What if? There is no time for what if, Haji. There is only time for what is. Keep to the path of love, human kindness and compassion. Whatever will happen will happen, and you must embrace it unafraid. He is right as always, and I apologize for my folly, an apology he graciously accepts. The tension is broken between us, though something still gnaws at me, a tiny unpleasant worry scratching away at a part of myself I cannot define.

Now why do you think Vashti stirred this up in you? he asks.

He thinks Vashti simply took me to her cryonics lab, so I explain what really happened, my words bringing a calculating expression to his face.

Vashti sent you that key, he says. She wanted you to play the disc.

I have not considered this. It is possible, I suppose, and more possible the longer I play it out in my mind. Reluctantly, I tell him what Vashti said about him being backward in his thinking, and he tells me he has heard much worse from her.

She has no love for where she comes from, he says, and she takes no lesson from the past. She’s an absolutist in a progressive’s mask, and though she plays at decency, it rarely enters her heart. She loves to create fitnah, he says, using the Arabic word that means mischief and the testing of faith. She turned Champagne against me, he says, and now she hopes to do the same with my children. Then why do you send us here?

So you can see for yourself, he says, and make up your own mind. Besides, she’s family. Before he goes, he puts me on the phone with my three cousins. We talk for a time, and Zoë, who hopes to be an ecologist, tells me about the great sinuous tree from which she has been gathering fruit. It is not one tree but two, I learn, which explains its many twists. She does not know the name of the first tree, the support tree, but the one that bears fruit is a strangler fig. She tells me how it has contorted itself tightly around its host, its gangling vines rooting into the soil to steal water and nutrients, the essence of life. It is a parasite. And it lives a long time, she says. Hundreds and hundreds of years. pandora

So I’m watching Mu’tazz retreat from a collared peccary, the grunting, snorting animal hot on his heels. Just a few steps past the perimeter, he ran afoul of this wild, tusked, rank-smelling bristly pig, its neck ringed with snow-white fur. Here it’s defending its territory and maybe its young, aggressively charging, but upon crossing the filament spray, it gives up the chase, the sudden light show and ultrasonic frequency disorienting it and sending it panicked in the opposite direction.

Mu’tazz doubles over, catching his breath. “I have become a cliché”—he frowns—“a Muslim running away from pork.”

“I’m glad to see humor isn’t haram.” I smile.

“Definitely halal,” he replies. “God enjoys a good laugh as much as anyone.”

“I’ve long suspected that myself.”

He sits on a blanket I lay out for him, and gladly accepts my bottled water. I watch him for a bit, listening to his breath and mine, and the sounds of nature, and the throaty cries of a pygmy marmoset resounding off the trees. But this is our trick marmoset, a holographic ghost image of a female long dead, the recorded call outliving her by decades. Any cheeky monkey who comes to investigate gets a blast of anesthetic—that’s the plan anyway. But Mu’tazz has also scattered his own traps throughout the rainforest: hollowed-out coconut shells with slices of fruit inside.

“This is an old trick,” he explained, while unloading them from my copter. “The monkey reaches into the hole to grab the treat but cannot pull his paw free without letting go. Because he is unwilling to let go, he is trapped by the force of his greed.”

Though they are low-tech contraptions, my nieces and I find them wonderfully resourceful, the kind of outdoor-savvy skill set Isaac’s kids have inherited, and Vashti and Champagne’s kids have not. And Mu’tazz is Isaac’s son in another respect as well, using the event as an opportunity to teach. “We all carry coconuts,” he told the curious girls. “They are our problems, our woes, and we drag them around, shortsighted, too proud to let go and welcome God into our lives.”

I leave him now to check on the others, and find Isaac in a state. His détente with Vashti just took a major hit—she’s been manipulating his kids, he complains, saying things they should only hear from him, which tempts him to do the same with her kids—turnabout being fair play—but he’s committed to rising above it and keeping himself pure. I don’t agree with everything Isaac does, but he takes the high road far more often than Vashti does and I have to give him credit for that. Over those first few months the tension between them brewed and brewed, and I was useless as peacemaker. It all finally bubbled over, with Isaac and Champagne insisting on having natural children, boys and girls, and Vashti insisting only upon girls via an artificial womb. No natural children were born. Champagne’s part of the story is a sad one, so let’s leave it at that. But Vashti—she chose girls because girls are slightly more resistant to Black Ep than boys, with ever so slightly stronger immunodefenses, and with the disease just one bad mutation from putting us up against the knifepoint of extinction, that was reason enough to proclaim, “No boys allowed.”

“This is a war,” she said. “Black Ep has declared war upon us, and what use can we have for second-rate soldiers?”

She further justified it with the very problems Isaac and Champagne were having—not much luck returning us back to the kind of sexual reproduction our ancestors enjoyed for eons. But there’s more to it than that. Vashti thinks all boys suffer from “testosterone poisoning”— that’s her diagnosis for Mercutio, by the way—and likes to point to the vast majority of killers and war makers in the course of civilization being male. “Just being practical,” she’ll say, and, “If we’re serious about preventing violence in the future, why not start society off as a matriarchy?” But then I remember Vashti feeling dispossessed back in school, sniping at the boys for showing off and disrupting the learning environment. She used to talk about matriarchies back then, arguing how they were the natural state of things once upon a time, and how patriarchies took over by hijacking the very first magic trick—giving birth—by having male gods like Zeus getting knocked up in the myths.

Considering the only births we’ve had over the past few decades have involved artificial wombs in ectogenesis labs, it’s safe to say that playing field’s been leveled. Then there’s the old debate about Lazarus and Simone. Had they lived, whose side would they have taken? Neither, I say, because there wouldn’t be any sides—we’d all be working together. Halloween too. Laz would have kept us all “on message” with his basic goodness, and Simone would have inspired us with her brilliance and enthusiasm. Even Tyler might have made a huge difference. We just aren’t enough people here. We needed a critical mass, but never got it, and if I weren’t such a hopeful person, I’d say it looks like we never will. Years ago I tried to bridge the gap, truly settle the ideological differences between them, and when Vashti brushed me off with her usual, “Biological limitations are to be overcome—end of story,” I pressed on and argued the need for diversity of opinion, not just diversity of genetic material. When you consider the extent of Isaac’s knowledge and skills, every day she refused to compromise with him was a day she hamstrung her life’s work. Like Champagne used to say, sometimes the most important step you can take in life is the step to meet someone halfway.

