

# PROM REVOLUTION

#

# by Mark H. Jamieson

This is a work of fiction, set in a fictional future. Names, characters and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual entities or persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

Written by Mark H. Jamieson

First ePublished: January 20, 2016

Copyright 2016

Cover Art by Mark H. Jamieson

Copyright 2015

All rights reserved.

Version 1.1 March 9, 2016

ISBN 978-0-9792518-3-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-3101590-8-4 (e-published)

Science Fiction>General

Young Adult>Science Fiction

mark@mhjlaw.com

mhjlaw.com

Thanks to Sandee, Jillian, Julia and David for their help in reading drafts of this story and providing comments that made it better.

# Dedicated to my wife. Looking forward to jumping to Paris with you one day.

## Prom Night, Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

Hiding on top of the bookcase, I watch my identical self below. His suit changes colors from blue to yellow, bound to Sadie's dress, while my suit remains off-white, my connection to Sadie, along with everything else, gone.

He tosses chairs and tables trying to find me, the crumpled silver moon in his right fist. That paper decoration can't hurt me, but he keeps swinging it back and forth, eyes bulging. It's strange to see yourself, really see yourself. His high pitched version of my voice shouts, "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want, but Sadie is with me. Me. I'm the only Steve Young."

I never thought that I would start a revolution by asking Sadie Solomon to the middle school prom. Then again, I never thought that I would be hiding from a pissed off me who was trying to kill me with a papier-mâché moon.

I am afraid of heights, so hiding up here is the safest place not to find me, unless he has that same idea. His suit changes from yellow to green. Pausing, he stares up at my hiding place. I lock eyes with my crazed self, hair standing straight up from our fight and too much hair gel.

I should be the one taking Sadie to Paris and getting my first kiss. Everything about this is wrong. Identical copies of people don't exist, and they certainly don't try to beat you up.

Something happened. Something changed everything. It had to be my former best friend, Mikey Rey. He did something. He did this to me. Did Mikey ask my permission before turning my life upside down? No. I'm not sure what he did or why. I don't even know when Mikey decided to ruin my life, but I'm not going to let him. I jump from the bookcase; I can't hide anymore.

## Monday, March 16, 2116

## Mikey

Flowers spring from manicured beds in all of the yards, blazing brilliant colors and flanked by real grass, deep green from excessive fertilizing. Steve Young's house like all the others, including mine, embraces spring so wholeheartedly that it forces winter into another chapter. Steve sees me, but doesn't budge from the porch. He just stands there eating chocolate covered pretzel chips. He doesn't seem fazed by the idea of eating candy for breakfast; to him this is normal. Next to Steve motionless and withholding judgment, stands a human-sized wooden bunny. I should anticipate it by now. Every time I visit, something unnecessary and without any purpose accosts me.

"Why the giant rabbit?"

"Mikey, don't your foster parents celebrate anything?" Steve responds before his eyes dart back, searching for something else in the bag to eat.

"I got a new remote control drone last week for acing the chemistry exam."

"Not chemistry, something that matters."

"Grades matter." Steve didn't care about grades and really none of them needed to care. That was one of the privileges of growing up over here.

"Time to start for school," announces Steve's personal assistant. Steve taps the PA's smooth blue shell then drops it into his pocket.

Steve's house sat at the end of the street, his backyard blending seamlessly into the park. The park ran through the middle of Orlando, only one hundred yards across, but two miles long, it created the main green space for the city. The city itself from wall to wall was only two miles east and west and one mile north and south, a squat rectangular box filled with smiles.

For the past six years, I've lived within the walls, surrounded by flowers every spring. On this side, the wall only rises ten feet high on top of the old roadways. Before the portals, grand roads connected cities, and people travelled for hours or days to get to their destinations. As the abandoned roadways fell into disrepair their ruins became the foundations for the city walls. In Orlando, the wall ran on top of these elevated roads on the west and south side. For the north and east sides, no highways existed. The planners created their own elevated foundation by bulldozing unnecessary structures outside the walls. At ten feet high from the inside the wall broke the line of sight for everyone within the city, and nobody tried to climb it. Its true height was concealed and only noticeable to those who saw it from the other side, something that Steve, born here, would never do. The wall's true size kept the unwanted workers out of the city.

The wall separated the two parallel normals. On the other side of the wall, people were also beginning their day, but nobody was eating candy. In our city center, the higher floors of the taller buildings allowed you to see beyond the wall, but who would want that view?

I was lucky, I made it inside, but one day, if I fail to provide a service to the community, they could toss me back out.

"Reminder: time to start for school," the personal assistant repeats its warning.

Something remains in the food packet, and Steve's eyes cross as he fixates on the bottom. As he turns the bag upside down, crumbs fall onto his clothes. I want to shout, "You're wasting food!" but the giant bunny stops me. Within the walls they waste food every day, and for celebrations they waste even more. Crumbs are crumbs.

His assistant interrupts my thoughts. "Departure for school needs to commence," which is assistant speak for get your butt in gear.

"Can't you turn that off?" He could turn it off, or change the presets, but everyday the same thing, the identical warnings to leave for school, and Steve never leaves on time or even tries to leave before the final notice. From my foster parents' house I could cut through the park at Shine, but instead I come here every morning to Summerlin crossing, adding ten minutes to my walk, but I still always arrive before Steve leaves his porch.

"It's on the default settings. It's easier."

"Come on, before it chimes again," I say.

As we walk down the path beside his house, other groups of kids join in the migration without acknowledging me.

"This way." I had a plan.

"Mikey, you're not supposed to cut through the woods."

"It's a park, not woods. No bears, not even muggers."

"Why would there be muggers?"

"Exactly. It's a short cut." Steve spent his whole life next to the park, right next to it, but probably only saw maybe ten percent of it from the designated pathways. A pair of cardinals, a bright red male and his dull brown companion, leap to the air from a branch, surprised at the disturbance as we dare to walk without a concrete path beneath us.

"Why are you in a rush to get to school?"

"Why do you let your assistant control you, instead of you controlling your assistant?"

"That's not an answer."

Sometimes Steve and I get out of sync. He didn't want to go to school. None of the trust babies want to be there. They just sit through the day pretending to learn. If they had a pill or something to jack information directly into their brains, maybe they would learn something. Instead, the school provides tablets with last century's technology. They're branded with new logos, but not the giant leap that the historians promised. The trust babies carry their tablets back and forth to school, but they fail to serve as a catalyst to knowledge. They're little more than extra weight to carry.

"Are we close?"

"Steve, you can see the top of the courthouse to your right past those trees. You can't get lost here. You see it? It's huge."

"I see it."

He smiles a bit at the sight of the familiar building as he gingerly tries to step without touching too much nature. Loose bricks from an old road mark an improvised path for us to follow through the trees.

We emerge from the woods above the main path that runs through the middle of the park further dividing Orlando into northern and southern zones. Following the main path west leads to Lake Eola and then to the courthouse towering over the transit station at the western wall. Our school sits in the center of the city, and we emerge within sight of its main entrance. Steve's personal assistant would be confused now that the morning walk took half the time.

We move onto a concrete path as two kids, Phil and Dale, staring at their tablets, almost bump into us. Dale does a quick head nod to Steve, nothing to me, and then returns to his screen. Their tablets run a game while their hands crisscross over the screens, moving their avatars. They weren't playing a sanctioned game, but a hacked open source version of Always Anarchy. All these games of trust babies – games like Always Anarchy, Warcry Savior and Deathman Salvation - romanticize struggle, glorify fighting, and allow the player to restart gameplay after death at the last saved position. They're not real, nothing about them was real. Trust babies walk in a manicured paradise while their minds seek pleasure from desolate fantasies of a post-apocalyptic world. Why do people seek the opposite of what they have?

Steve hits my shoulder, "Why did you stop walking? Zoning out?"

"Sorry." Steve grew up here. He never wonders if there will be food the next day. He never thinks about money or why he was born on this side of the wall.

"We've got to break you out of your freak shell," Steve comments.

I want to reply "No thanks," but he wouldn't understand.

As we near school, more kids emerge from paths that all converge on the steps. Steve notices a change to the sign and points at the banner - no electrics, just a cloth sign announcing, "100 Years of Joy 2016-2116". The banner partially covered the LED sign for Dr. Gerber Middle School. After the dates on the cloth sign, someone had sloppily written RIP. "Rest in peace," Steve murmurs, "That's funny."

"No, it's not."

"Come on, Mikey, it's hilarious." More kids emerge from rows of self-driving vehicles dropping off outside the school. With no chance of rain today, only open-air rides fill the street and all of the kids exit wearing white school uniforms. "Doesn't your PA check the weather for you?" Steve stares at my clothes, only noticing them now that he sees all the other kids in white.

Give me a break. Five possible shirts, three types of pants, and they all wear the same combination because of a suggestion from an electronic box? "I like black. It goes with everything." Black shirt, black long pants, black socks, black shoes: this felt right.

"It's sunny. Everyone wears white when it's sunny."

"Not everyone. It's not important." It's only 7:42 am. Still time. I let out the secret, "I found the password for the portals."

"What?"

"They used the first ten digits of pi as a password. What a worthless password, really, pi. Might as well use 'password'."

Steve closes then opens his eyes before asking, "What are you talking about? We were talking about your lack of fashion, not portals." He's such a fish-head.

"Before each transmission, the portals have to talk to each other, sort of like a digital handshake, to establish communications before sending the passenger to the other side."

"And this means?"

"I can monitor transmissions. Been doing so since Saturday. Any time someone beams out of Orlando, I can read their DNA footprint, neuro-pathway imprint, everything!"

"That can't be legal. You can't just read people's DNA."

"I don't think there's a law against it, and those machines don't work as advertised."

"They work."

"They don't."

"Of course they do."

"Trust me." I wanted Steve to trust me, to put the same blind trust that he had in the machines in me, a real person, his best friend.

"Mikey, it's instantaneous travel. You just jump. If I want to go to Hawaii, I reserve a ticket, walk through the machine and kaboom, pop out the other side to go surfing. It works."

"There isn't enough data." He needed to believe me.

"You didn't collect enough?"

"No, they're not sending enough."

"But it works."

"Each machine is sending information, like in the olden days, you know, a telegraph, fax machine..." Same stupid fish-head stare from Steve. "umm... walkie talkies, telephone. Enough for the other machine to know who is being sent and a neuro map, but it's truncated beyond the necessary algorithms. They aren't sending enough data to transport a whole person to the other side of the world."

"Just stop, Mikey."

"Listen to me." Steve had to believe, he had to understand.

"No, listen to me. I haven't seen any videos showing partial bodies showing up at stations. People would notice pieces missing. The portals work. If they didn't, then someone would fix them. My dad uses them everyday."

"They're not telling us the truth."

"Mikey, the machines work. You don't need to know how they work. My God, you don't even need to know how to fix them, workers do that. All you have to do is use them, and that is what I'm going to do one day, use them, not repair them. Save that for the workers."

I was losing him. He didn't understand. "But this is important."

"Why?"

"If they're missing information then it changes you." I said it. Someone had to know besides me. It felt better to get it out there, but Steve just stared, again. His personal assistant would start announcing the need to move soon, the need to do a bathroom check, or whatever it thought proper. "Did you hear me?"

"You're crazy, Mikey." He left before his assistant could give another warning, not wanting to hear the truth. I just have to convince him before he takes his first jump through a portal.

## Monday, March 16, 2116

## Steve

I had to get away from Mikey. He was crazy this morning. The portals didn't change people, they made life easier. You needed to get somewhere, you went! What could be better?

Dad said they promoted peace by making the world smaller. If Moscow or Beijing are just a short walk down the street, why fight? And nobody fought anymore. But I'm not sure about Dad's logic. Would enemies become friends just because they could walk through a portal into the other country?

The only criteria for a city to obtain a license to operate a portal was a designated weapon-free zone around the portal. Before the walls they were afraid of people sending bombs through the transports. So now nothing that could explode was allowed in the city. Within the walls we couldn't even have fireworks, an awesome but necessary loss according to Dad. Peace in our time created by walls and portals demanded sacrifices. That is what they pound into us in every history class. I know to select those answers on the quiz, but walls and portals can't be the sole reason for peace.

Neither the walls nor the portals made people behave differently, or stop the wars, those are just tools. Something that changed people at the core brought peace.

Being immortal must modify your perspective; make you better than the savages outside the wall. When you have the possibility of living for hundreds of years, maybe forever, death matters more, you lose more if you die. You never see armies of tortoises, creatures that live for centuries, marching up the beach attacking rival gangs. While ants, animals that count each day of their life, sacrifice legions of soldiers when they smell foreigners from another colony. Nobody inside the wall wants to end their life prematurely or live for centuries with the consequences of war. Maybe outside the wall, people still want to kill, but that only makes keeping the walls secure more important.

I pull up the live feed from Marsh Harbor in the Bahamas, clear skies with waves crashing on a wide-open beach. Yes, there are things worth living for. You just needed to know where to look. In less than two months, we will be snorkeling in those waters. Just a portal jump away, now that I'm thirteen. I've been waiting all my life to be old enough to use a portal, and paranoid Mikey isn't going to stop me.

Chemistry starts our day with Mr. Patz wearing his Monday shirt: thin blue stripes with a collar way too big. The teachers at Dr. Gerber Middle School dress in clothes from decades ago, revealing their age. Nobody under ninety would be caught dead in Mr. Patz's collar. Ms. McCausland always wears a hat \- each hat a bit different, slightly changed to match her outfit. That marks her as at least sixty. Mr. Patz doesn't care if we know his age. He seems proud to be one of the firsts, and is always talking about the change, like it matters now. Like his clothes, he seems stuck back in the past, before the walls went up.

Mr. Patz stands in front of the board with only one side of a chemical equation written. He looks right at me before noticing Mikey leaning out of his desk, almost toppling with his hand up high. Nobody else glances up from their tablets. It's crazy to start the day with chemistry, another indication of poor planning by the counselors.

Mr. Patz moves over to a poster advertising the Middle School Prom - 2016-2116 One Hundred Years of Joy. "Feeling old today. I remember sitting in those chairs in this same classroom. Back then my teacher was Mr. Damon. He played music from the Grateful Dead during exams. He said we needed to be able to take tests with distractions. I never thought that I would be here teaching, and definitely not at this age. Nobody did."

"Who, besides Mikey, would like to balance this chemical equation? Anyone?" The board re-configures itself to show several sample equations. "How about now? This is what we did on Friday as a class. Nobody? All right then, let's do a quick quiz."

Mr. Patz makes some quick motions with his hands, erasing the board. "I've sent you the quiz. This is an easy one. Almost eighty years ago, when I was a student here, we had this exact same quiz. I found it in the archives. It was easy then, and it should be easy today. Easy, that is if you took the time to review the material." The other students begin to fidget in their seats as the screens on their tablets glow with the quiz displayed prominently on the top layer. "The archives are blocked right now, so please don't waste your time poking around for answers."

Why were Mondays necessary? We need more Monday holidays and Fridays off, too. On the screen in front of me, the first equation has either propane or methane (always get those confused) combining to form a new molecule. Why would anyone want to combine a carbon-hydrogen molecule with anything? Three carbons and six hydrogens combining with water, okay. Pressing next on the tablet brings up possible multiple-choice answers all looking the same, just different variations of numbers behind some of the letters.

Scrolling down reveals more chemical equations to balance, more assortments of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. I'm never going to need this; I'll do better on the retest. The retests are always easier.

## Monday, March 16, 2116

## Mikey

As Steve leaves the school, he sneezes twice, and I let him know, "Aristotle first documented the relationship between sunlight and sneezing."

"It's just a sneeze," Steve responds.

"It's genetics. Nothing profound. Aristotle blamed it on the heat, a tickling of the nose."

"Glad to know that. What were the answers to the quiz?"

Swiping my hand across the tablet, I push the exam towards Steve's device.

As Steve glances down, he shakes his head.

"Did you get any?"

Steve points at his tablet, "I don't remember. They all look the same. We don't need to know this."

"I found Mr. Patz's quiz in the archives. He didn't find it easy when he was a kid. I pulled the other tests that I could find for you in case he gives us another one from his glory years."

"Look at the year on this. He went to school here what, seventy-seven, seventy-eight years ago? Why should I need to learn something that old? Why?"

"So that you can create something new."

"It just bothers me, Mikey. They keep telling us we're lucky, because we've got all this time, and then they go and waste it, forcing us to learn this stuff. Doesn't it get to you?"

"I need to learn it, or they'll send me back."

"They say that to scare you; they won't do it. It would be a waste."

"They could."

"You're so smart, and then you say the dumbest things. They won't send you back."

But they could, a possibility that would always exist. Steve knows that, I know that, but he doesn't want me to worry. I don't respond.

Outside the school, a line of self-driving cars wait to pick up students, while the majority of us strike off on our paths home. I scroll through my tablet, looking at the latest news. Nothing unique pops up. A celebrity couple broke up, a new one got together, and someone is feuding with a former co-star. Different faces, different names, but the same stories, cut and pasted from last week or month's news.

Steve continues walking with his head down looking at his tablet, flipping through messages and responding.

I shut my tablet down and just look around me. The oak trees all have the bright green of new growth with no blemishes or marks that will coat them by the end of the year, turning them brittle and hard. Bright green is the color of being within the walls.

We make it almost to his house before Steve breaks the silence, "My family is going to the Bahamas this summer. Do you want to come? You would have your own room on our boat."

"Donna and Joe aren't fond of me going away with other families. The regulations limit how much time I can be away from them."

"Can you just pop down for a weekend?"

"No."

"They put a portal at Marsh Harbor, I'm going to be using it to come back and forth. Just pop over for a day or two - take advantage of turning thirteen."

So I've got a month or two to convince Steve of the danger of portals. It would be easier if he believes. It's obvious, but he doesn't see it. "I'm not getting in a transport."

"You can't spend your life in this town. One day, you are going to have to get in one. You might as well make it now and have some fun."

"I'm not getting in one. Not going to risk it."

"You've got no proof. No missing pieces. Face it."

I can't show him anything solid, but if he looks, takes the time to really look, he can connect the dots. I've just got to get him to start seeing the dots.