“I am a Transhumanist,” Vashti replied, eyes flashing with the force of her convictions. “Unapologetically so. Isaac is, by comparison, a Humanist. Though I use that word loosely, given the life-after-death pabulum he feeds his children. He embraces the frailty of the human condition. I refuse to let suffering have the last word.”

The tilt of her head and the curve of her lip said she was right and he was wrong and only a fool couldn’t see it.“Just because he’s religious,” I said, which was all she needed to shout me down.

“Religion causes a kind of brain damage! It’s kryptonite to reason. We are not fallen angels. We are not cut off from our higher selves. That’s bullshit, absolute bullshit, Pandora. ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ are foolish words said by foolish people to explain events they don’t understand. You want a word? Try ‘evolution.’

‘Acceleration.’ ‘Extropy.’ ‘Immortality.’ Why pray to God when we can become gods? Hell, why stop there? We can even become Nature.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?”

“That’s not arrogance, it’s optimism!” She laughed. “Arrogance would be to assume we can’t!”

Isaac received my argument less impolitely, but with no greater enthusiasm.“She thinks she has all the answers,” he sighed, “and she’ll take any risk to prove she’s right. She doesn’t think through the consequences. It took millions of years to reach this point in human evolution—all the credit for that goes to Nature, Time and God, not a shred to us—and to think we can blithely pick up where those three left off? Dangerous.”

It reminded me of something Hal said to me once: “For such a fan of matriarchies, Vashti sure enjoys bitch-slapping Mother Nature.”

“Maybe self-evolution is the way to go,” Isaac hedged, “but there’s only a few of us left on this planet. We’re much better off restoring things back to the way they were, not remaking the world in our image.”

I don’t know who’s right, Isaac, Vashti, both or neither. That’s why I stick to maintenance and repair. Fewer headaches and I get to stay neutral.

Patently ridiculous. You’ve never been neutral, Pandy.

I’ve always tried to be.

Wouldn’t you say over the years you’ve been more in Isaac’s camp than Vashti’s? From the day Champagne went over to Vashti’s side, you became increasingly sympathetic to Isaac’s point of view.

Well, that’s neutral—two against two, I’m acting as a counterbalance. That’s your definition of neutrality?

Standing there in Peru, thinking about how we all got to this point, a thought creeps back into my mind. Something Halloween said back in that first year of freedom. Something he only said once. “You’re the only good one left,” he said, “but you spend so much time with them, I bet they’ll rub off on you. As the years go by, you’ll become more and more like them, and frankly I don’t want to see it.”

I must have blocked it out. I can’t remember what I said in reply. Something like, “I think you’re judging them too harshly.” And that’s still how I feel—Hal’s the biggest grudge-holder of anyone I know. But maybe that’s why he won’t return my calls now. Have I changed over time? Am I no longer who I once was?

“Monkey!” Izzy shouts, and I yell back, “It wasn’t funny the first time!” but then I hear Lulu shriek—sure enough, a little yellowish-brown creature has descended from the trees and gotten himself caught, not by the holographic trap, but with his hand locked in a coconut. I’m not even sure what it is when I aim the tranquilizer, and there’s no time to find out—it’s on the run, paw free now as I draw a bead on it—whatever it is, I don’t want to hurt it, but it’s no bigger than a housecat, and I’m just as likely to catch it in the back of the head as the rump, and far more likely to miss it entirely. Except I don’t. It’s the luckiest shot of my life, catching him square in the tush as if that tiny, furry target were the size of an elephant.

He shrieks, high-pitched like a frightened, furious bird-call, as he scampers off, dashing like a squirrel, but drunk now, stumbling, the knockout inevitable. He flops stiffly over onto his side, and I’m afraid I’ve killed him—but no, he’s breathing still, little pink tongue lolling out of his mouth, poor guy, and he’s one hundred percent monkey, all he needs are the hat, the vest and the cymbals. The girls are practically screaming in jubilation, Isaac congratulating me on my aim, while I just stupidly keep saying, “Is he okay?” until everyone assures me that he is.

Everyone except Isaac’s oldest son, curiously, so while Isaac and Zoë collect the pygmy marmoset, Izzy, Lulu and I double back to find Mu’tazz there on the blanket, pale as I’ve ever seen him, and clutching his stomach in terrible pain.

penny

Entry #310: The Princess and the Suffering

-open-

This is the worst news I’ve ever had to write. I feel like a thousand bricks are crashing down on me at once.

Vashti wanted to see me, so I went down to her office. She gave me a pep talk. Told me how great I was doing. Raised my allowance.

Olivia is Pandora’s new assistant—not me.

When she said it, I got cold all over. Olivia? I mean, really, Olivia? I said, “That’s just unfair!” and, “But I’m better qualified!” Yeah? So? Apparently better doesn’t matter.

It’s the trains. The stupid trains did me in. Pandora “appreciates” everything I’ve constructed Inside, but my Scarlet Pimpernel is “all for Penny’s enjoyment” while Olivia’s transportation system “can be used and enjoyed by everyone, and one of the most important qualities in this line of work is what a person can do for other people.”

I don’t do things for people? Who the hell did I give my money to, porcupines? I’m flat broke because I gave away all my money. To who else but people—the ones who were supposedly putting in good words for me? What a ridiculous joke.

Vashti told me there were so many other jobs I could do, but no, there aren’t, not the kind where I’ll be able to call my own shots. Not the kind where the people who hate me won’t be able to push me around for days and weeks and months and years, keeping me underneath their heels until all the qualities that make me special disintegrate into nothingness. This was my stand. I made it. I refuse to give it up. When I told her Pandora made a big mistake, she handed me pills, telling me how stressed I seemed, and how these might help me relax. Honestly, is this any time to relax?

“You don’t understand,” I told her, “you never do.”

I tracked Champagne down in the botanical garden, and when I told her what Vashti had told me, she threw her arms around my shoulders and stroked my hair like when I was a little girl.

“Oh, Penny, I know you’re disappointed,” she said, “but it’s not your time to do this. It’s Olivia’s.”

I said, “Didn’t you tell Pandora I was the best for the job, didn’t you tell her I was the only one who could do it right?”

She swore she did and said she was truly sorry that Pandora had decided to go with Olivia instead. I begged her to go to Pandora and make her reconsider, or to tell Olivia not to take the job, and she just held me until I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I felt something cold and brittle spreading through my chest, like ice crystals gathering in a storm drain. Can no one see that Olivia is nothing compared to me?

No matter what I said to Champagne, all I got was more stupid hugs, more empty reassurances, and dopey words about how maybe, just maybe, in time Pandora might feel the need to hire another apprentice. Number two isn’t good enough. I’d probably have to take orders from Olivia, and that’s too awful to even consider.

Champagne was no more help than Vashti and it just about killed me.Why didn’t I see it before—moms were just playing good cop, bad cop with me all along. Champagne is just sugarcoated Vashti. Don’t they care about me? Is my life really going to be lots of tea and sympathy from family members unwilling to help me get what I want and need?

“What you’re telling me,” I said, “is even though I should be working with Pandora, I’m not because of politics. Because she likes Olivia more than me.”

Champagne looked more useless than I’d ever seen her. I didn’t even listen to what she said—I just started to run. She called after me, asking me where I was going, but I just pretended I couldn’t hear her. She linked me, “Penny, I love you, everyone does,” but I killed the volume so I wouldn’t have to suffer any more lies.

I found Olivia dusting the porcelain room, which was perfect because I was in the mood to break something.

“You have to tell her no,” I said.

She tried, “What are you talking about?” like I’m one of our stupid cousins—but I had her number and told her it wasn’t fair. She knew how much I wanted it. She gave me advice and said she’d help, and then stole it out from under me.

“You can’t do this,” I said. “It’s not right.”

“Why are you blaming me?” she whined. “It’s not up to me. It’s always been up to Pandora.”

“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You played me. But that’s fine because you can make it right. You can say no. They can’t force you to do anything, and when you tell them that as much as you’d like to do it, it wouldn’t be right, they’ll have to listen to you.”

She just stared at me, and when I told her I was the best, she didn’t have any comeback at all, just hemming and hawing about “the way things worked out.”

“Nothing worked out,” I told her, and she laughed (!) into her hand, saying, “No, Penny, nothing worked out for you. ”

Jealousy. The perfectly average, boring, forgettable girl happy to see the top scholar, the star athlete and the virtuoso musician not get her due.

I told her this was the kind of thing people do that makes others not like them, and that sooner or later someone wasn’t going to stand for it, but apparently that wasn’t specific enough for her, so I said if she didn’t help me right now karma would catch up with her, and quick, and in ways she wouldn’t want.

“I’m not scared of you,” she said. But she said it so quietly, the liar. So I picked a doll up by the face and swung it against the wall, and it shattered, little pieces of porcelain flying everywhere, and when I looked down at my hand I saw it was cut up pretty bad. I squeezed the biggest fragment, all jagged and bloody, and Olivia shrank back against the wall.

“You’d be amazed at how resourceful karma can be,” I told her, then got out of there before it went from scaring her to hurting her, because the thought was in my head and I didn’t like how it kept pulling at me.

God, I hope that did it. I really hope it scared her enough to drop out. I don’t want this to go any further, but what if it does? What if I broke her like the doll? And got caught? Is the risk greater than the reward?

There has to be another way to get what I want. Think, Penny, think. My hand hurts.

Lock.

Entry #310: The Princess and the Suffering

-locked-

haji

I have never made a black kite before. Always I have sought bold colors to lend my creations vibrancy and magic. Not this time. This one will be black as the Black Stone. Black as my father’s eyes. My heart is restless, and so I do this for meditation, not leisure, though the two are often one and the same. As I connect a lark’s head to a knotted loop, I picture myself as a single dot in the fabric, envisioning the rest of the kite as infinite space about me, a universe unto itself. I can almost feel the enormity of it when my concentration is cut by the soft purr of the autoclean’s motor as it sweeps dutifully across the floor. I must look up to link to it, willing it to please come back another time. I call the Black Light, vainly perhaps, but with all the force I can muster. Many years ago, my father taught me that it is the color of enlightenment, the last step on the Sufi path.We call it fana. This is where the ego dies, in the blackness, where one can become empty and find union with the divine. It is an Arabic word, fana, meaning extinction or annihilation. Annihilation of everything but God. After fearing that my father brought me into this world only to destroy me, only to reach Dr. James Hyoguchi, I am now seeking self-annihilation to reach the love and wisdom of God. The irony is not lost on me, but it is precisely what I must do. I am off balance. I do not feel holy. I must move through this turmoil to find answers and peace.

May this kite be God’s kite, and when He flies it may my soul lift!

My father has taught me so very much over the years, but the construction of kites I learned from a book. I found it in Egypt, in one of the libraries we sought to restore, when I must have been half the age Dalila is now. I remember how my eyes danced over the racks, a kaleidoscope of color from spine to spine, and I wanted that one, the high one I could not reach. Hessa stood up on tiptoe and got it for me, reading it with me at the little table, delighted to see my imagination so captured. Every time I make a kite, I return to that first moment of joyful innocence, of awe and wonder at what I might create. Thought I might find you here, says a voice. This is Penny stalking into my sanctuary, a phone in her left hand, her right wrapped tightly in gauze.

She has discovered me in the Magdalenenklause chapel, Nymphenburg’s “place of penitence,” designed for solitude and prayer. Of little interest to my aunts and cousins, this grotto is one of the few structures in the palace that have not been altered in recent years. Though the outside looks ruined, the inside is clean and well maintained.

Will you please help me? she asks.