## Monday, March 16, 2116

## Steve

This is what I get for saying that Mikey has no proof. I'm outside for no reason, sitting underneath overgrown bushes by the western wall. It rained for an hour this evening, so as I wait, droplets from the leaves fall on my face, and when I shift position the whole branch moves, causing multiple strikes. Every piece of clothing clings to my skin, every second I get wetter.

Next to me, adding to the ridiculousness of this night, Mikey is wearing black from head to toe. I'm not sure if he's mimicking a ninja or just being Mikey. He changed from all black school clothes to all black whatever this is. His shirt has an attached hood, and he has that over his head with pull-string drawn so that he can only see out of a small hole in front of his face. Despite the humidity, he wears thick black gloves with active fingertips that allow him to continue operating his tablet. For shoes, instead of something normal, he has on black worker boots. I didn't even know they sold those in the city.

Below us, under bright lights, people stand in line waiting to walk through the portal while a separate portal flashes with each arrival of people transporting into Orlando.

"Watch them when they exit."

Nothing ever happens at the portals. That would be news.

"What am I looking for?"

"Watch the corners of their mouths. They pull down with pain. See."

"They're smiling. Walking, smiling people. Everybody is happy and alive. Look - another live walking body, and another. Everyone."

"It's a forced smile. Besides the corners of the mouth, look at their eyes. A true smile pulls the entire face."

"I don't see it."

"Take some pictures and cover the mouths with your hand. Just look at the eyes."

On my tablet, I snap pictures of the people emerging from the transport, smiling faces on each of them. With my hand, I cover parts of their faces. "What am I looking for?"

Mikey moves his hands over my tablet, alternating between covering the upper and lower halves of the faces, "It's easy to notice a false smile if you break up the face into zones. My social counselor makes me do this during my daily mirror time."

"Okay, I don't see anything wrong with these people, but if I did, what would that even prove?"

"Look at them. The tops of their faces don't match the bottoms. It's evidence of a lie, a false smile."

"I don't see it."

"Look at the people going into the machines."

"I can't see their faces."

"You can see some, but more importantly, watch their bodies."

"Nothing. Just a bunch of people waiting to walk into a transport and jump someplace."

"Some appear nervous, some happy; it varies. That girl looks like she needs a pill."

The constant jittering of the girl keeps her moving up and down the line. Almost dancing, too much motion for the somber act of waiting. "Definitely bouncing."

"And everyone coming out?" Mikey asks.

"They're happy."

"False smiling. Everybody coming out is not-happy happy, a homogeneous mash of okay-happy. Every one of them. The transport changes them. If it were truly instantaneous, then people coming out would have the same emotions coming out as they did going in; they wouldn't all be the same. They lose something with the transition. They're changed."

"You can't compare the people leaving to the people arriving."

"Everyone coming out is the same. They all look the same."

"Happy."

"Yes, emotionally, there's no variety. Emotions are easy to see, but what else do they drop with the transmission?"

"Nothing, Mikey, no proof." I get up from under the bush releasing a final torrent of drops. "I'm going home."

## Tuesday, March 17, 2116

## Mikey

It's another sunny afternoon walking away from school with Steve. He's dressed in white, controlled by his PA like all the other kids, dressed the same. Steve refused to see the truth even after our trip to the portal yesterday.

"Which faction are you joining for the tournament tomorrow?" I ask Steve.

He doesn't respond, his eyes following the girls in front of us. "Did you hear me? Tomorrow, which online faction are you going to join?"

"I'm going to soccer tryouts. You should try."

Soccer? The same guy who can't even run one circuit of the track at school thinks he can get on the soccer team? And why Steve thinks that I would want to play is beyond me. "I need to be online for the tournament and I don't do sports. My social counselor says it's because I lack empathy. It's just dumb."

"I've never seen you even try."

"I don't enjoy throwing balls."

"Kicking. It's soccer. You kick."

"It's not real."

"Soccer is more real than an online tournament."

"It doesn't matter. In a thousand years nobody will be telling stories about a soccer player."

"Then try a different sport."

"You know Robin Hood?"

"He's not real."

"That's my point. One thousand years from now they will still be telling stories about Robin Hood. Nobody will be telling stories about soccer players. The fictional world is more real than the sports world. That's all I'm saying."

"You should try."

"It doesn't matter, Steve. Nothing about playing soccer matters."

"It's just for fun. It doesn't need to matter." Steve looks at his feet and then mumbles, "They have some girls on the team." He then partially points with his hand without looking up. "Sadie plays."

Logic fails when an idiot refuses to use his own brain. "You're trying out because of a girl?" Hormones. It makes sense now; everything makes sense.

"I'm not."

The three girls in front of us take the path to Shine, towards my house and away from Steve's. Steve hesitates and turns his head to look at the girls as we reach the crossway. Sadie, blond hair bound in a pony, walks to the right of her friends and I catch her looking back at Steve, she is more aware than me that we've been following them this whole time.

"You're such a bad liar." I leave him at the intersection, partially blocking his view of the girls, as I start down that same path towards my house.

"Come by the field tomorrow if you change your mind," Steve calls out. I didn't need to turn around to know that he was still standing at the intersection, not making any progress towards his house.

Sadie Solomon, the source of Steve's fondness for soccer, has turned fully around at the sound of Steve's voice to wave past me, the invisible kid in black. In the six years I've been here Sadie has never talked to me. Got a, "Out of my way worker boy," once when she was running by me on the track, but I don't count that as talking.

## Tuesday, March 17, 2116

## Mikey

I'm in a hanger at the airport. An abandoned wing leans against the wall to my left, creating a perfect spot for playing hide-and-go seek. I slowly pull the wing back from the wall anticipating someone staring back at me, finger over his mouth asking me to be quiet, but nobody is hiding here today. Moving the wing exposes two baited traps waiting to catch a meal, a sure sign that I'm over the wall. After years of eating real food, I involuntarily gag at the thought of eating rats.

I've changed. The city has altered me. Something once common has become repulsive, and I'm aware of it. I also know that I'm dreaming, repeating the same false memories.

Nothing in the hanger blocks the sound of my footsteps, so the noise echoes off the walls as I walk across the empty, concrete floor. This area is too far from drinkable water sources, so it remains free from permanent squatters. As the sun rises up unaligned with the runway, I head away from the morning light to exit through a door on the west side of the hanger. I'm now only minutes from home.

No manicured yards dot this concrete landscape. I pass abandoned airplanes tied next to the chain-linked fence that is clearly ineffective in protecting the airport. Gaping holes grow each year from constant nudges as kids and adults enter at will, rummaging through the remaining skeletons of equipment still at the site.

I head north following a narrow gaming trail that borders the airport's fence. When the fence turns forty-five degrees to continue north-east, the path turns to match the change, and it's my sign to breakaway and head to the left.

This is the edge of the district with small plots claimed by residents. I pass the Easterling's home, a shiny twelve-by-twelve galvanized metal building, partially buried on the two sides facing the airport. The Easterlings were one of the first families to try living this close to the airport.

Rounding the exposed sections of their two water cisterns I can see my home, or at least its shell; a thin haze of smoke hovers around it. All that remains is the frame of the old bus that we lived in.

Aunt Molly, my mother's sister, sits outside next to a partial concrete block wall covered with graffiti drawings of overlapping flowers. She looks up covering her eyes to avoid being blinded by the sun.

"You're back? Thought we never would have to look at you again." She stands up and moves to intercept me, grabbing the baseball bat by her chair.

"They're dead. I sent marker rocks yesterday to pay my respects."

Stepping closer, she points the bat at me.

"You killed them. Abandoning them here."

Aunt Molly leans closer towering over me to spit in my face with each word, "For what? Fancy clothes? Blah, you never were any good." It's a shotgun splatter as drops of her saliva strike without control, hitting everywhere from my chin to my eyes.

I wake in my bed, my hands reaching to wipe away her spit but only encountering my own sweat. The glow from the green lava lamp dominates the bedroom, making all the shadows dark green. I take off my wet clothes and toss them into the closet, finding drier replacements.

At my desk I pull up my personal stats and display them on the wall. Scrolling through shows my parents as alive, along with my brothers and sister, but Aunt Molly is still listed as dead. She died before I moved into Orlando. Hers was my last funeral. She would always sing when she painted. She wanted us to be artists, always giving us recycled art supplies for birthdays. Before I left, I placed a painted rock in her memory at the cemetery.

Closing the files, I search for a new challenge replacing the display with a block of data from the people transporting out of Orlando. Now familiar symbols and characters mark the start of each transmission. I move through the lines looking for anomalies. My body is not going to let me sleep tonight, so I might as well get something useful accomplished and crash in the morning. Before me is all the information used to transmit a human being to another place. Nothing special when looking at it, just lines of data. In front of me on the screen is a pattern that I've seen before. I scroll back up, confirming the same eight letters, g-e-q-u-a-l-s-a, are there. Is it a marker for the destination? If I change a variable right behind it or drop in new blocks would they even notice?

Could I send everyone wanting to go to Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires by switching those variables, overflowing the station in Argentina and leaving millions of people very confused, or would they just disappear? Something like that needs to happen. It shouldn't be too hard, and it would give them a warning: proof positive that the portals are dangerous.

## Wednesday, March 18, 2116

## Steve

Mikey fails to show up for school today. Sometimes he does that. He's always harping about the importance of school, but he misses more days than anyone. He's probably just sitting at home pretending to be sick. If the administrators would let him attend school remotely, Mikey would probably jump at the chance. He'd love to just sit in his room all day.

Mikey needed to learn to socialize, to be part of the group, but he didn't seem to care. It wasn't until third period that someone mentioned the calm. It's amazing how truly different school can be without one person. It shouldn't make a difference, but it did. It started in chemistry and just continued throughout the day. Mr. Patz didn't give a quiz. He sat at his desk and drank coffee while we played with giant models of molecules at our desks. I created a little dog with mine, and the tablet was able to identify it as propanal. My random collection of atoms was something real.

In English, Ms. McCausland let us have free time on our tablets. No assignment, no limits on where we could go. She said that it was important for us to understand and appreciate modern media. She had never mentioned modern anything before, and it kept going in history. Mr. Hennen waited until everyone was at our desks and then announced a field trip to the park. Today we would be having class outside.

Without Mikey each teacher feels free to relax. I felt it. From a walk to school without someone besides my PA yacking at me to get moving, to all the kids in the hallway saying, "Hi," to sitting outside for history class while Mr. Hennen talks about some war fought for cheaper oil.

Ever since starting here in first grade, Mikey has been the new kid from outside of the wall. Craig Corbin and Donnie Formet moved over after him, and even Linda Hillerman, but they blend in. Mikey never blends and with his absence, everything seems bizarrely more normal, relaxed – calm.

## Wednesday, March 18, 2116

## Steve

Sadie stands in the center of the field, mirroring her body to match the trainer. The trainer guides the group of students through stretching exercises - nothing vigorous. I don't need to stretch, but it's a chance to be near Sadie. I stay in the back trying to mimic the routine.

Sadie doesn't see me fall when the trainer makes us stand on one foot while reaching out to grab the other. She's probably trying to make us boys look bad, as most of the girls don't seem to have any problems with her routine, while a bunch of the guys fall. The stretching lasts forever and then the trainer just stops and walks away, shouting, "See how long you can hold it." We lay on our backs, holding our legs up and parallel to the ground, the burning running all the way down, begging me to stop. My legs drop to the ground as soon as the trainer walks past my head while Sadie continues. Now is my chance. As the group starts to disperse I walk over to Sadie who is still lying on the ground, legs raised.

"So do you like soccer?"

She looks right at me, "This is hard."

"Okay." I wait. More people give up, until Sadie remains the last one.

She lifts her head to look around, confirming that the others have all given up, and then her legs fall.

"Do you like soccer?" I try again.

She stands up and then bends down, grabbing her knees with both hands before looking up, "Yeah." She then stands on one leg and repeats that dancing lord thing by reaching back and grabbing her other foot parallel to her head.

"Are you trying out for the team?"

"Yeah," another one word answer from her.

"Me too." I bend down, placing one of the practice balls on my knee to begin juggling it in the air with my legs. I almost reach my record of eight before it falls to the ground next to her.

Releasing her raised foot back to the ground, Sadie places it on top of the ball. She begins to move the ball back and forth alternating between her feet. Then with both feet, she twirls the ball behind her back so that it arches forward before she heads the ball. She continues to head and kick the ball without letting it touch the ground. Her body anticipates the next move as she continues dancing with the ball.

"Kind of thought that," she says with another kick. "Saw you standing over me in the middle of a soccer field," another kick, "wearing soccer clothes," head butt, "and then you kicked this roundy thing," kick. "I thought to myself, yep," kick, "that cute guy, Steve, is trying out for soccer." She pauses to smile, catching the ball behind her head with her neck and says, "Good luck with tryouts." She releases the ball slowly, allowing it to roll down her perfect back, and then she gives it a backward kick with the heel of her foot, starting the whole routine of heading and kicking the ball all over.

"You're good."

She lets the ball drop past her head and hit the ground. Then placing her foot on it like a Roman gladiator claiming a conquest, she questions me, "Good. Just good? You're funny."

## Wednesday, March 18, 2116

## Mikey

##

Below me, Steve stands while I climb. He almost hugs the tree trying to watch Sadie and her two buds, Emma and Mia, pass by on the other side of the street. Sadie spots Steve and waves. Steve raises his hand to wave back, and then as a pack they laugh, and he slowly lowers his arm.

"At soccer practice, she laughed at me," Steve announces.

"She, Sadie?"

"Yep, Sadie."

"Not surprised."

"But at me."

"A he's-cute laugh, or a he's-an-idiot laugh?"

"More like a he's-an-idiot laugh, but she didn't really laugh out loud: she just smiled."

"Kind of like a silent, internal monologue, ending with a he's-a-dork laugh?"

"Yep."

"Harsh."

"I don't think I'm going to make the team. She will. She's better than me at soccer. Much better."

With my climbing gloves on, I begin swinging, moving from branch to branch, almost brachiating. "There are other things to do."

"You're too old for climbing trees."

"Maybe you are. I see at least three zits from up here, probably more. You're just an old bag of poo gas. Getting acne, stinking up the place. I'm just a kid, making up for lost time."

Steve reaches with his hand and touches a small red zit barely just beginning its life, disfiguring his nose. "There's barely anything there. Really, Mikey, what's the point of climbing trees?"

"Zits are pointy."

"Why are you, a thirteen year old, climbing a tree?"

"We didn't have trees in the Milk District. They have them by the cemetery, but I didn't like to go there much. I prefer this."

"Yeah, well, I never liked climbing."

"You shouldn't be scared."

"I'm not scared, I just don't like it."

"To each his own."

The next branch is farther, but I know I can make it. Leaping, I grab on with one hand. This limb is almost wider than my palm. I feel the slide as my grip falters, and anticipating the need to move on, I leap to the next branch, this time using both hands.

"I don't understand you. You're crazy smart, and then you do dumb things like climb trees. You've got to start acting more mature."

"I'm one of the few who do their homework. I would say that the other kids need to be more mature, like me."

"No, you need to be more like the rest of us."

"And I should do that, why?"

"To fit in. Make friends. Be happy."

"I'm happy. Climbing trees makes me happy. You're the one standing on the ground and not doing something fun. Maybe that's why Sadie laughs at you. Maybe she knows you can't climb trees."

"You're an idiot."

"I can see my house from here." A laugh escapes before I stifle it.

"It's right there, Mikey. I can see it. You're proving my point."

"And your point is that you don't like climbing trees, and I do. You win."

"I'm too old for this. You're too old. Climbing is for kids."

"What if I climb a different tree away from the street? Somewhere where I can't see my house. Maybe over there."

"You're not listening."

"Oh, I'm listening. Heard every word. So climbing trees is for kids."

"Correct."

"Great, because I'm a kid."

"Get down here, and let's do something inside."

"I like it up here," I joke as I move lower. It isn't fun anymore. I can climb tomorrow.

"Get down here," Steve yells as he jumps and grabs my leg. The world slows as my right foot slides off the branch, twisting as Steve pulls. Steve's eyes open wide as he watches me fall from the tree. My whole body drifts towards him. Nothing stands between him and me. As we both collapse, my body crushes his arm against the ground. I feel the snap rather than hear it. Something within him breaks.

"Personal assistant, we need transportation to medical," I request from Steve's PA.

His personal assistant calmly replies, "Already arranging transportation and notified Steve's mother of the medical emergency. She will meet you there." During the seconds of the fall it already ran thousands of calculations anticipating the need for medical attention. Steve's mom will blame me. She'll say I'm a bad influence on her son; she'll probably scold me for landing on him.

## Wednesday, March 18, 2116

## Steve

It hurts. Not just my arm, but my whole side. Mikey, stupid fool, climbs a tree and I get hurt. Even in the waiting room, he doesn't fit in. Everybody else in here plugs in and watches a video or listens to music, but Mikey is reading a book. Only Mikey would find a decorating prop at a doctor's office and think that the designers placed it there for people to read. It was a brown book that matched the vase that it leaned against. Just like the blue vase had a blue book underneath it. The pattern repeated itself throughout the bookshelf, yellow book – yellow vase, red book – red vase. No one reads books. "What are you looking at?"

"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break."

"What are you talking about?"

"Shakespeare." Mikey points at the cover of the brown book. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

"Why?"

"It's old."

"We don't have to read Shakespeare until next year." Another adventure for Mikey - reading from the decorating props while I'm in pain. "You messed up the bookshelf."

"Here," he says holding the book out to me, "have you ever held a book?"

"I've got a tablet filled with books."

"Not the same. Someone wrote in this one: 'Sly equals moron'."

Mom walks in wearing her tennis outfit. Her hair is blond today. "Mikey, I want you to leave."

"Yes, Ms. Young."

"Where does it hurt, Steve?"

"My side. My arm, here."

Mikey puts the book back in the wrong section of the bookcase next to a red vase and its matching book.

Mom turns from me to stare at Mikey. Hands in his pockets, head down, hair partially covering his eyes, he turns and leaves without saying, "Goodbye."

"It's okay. They'll give you a pill soon, and everything will be fine," Mom reassures me.

We only sit a little bit more before the nurse sticks her head in, "Steve Young, the doctor will see you."

The examining room contains a chair in the center with large block letters, BOTR, on the armrest. It's all metal, providing no comfort, while two regular chairs with padding sit against the wall providing a clear contrast to this cold piece of furniture. It seems like someone could have put a cushion on this grand metallic beast.

The doctor smiles at Mom. Everyone knows Mom. The doctor's probably one of her friends. "Steve Tyler August Young. It's been a while, Stevie." Nobody calls me Stevie. "I need you to take a seat so that we can run a scan." She points to the hard chair while leaning against the wall, her tablet tapping gently against her side, grinning a smile whiter than her lab coat.

The hard chair fits my body wrong, failing to adjust to my non-adult sized body. Lights ringing the perimeter of the chair glow, becoming alive with the weight of my body on it.

Looking at her tablet, she says, "Everything looks normal, except that broken bone. It will probably heal all right in time, but let's not take chances. Take this pill, and you'll wake up with your arm all better, Stevie."

She holds out a small metallic tray. In the center sits a round pill, about the size of an aspirin, glowing green. At the corner of the tray rests a miniature plastic cup filled with water.

"It's glowing."

"Yep, that's how I know its working."

Between my fingers, the pill feels mushy like a gummy bear, and the light at its core reveals a liquid center that stretches out with each squeeze.

"It will be fine." Mom has her hand on my shoulder as she leans in, "I remember my first time." Mom didn't usually touch me. She's normally focused on the adult males in the room, but since the doctor is a woman, her attention lands on me.

"I've had pills before, Mom."

"Oh, yes, I know. I just, never mind."

"You'll want this," the doctor motions to the water still on the tray.

I'm thirteen, not two. I've taken plenty of pills before just not glowing green ones. The pill catches for a second at the back of my mouth, and a burning sensation begins to rise up my head. I need help and reluctantly grab the water to break the stalemate. I feel the heat, hot chocolate warm, as the pill slides down my throat. Then everything blurs: first grey and then nothing. Nothing.

Then the excessive heat leaves my throat while bright lights strike my eyelids. I block some of the rays by placing my arm up as a shield until someone pulls it down. A dark shadow hovers over my face.

I open both eyes only a sliver and look through my eyelashes at two circles emerging from the depth. They must be eyes, large eyes, staring at me. "Mom?"

"Oh, that was fast," the blurred image above me speaks in Mom's voice.

"I'm here."

"Yes, I know. I've been with you since they brought you back."

"I couldn't see you."

"You're better now," another woman's voice, "but take your time, Stevie." It must be that doctor. Doctor something. "Your mind may take a bit of time to adjust to the change."

"I'm fine. I can do this." I push myself out of the uncomfortable chair to get away from this doctor. Everything in the room looks like flannel. Trying to focus, I take a step forward and then trip.

"Take your time. Let's just move you over here," the doctor suggests while holding on to my arm, guiding me to one of the soft chairs, similar to the ones in the waiting room. Up close, the blurriness remains in my eyes, but my body slides over the slick leather surface before I sink in. The chair is much more comfortable than the metallic beast.

"Will he be okay? Should we try again?" Mom asks.

The doctor reaches down and touches the tips of my shoes and then smiles up at me. I can see her teeth, not individual teeth, but a haze of ivory at the bottom of her face. The white moves and reforms as words escape, "I thought so. Boys his age grow so fast. His last scan was over six months ago. His shoes are too big."

"Oh, my gosh. I was so worried."

Strange for Mom to be concerned about anything involving me, anything. I try to focus on Mom's face, just her face in this room. Her face is a hazy tan with a blonde halo of hair, but then it starts to change. It's her eyes. Two points starting to intensify.

"Get him some smaller shoes. If you notice anything, please call the office."

I focus on Mom's eyes. They are blurred, lacking any white. They start to evolve with crescents appearing, wrapping around each pupil.

"Of course," Mom replies to the doctor.

Her eyes are green, no hint of blue today. They're sparkling emeralds pointed straight at me. Mom's eyes.

## Thursday, March 19, 2116

## Mikey

##

We step out of the school entrance into the full afternoon sunlight. Steve prepares to sneeze, but then nothing happens. Something is different. He's got the same fish grin: that's not it. His hair is combed: that's different, but not unusual. Something. "What shoes are you wearing?"

"All the kids are wearing them," Steve responds.

All the other kids wear the same clothes, the same shoes. "I'm not." It didn't make sense to wear the same thing as everybody else. "Can you even run in them?" The shoes ballooned out on the insides with wide bottoms for an almost symmetric oval footprint.

"They're comfortable."

"Yeah, right." Then I saw it on my tablet. "They did it. They proved that the God particle has another super-symmetrical sibling, the higgsino."

"And I should care why?"

"This is big."

"How big?"

"It's actually one of the smallest things to exist. Funny. The implications are huge. They really proved it. The Ruff particle."

"Ruff?"

"It's the companion to the God particle, the missing mass, and dog particle would be sophomoric. Imagine."

"Imagine what?"

"Well, the God particle laid the foundation for the portals, so this could be the first step towards something else. Really get things moving."

"What?"

"I'm just guessing, but think about it. We've been humming along without any real breakthroughs for decades, longer, and now this. It's about time." Finally, something new.

"Mikey, stop! Watch where you are walking."

The vehicle stops inches from me. They always stop. It's in their programming. The one rider is Trevor from English. Every time the teacher calls on him, he stares back, waiting for the instructor to break his gaze and move on to the next student with a better grasp of grammar. Stuck due to my obstruction, Trevor stares at me just as confrontationally as he looks at his instructors. Without saying a word, he wills me to move on.

"Sorry," I try to explain to Trevor, "got excited. The Ruff particle. Crazy!"

"Get out of the road," Trevor calls from the vehicle, ignoring my explanation.

"This will change everything." I step off the street back to Steve.

"Why do you want things to change?" Steve asks.

"They hide things from us. The portals don't work. If you think about it, if the people going in aren't the same ones coming out, then it's murder."

"You're crazy. It's just a transport."

"It is crazy. Believe me. Everything about this place is crazy. On the other side of the wall, it's dog eat dog. Here, it's more rabbit eat rabbit, but nobody notices the nibbling."

"Stop complaining. You're always complaining. Enjoy it."

I wish I could be more like Steve, ignoring the false life that we live over here, but I can't. "It's just hidden. It's still there; everything is still wrong. They just cover up the bad here. Pour chocolate on top."

"You sound crazy."

"I'm not. Perfectly sane."

"Perfectly sane to think that the whole world is against you."

"It's not against me; it's just not what it claims to be. Doesn't that scare you? I mean think about it. Someone is pulling the strings, making you walk through your puppet life."

"No strings on me." Steve twirls, his arms out wide.

"If you live a lie, it's like someone controls you and makes you serve their needs, their goals. You can't walk blind. Open your eyes."

"Calm down, Mikey."

"It's all wrong here." I need to be alone. I run through the street. More vehicles abruptly stop with a squeal of brakes to avoid hitting me. Classmates in the vehicles and beside the road jarred from their false realities look up to see the source of the sounds in the real world.

Someone yells, "Freak!"

Another, "Worker!"

Leaving the street, I head back into the park, refusing to run on a path.

## Thursday, March 19, 2116

## Mikey

##

Through the speakers, Steve's voice sounds loud even without additional amplification, "Mikey, you can't freak out like that."

"Nobody cares."

On the screen his usually pale skin flushes red almost to the hue of the newest zit rising out from his chin. "Well, you should care about what people think of you."

"That's not important."

"Mikey, tomorrow I need you to try to act normal."

"I'm always me. How can I be more normal? To be something different wouldn't be me; that wouldn't be normal."

"Try more. I like hanging with you, but I'm going to have to put some distance between us at school, unless you change."

"I'm not good enough for you, is that it?"

"That's the problem. Nobody thinks like that."

"I heard them yelling at me."

"You were acting crazy. You drew attention to yourself."

"I don't want to be like everyone else."

"If you don't act like everyone else, people are going to treat you different."

"They shouldn't."

"Mikey, that's the problem. You want people to change for you, but you won't change for anyone!"

"No, I want people to let me be me."

"Running through the street at cars isn't normal. Do you think you can act like that and nobody will notice?"

I need Steve to be on my side. I need someone to believe. "I'll try Steve. I'll try, to be more normal."

## Friday, March 20, 2116

## Steve

##

Mikey shows up this morning at my house just like every morning but he's wearing white today. I'm not sure if he is trying to fit in or if he just ran out of clean black clothes. Nothing strange happens during the walk and we make it to the school with only three reminders from my personal assistant.

Sadie stands by herself, leaning against one of the school's ionic columns at the entrance, the morning sunlight unable to directly strike her, but somehow reflecting back at the school to touch her hair. With each step, I wait for her to glance my way. I want Mikey to slow down, or do something to increase my time on the stairs. Her head bends down, eyes locked on her tablet, and I'm running out of time with each step. I lift my final foot outside the entrance as she looks up.

"Hey, Steve. We missed you yesterday. Are you going to soccer practice today?"

"Of course." And without pausing, Mikey and I cross the threshold. Sadie is still outside, but she sees me.

Mikey's voice cracks in my ear, "I thought you quit."

"Not anymore."

"Why not?"

"I like soccer."

"You like soccer or Sadie?"

"Just give this to me. It's a big deal, like your dog particle."

"Ruff particle," Mikey responds.

Mikey doesn't understand girls. He doesn't even try to be with them. "Have you even thought about prom?"

"Why?"

Figures. "Are you going to ask somebody?"

"Again, why? It's middle school prom, half the girls are taller than me, and half don't want to be seen with me. If you did a Venn diagram, there would be a sliver of girls who don't fit into those two categories. Truthfully, I don't want to dance with any girl, inside or outside of those groups. Dancing is a very awkward concept."

"You don't have to dance. Just go."

"I'll save that torture for high school or college. It'll be something for my future-self to deal with, thank you."

"Never mind. I think I'm going to ask Sadie."

"Because she said, 'Hey,' to you just now?"

"It's lots of things." Mikey doesn't understand. Sometimes I wonder why he keeps showing up in the mornings. It made sense in the beginning; his first years here we did everything together. But now, not so much.

"Can you go with me to take more pictures at the transit station after your soccer practice?"

He isn't growing up. He's still trapped in the fantasy of childhood. "Mikey, I want to be real today. No climbing trees. No science fiction about evil machines. Lost data that you can't hack into doesn't mean anything sinister." He needs to hear the truth. "It just means that you are not as smart as you think."

"Nope, I'm smarter."

"Dumber."

"I can see why a girl would want to be with you: rapier wit, high hair, a zit speckled complexion, and long-floppy arms. A dream."

"I'm going to ask her."

"I don't doubt it. I just wish that you would focus on what is really important. And it's not clothes or some middle school dance. We could save some lives."

"Not today, Mikey."

"When?"

"Probably never." I turn. The class is straight ahead, but I turn for no reason except to leave Mikey. I need another calm day without him. I'm not going to die by stepping into a portal, and I'll prove that to Mikey at prom. I've got to make the night special, and jumping to another city for dinner with Sadie is the perfect way to do it.

## Saturday, March 21, 2116

## Steve

She lives south of the park so her house looks ancient from the outside. The southern half of Orlando remains under regulations to preserve the history and remind us of the past, but it's just a facade. Only three years old, the house remains the newest one on the block, but the architecture mimics and pulls aspects of all the houses around it, blending into the environment.

Sadie walks out to the porch and sees me with three thousand and one daisies. One hundred and twenty five bundles of twenty-four daises each cover her yard, but in my hand I hold only one.

"You posted that daisies were your favorite."

"I love them," Sadie responds.

I watch her trying to count them and when she gives up and turns to me, I hold out the single daisy. "Will you go to Prom with me?"

"How many flowers are there?"

"Three thousand," extending my hand closer, "and one."

She reaches out and takes the flower, "I've never been to Prom before."

In a movie, this would be where we kiss for the first time, but this is real life, and these are the awkward years of middle school.

"Personal assistant, fireworks," I command. Lasers project 3-D daisies behind me on the street. The images then soar into the canopy of branches over the road, before exploding into miniature yellow and white stars. As Sadie watches the show, I catch glimpses of stars when the bold chance to fall across her body. Yep, when they make a movie about my life, it will be spectacular.

As the light show ends Sadie's eyes bulge as she keeps moving her head back and forth scanning the yard. "What's next?"

"Nothing."

"Not bad." Sadie steps forward, wrapping her arms around me. It's our first hug. That counts for something. Her perfume surrounds me, more powerful than the flowers covering the lawn, and as I enjoy it she whispers in my ear, "I like jewelry, too."

## Saturday, March 21, 2116

## Mikey

Steve has been trying to chime in, but I leave him on hold. He ignored me all day. I'll let him wait a bit before he apologizes. I take a deep breath and then lean back in my chair to accept his groveling by video call.

"She said, 'Yes'." He is jumping in the screen, and the camera tries to follow his bounces. I freeze a frame and cover his eyes, then cover his mouth. Yep, he's really happy.

"Who said, 'Yes'?"

"Sadie. I'm going to the prom with Sadie!" More head bouncing.

"Oh."

"We're going to Paris for dinner. It's still not too late for you to ask someone. Join our group."

Prom is this Friday. Instead of two months until he dies in a portal, he's doing it this Friday. "You're thinking about taking a portal?" Photos showing people emerging from portals cover an entire wall of my room, a current live video of one of the entrances is projected on another wall, showing people unknowingly taking their last steps, and Steve wants to walk through one of those things.

"I'm thirteen. She's been thirteen. Everybody does it when they become a teenager."

"Trust babies do it."

"And?"

He doesn't care. I can spoon feed him the information, but he refuses to digest it. "Sometimes I forget how obnoxious this whole world is. You're going to spend thousands of dollars in one night to travel halfway around the world so that you can put food in your mouth. Across the wall, there are people just like you starving to death."

No longer bouncing, Steve stops and looks right at me, no longer smiling. "They aren't starving; they get rations. And they aren't like me. They aren't even like you."

"Not even like lowly me. Thanks."

"Anybody who deserves a chance can apply for a scholarship to join a host family."

"They only give out a handful of scholarships. Who else at our school came from the other side?"

"At least three others. They just mainstream better than you."

"So three is enough?" I ask him.

"At least four with you, probably more."

"There should be more, lots more. Every day I look at the faces of kids at school. They aren't there."

"You can't tell by looking at someone if they came from over the wall."

"Yes, you can. All of you look soft, and too young, like babies, only the words coming out of your mouths sound shinier. But a five year old from the other side could beat you up without any weapons."

"You're not so tough."

"I don't need to be over here."

"Be grateful that you got over. You get a chance to be a teacher or doctor."

"You sound like my host mom."

"And you sound ungrateful."

What does he want me to say? Thank you for letting me live the same life as you, someone who never had to pass a test to live here or worry about being sent back. "I'm grateful enough not to want to throw it away." He's missing the point, and I'm getting off track. I need more time. I need a plan before he goes into a portal. "Did you forget about what happens when you transit?"

"Mikey, your body goes to the other transit station. If it didn't work, millions of people wouldn't do it everyday."

"Maybe once you do it, you don't care anymore."

"Some day soon, you're going to have to use the transit. Maybe you should go back over the wall now."

"Don't say that."

"Just be happy for me."

"Are you sure you want to go with her?"

"Sadie's beautiful. Just let me live my life."

"Even if you're an idiot?"

"Yeah, especially if you think I'm an idiot."

"Okay. Fine. You're coming over later?"

"Not sure."

"Come on."

"Okay." Not a direct apology, but he would come over. I'd have some time to convince him not to use a portal. I need a plan, some way to stop him.

## Saturday, March 21, 2116

## Steve

It's been a while, probably before Christmas, since I saw inside Mikey's room with my own eyes. Normally we just chat from our own rooms. Tin foil covers his windows, keeping out any natural light. With the overhead light off, the entire room glows from the monitors and three lava lamps.

Mikey writes on one of his walls with a stylist that leaves a fluorescent trail. He's working through an equation. Multiple projections in slow motion show people stepping out of transit stations. Mikey waves his hand, and all of the videos freeze and then change to show people disappearing through the transit arch. Mikey slows down the display rate until each video shows the outline of a person who has just disappeared.

A personal screen shows a picture of one of the women captured at the moment of her reappearance at another transit station. Mikey erases part of his equation and then adds to it, developing a different one.

"Does your host family ever come up here?" I ask, knowing they don't.

"Nope."

"Better hope they never do." Trails blazed through piles of clothes lead from the doorway to the bed and back to his closet. Off the paths, layers of toys, papers, trash and clothes ascend from the floor. A desk in the corner provides support to the wave of clutter, allowing a second level higher than the hills on the floor. On top of the highest mound rests a silver drone. An arch of light springs from its underbelly attesting to life still in the machine.

Mikey notices me looking at his toy. "Don't touch that."

"Why can't I touch it?"

"That one tends to overload and discharge electricity. It could kill you."

"Serious?"

"Dead serious."

"Why keep it?"

"I can't get rid of things. I might need it, use it for parts. It seems wrong to waste it."

Another spark of electricity escapes the drone, this time with an accompanying crackling blast of smoke rising from the stack below. The flash of light reveals part of the mound of junk holding the drone, including stuffed toy animals that any teenager would have thrown away years ago. Charred scars run down the fur of a brown bear already marred from previous bursts of energy. "Wrong? You're afraid of portals while this electric firebomb straddles a teddy bear!"

"My social counselor says that eventually I'll grow out of it. I didn't have anything over there, so it's hard to just throw something away. A hoarding response is normal until I learn to trust."

"It can't be that bad over the wall." Mikey doesn't respond to my jab. Mouth firmly shut, he starts bobbing his head with his fists clenched; he did that a lot when he first came over. Mayonnaise and crackers won't calm him this time.

"Okay, I don't know what it's like." During the first years, his foster parents always kept a jar of mayonnaise close by. The first time I met him, he had a mushy cracker sticking out of his mouth, still sucking the remaining mayonnaise out of it.

"It's hell."

"At least your family is proud of you getting over here. Be happy about that."

"Everybody on the other side hates the trust babies. It's betrayal when someone scores well and comes over to live like this. They want it, but they hate me for having it."

"Lots of workers come over every day to work."

"But they go back. They bring cargo and money back to the other side."

"But you could go back and visit. Your host family would let you."

"I don't want to go back."

"You're free to go."

"Nobody wants to go back. Workers go back because they have to go after they finish their shift."

"And after they sleep, they're able to come back and work another shift."