I am in the midst of something but will gladly help if you but wait a moment, I say, but she does not understand, sitting next to me on the pew saying, You’re making a kite. That’s terrific, but I need you now.

I have come here seeking quiet refuge, I explain, and I stop explaining when I see the heartsick look on her face. Whatever she needs must be important and perhaps it truly cannot wait. I set the black kite down.

Call Pandora, she says.

She wants me to speak on her behalf, to convince my aunt that she should receive special instruction while the girl of my brother Ngozi’s affection, Olivia, should not. This is doubly wrong. First, I have already complimented Penny to Pandora. Second, I am not in a position to judge Penny’s merits relative to Olivia’s. The Inside remains a mystery to me, and if she is asking me which domain I most prefer, the answer is Tomi’s.

I don’t care if you’ve already called her, she says. Call her again. What good would it do?

She’ll listen to you, Haji. She may not like me but she’s definitely sweet on you. I’m counting on that. What can I say to her that has not been said?

Tell her Olivia doesn’t have the maturity to handle that kind of responsibility. How do I know that?

Because she insulted you. Because she made fun of your religion. I don’t know, because she ripped up one of your kites, how’s that?

You want me to make something up?

Right, make something up. Whatever you think she’ll believe.

I sigh and tilt my head back. Scenes from Mary Magdalene’s life stare down at me from the frescoes above.

What? You won’t help me?

Not if it involves lying.

I’m not asking you to make a habit of it. I’m asking you to slant the truth, just this once, as a favor to me. As a tiny kindness to someone who desperately needs it.

Penny, you are banging a drum.

She does not know what I mean. I explain:

Once upon a time, there was a young boy who liked nothing better than to bang on a drum. He would joyfullybang it all day long, no matter how much the noise irritated those around him. No matter what his parents tried, he would not stop, and in desperation they turned to learned men who called themselves Sufis.

The first alleged Sufi tried reasoning with the boy, arguing that so much drumming would damage his eardrums. The second professed that drums were sacred instruments and should only be beaten on specialoccasions. The third distributed earplugs. The fourth tried to distract the boy with books. The fifth offered to teach the boy’s parents and neighbors how to live with the noise. The sixth introduced the boy to meditation and claimed that the drum was merely a figment of his imagination. But none of these men were true Sufis and none of the remedies worked. Finally, a real Sufi arrived. He took stock of the situation,sat next to the boy and handed him a hammer and chisel. I wonder what is inside the drum, the Sufi said. Penny stares intensely at me, saying nothing. She clears her throat. She frowns. She says, You’re saying there’s a simple solution to my problem?

Of course.

Tell me, she whispers.

Stop caring about it, I tell her. She shakes her head as if I have suggested something unconscionable. Stop caring, I repeat. Let it go. Some things are not meant to be, and we must press on, finding new dreams when the old ones have been destroyed.

That’s your advice? she says.

Perhaps God has another plan for you. Will you resist it or accept the embrace?

Do you hate me? she asks. Is that what’s going on?

I hate no one.

Well, when you look at me, what do you see?

I have no ready answer, and so she fills the silence with all the triumphs in her life, a litany of virtues both perceived and imagined. For all her achievements, she is the unhappiest girl I have ever met, and the feeling I absorb from her tells me she would only do a good deed if she thought someone was watching. Pity rises in me and I try to take her hand, but she is too agitated for such a gesture. Is it money? she cries. I don’t have any left but I swear I’ll get some if you call. I do not want your money.

Here, she says, I know what you want. She whips off her blazer, tossing it aside. The tie is next and by the time she gets to the shirt I tell her to stop, but my words mean nothing to her, and I avert my eyes. I know what you want, she says, again and again, voice rising, a furious, anguished girl offering sex she cannot even feel.

I will not be a party to her abasement. I tell her this and I leave. Outside, I can hear her shaking the pews, kicking them. I can hear the wood splinter. She is crying. Not in great heaving sobs, but in sudden tremors and tiny chokes. There is nothing I can give her, and nothing she can give me. I wait until the fit of temper has been tempered, until she is quiet again, and when she emerges I am relieved to see that she is dressed once more.

You’re too holy, she says, the gauze bandage on her hand unraveled and dangling until she rips it off with her teeth. How nice for you to be so holy and enlightened when I’m losing everything I ever had. She leaves me, and when I reenter the chapel I see my black kite in tatters, stomped irreparably beneath her heel.

God breaks the heart again and again until it stays open, I mutter.

I fear Penny is right. Maybe I am too holy. Were I less so, maybe she would have listened to me. If I spoke like her, thought like her. Maybe the way to find enlightenment is to give up on it completely. As the autoclean disposes of the debris, I take measured breaths and collect my thoughts, pushing the unpleasant ones aside. My work is ruined, but Champagne may have materials I need to start it anew. But not now. Tomi and I have a date Inside in less than an hour and I do not want to be late for it. Haji?

Someone is linking to me, and I recognize the voice as Malachi’s.

I heard you found out, he says. Who you are, I mean. Where you come from. Where my DNA comes from, I correct him.

That’s more accurate, he agrees.

For several minutes we discuss Dr. Hyoguchi, to whom Malachi owes his existence. The source of my DNA is not so much a programmer as a patriarch, where Malachi is concerned. Am I anything like him?

Not so much. Since meeting you, I’ve been curious to see if you might spark to some of the things to which he sparked. But as I say, not so much with you.

A disappointment, then?

In a sense.

So would you rather that I go through with the procedure? So your father might return to you?

I’d love to have him back, he admits. I miss him. But I’d never in good conscience ask you to go through with that. Eventually, I’ll find another way to resurrect him, a way that won’t come at your expense. You should see what Pandora and I have been working on. It’s fascinating. I think to ask him about it, and behind that thought another follows. Could Malachi have sent me the key?

And if so, to what end?

But he has gone back to talking about Hyoguchi, and as I wait for a pause in his speech to voice my questions, the sound of interference begins to build until an abrupt click ends the conversation, removing Malachi in midsentence.