"How many people have you seen die, how many funerals have you been to?" None. He knows the answer; why question me? It's the same answer for anyone who's grown up on this side of the wall. "If I go, what chance do you think I have of ever getting back?"

"You just walk back in through the gate."

"I survived over there, but I saw lots of funerals. People over there would cut you, without any hesitation, to have half the stuff in this one room. It's not right, not fair, but I don't want to lose any of this."

Mikey's losing it. I shouldn't have come over here. "What did you get that you couldn't share with me over the net?"

"I wanted to show you this."

Mikey points to the walls showing people appearing at the portals.

"More pictures of portals." They say that paranoid people will do this, surround themselves with a false reality, build layer upon layer of delusions until they can't see the truth. "This is crazy. I'm jumping through a portal Friday. I'm going to prove to you that they don't change you. I'll see you after Prom."

You can't convince a crazy person that he is wrong. I turn and leave.

## Thursday, March 26, 2116

## Mikey

From above the transit station I watch the passengers getting ready to transport. Tonight marks the third attempt at implementing my own instructions.

On my tablet I split the screen so that I can view the code being transmitted from Orlando. On the parallel screen I let my own project run in mirror mode. Tonight I've hacked into the lower strength portal for non-living items, no need to experiment with real people.

So far my nightly trips to the transporter have deprived people of two wallets, a purse and one stuffed teddy bear. The wallets and purse all vaporized on the spot before getting a full upload. The teddy bear is properly categorized as lost, not destroyed, as it is still in transit. The receiving portal requires confirmation that the original object is vaporized before initiating the rebuild. By making my change too early, the system could never verify the destruction of the original article and the portal's overriding control refused to allow the teddy bear to reappear. It's still out there, at least the code needed to reconstruct it. I'm just not able to find it and direct it to another portal to rematerialize it. Might as while be destroyed.

I need to insert my code in the goldilocks zone. Not too early so we fail to get a full upload of the information for transit and not too late so that the machine thinks the original object is still there. Need to trick it just a little bit and control the flow.

A woman with a pink purse steps forward, handing it to a worker. The bag begins the trek down the conveyor belt. A pulsating ring waits for it, to record every detail and then eliminate it from this existence.

On my screen the code begins to flow for the purse, reaching over I initialize my variation. For a second, one blink of the eye, but a thousand times longer than standard the purse remains in the portal, and then the program begins to dismantle every molecular bond vaporizing it in a flash of energy.

My program can work; I can insert my own instructions without immediately destroying the purse, step one proven. Same process should work for changing the instructions for transmitting people. Got twenty-four hours to confirm and perfect that, before trying this on Steve. Going to be another all-nighter.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

I'm holding Sadie's hand at school. I, Steve Young, am the cause of her smile. Around us the world continues, the same images dancing in their familiar patterns around me as I stroll down the hall. The same teachers stand by their doors, the same kids walk the halls, nothing is different until I look to my right and see her standing by me. For the past week I've been blessed with Mikey being absent from school and standing in his place, the most beautiful girl in school.

"I'll see you tonight," I remind her.

"I'm curious to see how you're going to top three thousand daisies." Still smiling, Sadie leans closer, "You know my parents want me to archive the whole night."

"Mine, too."

"My mom showed me video from her middle school prom. Back then they wore dresses that were basically see through. Embarrassing."

"My mom did the same thing. More embarrassing for me." And it was. Kid-Mom looked just like current Mom, but she wore a sheer silver gown, that ran from her neck to her toes, with thin black horizontal stripes starting at her thighs, circling up, wrapped with a thick black belt, and that's it. My mom was basically butt-naked dancing with some strange kid in a blue tuxedo.

"At least our generation is normal."

"I'll see you later." I walk away from her and see Mikey waiting for me at the door. He's not wearing the school uniform, instead a wrinkled white t-shirt and his standard black pants. I walk past him into the sunlight. Empty self-driving vehicles wait for assigned students to appear, but there are always extras. "PA, get me a ride."

"Blue-14 is available."

Lights flash around the perimeter of a blue one waiting apart from the others on the street. "Thank you." Hopping in I issue directions, "Take me home." I deserve a break from walking, a chance to clear my mind on this beautiful day. Mikey watches me from the top of the steps still at the school entrance, standing by the same column that Sadie leaned against the other day, but in a shadow, the afternoon sun unable to reach him. I raise my feet, placing them on an empty seat as the vehicle pulls away. It seems a waste to not enjoy the rest of the day. "Correction. I want to go shopping. Take me to a jewelry store." I need to top three thousand daisies. Sadie deserves something special to wear tonight for Prom.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

It's not dark yet, but already the porch light is on. I leave my house and see Mikey sitting on the ground looking at our gnome. The figurine stands less than a foot high, from the top of his red hat to the bottom of the shovel that he leans against.

"Why do you have this?" Mikey asks without turning from the figurine.

"It's decoration."

"Too early for Christmas."

"It's not a Christmas decoration."

"What other holiday has an elf?"

"It's a gnome. It's not for any holiday. Are you doing this on purpose?"

"What?"

"Being annoying."

"Nope. Just natural."

"Do you like the suit?"

Mikey pats the gnome on its head, saying goodbye, and then turns to look at me. He looks up and down, and then shrugs, "It's white."

"Mom says off-white. But that is now."

"Not a fan. Looks stiff. I wouldn't last a minute." Mikey stops smiling and says, "Don't go."

"Grow up."

"You can't ignore everything I've shown you."

I see my ride for the dance turning onto the street. It's lime green with miniature strobe lights running down both sides flashing alternating colors. It's a classic and it probably won't run on the street again until next year's prom. The standard vehicles only seat four and none of them continuously broadcast flashers while in transit, but this beast announces itself with a blaze of warnings. As it moves closer, I count the seats: at least twelve, all arranged in a circle facing each other. Two boys and two girls already sit in the main compartment as it twirls on the center axis giving each person an opportunity to face in the direction of travel. As it spins, colors from the clothes on the kids pulsate as each boy's suit linked to his date's dress changes colors to match the shifting colors coded into the gowns.

"Mikey, they're here. There isn't anything wrong. Stop worrying."

"It's happening."

"It's not." The vehicle stops in the road taking up the entire width of the street and forcing all of the other cars to choose alternate routes. Everybody screams for me to join them. "I'm going with my friends."

"I'm your friend, zit face," Mikey calls after me, trying to make me feel guilty. Layers of concealer cover the one zit on my chin, and Mikey should be my friend always, portal or no portal, but tonight he's pushing it.

"Come on, Steve. Leave the freak," Dale shouts from the car. Dale's insult is unnecessary, and for a second it almost makes me want to stop and stay with Mikey, but why? Going with Sadie to the Prom is what I want. I don't want to climb trees and run away from the fact that I'm growing up. I'm thirteen, old enough to take a portal, and today I'll do it on my first date and hopefully steal a kiss too. And Mikey will continue to be my friend; he just needs to let me be free to make my own decisions.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I call back to him, "Don't worry."

Something as mundane as riding in a car becomes amazing when you can share it with friends in one of the largest vehicles in Orlando. As we move through the streets, the smaller vehicles pull over to give our oversized vehicle room to maneuver. The whole world pauses to let us through.

Cutting across the park at the Summerlin crossing we pass the school to reach Sadie's house, south of Lake Eola. The car stops in front of Sadie's house and again the other automatic vehicles need to reroute around us to avoid this new obstacle parked in the road. She must have seen us (and how could you miss us) because as soon as I hop out of the vehicle, she emerges on her porch. She pauses to shout back a goodbye to her family and then steps down to meet me in her blue-grey dress coded to match her eyes. I document the moment before turning off my public broadcast. This is for me.

"Are you ready?"

"Of course," she responds. I reach out, handing her a bracelet. Her eyes widen as she touches the bracelet's fourteen linked daisies made from eighteen-carat white gold. In the center of each flower, a yellow diamond shines. Taking the bracelet from me, she wraps it around her left wrist. "It's beautiful," she whispers, barely loud enough for me to hear, her hand up looking at the diamonds sparkling.

I reach up to grab her hand, pulling it out of a stream of sunlight. When our fingers touch, my suit switches from off-white to blue-grey to match her dress.

"I wanted your first memorable thing to be from me."

"Daisies and diamonds; can't get much better."

We walk down the path in her yard to the waiting car, and as we step into the vehicle, Sadie's dress changes to a valentine heart red, and my suit changes to match the new color.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Mikey

A metal roof over four hundred feet long rises and falls three times in a sine wave that forms the cover for the central transit station. Blue lights line the edge of the metal, accentuating the unique shape against the dark sky. Behind it to the east a full moon rises up from the horizon, appearing gigantic at the edge of the sky.

With no buses running out of the walled city, the station takes a new life as the gateway to the rest of the world. On the other side of the city, over the wall, old buses serve as businesses and homes in Milk District, including my family's home. My worker parents run a shop out of the front of their bus selling electronics, while the back half remains our private home. Everybody tries to establish a niche on the other side to survive. If I had stayed, right now I would be huddled in a circle with my brothers and sister going through a pile of tossed out appliances, stripping them of motors, batteries and salvageable metals.

On this hill before the western wall I am as far from them as I can get without leaving the city. My old home is less than three miles away at 28.551225, -81.345381, but it might as well have been on the other side of that full moon. It would take over an hour just to walk to East Gate and it would be foolish to go anywhere in the Milk District at night.

Behind me, trees form a hedge masking the harsh reality of the western wall. From my concealed spot at the trees' trunks, I watch the transit station below. I'm near the same bushes, dry tonight, where Steve and I took pictures of people transporting. From this angle, I can see through the grand windows that allow everyone the illusion of witnessing instantaneous travel. I sit by the remains of bleachers that once covered the hill where crowds watched the first transits by portal. Documentaries in the archives show families with signs waving farewell to their relatives but nobody but me sits out here tonight. What was once unique has become common.

From my backpack, I pull out my tablet, a bulkier machine than my regular one for school, but this model faces falls without fear. With shatterproof glass and reinforced braces that serve as additional handles, this tablet adores the outdoors. Tapping the screen causes numbers and letters to fly across, announcing each transit from the station below.

I have to wait over twenty eight minutes before the vehicle with Steve, Sadie, and the other five couples finally pulls up to the transit station. It's a garish sight: six couples each flipping through a rainbow of colors, with each gown staking a claim to a temporary spot on the spectrum. It's as if fireflies inherited DNA from a string of Christmas lights, with each dress designating a new hue and then her date's suit matching in response.

Steve and Sadie, the final couple, exit the vehicle and follow their group into the transit station. Before Steve walks inside, he looks back over his shoulder. He looks right at me, but fails to see anything.

From my vantage point, I can see each person going through a brief inspection before standing in the final line for the actual portal transit.

I mentally go through my counselor's notes, matching the jumps, hand holding, and twirls to emotions and then mirror check the faces. Steve's group discharges multiple levels of happiness. They truly fail to recognize the danger before them. Maybe the powers that be restrict portals from younger children to give them a chance to decide for themselves and weigh the risks. But the kids below me eagerly inch forward in the queue, unwittingly taking their last steps.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

I've been in the transit station before on field trips from school, but never in the actual line to transit. Dale, who's fourteen, has made several jumps with his family since turning thirteen, but for the rest of our group, tonight marks the first.

One of the workers noticing a group of newbies announces, "All electronic objects with inherent intelligence must be removed from your body and placed in the official transit bags. This includes personal assistants, long term memory consoles, and similar devices." I remove my personal assistant from my coat pocket, its exterior blue metallic case the size of my palm, placing it in a transit bag. I hand the worker the pouch and watch as it travels down a conveyer belt. She continues to reassure the group, "Everything will be waiting for you on the other side." And then with a flash of light, the bag disappears through a smaller portal dedicated to transporting cargo.

The first couple in our group, Dale and Olivia, kiss before separating to travel individually through the main portal arch. The next couple follows their example, putting more pressure on the next. It becomes a pattern, as each couple kisses and then they each go through the transport into a blinding white light.

Sadie turns to me, "Are you ready?"

"As I'll ever be." I'm ready for the kiss, and I'm ready to jump to another country in a blaze.

"It's my first time, too." She moves closer. "Let's save my first kiss for Paris, maybe at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Let's spread our firsts out through the night."

Before I can say anything, Sadie playfully taps me on the shoulder, saying, "You're it," and quickly walks towards the portal. Right before hitting the threshold, she turns her head back at me and while waving she laughs. An intensely bright light surrounds her in the portal, and when the flash fades, the sound of laughter disappears.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Mikey

From the hill, I watch. I count down the people until the one that remains is Steve. The flash that transports Sadie cascades down my tablet in a fresh bank of numbers. As Steve approaches, I begin to access my personal project, something simple and rather eloquent.

As I watch the screen, it flashes, and all the numbers turn from white to blue.

Now to wait for Steve's final steps to the portal: five, four, three. I initiate the sequence, and as he enters the portal, all the numbers on the screen divide into mirror images with the white numbers reappearing on the left side of the screen, while identical blue numbers cascade down the right side.

It's done. Below me in the transit station, the same white light engulfs Steve, and then a pop-up message appears on my tablet.

The message has superimposed itself onto my top layer, covering everything. This shouldn't happen. I've personalized the security on this machine to prohibit anybody being able to dominate my settings, but there it is - a black box with the words, "That was a brilliant step, but only one step of a long journey" on my top layer. Tags provide the message with an origination address of 28.546228, -81.351375. Whoever sent this lives outside the city, just on the edge.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

I walk forward into the metallic arch of the portal following the scent of Sadie's perfume and the memory of her laughter. At first, the brightness blinds me, but it doesn't hurt my eyes once I'm within the light. I can move and look at myself, my suit now off-white.

With the removal of the intense light, I'm smiling, feeling true happiness, not some fake happiness that Mikey claims transports feel. Around me everything looks the same: there's nothing special on this side of the portal, and then I hear the noise. A throbbing alarm sounds and around me everyone looks up at the ceiling to the source of the noise and the flashing red lights.

Everyone looks up, except the worker. The same woman who took my personal assistant looks directly at me. Behind me stands the portal, the same metal machine that I just walked into, but now I'm on the other side of the arch and still in Orlando.

A worker behind me starts yelling, "Containment! Containment!" and begins to shove guests in the line for my portal. Through the open gap in the arch, I watch him moving towards me. He's a sizeable man, his face marred by tattoos. In his hand, he carries a stun gun, and with precision, his right arm aims the weapon directly at me. "Put your hands up where I can see them."

Nobody in the station moves, except the one worker walking towards me. Everyone in line for the portal stays in place, maybe slightly arching their bodies to get a better view of the excitement in the center.

Talking into his collar, the worker shouts, "Transit Paris. Transit Paris, this is Orlando. I need verification that a Steve Tyler August Young has been received. Repeat: I need verification that a Steve Tyler August Young has been received."

From this distance, I can't hear the response, but I see a curt head nod from the worker acknowledging something.

"Steve Tyler August Young, I need you to walk towards me with your hands up." This worker continues to shout, and the previously stunned worker still closer to me reaches for her gun. I take a half step backwards away from the portal, keeping my eyes on the workers on the other side. "I need your cooperation. Please move this way back through the portal," he commands.

I stop and move forward - the worker can help, I just need to let him. I hear the explosion from the stun gun before realizing what my eyes see. Three prods from the weapon fly towards me, trailing an electric wire back to the gun. On the live wire, electricity awaits contact with me to flow. As they fly through the air, they attempt to pass through the portal directly at me, but instead, inches from my face, a force within the arch rips the leads back from their path. Sparks fly from the prods when the metal tips magnetically stick to the sides of the portal. Current on the line flows back to the gun into the worker's hand and down the right side of his body. The man's hand begins to blister from the heat and then he looks at me, the cause of his pain, and screams. He doesn't scream words, just the sound of pain, as he tries to move towards me, his right leg hesitant to respond.

I turn and run towards an emergency exit sign. I've never had an emergency until today, and pushing open the door lands me in a hallway. At the end of the hallway, another set of glowing red letters promises escape, this time above a set of double doors. Making it down the hall and barreling through the exit, I emerge outside. Before me, I see the dark familiar western wall, and behind me the central transit station with flashing red lights spilling out the windows and the alarm still blaring. Thousands of miles away the rest of my group arrives for dinner in Paris.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Mikey

Steve bursts from a side door in his off-white suit, immediately followed by two workers in standard grey jumpsuits, a woman and a larger man running with a limp. Behind them through the oversized windows, red pulsating light streams out of the building. Attempting to scramble up the hill into the darkness, Steve manages to get maybe sixty feet before stumbling and falling to the ground. The first guard reaches him with her stun gun drawn and points at Steve's chest.

I hear Steve shout something, probably, "I give up. Don't shoot," but I'm unable to discern the words with the alarm from the station still blaring.

Right before she fires, my silver drone maneuvers in between them, blocking the worker's view. As the toy spins, an arch of energy escapes, striking the worker.

The other worker hobbles away, and I send my drone on an intercepting course. When my toy and worker collide, a second burst of energy causes him to collapse to the ground and the drone to fail. Moving to get my drone, I have it do a final discharge before grabbing it with my own hands. I pause to check on the worker who is alive. My drone is still violent but not deadly. His ID reveals him as Anthony Kilgore. I gather the identification and his used stun gun: non-functioning, but it's habit to grab what I can. With these objects, I move to the other worker further up the hill with Steve.

I go through the second guard's possessions. Her ID may be helpful. Thank you, Sara Bishop. She, like her companion, should survive. More fortunately, her stun gun remains fully charged, providing us some self-protection.

Steve pulls himself up and shakes himself out of his stupor. Recognizing me hovering over the guard he asks, "Mikey, what are you doing?"

"I'm saving your life." With her possessions stored, I reach out and help Steve get up on his feet.

"This is all your fault. You did this."

"I stopped them from killing you."

Steve begins shouting into the air, "Call Sadie. Call Sadie. Personal assistant respond."

"You put it in the bag. It's in Paris."

"Along with Sadie and everybody else. You freak." At that moment, Steve tries to hit me. He's punched me before, I mean we've wrestled, but never has he tried to hurt me. It will be a long time before a trust baby will ever be able to get a jump on me, and his arm swings harmlessly through air.

"We can't stay here." The guards would be rousing soon and more should be on the way.

"I'm going to prom. I can't go to Paris, but you're not going to ruin everything."

He stomps away from me, and I follow. I need to be with him when he truly understands the implications of me saving his life.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Mikey

I follow Steve at a distance as he walks to school. The main path through the park originates at the transit station, and with minor curves meanders east to school. Driver-less vehicles, less pretentious than the earlier mammoths, drop off kids at the front entrance. All the couples wear matching dresses and suits, but no one notices the lone Steve in his colorless suit as he walks up the steps into the school. The couples pause to pose for self-portraits by a statue of Bacchus, wearing Mardi Gras beads, temporarily placed out front for the school dance. Bacchus appears at every festival around town, a token from an amusement park long gone.

I use the school's internal communications to watch Steve inside the building. He walks into the gymnasium, ducking under tin foil stars and papier-mâché moons that hang too low from the ceiling. Even outside the school, I feel the bass from the music and my tablet's speakers add the missing treble. The banner from the front of the school "100 Years of Joy 2016-2116" now hangs inside the gym with all signs of vandalism removed, probably a copy, and underneath on foldout wooden bleachers, Steve sits and watches the other students dance.

He shouldn't be there; he should have listened to me. Without his personal assistant, he is cut off and doesn't have access to the latest feeds from the rest of the world. Steve's friends post a video of Sadie and Steve in Paris, walking towards the Eiffel Tower. Sadie laughs, she always laughs, before grabbing Steve's hand and running for the tower. It's a short video, but already hundreds of people have liked it and posted comments. This is not going to be good.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Steve

Bad music combined with flashing lights assault me as I wait for the group. They should be here. A true friend would have jumped back from Paris to see what happened to me. It's been over two hours, already way past our planned time to return. There's no reason for them not to be here, unless something happened to Sadie. Maybe I was the lucky one. Maybe something at the Paris end of the portal stopped me and kept them from coming back, or hurt Sadie.

Wrapped in my doubt, I see the group pushing through the double doors into the gym. Nobody cries or runs over to make sure that I'm all right. They look fine. Dale leads, his coat off and wrapped over the shoulder of his date. They walk in and then stop near the door. Sadie strolls in, arm and arm with some lanky dork in a matching suit. With his arm around her, his suit changes color, synchronized to Sadie's dress. My clothes fail to show any ability to match colors with Sadie and remain off-white. The guy looks like me or like some clingy version of me draped over Sadie. What the hell is happening?

The group waits at the entrance an unsure pack surveying the scene. Dale, the first to break from the herd, begins pulling his date towards the dance floor. Sadie and her parasite don't immediately follow Dale, but they do a mocking waltz, slowly moving away from the front door. He's hanging all over my date.

Enough of this. I leap up from the bleachers and move towards the waltzing couple. In my head I count one-two-three one-two-three. He misses a step: she stops, and they just stand there not dancing and standing too close. She's going to kiss him. I insert my hand between their bodies directly onto his chest and unsuccessfully try to push him off of Sadie and demand to know, "Who are you?"

"Is this a joke?" the parasite responds.

I turn to Sadie, "Who is this guy?"

Sadie's eyes widen, and she buries herself into the guy's side, wrapping her arms even tighter around him, "What's happening?"

This stranger shouts, "Emergency. Police!" holding in his hands my personal assistant.

I leap forward, trying to grab the personal assistant. "That's mine."

The guy separates from Sadie and takes a swing at me, but part of me anticipates the attack as identical to my punch at Mikey earlier, and I pull back, easily dodging it. He tries another swing and I avoid it. I feel invigorated; something inside me has changed. Every move he makes, my mind sees the next, anticipating three steps ahead, planning defenses preemptively.

I never thought that I would be able to easily beat someone in a fight, but this guy can't touch me. It's time to damage him. I swing at him to knock any future smile off his face, and he steps to the side avoiding the punch. Lucky for him. I follow up with more swings, and with each punch the other guy dodges or knocks my hands away. Students, all wearing matching formal wear, form a colorful circle around our fight. Neither of us lands a solid punch. Dancing around him I see my zit on his face. It's the same zit that I tried to cover up this afternoon protruding from his chin. The layers of concealer removed by sweat. Both of our faces gleam, and reaching up, I feel his zit on my chin.

"You're me," I tell him.

"Impossible."

"Something went wrong at the transit station. Mikey was there."

The other guy drops his arms. "Mikey?"

"Yeah, he did something to the transit."

"He did this."

"He messed up the transit."

Guards burst in through the entrance, firing their stun guns at the students. Between the doors and us, impaled bodies fall to the ground. I run the other way, crashing through double doors that lead towards the classrooms. The guy, my double, follows.

"You can't run. You have to give yourself up."

Running through the hallway, I push papier-mâché moons and stars out of my way. Behind me, the double becomes tangled in strings and decorations. He flails around, rips down a moon, and escapes.

Racing around a corner, I shoot up the stairs, hoping that he won't follow me, but he hears my steps as they echo in the stairwell. If I keep going this way, I'll end up back at the front of the school. I need to double back or go somewhere else. I reach the second floor with some time to disappear before he exits. As I run, I check the doors; all of them are locked. A bathroom door swings easily open at a push, but I pass on that option. The next classroom door, thankfully, is open. I rush inside, jam the door shut, and topple a bookshelf against it for good measure. Thumping starts against the fallen shelf as my double pounds on the other side of the door. My pursuer was closer than I thought.

With each shove, the door moves a little more as the bookcase slides a bit further. He eventually squeezes through the opening into the interior of the classroom. He immediately switches the light on, removing the darkness and any hope of hiding. My double has a papier-mâché moon in his hand, swinging it back and forth against imaginary enemies. I hope he'll move on to the teacher's office and then to the next classroom without noticing my hiding spot, but he senses I'm still here.

"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you want, but Sadie is with me. Me. I'm the only Steve Young."

He moves through the room, row by row, looking under desks for me. Then he looks up, spotting my hiding place.

"You need to stop running. Whatever Mikey did needs to be corrected."

"They'll kill me, and you know it."

"I don't."

"I do, and that means that you're lying." I know that they will kill me. The paranoid voice of Mikey rings in my head, reminding me that every day they commit murder at the transit station.

"I don't know what you are, but you're not me."

I'm something. The real Steve Young, but the one that shouldn't exist. "Mikey stopped them from killing me."

"You're a copy."

"No, you're the copy." This whole scenario shouldn't be happening and I'm not going to win this argument with myself.

"I'm the one who is supposed to be here," my copy from Paris responds.

"But I didn't die."

"That's not my fault or yours. Mikey did this. He messed it up."

"I need your help."

"I can't help you."

"You can let me go."

"No."

I jump down from the bookshelf and run out of the room to the teacher's office before my double can grab me. I lock the door and then run to the other classroom connected to the office.

"The police will get you," my double screams through the glass into the office, "You're not real anymore."

Back in the hallway, I scramble to find another way to escape. Mr. Patz's door is open, so I hurry in and run to the back of the room. I tug at the loose window, the source of Mr. Patz's draft, the contributor to his allergies and constant source of his rants about insufficient school funding. Paint flakes off as I force the window a bit higher. Minutes of pulling only provide a gap of maybe a foot, but it's what I need. I lie down and scoot on my back out the window. With my head and arms outside, I can stretch out and grab edges of the window frame. Now the hard part: pulling with my arms, I inch up the outside of the building, very aware that I'm on the second floor. Once my butt exits the building, I imitate a lizard pulling myself out at an angle to keep as much of me as possible touching the school. One foot touches a small lip of concrete at the base of the window casement; this is critical. Barely two inches of support keeps me from falling over twenty feet to the ground. Hiding on top of bookcases didn't fool my double, but he won't look for me out here.

To myself I chant, "You can do it. Come on now, you can do it." Inch by inch, I move more of my body outside the window, until I can stand upright. Shuffling, I make it to the next window that is closer to the grand oak. The three hundred year old tree towers over the school. To preserve the oak and keep a massive branch from resting on the roof, workers constructed a latticework tower.

I let one foot leave the window ledge and rotate so that my back now rests against the building. With the tower standing in front of me, I grab it and I swing my feet over, wrapping my legs around something real. The openings in the latticework provide multiple places for handholds, but only the tips of my shoes fit into the holes. Supporting my weight with my arms, I descend. With each ring lower, I feel relief. I make it ten feet before my arms give up, and I fall the rest of the way to the ground. I would have said, "slide", but probably around three feet from the ground my foot actually catches for a second in one of the gaps. Momentum causes my upper body, now traveling faster than the bottom half, to push outwards, and my head strikes the ground before my feet.

As I lie on the ground, multiple police vehicles move down the east side of the school, with spotlights looping up and down, flooding the first and second floors. As they pass, while all eyes are on the school, I make a dash from the base of the tree to a group of younger oaks planted at the edge of the park.

I look back at the school to see police surrounding the perimeter. I never knew so many workers had alternate assignments as police officers. They usher students out the front entrance into waiting cars. None of the dresses or suits try to mimic fresh colors, so the children all appear dressed uniformly in off-white. I remove my own jacket placing it at the base of these trees, recognizing that this bright garment fails as camouflage. Finding the manual control panel in the interior pocket, I switch the suit to black. The jacket and pants now black, I put them back on waiting for a chance to run.

Leaving the trees, I strike out into the park, trying to locate the non-path that Mikey and I took from my house through the woods. I trip over a brick, my head striking the ground and just missing another brick. Some congratulations that I picked the correct route! Deeper into the woods, I pause, resting my back against a tree facing away from the school. I'm alone here, no animals or people, until Mikey steps out from behind the shadow of another tree.

"Where did you come from?" I should grab him and haul him back to the police. He did this. He's the one who should be chased and punished. Not me.

"Been watching."

"What happened at the transit station?"

"I stopped them from killing you."

"There are two of me." Mikey made me a twin. An unwanted twin.

"The other one is a fake copy. Actually a copy of a copy, a double fake. They vaporized the copy in Paris when he jumped back to Orlando." Mikey holds his tablet so that I can read the screen, but I push it away. I need my own PA. "I received a message right after I stopped the transfer from killing you. It's from the other side of the wall."

"How can a message from over the wall help us?"

"I don't know."

"Who sent it?"

"It doesn't say who."

"What good does that do us?"

"It was an automatic message. Someone was anticipating that this would happen."

"That doesn't help. I need you to correct this."

"I saved your life."

"There is an identical me living my life. He has my personal assistant. He's got Sadie. Right now, she is with him. He probably got my kiss in Paris. You took my life away."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Fix it." He did the deed; he should fix it.

"I can't."

Why can't Mikey help me? "You owe me. I need you to find a way to fix this."

"I don't know how."

"You didn't think about this?"

"No."

Mikey hacks into the transit computer, changes code and doesn't think about what will happen! "I can't live like this. Something has to be done. Something." I get up from the tree and start walking in the direction where my house might be. I hate walking without a real path. "What did that message say?"

"It said, 'That was a brilliant step, but only one step of a long journey.'"

"A fortune cookie, someone sent you a fortune cookie."

"We also have its sending address."

"Is it close?"

"If the wall weren't there."

"Give it to me." He owes me and doesn't resist as I take his tablet.

"You didn't believe me about the transports. Didn't you even listen to anything I said about the other side?"

"I need to find an answer, and whoever sent you that message knows more than you."

"You can't go. It's dangerous."

"It's just outside the East Gate." Okay, school center, house north, I turn right. Even I can find the east wall. "I'm going."

"Don't."

"I can follow a map." A big fat dot sits on the screen showing where the message came from.

"You're going to have to wear something different. Nobody wears formal over the wall."

I don't respond to Mikey's joke, if that is what it was. We walk for over forty minutes without any paths under our feet through the park to get to East Gate. Mikey has us stop by a donation station, a freestanding metal container that has a picture of smiling children all wearing brightly colored clothes. There is a box of clothes on the ground too big to fit in the opening. Mikey reaches for them and hands over a black shirt with a picture of a bull's head on the front, a reprinted t-shirt from the ancient restaurant still standing north of the park.

Even an arm length away, the essence of the shirt hits me. "It smells."

"Be glad. I'm surprised that there is anything here. The ones close to a wall are normally picked over. It must have been dropped after the shift change. That's a bit of luck. You need to wait until morning to cross with the other workers."

"Are you going?" I ask but Mikey doesn't reply. He hands me a pair of pants with a stain extending down the front, but at least they don't stink. Still gross. It can't be that bad on the other side. We give them free stuff – disgusting, but free. And if the solution to this is in Mikey's exaggerated hell, then I'm going with or without him.

## Friday, March 27, 2116

## Mikey

I watch Steve put on the clothes. The grubby clothes help, but if anyone actually looks at him, they'll see a caricature of a worker. He's too soiled, too mismatched, and he stands wrong, walks wrong; he won't last.

I pull out an orange shirt with the profile of an Indian head on it. If I do this, I won't get back here. Neither of us have much of a chance to get back to this side of the wall. Too many things can go wrong and there won't be anything or anyone to call for help. But if I don't go, Steve doesn't have a chance. So I'll live my life in this green world, and Steve will die because I tried to save his life? I take off my shirt and replace it with the orange one. It might seem like I have a choice, but really, I don't.

"All right. Let's wait closer to the gate. Maybe try to rest."

We find a spot next to the Antioch Church, partially hidden from the street leading to the East Gate. We wait, but neither of us can sleep.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Mikey

When the sky finally begins to lighten, we join the true workers ending their night shift at the East Gate tunnel. I make Steve wait until I see a carrier with multiple bags under her arms. Then we step in line right behind her and in front of another carrier.

The queue of people on the ramp gradually sinks deeper into the wall and then doubles back as we wind up and back through a maze of ropes marking the proper place to stand. The roped pathway forces us to revisit the same faces over and over after the queue switches direction and strangers pass us again for a second and third time.

In the dim light we inch forward until the line halts as we make it to our destination: the inspection station. Guards search the items being brought over by the woman in front of us. They empty the contents of her bag on the table under a window. Rough hands move through her possessions, sorting them by value. Some of the more valuable items quickly go into the pockets of the guards, while the majority of her wares return to her. She raises her voice a bit to complain, but it feels artificial. The guards know her. There is a familiarity in this staged act. The guards pretend that the items confiscated do not constitute bribes, but then they intentionally fail to search her body where the truly valuable contraband remains concealed.

We get to the station, nothing to declare. Steve pulls out his pockets to show that they are empty. The guards look mad. I reach into my pocket and pull out an extra pair of underwear that I grabbed from the recycling station. The nearest guard still admiring his new pocketknife from the carrier slaps me with the back of his hand.

"Stop wasting my time."

The guards are already looking past us, at the next carrier.

When we make it outside the tunnel into the morning sunlight people surround the first carrier trying to buy the smuggled contraband. Other previously sullen people also burst into shouts on the other side of the wall announcing their goods - more carriers. People arriving from inside the wall quickly sell their goods to merchants in the crowd. Nothing changes. The people buying are the same wholesalers who will later today sell the goods at their established stalls at the outdoor market.

On this side of the wall, no trees block our view of the sky filled with a raw sun just beginning its daily journey over dirt roads. Everything within eyesight was demolished years ago as foundation for the wall. From the ruins grow this massive shantytown without any real buildings. And behind us, around the East Gate, rises the wall revealing its true height and stretching a mile from the north to the south. Next to the wall, waiting their turn, stands a queue of daily workers commencing their morning routine of passing through detectors before being granted access inside. The guards in that line search for weapons and bombs before admitting the workers back into paradise. Behind the line, attesting to the need for searches, a group of workers replace a layer of block lost during the last riot. Their repair along with the patches from other years, mark the wall with multiple different hues of gray.

Instead of trying to sell or buy goods like the other workers, I move Steve quickly away from the crowd, heading south alongside the wall. Stacks of trash flow almost to the top of the wall, gravity keeping them from cresting over.

"Everyone is so dirty."

I close my fingers quickly, wanting Steve to shut up. Steve doesn't notice my signal or our follower, a girl probably five, holding a teddy bear with a missing leg.

"It's bigger than in the videos."

"Don't stare. People on this side never stare at anything unless they are willing to fight. Never look people in the eyes. Keep looking at the ground."

"Why?"

I'm doomed. "Nobody wants to be your friend over here." I look into my jacket at the tablet still held to my chest by an extra belt to avoid detection at East Gate's checkpoint. Instead of staring at the wall, Steve now stares at the children searching through the trash for something to sell at the market.

"Don't stare."

The area by the gate continues to be a prime spot to shift through trash. Daily dumps by the guards on either side of the exit add fresh material to the pile. The guards can only hide so much contraband in their uniforms, so bulky and valuable gets replaced by small and expensive, and the discarded items conveniently fall outside from open windows in the East Gate or from the guard tower.

"Okay. I'm starting to see why this might not be the ideal place for me. Let's find the messenger and get out."

"We're close."

We walk between and around shacks stacked tightly next to each other, keeping the wall on our right side. With quick peeks on my tablet, I track our progress to the messenger. "Over here," I shout to get Steve back. Steve, wandering ahead of me, still doesn't understand the danger. I move to the entrance of a shack, where an old sign with the words "Hoods Up" forms the door. I announce, "Permission to enter."

"State your business," responds someone from inside the shack.

"Transportation anomalies."

"Enter."

We push back the sign and then immediately duck to avoid hitting our heads on the lower doorway entrance. Once inside, we can stand, but Steve's hair touches a board serving as part of the roof. A bedroll held off the ground by a frame built from recycled planks fills the majority of the interior. An assortment of cooking supplies jam any available spots in the far corner next to the bed, while right next to me sits a waste bucket reeking from its contents. Under a torn blanket needing a new set of patches sits a man with a disease-ravaged face.

"It's me. My name is Mikey. You called us."

"You're younger than I expected. Who's your friend?"

"This is Steve, the one who didn't transport. Can you help?" The man's eyes shift to Steve, moving freely behind his scarred skin.

"The boys who cracked the transporter code need my help. The real question is, who will you help, if I help you? The workers or the trust babies?"

"Everybody needs to be helped, or it's going to get worse for everyone."

"Look around you. Mikey, is it? It can't get worse for me."

"So will you help us?"

"I'll only help you if you help these people."

"We can't do..."

I interrupt Steve, who is about to blow our chance with the only person that could help, "How?"

"I want the wall destroyed."