I call his name, once, twice, but I am once again alone.

penny

Entry #311: The Princess and the Sad Thing

-open-

I’ve made a list. Let’s not call it an enemies list. Let’s call it a list of people who need to be sorry for what they’ve done.

The trouble with lists is who to put up at the top. That’s part of the fun of it too, but I don’t want to make those choices yet so I’ll do it alphabetically: Brigit, Haji, Izzy, Lulu, Olivia, Pandora, Sloane. That’s seven. I’d make it nine and put my moms on the list too, but there’s sorry and then there’s sorry, and I have to cut a little slack to the people who brought me into the world. I’ve been thinking of making a chart where I tie each of the seven to one of the so-called seven deadly sins, but they’re all guilty of more than one, and it’d be unfair to peg just Olivia with envy when frankly they all envy me. Wall-to-wall envy, wall-to-wall pride, and they’re too damn slothful to get up off their butts to help someone in need. To hell with them. If they think I’m not worth fighting for, maybe they should see what I’m like to fight against.

The new name on the list is Haji, because getting help from Haji is like asking a chipmunk to do calculus. Or begging a blind man to see. Or more to the point, yelling at a cripple to stop limping—he can’t. He wasted my time and energy with a stupid story about how I’m playing the drums when everyone knows my operas are part of the Baroque tradition where you use very little percussion to accentuate the melody, and the worst part is he actually thought he was helping me, the condescending fool. Actually, he’s not a fool—he’s a robot. A Sufibot, that’s what he is—pull his lever and he jingles and jangles and burbles out pithy, holier-than-thou fortune cookie sayings. Well, I’ve had it with his oh-so-pious non-contraction-using Jonny Quest ass—he’s on the list!

I should probably go to the source and blame Uncle Isaac for unleashing genetic throwbacks upon the world. That’s probably worse than infecting them with religious mumbo jumbo. Why create garden-variety Homo sapiens when you can have Waterbabies? If you’re going to bring back old hominids for nostalgia’s sake, why not go all the way back to Homo erectus or Australopithecus? They might at least make interesting grunts, or discover fire or something. Let’s face it—my cousins are oxygen thieves. They’re just backward people taking up space, and if they all met up with an ax murderer I don’t think they’d be missed.

I don’t miss Hessa, that’s for sure. It’s a funny thing— I’ve been carrying around this guilt for a whole year but now I’m thinking I did the world a favor. Just one more accomplishment I won’t get credit for. Okay, I didn’t just hex her. I played a joke on her. But that’s all that it was, a stupid prank. It’s not like I plotted her death or premeditated it, rubbing my hands together and cackling in ghoulish glee. She got on my bad side, so I hexed her, and then the joke, and then she died. Like an accident. I’d say it was an unfortunate accident, but by that I’d only mean it was unfortunate for her. She was this silly little Sufibot who took nothing seriously—everything was just a big game to her like nothing really mattered, and she was all buddy-buddy with Sloane, and I just knew she’d turn into another Brigit if someone didn’t take her down a peg. She was coming to breakfast one day, and back then my baby sister Katrina used to have this bad habit of running through the house like a crazy person—she still does it these days, just less— and this time when she ran in, she accidentally knocked the pillbox out of Hessa’s hand. Everything went flying and Katrina apologized, but Hessa just laughed like it wasn’t the least bit annoying, and we all had to get down on the black-and-white-checkered floor and crawl around on our hands and knees to help her find all her medicine. And I decided to hold on to a pill because—I don’t know, I guess just because I could. She had plenty of them after all. It wasn’t until the next day when the idea for the joke came to me. I was rolling this dirty white pill between my fingers, trying to move it from knuckle to knuckle the way I’ve seen magicians move coins on the Inside. And I just noticed how generic the pill looked. Not very special. Just boring. So I had the idea to dip into the medicine cabinet, and going through all the different bottles, I had a nice laugh finding laxatives that looked almost exactly the same. It was too good not to do. When they all went out skating, I snuck into her pillbox and made the swap. And I hexed her. And I thought, let’s see how happy-go-lucky you are after a taste of the crapping hell.

What I didn’t know was how incredibly fragile she was. From an immunological perspective, she wasn’t any tougher than the porcelain doll I smashed. Three days without her medicine and she got a lot more than diarrhea—we’re talking vomiting, fever and worse—that tiny gap in her defense was all Black Ep needed to take hold. I’d never seen anyone get really sick before.

It was awful, honestly. It wasn’t what I’d planned.

I didn’t want to get caught, so I swapped the original medicine back for the laxatives before Vashti could check. They put Hessa back on the right pills, and even tried some new ones, but the damage was already done. It had become multidrug-resistant, like the worst strains of tuberculosis and HIV. Once Black Ep gets a foot in the door, it’s over.

Isaac flew out, suspicious and rightly so, but no one could prove anything. Hessa got worse and worse and when it was all over I wore my grief on my sleeve so no one would suspect and that was pretty much that.

I’ve been carrying this for so long, it feels good to finally write about it. I can’t really talk about it with anyone. They might not understand—they might think I’m responsible when no one told me how vulnerable she was. Call it what you will, it was a joke, an accident, a tragedy I’ll admit, but not murder. I didn’t mean to do it then but today I realized that never in my life have I wanted to kill someone more than I do right now.Take your pick of anyone on the list and I can picture a dozen different ways of doing them in, each more satisfying than the last. But you want to know the sad thing?

I don’t think I can do it.

I just don’t have it in me. Believe me, I wish I did—I’d be beautifying my environment—but every time I try to psyche myself up for it, I wind up with some awful memory popping into my head that messes everything up. As much as I hate Brigit and Sloane—and I can’t stand either of them—I can remember learning how to read with them, or skipping rope and playing double Dutch. One time when they tried to get me in trouble, Olivia stood up for me and kept moms from fining me. Even Haji made me laugh once—that time I beat Tomi in the Louvre.

Why can’t I get these thoughts out of my head?

Haikubot?

Troubled though I am

Happy moments in my past

Bar me from madness

Okay, Haikubot, you just made the list.