"It keeps everyone where they should be," Steve dutifully chimes in.

"It keeps beggars, the sick and dying out of view of the trust babies. You can't even look directly at me, can you?"

"I was told not to stare," Steve replies. I can't blame Steve for not wanting to look. Across the man's face and every exposed piece of skin, lumps of scar tissue hide the person underneath.

"Stare. I invite you. Have you ever eaten armadillo?"

Steve shakes his head, "No."

"Don't touch the buggers. This is what untreated leprosy looks like." He pulls out his hands from under his shirt, a full thumb on one while only nubs remain for the rest of his fingers. His body is dying piece by piece, but he knows the answer in his head: he must have a solution.

"What can we do?"

"For this, nothing." The man uses his remaining digit to point at his chest. "I'm living one life and this is how my story reads, no rewrites. You can finish what I tried to start. It's unnatural for the trust babies to live forever, and this disparity of wealth can't last. If you just give it a little push, society will remove the wall."

From his bed, he looks around the shack and then focuses on his bracelet. "Have you ever heard of the Sullivans?"

I nod.

"Good. Wonderful people in their own way, but I never wanted to be like them, living forever, pure hell." He pulls out a bottle of whiskey from under his bed. "We can't all become gods. Not enough room on Olympus." Twirling the bracelet on his arm, he unlatches it, using his full thumb, and holds it out. "I've been like this for thirty years. It's how it has to be. I'm not contagious. If so, my patients would suffer. Nobody has caught it from me yet."

"You're a doctor?" Steve finally looks at him as he asks the question.

"Someone had to be over here to treat these people. Someone has to live in the real world, and yes, this is the real one. And I do treat them when they let me. Fewer these days."

I step forward and take the bracelet from his outstretched hand. "Thank you."

"Mikey, use their strength against them; then let society fix itself. It always does."

"Do what exactly?"

"I'm old. I know one hundred and twenty doesn't sound old to someone that might live forever, but it is. You cracked the transport code, which impressed me. You'll figure out a solution."

"Sir, I've only got my tablet. There isn't even a connection to the net on this side of the wall."

"My lab, my original lab, should still be safe. It sent the message with this false origination code that brought you here. A prototype for the first transporters is still there, and it is linked to their system."

"Where is it?"

"In the hospital."

"The Southern?"

"Yes." The remains of two hospitals stood outside the walls of Orlando, one to the north and the other south. On a map, both routes appeared equal, but that would be a lie.

I don't like cemeteries. I'm not a fan of seeing my final resting place, and the southern route takes us by edge of Orlando's largest.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Steve

As we step outside of the shack, new offensive odors fill the void left from the wastebasket. We now have a mission from a guy dying in a shack made of signs advertising hoods going up, whatever that means. "Who was that creepy drunk guy?"

"Dr. Gerber. That guy and the Sullivans built the first transporters."

"They renamed our school after that crazy old man?"

"Yeah, and the Sullivans are going to pay for the remodel of the school and probably own half of Orlando."

"Oh, those Sullivans. Why is he here?"

"It wasn't always like this." Mikey looks into his jacket at his tablet. "There aren't many records in the archives from before the wall. Looks like a factory or something big was at this spot. Maybe he worked there."

"Where they built transports?"

"No, milk. Says here the factory produced milk."

"You don't build milk, Mikey; it comes from a bottle."

"Not important. I don't know why Dr. Gerber is here."

Behind us we hear a shout, "That little one has a tablet!" Four kids along with the teddy bear girl walk towards us. Except for the girl and her bear, each of them carries something metal in their hands. No papier-mâché moons this morning.

"Run!" Mikey yells, but I'm already moving.

We run on the edge of the trash pile. The shacks are to my left, each built close enough together to form a barrier. And to my right the mound of trash along the wall forms an insurmountable barricade. With each step through this gorge, I slide a bit but keep my balance, as the ground beneath me remains loose with discarded items. One of the kids sprints higher on the mound, running almost above me, knocking bits of trash into my path. Mikey disappears. I don't know where he went, but he vanished from sight. It's only me now, with the one kid to my right running on top of the trash and the others behind me. A gap opens to the left into the shacks, but I press on, not wanting to slow down to turn. Glancing up, I see the one running above me smile. I'm not sure why someone running on garbage would ever have cause to gloat, but I'm not going to give him any satisfaction. I press myself and gain some speed, my legs aching. The kids behind me slow down, and the one above starts to walk.

Victory! Even a kid who grew up inside Orlando can outrun a bunch of worker kids. Then I see the obstacle. Sand colored bricks form a barrier extending outward from the wall at least thirty feet high, almost to the top of the wall, and this new barrier reaches out into the shacks. At the top, a sign reads AT&T. I face a dead end created from the remains of an old office building.

The kid on the mound walks slowly to this new obstruction. He jumps and grabs, pulling himself easily up to sit on top. His feet now dangling, while he looks down at me and repeats that same stupid grin.

The three kids and teddy bear girl block the path behind me. They casually walk towards me, knowing that I'm trapped. No longer running, I bend over to catch my breath. Of the three, two are definitively bigger than me. The third is my size, but skinnier, wearing layers of clothes and dirt: it might be a girl.

A bottle hits my shoulder. No blood: just skims off. The lone kid on top of the ruins laughs and then searches for another missile to throw. Next to himself he starts lining up possible ammo. One of the bricks moves as he places down another projectile for his increasingly large arsenal. Then with both hands, he starts loosening the brick further.

Ahead of me, I face a soon-to-be, brick-throwing menace. I can't stay here. Pulling up to my full height, I begin to walk back to meet the other three. Each one carries metal bars. The possible girl trailing behind the boys holds a hollow pole extending at least five feet behind her. Each of the boys hold smaller solid metal bars, that clank instead of ring like hers.

"I don't want to fight," I shout at them.

"Don't worry, it will be over soon. Give us the tablet," her voice confirms that she is female, as she begins spinning her weapon around her body. The speed of the pole creates a blur of motion, and then it falls to the ground and she follows face first. She hits the ground exposing the stun gun prods attached to her back, and Mikey standing behind her with the guard's weapon still pointed forward. Moving, Mikey picks up the pole and begins the same routine as the girl, twirling it over his head before swinging it around his body. The two boys rush him, and he hits each of them across the face with the pole before they can take a swing at him. They regain their feet but now keep safe distances.

"Let my friend go!" Mikey shouts. A brick sails by his head from the trajectory of the smiling boy.

One of the two dazed boys switches his metal bar to his left hand while pulling out a small knife. Another off-target brick lands at my feet.

Reaching into his shirt, Mikey pulls out the tablet and holds it high. "Is this what you want?" He throws his machine over our heads onto the trash pile. The little teddy bear girl, only a bystander during the fight, goes after the tablet. The two boys move forward to attack Mikey, and another brick lands next to me, breaking into two. Time to move. I gather the two pieces and rush forward. With their backs to me, I know I can get one. Mikey continues spinning the pole while the boys remain cautious with fresh memories of being hit. As Mikey holds them off, I raise one of my stone-age weapons and then bring it down on the unsuspecting assailant's head. As the blow hits, his body crumples, and he collapses to the ground. With the remaining piece in my arsenal, I face the last boy fighting Mikey.

"I've got it," teddy bear girl shouts, and while she screams the outnumbered boy throws his knife at Mikey and then runs straight up the pile of trash. The knife lodges in Mikey's stomach, its silver hilt visible outside his jacket.

Above us the smiling boy joins with the little girl and the knife thrower at the treasure.

Looking at Mikey and then at the two other assailants still on the ground, I ask, "What just happened?"

"That's life outside the wall," Mikey replies as he looks down at the knife in his stomach. "We need to go before they get brave again."

"You just took on a gang of kids. Where did that ninja craziness come from?"

"I, we both surprised them."

"Six years. We've been friends this whole time, and you've never done anything like that."

"Nothing could really hurt you over there."

As we walk away, blood from Mikey's cut begins to spread.

"You're bleeding."

Mikey pulls out the knife and then uses it to cut out the lining on his jacket. The underwear declined by the guards, now pushed tightly over the wound with the lining wrapped around him providing a temporary bandage.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Mikey

Steve keeps staring at my stomach. Just like the wall, now I'm another oddity from outside. "Do you believe me now? On this side of the wall, there is always someone trying to take what you have. We need to keep going."

We need to get to the south side of the wall. There will be fewer people there, less chance for problems. In front of us, the land rises up. After spending time inside Orlando and seeing old maps of the city, I recognize this as an abandoned road, one of the many that ran through the country before the portals. Walking to the top, we can see back to the slums in the Milk District. Another wall prevents us from seeing into Orlando, but I can see the top floors of some of the taller buildings inside the city.

Pulling out Dr. Gerber's bracelet, a green light on its side flashes, but I see no other visible signs of communication.

"What is it?"

"I think it's his personal memory. Last century it was common for people to store data. Before the walls, people carried around their data storage, like your personal assistant."

"But that thing doesn't do anything."

"It can probably receive messages. It's the progeny for the personal assistant. There wasn't universal storage. If we're lucky, he has given me access to the code that they used to create the transporters."

"And?

"Instead of just stopping them, we can control them."

"I don't see how that is going to help us."

"It's a start."

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Steve

Mikey has us walk west on the abandoned road above the swamp and forest that dominate the south. "They say the South is filled with the dead. A large graveyard with monuments to the dead as far as you can see," Mikey comments.

"I heard that you burn your dead."

"In the Milk District, if you have money, you get burned, but that takes a lot of wood. Most people bury their bodies in the ground. That's why the swamps around the cemetery are haunted. Come look."

Below us in the cemetery, rows and rows of large flat rocks cover the ground, and in between there are smaller rocks. "What are those?"

"Those are grave stones. After someone dies, you mark a rock and bring it out here to permanently remember them on the surface."

We move on, and Mikey stops again and points down. I look over the edge of an open pit between large markers. At the bottom of the pit bodies fill the shallow grave.

"It's tradition. Every day, they dig a new trench for the day's bodies. Then the next day, people will come out, in a parade, with flowers and their rocks, for the group burial. Some people get multiple rocks or a large rock: it's how we say goodbye." Something high-pitched howls to the south. An animal, not a ghoul. "Coyotes run throughout the cemetery."

"Why don't they eat the bodies?"

"Look!" Mikey points into the trees. Partially hidden among the trees sit hunters in camouflage. Each hunter has a bow and a quiver of arrows. "If you ever need a coyote hat, the Milk District is the place."

We move on, away from the hunters watching over the dead. "How will we know where the hospital is without your tablet?"

"It's south."

"The hospital is through the graveyard?"

"No, west of the graveyard, and the swamp, but south down the Avenue, one of the old roads."

To our left the woods continue, overgrown with oaks like back home interspersed with cypress trees that Mikey says indicate the border of the haunted swamps. To the right, the southern wall bars our view of the city, but as we walk further west closer to the original core of the city, more skyscrapers become visible. I rarely go downtown, but I recognize the buildings, especially the one with the green pyramids on top in the south-west corner of the city. "When, Mikey?"

Mikey takes a moment, looking to the south. "It's there," he says, pointing to the left of a small lake where cypress trees ring the perimeter of the wetlands. "We need to get past that lake and to the hospital. Quicker if we exit now."

We climb down from the highway. On the true ground, the canopy of trees quickly blocks out the noonday sun. Heat radiates off my skin, relieved to be in the shade.

"The hospital is down this street," Mikey comments.

Nothing surrounds us, and I see no street anywhere. "What street?"

"Those were street lights. This is the Avenue: it leads to the hospital." Now I notice broken metal poles at various lengths, bent twisted, and stripped of their lamps.

"How far?"

"Maybe another half hour walking, maybe a bit more, but we still have to watch out for thieves."

"Out here?"

"Not as many as near the wall, but there isn't as much cargo out here and they fight over every scrap that gets this far."

Instead of a half an hour, it takes over an hour. Although he's denying he's hurt, Mikey's stomach still bleeds and he has to take lots of breaks. Trees and shrubs have grown up through the debris flanking the street. We hide in their shade from the few people walking the path. We don't set foot onto the Avenue, less than ten feet across, but keep it in sight as we travel south towards the hospital. Finally, Mikey stops and points up above the tree line to a building rising up.

"It's huge."

"That is just one of many."

All the people who would have fit in that building. I wonder, "How many workers lived at the hospital?"

"Only the patients stayed here. Thousands of sick people."

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Steve

A constant thumping somewhere in the distance matches the cadence of a heart. The pounding increases as we pass room after empty room. Peeking in the doors sometimes reveals a bed, and less frequently one occupied by someone dead or dying. Without working lights, sunlight seeps into the hallway only at open doorways, creating an alternating pattern of light and dark on the floor.

I have to shout over the noise, "Why would someone still come here?"

"Some doctors still practice on this side of the wall." I hear Mikey's words, but also chanting. It doesn't sound like English, maybe French accompanying the throbbing beat.

We reach the source of the noise: an entire room filled with people striking wooden drums in unison. A child, maybe three years old, with his personal drum painted red and black, tries to keep time, while two glistening women leap and whirl around an unconscious body on the floor in the center of the room.

Mikey pulls me away from the doorway. The hallway ends in an open area. Broken panels from the glass ceiling allow rain into the former lobby being transformed into a terrarium. A large, circular desk dominates the room, its marble top pristine while all the other furniture decays.

"Dr. Gerber's lab," Mikey announces, placing his hand with the bracelet on top of the desk. The bracelet glows and shimmering light radiates out on the surface. "There's still some power here, not much." On top of the black marble, thin blue lines crisscross, revealing the hallway and rooms that we just visited. The image rotates, showing a 3-D representation of the building, and a red dot appears on the screen.

"Are we close?"

When he pulls his hand away, the image abruptly disappears. "It's in the basement. Down and over a bit from here."

At the edge of the lobby is a bank of metal doors for elevators, but Mikey leads us around the corner to the entrance of a stairwell. Opening the door releases the smell of old urine and waste. Walls streaked with the dried remains from people using the stairwell as a bathroom compete with black mold creeping up the walls. At the bottom, an old door blocks our path with mammoth Florida cockroaches scampering across the floor and walls as we approach. I yank on the door handle to get us out quickly, but it fails to move. I try again harder. No movement.

"Let me try." Mikey reaches his hand to the door, but before touching it Dr. Gerber's bracelet begins to glow along with a portion of the wall. Layers of grime obscure the writing, but the words "Welcome Dr. Gerber" become partially visible beneath. Mikey barely touches the door and it unlocks, but it takes both of us to swing it out through the accumulated waste on the floor.

Inside, the basement floor is clean, only our recent footprints mar the pure white tiles. These blemishes remain for only a moment as the grime dissolves into the floor evaporating each footprint behind us.

"That was creepy, Mikey. Admit it."

"A bit mad scientist crazy."

"No difference."

This sterile hallway is free from any dirt or signs of decay. Fresh air from an unknown source flows around us, no hint of any foul smell. Lights turn on automatically as we pass. Instead of rooms for patients, large glass windows divide us from areas with lab tables and equipment in various stages of being built. After passing several laboratories Mikey stops and stares, recognizing something familiar. In the center before us is a portal, but instead of being built to let someone walk through it, this one is built into a bed, allowing someone to lie within it.

We enter through glass doors using Dr. Gerber's bracelet to unlock them.

On the side of the unit is written, "Bone Organ Tissue Replicator – BOTR."

"I need to see something." Mikey gets up and lies on the machine. A panel glows beside the machine and with a few touches by Mikey, the whole machine lights up: then there's a flash.

"Mikey!"

"I'm fine. I just wanted to scan myself." Craning his neck to look up, Mikey studies a detailed display, showing the wound to his stomach.

"It's deeper than I thought. There is a nick to my small intestine. Small hole. Increased chance for infection."

"But you can fix it. You're in a hospital."

"I don't know. I'll try." Mikey places Dr. Gerber's bracelet against a stand next to the portal and begins flipping through virtual pages. "Most of their work appears to be in the creation of artificial organs. It wasn't until the end that they started making copies of the whole person." Mikey pauses on a page. "Dr. Gerber's notes mention a storage vault. They spent a lot of money on it." Mikey moves to a wall with no apparent door and places his hand with the bracelet on the center of the wall. An outline for a door appears around his hand, and with his other hand, he touches the symbol for a doorknob, and the wall opens.

Mikey enters, and I follow him into a large room filled with row after row of machines.

"What are they?"

"Active memory storage. When they stopped making artificial organs, they started making electronic records of the whole person. Each one can hold data for millions of people."

At the end of the row of machines, I see a traditional transport portal, an archway that allows you to walk through.

"But there are so many machines."

"This is how they do it. When they need to, they just make a new copy of your entire body."

"They what?"

"Last week, when you broke your arm."

"You broke it, when you fell on me," I remind Mikey.

"Sorry, I broke your arm, and how long did it take you to heal."

"You were there for most of it. We went to the doctor's office and had to sit in the waiting room forever. And after you left, we went in, they gave me a pill, and then I woke up better. Waste of an afternoon."

"I thought I was protecting you yesterday, when I stopped you from getting on the transport, but it started before that. I should have noticed something. Did you feel different or disoriented after the doctor's visit?"

"I was wobbly. Everything fuzzy, tripped over my shoes."

"Nobody can walk in those oval shoes."

"No, we bought the oval shoes later that day. The doctor said my old shoes were too big."

"Feet don't shrink."

"It wasn't my feet, it was the shoes."

"When was your last check up?"

Mikey gets so distracted. "I don't know. It doesn't matter."

"Your shoes were too big, because their records were from your last check up. You were smaller the last time you saw the doctor. They created a copy from your records, replicated your current clothes, and then dropped a copy of your memories into the new you."

"I'm a copy?" I don't feel like a copy. I'm me.

"Maybe a copy of a copy. I was focused on the transports."

"Why not just create a new copy with my current body and memories. Why an old copy?"

"An exact copy would have had that same broken bone. They had to bring back a copy without a defect, an old copy. They probably do that all the time."

"So I died?"

"The Steve that had a broken bone was vaporized."

"It's still death."

"Depends on how you define it. What do you remember about the doctor's office?"

"I sat in a metal chair, I took a pill, my arm felt better, everything was fuzzy, and it didn't hurt anymore. The pain was gone."

"They recorded your memories up until that pill. They used the pill to knock you out while they replaced your body."

I'm a reboot, replaying from the last saved game.

Mikey continues, "Easier to lie to you. Say they fixed you. Do you know anyone who is really old?"

"My third power great-grandfather is one hundred and forty. He's the oldest."

"And does he look old?"

"Yeah, he looks old."

"Does he act old?"

"He can still play tennis and golf. He lives for that. Out there all the time."

"What does he do to stay healthy?"

"Nothing, he just lives."

"A copy of your third power great-grandfather lives."

"The copy is what I know as him."

"And you will live forever. All the trust babies live forever, because they keep dumping their memories into copies of their younger bodies."

"I won't live forever. The guy living in my clothes will live. I'll be dead."

"Everybody dies."

"I'll die more."

"Without a funeral."

The machines around us hold the answer. "This is their weakness. We destroy the records, and then they can't use the portals." Before hearing Mikey's answer, I start searching the room for a weapon, something that could damage a metal box. A large metal bar would be perfect. "Mikey, where's your pole? That girl's pole."

"We could destroy them, but there are copies of this data at each hub."

"You don't know that."

"It's how I would do it. It's too valuable to keep all at one place, especially at an old hospital on the wrong side of the wall. Each hub must keep a copy, and the handshake is just a confirmation that both machines have the same copy. Then they just send the neuro information and minor alterations. It makes sense."

"So we don't destroy the records?"

"Wouldn't change anything. But we might be connected to the whole transport net."

"And what can we do if we are?"

"Let me confirm a link first." Mikey moves over to the transport hub and begins to interact with the terminal. "Right now, you are a wanted person because there are two of you. Well, what if that weren't a unique thing?"

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Mikey

I mimic the output so that half the screen on the wall has the same familiar numbers and letters scrolling across as I had on the tablet. Except that instead of access to one portal and person, from this lab I control every portal in the world and manipulate every piece of data flowing through the system.

"I've found the gap." The code on Dr. Gerber's bracelet predicted a preset and I've matched it in the active code. "Spacings of thirty seconds between arrivals. Every fifth or sixth arrival, there is an additional gap. We can drop a new copy at that point in time."

"So about ten new people an hour?"

"Twenty gaps, sometimes more each hour. Over one hundred thousand total."

"What?"

"There are five thousand three hundred fifty-eight transporters over the globe. If we keep this up most of today, there will be another million people, and double that in twenty-four hours."

"Millions?"

"The ones who travel the most might end up with more than one duplicate."

"This is crazy."

"Thank Dr. Gerber for giving us access to the entire portal network."

I use part of the screen to post video footage from outside the transport in Nashville, Tennessee.

"Are you ready?" My hand hovers over a virtual red button.

"Do it," Steve shouts. And it begins.

"See that woman just emerging on the screen with the hat? Right behind her will be a copy." The portal glows and walking out is a man, the first one at this station. I switch the video to a station in Atlanta, Georgia. "That woman picking up the briefcase, a copy."

"How can you tell?"

"I can't. I just know the order, and it's happening everywhere. So as of this moment we've created over five thousand new lives. Oh, and with that, five thousand new purses, wallets, bags or whatever else they had. That will delay them noticing." I start scrolling through the footage at each station. Everything appears normal, no sirens, no police. Switching to a virtual map the computer tracks the copies with a blue dot. As my view expands, more blue dots in different cities. "I can't track them once they leave the station but it's spreading."

"And what will this do?"

"I don't know. I've never created life before."

"Seriously."

"I'm being serious. They vaporize the originals everyday. Today, I closed the loop and created life."

"Why?"

"Because this is their strength and their weakness."

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Sadie

My personal assistant announces that Dad is calling. "Sadie, where are you?"

"I'm at the candy store with Emma and Mia."

"I need you home. It's not safe out there." I end the call and he immediately calls again.

"Sadie where are you?"

"I'm still at the store."

"Which store?"

"The candy store." Adults complain about kids not listening and then he can't remember something from a second ago.

"Please come home."

"Don't worry Dad. I'm on my way."

He sounds angry so I pick up a chocolate-shaped bull for him. He collects bulls, not cows, just bulls. Bulls make him smile, something to do with his job when he had to work. I say my goodbyes to Emma and Mia. They will be going to the cafe next door. It's our weekend routine, hitting the shops and then a bite to eat, but I'm over it. After the craziness of prom, going home and resting sounds wonderful. Maybe I'll take a bath, just soak and listen to music. The autonomous car requested by my personal assistant pulls up to the front of the store.

As I walk through the exit, a worker in dreadful grey starts screaming, "Stop! Stop!" They always wear grey or black. Someone should donate them more clothes with colors. They always look so depressed, so serious. The worker continues to yell, "You can't leave with that." He keeps pointing at my purse.

"My purse?" Why in the world does he want my purse?

"No, inside, the candy."

"I want the candy."

"You have to pay."

"And?"

"Something is wrong. It started earlier, and ... ", he stops midsentence, "You've got to pay."

"What do you mean?"

"Your balances are coming back as empty. They don't show you having any money."

"Are you crazy? Is this a worker scam?"

"I'm sorry, but something has changed. You have to pay with cash."

"Why would I carry cash? Cash? Just re-scan me I'm not some worker."

"You can't take the candy."

"It's just a piece of candy. Maybe over the wall, you think it's a big deal, but it's just candy."

"I can't let you take it."

"It's for my dad." This is ridiculous. One piece of candy, a stupid chocolate bull; it's not worth this trouble.

"You can't have it without paying."

"Fine. Keep your stupid candy." I reach into my purse and throw the chocolate bull at him. It bounces off his chest, falls to rest in his arm for a second, but as he reaches for it with his other hand, it dislodges and continues down. The tips of his fingers fail to grasp it catching only empty air. The bull falls to the floor, and then all the king's men couldn't put that back together. Okay, that was worth it.

"All of you, out!" The worker turns around and starts screaming at my friends.

Emma and Mia just drop their candy into the bins while the irrational guy screams at them. They walk around the pieces of chocolate on the floor, some still wobbling. What a shame; he should have let me take it.

What gave him the right to yell at my friends? "Wait till my dad hears about this. You'll be permanently over the wall." I step out of store, "Call Daddy."

Multiple echos respond, "Sadie ... Sadie ... Is that ... Go home ... Sadie ... Go ... home ... home ... safe..."

"What?"

Again overlapping voices, "Home... see you ... home."

When I get to my house, the hall lights fail to turn on automatically, the living room ones delay before responding, while the rest remain off. On the main entertainment screen, there's nothing but news: the filter must be on the fritz too. Why would it select news for me to watch? People scream at the video camera. One guy, a regular guy dressed in green, smashes the plate glass window of a store. It looks like Orlando, but it must be somewhere else.

One of the channels shows guards outside a transit station turning people away. A reporter states, "Getting reports of a technical issue at the transports. Authorities anticipate that there will be delays for people attempting to use portals today. No word on when this delay will end."

The next channel shows a group of kids running away from a different transit station, a small fire in a trash bin burning by the entrance. Guards attempt to put out the fire using their jackets, but it spreads to the side of the building rising over their heads so that the waving of their clothes looks silly.

The newscast continues, "There are reports of civil unrest across the globe. Police activity is rising to counter this surge. Hampering their efforts is a transit shutdown of the portals that has trapped many officials in territories away from their hometowns."

I'm so glad I'm not out in this chaos - bunch of crazy people upset, and nobody can transport home. Wacky.

On the screen, the camera zooms in too close to a woman's face without any makeup, "My son is not home. When are they going to let my son come home?"

Another channel shows a group of people pounding on the doors at a local bank. A reporter states, "The WorldNet Bank has shut its doors after a run by consumers attempting to withdraw funds. Regional banks have also reported a similar spike in withdrawals. Authorities are investigating a possible world-wide crime ring. A massive sell-off of stocks has triggered an unanticipated market adjustment. Shortages of goods reported at local markets across the city as people panic buy. Authorities have said no new food will be transported into the city using portals. Just in time inventories are also to blame for the shortages. Hotel occupancy rates are high during the transit shutdown, the only bright spot in today's economy. Credit fraud is spiking and crime has exploded around the world." Two people in front of a coffee shop dressed the same fight with each other on the video. As the camera zooms in, the two appear to be identical twins.

"A curfew has been established for most of the major cities. Nobody is allowed on the streets tonight starting at dusk, and everybody who doesn't require a portal is advised to report to their home prior to nightfall. New reports have just come in that people have been severely injured, and some deaths associated with looting in both Philadelphia and Madrid."

The next screen shows people in uniforms shooting at groups of civilians. As the people fall to the ground, the screen goes blank. I scroll through the channels, but none of them broadcast anything remotely entertaining. Ridiculous. Everything wacky. Dad will fix it.

"Sadie are you all right?" My dad enters the living room and gives me the kind of hug that only a dad can give. His arms wrap around me, and I'm buried within the familiar feel, smell, and touch. Everything will be all right.

He then begins moving through the room, looking in drawers. Talking out loud to himself, he says, "He's probably taken it."

"Dad, none of my shows are broadcasting or stored anymore. They've been overwritten, and my personal assistant is broken. They wouldn't let me have a piece of candy. The worker was really rude about it." Lights flicker.

"Have you seen anything weird today?"

"I just told you, my PA is broken. I couldn't get candy, and now the entertainment center is playing stupid news. Oh, and the lights are flickering."

"Something happened today. Something bad. Tell me again about the boy at the dance last night."

"Some guy dressed up to look like Steve. He had everything right except for the suit. He sounded like Steve, but he acted weird. Steve said it was some kind of joke."

"That must be..."

The front door opens, and a person identical to my dad walks in.

Wearing his clothes and looking right at me, he shouts, "Get away from him, Sadie. Don't let him touch you." I move a step away from Dad. The new guy can't be him, but he looks and acts just like him.

The one closest to me shouts, "Call the police."

Both of their personal assistants respond in unison, "Emergency response is currently unavailable."

"Get away from my daughter." The new guy heads for my dad asking as he walks, "Were you looking for my gun?"

"Sadie, someone stole all of our money and my gun. Get out of here and find the police. Go."

In partial agreement, the new guy states, "Get away, Sadie. Find someplace safe."

I run through the still-open front door.

Outside, I turn back and see my dad hiding by the side of the house. Another one, but this one is wearing his clothes from yesterday.

"Sadie, come here. It's me." I cautiously approach this third dad. He reaches out his hand holding a stack of bills. "I want you to have this."

"Why?"

"It's all over the news. Whole bank accounts were being wiped out, money disappearing, so I pulled all of our money out of the bank."

"All of it?"

"Only thing I could do to protect it. I had to sell all the stock, too. Someone was in our account buying and selling. Our money wasn't safe. Market is tanking."

"What's happening?"

"Most of the banks can't handle the rush for cash, but we got ours out in time."

"I couldn't buy anything today."

"You'll have to use cash until things gets back to normal."

The large glass wall on the side of the house shatters as two dads crash through it. The two original dads continue fighting on the ground, wrestling each other over broken glass. One of the dads starts to get an advantage and sits on top of the other. Each time he hits the dad on the ground, more blood flies out of multiple cuts from his wounds. The victor then looks up and sees the third dad. "Another one."

The third dad doesn't say anything after being spotted. The victorious one gets off his beaten opponent and starts to walk to the newest dad, who pulls out an antique gun. Dad got the gun as a birthday gift when I was five. After he opened the gift, I only saw it once or twice. He kept it locked up, someplace hidden. With a silver barrel and spinning cylinder: it was a gun straight from a western movie. It must be a fake, a prop. I had this little red cowboy hat, and I would beg Dad to bring out his gun and play with me. He never brought it out to play, but would look at me seriously and say, "I've got a magic gun" and then he would "shoot" me with his fingers. Nobody had bullets within the walls, illegal to own them, but the explosion wipes away that false thought. The antique weapon roars to life, sending real bullets, not fake magic projectiles at the other two dads. Some of them fail to hit anything, but at least one bullet hits the dad trying to approach the newest addition. He falls to the ground.

I run.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Steve

"I located a private transport," Mikey shouts for no apparent reason. Just when I think I know what is happening, he focuses on something new.

"What are you talking about?"

"All of the transports are down. I've been waiting for it, and it happened."

"What happened?"

"There is always someone who has more, and I just found him."

"Who?"

"When they shut down the network, they just shut down the public transports."

"All transports are public."

"No, someone has at least two transports for private use. He jumped out of Colorado, middle of nowhere, origination point 40.370771, -106.985010, and ended up in the Bahamas on Sandy Cay at 26.583821, -77.007112, a private island. I now have the id's for the two units; there is not a public address for them."

"This person has a private transport in his house?"

"Houses, yeah. I've crossed-referenced. It looks like two large buildings, but definitely somebody's home."

"Can you imagine? Being able to jump from one house to another."

"Another one just jumped."

"Same place?"

"Yeah, but this one is female. Probably the other half of the world's richest couple."

"Who are they?"

"I don't know. Their transmission didn't include the normal stack of information. Do you want to go meet them? They might be worth meeting."

"Why would we do that?"

"Because I'm dying."

"You're not dying." Mikey couldn't be dying right now in the middle of a hospital. Good people don't die.

"I am. We can send copies and block it from eliminating us, but I don't know how much longer this body's got." He pulls back on his jacket to reveal the linen wrap over his wound. The entire bandage is dark red turning black, and behind it his stomach swells. "It hurts. I'm running a fever, probably an internal infection."

"Your copy will have a knife wound."

"I've looked, and they have files on me from my yearly physicals. No knife wounds."

"I'll send a copy of me with you." I can do that. Send a copy to protect a copy of Mikey, while I stay to watch my friend, the real one in front of me.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Sadie

Glass covers Washington Street in Thorton Park from smashed windows, including my beloved candy store. Around me the destruction continues, mostly workers, but some regular people, too. Dale, from school, stands on top of a bench across the street swinging his baseball bat at the street lamp, one of the few still intact. When the bat finally connects, he hollers as glass flies into the street.

At the candy store I can see the worker lying on the ground. He's the same one from earlier, the one who was so rude. Now he's slumped on his side under a display of candy on a stick. He doesn't look hurt. No blood, no bruises, just on the ground and groaning.

"I need to get to a doctor." On the ground next to him is an oversized lollipop with twirling red, yellow and orange. "Please help me."

"Maybe you should have been nicer." On the top shelf multiple chocolate bulls look down at us. On my tiptoes I grab a bull, and then drop a paper bill next to him, it more than covers the price of the candy.

"I was doing my job," his excuse for being rude spoken too late. I leave the store with my candy.

Outside on the street, people flock outside the bank, scrambling for the loose paper bills that have joined the trash blowing down the street.

Dale moves towards that mob, screaming, "Anarchy!" swinging his baseball bat.

Mia stays hunched down scanning the street for pieces of money, while around her people scatter. Now with a clear line of sight with me, she shouts, "Sadie, grab some."

"Why?"

"It's money. Nobody has any. I haven't had anything to eat since lunch. I'm starving." Hunched over, Mia grabs the few remaining bills near her.

I hold up my stack for Mia to see. "I've got some." She straightens up to walk over and join me. "Is Emma around?" I ask.

"She was at home, when my phone died."

"We should go there. Stick together."

"Uh, huh," Mia agrees, as she reaches out, but a boy on a bike cruising by gets between us. He snatches the money out of my hand. Some bills escape his grasp and fall to the ground and Mia jumps in a mad rush to retrieve them.

"They're mine, Mia."

"You dropped them," Mia announces, stating the obvious while failing to acknowledge my ownership.

"They're still mine."

"You were giving them away."

"I want them back."

"I'm hungry," Mia shouts and then flees holding in her hands crumpled paper money.

One of my best friends runs away, abandoning me. Correction, former friend, no longer part of my life, what's left of it. Somewhere Dale repeats his "Anarchy" chant and around me there is chaos. I need something real. There needs to be something real. It started last night. That guy claiming to be Steve, just like my dads. That started the spiral, the crazy. Dad asked about him, the guy pretending to be Steve. A joke, that's what Steve said, but it wasn't a joke. Nothing about this is funny.

I pick up a bill that rests by my shoe. It's just paper. The number one hundred printed all over the note gives it value and lets you use it to buy stuff. Holding it up, I see through the bill the image of a guy with a receding hairline and wavy long hair repeated even inside the paper, his twin looking at me. More images may exist in the direct sunlight; as I rotate, slowly turning the bill, I notice more numbers, and even smaller pictures. Through my peripheral vision, I see the shadow as a man walking by snatches the bill from my hands. He pushes the valuable paper into his pocket and keeps walking away. I never see his face: he was just some random man who now has my money, the last of my money.

I return to the candy shop. The worker, still on the ground in the same place as before, doesn't speak to me. His eyes never move as I reach down and grab the bill from the floor in front of his face. I take an entire shelf of candies, stuffing them into my purse, and not a word, nothing from the worker.

I need to get somewhere. Someplace normal. I head back up the street towards school; it's only a few blocks away, closer than my house.

In the middle of the intersection of Washington Street with the path for Hyer Avenue stands a fountain with water cascading over statues of Roman goddesses, something familiar still standing. At the base by a pool of water, a policeman lies on the ground. Without a functioning personal assistant, nobody can help him, and people just walk by, everybody but one woman. She holds his head in her soft arms and without any idea of what to do, she pats his head, telling him, "You will be okay. Everything will be all right."

I've heard that before. I bend down next to her. A billy club remains tethered to the man's belt. I release the clasp and remove it for myself.

"What are you doing?" she asks me.

I don't say anything. Paper bills mean money, but only for the ones who can keep them. Let her figure that out.

## Saturday, March 28, 2116

## Mikey

We emerge in a golden room with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the ocean with a setting sun plastering the sky in broad strokes of pink and orange. A couple both dressed in white stand by the window: both of them appear to be in their twenties. When they see us, they flash perfect smiles, the whiteness of their teeth outshining their clothes. They carry nothing with them, no bags, tablets or personal assistants. And while currently too far away to confirm, I don't see any jewelry.

Still smiling, the woman speaks with unnecessary pauses between each word, "Sorry, just leaving, we always have dinner by the water at seven twenty. Best way to end the day." The woman slips through the window her back to us.

"I would appreciate getting to know you a bit better, but I'm a creature of habit," over his shoulder the man tells us in the same pausing canter as the woman, while already moving towards the window, "When you feel like it, come down to the beach. My stomach is rumbling, telling me it's dinnertime. I'm a slave to it."