I’m going back Inside now to think of the worst thing I can possibly do to Olivia. Even if I don’t have the nerve to kill her, I bet I can make her life a living hell. And maybe I’ll find another present from my mystery friend. So far, I’ve got half a yin-yang symbol, half a heart-shaped locket, half a long-stemmed rose and half a playing card. All I need is half a plan to get the life I deserve back and maybe I’m in business. Wish me luck.

Lock this.

Entry #311: The Princess and the Sad Thing

-locked-

haji

I am anticipating Tomi’s sprite when Rashid sends me his, a glowing silver and gold light that serves as both a call and a calling card. When I answer it, I am transported to the domain in which he sojourns. He is stretched out on a bench in the Ancol Dreamland, a science-and-technology-themed recreational park, which is to Jakarta what Epcot is to Florida. I am surrounded by ghosts, computer-generated vacationers rushing from one attraction to the next, their voices occasionally overpowered by the noisy rattle of bajaj s, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws.

Rashid scooches over on the bench and beckons me to sit, offering me my choice of coconut scones, tuna chapati or kuping gajah. I select the kuping gajah because it is made of chocolate and is shaped like elephant ears.

This is one of the places she visited, he says, squinting from the sunlight. I shield my eyes as I glance about, taking in the lagoon, the souvenir shops, the dance clubs. Off in the distance I can see white-crested waves crashing into honey-colored sand. Before she died, Hessa told me some of the girls were teaching her how to surf. Maybe that was here. Rashid suddenly coughs, spitting up a piece of coconut scone. It lands on the sidewalk in a wet gob. He frowns and rubs his mouth with the back of his hand.

Are you okay?

Never better, little brother, he says with a smile just this side of grimace, then hands me a stack of numbered postcards. Everywhere Hessa went. I riffle through the images, beautiful and exotic, pausing at the vistas I know she would have especially enjoyed.

Have you found anything out? he asks.

Nothing.

You seem different, he says. Something eating you?

I stare at him. I am tempted to tell him where his DNA originates. Doing so would disrespect my father. I do not like keeping secrets but I must honor his request.

Why are you looking at me like that? he asks.

I reach out to put a hand on his forehead. He swipes it away.

I’m sick, he admits.

How sick?

Sick, he shrugs. Don’t tell anyone. They’ll kick me Outside, and I have a whole day planned in here. Why not hold off until you feel better?

Why not mind your own business, he snipes, coughing violently again before leaving my sight in a flash of sparkling light, teleporting off to a new domain.

Pandora is not online, I learn, so I send her mail suggesting that she might want to look in on Rashid. I do not use the word sick.

The postcards make useful shortcuts. I tap the top one, my virtual fingertip conceding its artificiality by stretching into an emerald green display menu when it makes contact with the call number. A twitch whisks me off to the domain itself, a cash register’s accompanying chime announcing that my bank account has been drained a nominal fee.

I visit a dozen domains in all. I am looking for some kind of pattern, some clue as to how my sister died. I find nothing.

I may never know the truth. Not every question has an answer. Can I live with that? Can I simply let her go?

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the soul rejoices for what it has found. And so I resolve to honor Hessa with the way I live my life. I will start with a gift for Tomi, I decide, something whimsical that will make her smile. A stuffed animal? A panda bear or a rabbit, perhaps in samurai costume.When I tap into my account to see how much there is to spend, I see a row of nines stretching across the display. It is from Pandora. To the left of her name, under service, is the word liberty. Why she would grant me such a liberty, I do not know. I have enough money to fill an entire domain with stuffed animals. Perhaps it is a mistake, but if it is a mistake that brings Tomi joy, I welcome it with open arms. Unfortunately, a maze of choices encumbers my shopping spree. With so much money at my disposal, there are simply too many choices. It seems I can go anywhere and do anything and I have no idea where to begin.

Tomi rescues me from cognitive overload, and when I greet her I discover that she has a present for me as well. Look, she says, leading me to a tower window and drawing my attention to the horizon with a delighted sweep of her hand.

Since last I came here, she has made significant additions to her domain. I see castles and armies, shrines, temples, shops and homes, a land bursting with life and color with all the splendor and pageantry fit for an emperor. The streets and the fields are teeming with citizens, and the sky is flush with kites. Do you love it? she asks.

How did you do it?

I’m rich, she says. I can build whatever I want.

I let out an appreciative whistle. She has outdone herself.

Want to fly a kite with me?

I cannot answer. She asks me again, but I am consumed by what I see.There is a pattern in the sky, I realize, a familiarity in the motions of the kites. I can see them moving closer and closer to an image in my mind. From nowhere, an intense hyperawareness washes over me, déjà vu followed by incomparable bliss. I have been picturing the design I sketched in bathwater on the ceramic tile floor back in Saqqara and it is identical to what I see now. It is like I am living the past and present at the exact same time. In that instant I cease to exist, my physical body dispersing to the winds, and my soul is up with the kites, a single point in the pattern, and that pattern is God.

Worlds rush past me, and time and space and wonder and love.

I have known moments of higher consciousness before, moments of sublime connection with the universe, but none like this.This dwarfs everything. Laughter escapes me in a magnificent rush and all my troubles are borne away.

When the moment passes, as it must, when I turn to Tomi, I can tell from the look on her resplendent, perfectly symmetrical face that as quick as she is, she was too slow to see my transformation. She did not see me join the kites. But it does not matter. I have had a religious epiphany, or gone mad, or both. Whatever it is, I have never felt more alive, and I realize now that whatever happens to me from this point on, nothing can take away the pure, unadulterated ecstasy that has come to blossom within my soul. penny

Entry #312: The Princess and the

Unexpected Windfall -open-

Something’s wrong here. I have all the money in the world and can buy whatever I want. No, really. My bank account says I have nine trillion nine-hundred-ninety-nine billion nine-hundred-ninety-nine million nine-hundred-ninety-nine thousand nine-hundred-ninety-nine big ones. And ninety-nine little ones. That should be a good thing, but it’s not. I can already tell.

Something’s really, really wrong.

Lock.

Entry #312: The Princess and the

Unexpected Windfall -locked-

pandora

Diagnoses are made.

First, about Mu’tazz. I’ve been crossing my fingers for something like an aggressive gastrointestinal flu, but Isaac suspects Black Ep. They’ve quarantined themselves in the back of my copter. Mu’tazz keeps making terrible retching sounds. I’m rattled. I can only imagine what Isaac’s feeling. What we went through last year with Hessa, to go through that again—God, it feels unbearable. Second, about the monkey, it’s monkeys plural—my “he” is a pregnant she. A tribe of pygmy marmosets survived Black Ep naturally all on their own, which means maybe so can we, if we can only figure out what’s protected them while so many other primates bit the dust. The potential for what we can learn here practically has me dancing with joy, and maybe I would be if it weren’t for Mu’tazz. Third, Malachi’s gone. I tried to raise him and he’s just not there. And that’s crazy, because he’s always Johnny-on-the-spot when I need him. I’m running a remote diagnostic, and all it’s telling me is that he’s running a diagnostic too. That doesn’t explain why I’m not getting any response. Maybe the glitches gobbled him up and I’ll have to restore from a backup.

Before I can report to Vashti, she’s called me, hurling curses at me the moment I pick up, in a completely out-of-control attack mode I call “Pit Bull.” Vash rarely loses it, and when she does she usually won’t go past “Rottweiler” or “Doberman,” which makes the rare Pit Bull really something to see. The only words I can catch are “cocksucker” and “massive security breach.”

“Slow down,” I tell her.

“Your boyfriend fucked me!” she screams, sending me scrambling for mental turpentine to erase the picture painted in my head.

“What’s going on?”

“Halloween just stomped his dirty boots all over your precious security system. Everything’s compromised. Universal access to all the files.”

“How do you know it was Hal?”

“Who else could it be? Can you think of someone else with that special mix of venom and know-how?

When the system unspools the address I guarantee you it’ll say the attack came from America. And he promised, Pandora— that son of a bitch gave his word he’d never interfere but that’s exactly what he’s done!”

“Well,” I say, trying to keep a cool head on the situation, “first things first—take the kids out of the IVR.”

“Are you stupid? Champagne already did, but the damage’s done. You can’t unring a bell.”

“Okay, so they learned a few dirty words and got an eyeful of violence or porn or whatever else is floating around in there.” Hey, good news, we found a monkey and listen, bad news, Mu’tazz is sick, I want to tell her, but she’s still rabid.

“Pandora,” she spits, “what’s floating around in there is personal. All my logs, my lab notes, my private communications. Every single file is there for the taking. He found them, he put a price on them and he pimped them out.”

“That is a problem,” I admit, and maybe it was Hal, because right about now I can see him laughing his ass off. And she’s right—it’s a sophisticated attack and he’s just about the only person I know with the kind of savvy to pull this off. Encryption and programming against decryption and reprogramming—I spent months and years setting up the walls he just knocked down. I wonder how long it took him. Should I be insulted or impressed?

“Some of the girls are going to be upset,” I warn Vashti, which serves only to put a muscle near her left eye into spasm. She is breathless with impotent rage.

“He has to answer for this,” she says. “It’s on his head.”

penny

Entry #313: The Princess and the Price -open-

What do I deserve?

It’s a fair question, isn’t it? What exactly do I deserve? Anything at all?

Obviously I don’t deserve your respect. You don’t trust me, and why should you? Why trust the lowest of the low? Better not to give me even my most basic privacy, which you apparently don’t, because you’ve been reading my journal.

I know you’ve been doing it for years.

You’re doing it right now.

But this space is private, isn’t it? Private and personal? For Penny’s innermost thoughts—you said I could write whatever I wanted and it would always be secret and I always believed you—how silly when you don’t care, when you can break my locks and read it like I’m beneath consideration. Like I’m nothing.

Am I nothing to you? When you look at me, is that what you see?

And when I look at the two of you, what do you suppose I see? You might want to think about that, now that the telescope has turned. Now that I’ve read your logs. I know what you’ve done, how you think, all the ways you’ve tricked me. How does it feel to know someone’s got a finger on all your horrible lies?

Oh, did you ever put one over on me. All those times you told me how smart I am, what a great student this, what a hard worker that, when behind my back you say I’m “disappointing,” an “underachiever who has yet to capitalize on her promise”? I show “signs of immaturity”? My operas are “obnoxious and derivative”? And thanks for all the extra money, Champagne.You let me think I was rich when all told I barely make more than Katrina. Katrina’s nine goddamn years old!

You let me think I was best—the alpha—when really you think I’m the omega. I’m the one you worry about. The one you feel sorry for. Poor Penny.

This is my true state? Should I just lay down and die? Do you have any idea what kind of monstrous betrayal this is, you filthy fucking bitches?

Vashti, let’s talk about my “psychological instability.” I’m a narcissist, am I? With “magical thinking” and a “self-induced sense of superiority”? And I’m a “growing problem”? You don’t know the half. You wrote you sometimes doubt I have “feelings of any kind.” That’s just brilliant! Sure, I’m a block of ice. I don’t feel anything, so you can do whatever you want to me and it just won’t matter. That’s your big analysis? That’s what you believe? Then why am I so hurt? Did you ever stop to think that in my heart I might feel things more deeply than you ever could, you degenerate piece of shit?

I was incredibly arrogant, wasn’t I? So arrogant that an hour ago I thought I had nothing left to lose. Now I see I was wrong—all the things I took for granted were things I never had. Gone now, everything’s gone. Can you explain it? Can you explain how you could do this to me? I may not be a human being, but I always assumed you’d treat me with human decency. How could you?

I always stood up for you. I loved you. Last spring when you decided to crack down on the rules, Brigit and Sloane thought it would be funny to call you the Vichy instead of the V.C. and I said they’d better stop or I’d tell. But they’re right, you made them right—you are the Vichy—you’re Nazis, Vashti in charge, and Champagne “only following orders.”

“We’re at war with Black Ep,” so you wanted focused and obedient soldiers. You had Pandora string the Inside with subliminal messages.