The couple - it must be Brenda and Jordan Sullivan - move through the permeable window and walk down the path towards an arched canvas that casts shade over a table. An antique metal railing crumbling from years exposed to the salt air marks the edge of the path on one side. Brenda, taller than Jordan even in causal sandals, walks with her arm wrapped around her husband, both traveling the well-worn path to their waiting table, their footsteps falling in sync with each other.

Steve watches them walk away and then asks, "Who are they?"

"The Sullivans. Co-founders of the portals." Like the couple, the golden room lacks accessories, existing purely as a functional space. No pictures hang on the walls, and all the inside tabletops are bare. The only extravagance seems to be symmetry as every piece of furniture has a matching pair. "We should join them," I decide, as there is nothing worth looking at in this most amazing room.

Outside the house, I grab the still-warm metal railing just as a sea breeze strikes me, accentuating the change in temperature at sunset. At the end of the walkway, Brenda and Jordan pick fruit from prepared plates in front of them. Beside the table is a small BOTR device the size of a microwave within a brick enclosure resembling an outdoor stone oven.

"Please, help yourself." Brenda points to the BOTR device. "You don't want the food to get cold." Brenda's sentence ends with the now familiar smile. They both laugh with a series of three quick snickers. "Sorry," Brenda continues, "a long standing joke."

Reaching into the machine reveals a plate of fruit matching the ones by the Sullivans. After I close the door, there is a bright flash inside and then Steve recovers another plate. We sit, and I edge my chair out so that I can see the sunset behind me. On my plate, swirls of orange, yellow and white with dashes of blue created from tangerines, pineapple, banana and blueberries form a picture duplicated exactly on Steve's plate. "Do you always have guests?" I ask and then take a bite of a pineapple. The dry piece of fruit with the texture of a rice cake and lack of flavor crumbles in my mouth. I grab a glass of water to wash it down. It's worse than Steve's morning snacks.

"No. You are our first guests in, how long has it been?"

"Almost seventy years. Sound right?" Brenda turns to Jordan.

"No, closer to eighty years ago, give or take one or two. It's just us now."

"Last guest, President Taylor, right after he started building his walls."

"He thought it was the solution."

"Some people like to hide their problems and hope they will go away. He was like that. His wife was lovely. Brilliant woman - she should have run the country."

"What happened?"

"Well, he built his walled cities. Filled them with trust babies in the center, with access to transport stations, and he left everybody else outside the wall. The other countries followed suit, as a condition of receiving a portal."

"I stopped actively courting politicians after that. It was hideous," Jordan comments.

"That bald guy, that one from Georgia was different," Brenda adds.

"Too different - he couldn't translate his vision into something that the public could grasp. But it was too late then."

"You're the Sullivans, Dr. Gerber's partners, right?"

Jordan gets up and extends his arm for handshakes. "How rude of me. So long without guests."

"Too long. I'm Brenda."

"I'm Mikey and this is Steve."

"Michael and Stephen," Brenda echoes back changing our names, "the ones named in Dr. Gerber's will."

"His will, what are you talking about?" I ask.

"Have you been monitoring the news? It's chaos," Jordan mentions.

"Necessary chaos," Brenda agrees.

"Necessary?" Steve questions. Steve must agree with my assessment of the food, as only a few empty places exist on his plate.

"It was bound to happen. All those resources being wasted. Imagine how much energy it takes to rebuild a person every time they want to travel to another city. Every time you want a piece of fruit." Brenda picks up another slice of pineapple. "Very inefficient for the masses." The piece starts dissolving upon touching her lips and she inhales the flakes.

"But you made the transports," I remind them.

"We made them to save lives, not to joy ride."

"They abused the gift."

"Yes, they did," Brenda agrees with her husband.

"Look at you. You look barely older than me. How many wasteful trips have you taken to eat dinner by the ocean?" I ask. I'm not buying that these guys are victims.

"Point taken, but we've earned this. We built the machines. If anyone should benefit, it should be us."

"Still."

"You may not like our lifestyle, but we have other things to discuss," Brenda slowly states in her choppy manner. "Dr. Gerber died today, but before he died, he saw a portion of the wall fall."

"How did he die?"

"He just died. His body was old, hideously diseased, I am amazed he lasted that long."

I didn't know the man. I never had the chance. It's good that he saw the wall fall. That felt right, but him dead seemed wrong. I just talked to him; it's possible I was the last person to talk to him. The last words on this Earth should mean something, else why speak?

"What do you mean the wall fell?" Steve lurched in on that fact.

"The East Gate isn't the only opening on the east side now. A portion of the wall to the north collapsed from an explosion. It remains open. Looters running through it. Quite hideous."

"Are people hurt?" I need to know.

"Some because of the explosion, but more from the upheaval."

"Because of me?"

"Because of the imbalance. Somebody had the explosives prior to today: that didn't just happen. They just used them today, taking advantage of the situation. A hole in the wall is nothing. More symbolic than anything."

"People got hurt."

"Civilizations flourish when opportunities exist that benefit the greater good. Civilizations fail when the individual opportunities benefit the few and not the civilization. Yes, Michael, nothing will be the same because you changed the world today. Is it better today? No. Can it be better? Yes." She reaches out and touches my leg. "It would have happened someday, you just gave it a little nudge."

"And now what do I do?"

"Dr. Gerber left his fortune to you, Michael. Everything."

Steve smirks, "He lived in a shack in the slum. What fortune?"

With a hand on Steve's arm Brenda silences him. After selecting a piece of pineapple from her husband's plate, that also dissolves in her lips, she calmly states, "He had more assets than Jordan and me. He never spent any of it after he went over the wall and stopped all use of portals. He died like he did to avoid the temptation of walking through a portal every day. Imagine dying from old age when the very machine that you invented can cure you. I never thought he would do it."

"I did. Fool," Jordan huffs.

"You now have more money and assets at your disposal than most countries. I would suggest that you finish your dinner and then plan on how you're going to use it."

In twenty-four hours I have gone from being a weird kid from Orlando to being the richest person in the world. "What's the deal with the food," I ask the Sullivans.

"It's perfect. We eat it everyday, identical to our first meal here." Brenda reaches behind her and pats the mini BOTR machine.

I attempt to stab a banana, and it splitters into multiple pieces.

"See perfect," Brenda's head is tilted and her smile is perfect.

"That is not right," I point out to her. Clearly bananas do not shatter, but she remains blankly smiling.

Jordan starts cutting his food with a fork and with the downward strike another piece of fruit shatters. Jordan scoops up one of the larger pieces and smiling says, "Perfect."

Before we can continue this discussion on perfection, Brenda announces, "It's 7:50, dear."

"Oh, time for bed."

"Let's talk more in the morning. Good night."

The Sullivans walk back up the path, arms wrapped around each other, each foot stepping into the shallow space on the stairs, worn from years of identical feet stepping in the exact same spot.

Steve doesn't say anything, picks up more fruit, then pulverizes them just by squeezing them between his fingers. "Why is the fruit bad, Mikey?"

"Something gradually changed over time. They would have noticed if it had been all at once."

"They changed too."

"Yes, they don't seem right." Behind me the sun, now below the horizon, casts a glow on the western sky. "It could be two things with people, maybe when you combine the recorded physical data for the person with the current memories, something doesn't fit. Like pushing a cupcake through a slightly smaller octagon hole, and the extra bits get scraped off. Or the second option is that the data gets corrupted over time, creating fragile pieces of fruit."

"Will it affect us when we jump back to Orlando?" Steve asks.

"It probably already did, just not noticeable, so small after one jump. Probably wouldn't hurt us, but I think that is why Dr. Gerber stopped using the portals."

"He didn't want to end up a dried piece of fruit."

"Not my idea of perfect."

## Sunday, March 29, 2116

## Steve

The next morning we re-materialize at the lab's portal and Mikey walks over to a table with a rumpled sheet on top. He just stands next to it.

I walk over to join him. From the way the cloth falls you can tell that a body lies beneath. Lifting up the sheet, I see the original Mikey's dead body. He didn't vaporize at the portal when we transported to the Bahamas; his knife wound slowly ended his life.

"I died," Mikey moves the sheet back to cover the dead. "We should do something with the body."

My double walks in, only briefly looks at me, and then turns his attention to Mikey, "I was looking for a bag; I found these." He holds up some large black plastic trash bags. "Was the trip worth it?"

"Yes," Mikey responds, "We should take the body to the pit."

My double places his hand on the still-alive Mikey's back, "He just fell asleep. After the medicine, he didn't seem to be in any pain."

"Thanks."

My double asks, "So is there another pair of Mikey and Steve in the Bahamas?"

"No, back to default." Mikey assures him. "But I don't suggest you ever take multiple trips in a portal."

"One or two is still okay?"

"We saw the effects of thousands of jumps. One or two should be fine."

His body relaxes, "I've been thinking. Did a lot of thinking while you two were gone. I don't want to go back there, to Orlando. I've been looking at some of the news reports. It's changed. Everyone is fighting over money, people are dying. Lots of people."

"You can't stay here. You'll starve," Mikey tells him.

He's right, but I don't want Mikey to convince him to return home. I don't know where to look, being in the same room with myself. Should I stand next to him, or keep apart? So I stand silently while my double talks to Mikey.

"Let's take Mikey's body to the pit. Give him a proper send-off. Then I'm going to go to Colorado. Is that private portal still open?" my double asks.

"It is," Mikey confirms.

"I want to keep the portal on default," my double tells us.

He knows that means that his current body will be vaporized, "You want this body to die?" Mikey asks.

"I don't want us to have another one," my double confirms, which is good to hear. I don't need more of me. He continues, "I want it to be normal again, but it can't be, so I need to get away."

I just stand there mute, while Mikey responds, "Okay."

My double turns to me and shakes my hand. "Good luck. I mean it." I didn't anticipate that. That brief trip to the island changed me, or watching Mikey die altered him. Others may not notice the difference between us, but I feel it, and he must recognize it. We share that.

## Sunday, March 29, 2116

## Mikey

Two plastic bags cover the deceased me, one from the top and the other from the bottom, with an electric cord wrapped around the overlap in the middle to secure the makeshift cover for his body. I lead the way with the two Steves behind me, all of us holding on to a portion of the load.

Hunters lurk in the trees, looking for scavengers attracted by the burial pit. Within the hole, several piles of fresh wildflowers rest on top of the partially-exposed bodies already there.

As tribute more flowers will continue to appear until the mass burial. We let go at the edge of the pit, and I watch as our body rolls down the side of the hole to join the others. "I'll bring back a rock," I tell the dead. I need to do something to mark my own passing.

"I have this." The Steve from the lab hands me a rock.

Inscribed are the words, "Mikey Rey, a friend always."

I wrap my arms around him, "Thanks. You'll need this," and I hand Dr. Gerber's bracelet to him.

"Have a good life," lab Steve tells me before turning his back to return to the portal at the hospital. He slows as he walks before turning around, "When you get back to the city, eat one of those yellow Peeps for me," he shouts.

I can't respond, I don't know how to answer that strange request, so I just wave and return to looking down at the pit. When I do look back at the trail Steve from the lab is gone.

I don't feel like a copy, but I know something is missing. The real me, now dead would be doing something slightly different right now. But I can only be me, I can't second-guess what might be.

I get up and place the rock by one of the oak trees around the pit. Plucking some flowers growing at the base, I toss them over the hole and they land on the black plastic. I'll move the stone over the fresh ground next week after they cover the bodies, but today I just add tiny flowers.

## Sunday, March 29, 2116

## Steve

Around the base of the wall at the East Gate, the guard posts are empty. No lines delay progress, and a man eagerly jogs from the city side, brazenly pulling a wagon with a red dryer balanced precariously on top. Why someone living in a shack without electricity would want an electric machine to dry clothes tests logic, but maybe the true value is the wagon carrying the appliance: that would be handy. All the workers ignore us, more concerned with rushing out of the city with precious cargo or back into the city in search of new treasures.

Walking up the East Gate path, the exterior of the wall looks the same. But without guards standing to monitor people leaving Orlando, the interior appears grand. We pass the table where guards previously searched for contraband that they pocketed as bribes. The table remains, covered with items that would have been considered worth keeping yesterday. The people rushing up or down in search of goods even more precious ignore yesterday's valuables, suddenly worthless.

The woman, the carrier from yesterday, comes waddling down the path. She smiles at us, both arms full of brimming bags.

Emerging into the city reveals a new reality. Smoke saturates the air from the burnt remains of a food stand at East Gate. In the distance columns of smoke rise from larger structures still burning downtown. Even the trees that didn't burn now have soot covering their green leaves.

We walk through the middle of Orlando down the main path in the park, occasionally passing burned vehicles.

"They panicked," Mikey announces.

"It doesn't look real."

"Nightmare."

In front of us, on the side of the path, a group of kids stand on the steps of the school. One of the school's brick walls has collapsed inward and smoke rises from the burnt rumble, but the columns remain standing in the front. Some kids by the destroyed wall dig in the pile with metal poles, ash covering their arms.

Sadie wanders away from the others, twirling a police baton by her side. The spinning stops and she shouts, "Get him!" Sadie and a herd of kids begin rushing towards us. More running. We cut down the Hyer Avenue path and then sprint between old, wooden two-story houses turned into restaurants. Instead of gaining on us, these out-of-shape kids quickly give up the chase and start walking back to the school, except for Sadie.

The last time I saw Sadie, she was hanging on to that slimy double of mine in the gym. She wasn't wielding a club then, and she definitely didn't look at me like an evil piñata.

Her eyes glare and arms pump as she strains to make up the gap between us. Mikey stays in front of me. I see his goal. Familiarity helps at these times. He dodges to the right, leaping a low chain link fence, and I follow.

Behind me Sadie hurdles the fence without hesitation, narrowing the difference. She's faster, and before I can make it out of the cut-through to Lake Eola Park, she becomes a shadow. Each time I change direction, she mimics. While running Sadie swings her club at my legs, aiming for my knees. She connects, pain shoots through my left leg, and I tumble off the concrete path almost into the lake.

Lying helplessly in the grass Sadie jumps on top of me and pins me against the ground. "What did you do?" She holds the baton against my neck with her left hand. The intersection of the handle and main stick press against my throat while she strikes me with her right fist.

"I didn't do anything."

"I watched my dad get killed. Did you hear me? He's dead. But for some reason, there were three, three copies. You sick freak. Why did you do this?" She's crying and punching me, oblivious to my innocence.

"I didn't do it. Honest."

Mikey walks up. I wait for him to act, to grab her baton and get this crazy girl off me, but he just stands there with his hands in his pockets.

"I did it." I hear him say loudly. She hesitates, the next punch noticeably softer, but it still hurts. He repeats, "Sadie, I'm responsible."

Sadie leaps off me, spins around, and attacks Mikey. She swings the baton with her left hand, and then switches to her stronger arm and the velocity increases, each smack louder.

"Stop. Stop it." I scream, but her strikes continue, each one landing with a thud of wood against bone.

Mikey screams, "I declare as my last will that I give all my assets to you, Steve."

The next hit across the temple sends him crumbling to the ground. Sadie continues to hit Mikey with her club even as his body fails to respond. Somewhere, a functioning recording device memorialized Mikey's last will and testament before he died.

## Tuesday, March 31, 2116

## Steve

A bright light fills the transit station. In the glow, the outline of a boy forms before the brightness subsides enough to reveal Mikey.

Looking at his body, Mikey asks, "What happened?"

"You died." I minimize the program running on my tablet, a replica of the one stolen from us in the Milk District.

"So this is an old version of me?"

"From your last annual physical. But, I dropped in all the memories from the scan when we jumped back from the Bahamas."

"That explains the memories and no knife wound." Mikey keeps rubbing his stomach over where the wound should be. "How did I die?"

"Sadie beat you to death with a stick."

"A stick?"

"That's how she did it."

"And this, how did you know how to do this?" Mikey says pointing to the transport and then to himself.

"Lab Steve, my older self, called me after getting to Colorado. While we were visiting the Sullivans in the Bahamas, you other self, wounded Mikey, talked a lot before dying. He walked Lab Steve through the process of bringing him back step-by-step. He didn't want to die."

"Nobody does."

"He gave us permission to bring you back if something happened. Are you mad?"

"No."

"Does it feel right?"

"Too soon. I'm still trying to figure everything out, but I think I'm okay with living. Better than dying, but I don't want to end up like the Sullivans."

"Agreed. They tried to stay young forever. You other self said it wasn't natural to try to stop time."

"But natural to bring back the dead?"

"You would know his logic better than me. He was you."

Mikey looks at his hand and then back to me. "The difference is only in the number of jumps. The Sullivans made hundreds of jumps each year. Tens of thousands over their lifetime and each jump took a piece of them or contained a slight flaw. By trying to stay the same they lost something. That was unnatural and they repeated it until they were like their food - damaged and flawed. Bringing back the dead is unnatural, but we can avoid the damage if we limit the number of jumps." Mikey keeps moving his hand over his stomach. "I feel good. Might of lost something with the jump, but I'm here. Did I really die?"

"I was there."

"This is so messed up. Sadie killed me with a stick?"

"One of those police batons."

"Sounds bad out there."

"Real bad. It's not just Sadie who's mad either. Lots of people want to get you for creating copies."

"What about you?"

"I shouldn't exist. I hate that everything changed, but I'm glad I'm alive. Thank you."

"You're thanking me?"

"Yes, and there's some good news. I have all of Dr. Gerber's money."

"You?"

"You gave it to me."

"Really?"

"I'm not going to hold you to it," I let him know. "You might not have been thinking clearly with Sadie whacking you on the head."

"Thanks."

"What should we do with it? That is the real question."

"I don't know," Mikey replies.

"We need to rebuild the school when things calm down," I suggest. "A lot of it is gone. Burned to the ground."

"Seems fair to give back Dr. Gerber's school with his money."

"And then? That can't be it. Mikey, billions and billions of dollars. He was crazy rich. There's got to be something meaningful we can do with it."

"I'm still recovering from being dead."

"The school is a start." Mikey needs to think bigger.

Mikey stops rubbing his stomach. "We could build the school in the Milk District."

"In the slum?"

"Why should the Milk District be a slum?"

THE END