You made us take mood-altering drugs and said they were immunogens.

You gave us pills to inhibit our libidos, and blamed it on our physiologies. No distractions from our studies. Even if I can’t give birth, don’t you think I deserve to feel like a woman? Is the plague so important you’d deny me even that?

I’m not a lab rat. Fuck you for the liberties you took.

Vashti—

You can’t lie anymore.

You can’t control me with drugs.

You can’t control me with money.

You can’t control me with love.

You can’t make me into something I’m not.

You can’t kill my free will.

You never really cared about me.

You only pretended.

Champagne—

I used to feel safe when you held me.

I used to feel loved.

I treasured the time we spent finger-painting.

Blowing the soap bubbles together.

Letting me braid your hair.

I used to call you Mommy.

And you stood by.

You did nothing.

You let this happen.

Listen closely, you hideous cunts: I have something you don’t. It’s beating fiercely in my chest, and if you saw it you’d wither. You don’t know the first thing about love, and the hate you’ve spread will come back to you with teeth. That’s fair warning. If you take away nothing else from this, fucking understand this: The next hex I put out is going to make you shriek.

Everything you did to me has a price and I’m going to collect it.

pandora

I’m five hundred miles from Cape Verde when Malachi comes back from the dead. His hologram flickers in so silently, without warning, that I jump in my seat, banging my knees against the console. From the wild look in his steel gray eyes, I can tell he’s shaken and spooked, all his fight-or-flight flags triggered.

“Reset your flags,” I tell him, and even though he could instantly drop his mood back to Buddha-like calm if he wanted to, it’s not in his nature to do it. He shakes his head violently, puffs out a breath, brushes his hair back with his fingers and looks at me.

“Someone took me out,” he says.

“Do you know who?”

“Pandy, it was a skillful trap. Reminded me of the attacks Mercutio made against me years ago. Not the same signature, but the same level of sophistication.”

“Was it Halloween?”

“It came from Michigan. So unless you think Fantasia did it—which I don’t.”

And I don’t think that either—in my head, pieces of the puzzle are snapping into place. Halloween wants to humiliate Vashti but can’t reach her with Malachi intact, so he traps Malachi first. Wounding the security guard to rob the bank. I share the theory with Mal and he suspects I’m right.

“He took out Pace three seconds later—it looks like we were simply alarm wires he had to snip. Which, it goes without saying, I consider an insult.”

“So now he’s wounded both our egos. Do you think he was trying to destroy you or just keep you tied up for a while?”

“I won’t hazard a guess. Either way, it’s pretty callous.”

“Callous,” I agree. “Especially since you left things with him on good terms.”

“Better than you know,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

He throws me a conscience-stricken look and tells me he’s glad I’m sitting down. “For years, I’ve had a deal with Halloween. I’ve worked for him. But this tears it—he’s just burned through the last of my loyalty.”

“You work for me,” I say.

“No, I work with you. I worked for him.”

“So you’ve been lying to me?”

“Oh yes,” he says mournfully. “Do you remember seventeen years ago? When you first started spying on him?”

Of course I do. In that first year of freedom, Halloween was trying to kill himself. Not directly, but the effect would have been the same. He went to Pennsylvania to restore a rusted deathtrap of a roller coaster by the name of Breaking Point. Malachi furnished me with the satellite photos and I knew I had to try and reel him in.

“He figured out what you were doing and put a stop to it,” Malachi says. “The satellites aren’t under my full control— in fact, for the past seventeen years, I haven’t been able to take a picture of any part of the United States at all.”

“So the pictures you’ve been sending me? They’re fakes?”

“All of them,” he says. “Halloween put me up to it. I owed him a favor for saving me from Mercutio’s tender mercies, and for not deleting me when he could. That’s the arrangement we struck.”

My stony silence forces an apology from him.

You didn’t force an apology from me—it was freely given.

You just wanted to drop your regret flag.

I still regret it.Though the decision made sense at the time.

“Do you still talk to him?” I ask.

“Not in years. I honestly don’t know what’s been happening to him, or why he’d do a thing like this. Perhaps he just snapped. Isolation can do funny things.”

“Well, by betraying me you helped keep him isolated,” I snap. “Whatever your reasons for doing it, you might have done a world of harm.”

“I’ll do whatever I can to fix things,” he promises. “What can I do to help?”

“Take the wheel,” I say, disgustedly leaving my chair and storming to the back. My head may be spinning, but one thing is perfectly clear. No matter what Hal wants, I’m going to pay him a visit. He has to answer to Vashti, he has to answer to Malachi, but more than anyone else he has to answer to me.

I come to the three girls, who are still excitedly debating names for our sedated pregnant marmoset, their rapid-fire chatter pausing when they see me.

“Is Mu’tazz okay?” they ask, and I have no answer, but I tell them that I’m on my way to check. And so into the quarantine I go.

My sixteen-year-old nephew is sprawled out on the blankets, covered with sweat, eyes closed and mouth open. “He’s delirious,” Isaac tells me, lines of worry etched into his face. “He keeps fading in and out of consciousness. I wish he’d just sleep.”

Mu’tazz mumbles something I can’t understand in a language I don’t speak. I kneel down to see his eyes open ever so slightly, but they focus on nothing, and then close once again. I take Isaac’s hand.

“Is it what you think it is?” I ask.

“Worse,” he says.

“How can it be worse than Black Ep?”

“I have a course of treatment for Black Ep,” he says. “Not for this. I’ve never seen this before.”

“Something will work,” I assure him, but I realize, quietly, that I’m not so sure. I speak not from knowledge but from hope.

Mu’tazz repeats what he said, muscles thrashing, his hands grinding into the blankets and squeezing as hard as he can.

“Is that Arabic?”

“Aramaic,” Isaac says. “I’ve been teaching him Aramaic.”

“What is he saying?”

Isaac does not look at me. He looks at his son and shakes his head, as if he could somehow save him with that one simple negation. A teardrop escapes him, rolling down his cheek to splash upon the blanket.

“‘It is the End of the World,’” he says.