In truth, I hadn’t. If I had had solid information on how a brain-band junkie acted, I could have created a behaviour profile and checked her behaviour against it. In the absence of that information, I had to think of everything I had seen her do and then try to determine how many of those behaviours could be put down to being chemically induced. All of them could have been. Especially the mouth!
Her second answer was equally plausible. In the fall, every able-bodied IOF citizen is assigned to a farm to help with the harvest. High school students are included in this labour pool. This was one of the reasons I didn’t want to have a farm job – I had found harvesting wheat with a scythe to be extremely boring as well as tiring. I had heard of a few cases where students were assigned to work in offices as replacements for the adults who had been sent to the fields. It was theoretically possible that she was one of them. They might have thought her too scrawny to be of much use on a farm.
I felt her touch me again. “And the answer is….”
I had to explain that I didn’t have an answer yet. When she asked why, I felt it only fair to tell her.
“Too scrawny to be of much use?” she asked. She got up on her knees and pushed me sideways. “Was that a scrawny push?”
I levered myself back upright only to find myself slammed back down on the cave floor. “How about that one?” she asked as I lay on my side. “Still too scrawny?”
So, that led to a challenge. We did five different physical contests. I lost every one. She just overwhelmed me. And each time she won, she asked, “Scrawny enough for you?” and gave me a two-handed shove in the chest. I was expecting it by the third time. Didn’t make much difference on what happened to me afterwards though.
I lay on my back, stretching out a sore muscle after the last defeat, and watched her stuffing things into her pack. Then, she was crawling to the entrance and I was frantically jamming things into my first pack, so I asked, “I thought it was too dangerous to leave before night?”
“Rick can have you for all I care!”
“Why are you so mad?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to insult you by calling you scrawny.”
“I’m not mad because you called me scrawny.” Then she was gone.
I crammed everything left on the cave floor into my packs and scrambled out. She was already halfway down to the canyon floor.
“Why are you mad,” I yelled after her.
She turned to face me and screamed back, “Because you actually thought I could be a brain-band junkie!” Then, she turned and began to run.
“But it was theoretically possible,” I yelled after her but I don’t think she heard me.
Back to the Table of Contents
Chapter 10
Humping two heavy bags, I couldn’t run fast enough to close the distance. It wasn’t until she took a rest break that I caught up. At least she let me catch my breath before we continued at a walking pace. When she offered to help carry one of my bags, I figured it would be safe to talk. But I kept my mouth shut anyway.
We were taking breaks every twenty-minutes when she pointed to the east canyon wall and spoke to me. “That’s the only path out of this canyon that has been remotely possible. We have to get into the woods again – we’re too visible here. It will be a tough climb and we’re already tired.”
“Energy restorative?”
“Potentially dangerous. There’s a theoretical possibility that it could harm us.”
“Theoretical possibility?”
“Yeah, one chance in a trillion, but you never know with theoretical possibilities.”
She was facing away from me when she made that crack. It didn’t have much of a bite to it. I realized that she was giving me an opening and I had my speech all ready. I moved so that I was facing her before speaking. “Look, I’m sorry I made you mad. I was treating it like an intellectual exercise and I should have realized that you couldn’t be a junkie.”
“Not even one chance in a trillion?” she asked with an expressionless face.
“Not even one chance in a google,” I said as confidently as I could. A google is a one followed by one hundred zeroes – it was the largest named number that was currently in use. I mean, with those odds, theoretically, anybody could be a brain-band junkie. I certainly wasn’t going to say that though.
“Not even one chance in a koogle?”
I had never heard of a koogle before. I doubted very much that the word even existed. She was looking at me, her face still expressionless except for a single arched eyebrow that was daring me to say that there was no such word. I was fishing around for something to say that wouldn’t offend her when I noticed a possible pattern. Google to koogle. “Not even one chance in an oogle,” I said.
“What about a soogle?”
That meant I got to say woogle, which made her lips twitch.
She took a breath and blurted out. “I’m sorry that I said that I didn’t care if Rick caught you or not. I didn’t mean that. I’m not going to let Rick catch you.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say. She was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and we were standing very close to each other, and it was a really awkward moment, so I said the first thing I could think of. “I’ve heard that the geneticists are close to giving everyone the same shaped eye balls. It will mean that nobody will need to wear contacts any more.”
She turned away and began scanning the canyon wall. “Too late for me, I guess.”
I was going to ask her what kind of vision problem she had, but didn’t get a chance. She said that the canyon should be narrow enough that we could climb a tree on this side, shoot an arrow across the canyon high into another tree, and use the sky-rope to carry us and our bags up the other side. I agreed that it could be done but only if the sky rope wasn’t at too steep of an angle to the other side. I offered to make the necessary calculations.
While I was creating a crude transit to measure our projected angle of ascent, I noticed that she was just sitting on a boulder in the stream, sloshing her bare feet back and forth in the water. Then I got busy with the calculations – the maximum weight of passage, co-efficient of friction, expected power output of my ring, and so on – and I lost track of time. When I looked up to give her the answer, she was sitting under the tree that I had planned to use and listening to music.
I first had to determine where to attach the sky rope, so I started up the tree first – using the transit repeatedly to take measures of the angle to the obvious tree target on the other side of the canyon. “This should do it,” I announced with some certainty when I was high enough and stuck my knife into the trunk where we should wrap the filament.
“Hang on a sec,” she said and clambered past me an additional meter, pulled her own knife out of the opposite side of the tree, and rejoined me. We made it safely to the other side without any further conversation.
# # # # # # # #
We stopped hiking well before sunset. She had found a small clearing with a brook nearby. “We’ll stay here tonight and tomorrow,” she said. “No fire tonight.”
I flopped down on the ground. I was beginning to regret I had packed so much. Some of it was winter gear that I didn’t need right now. I was safe for now, but was I going to walk around Alberta with two huge packs for the rest of my life?
I felt a food bar fall into my lap. “Just keep saying to yourself… each bar I eat makes the pack lighter,” she said.
“You’re tired too?”
“Yeah, I’m beat. We need to rest. Tomorrow, we’ll cook up some of your dried food. I have some too. We’ll have a feast."
# # # # # # # #
We were sitting around the fire pit I had built – the one with no fire in it yet. She was talking about her favorite foods but I had nothing to contribute. My school’s cafeteria had a very limited, and very predictable, menu. Her school must have had a much better nutrition program, which surprised me a little since I thought all the IOF schools were identical. Sh
e asked me what foods I didn’t like and so I told her about the incident with the raw fish. She started to giggle when I told her about trying to keep the food falling off my fork so I wouldn’t have to eat it. When I described what happened when we found out it was raw fish, she burst into laughter and was actually hugging herself, she thought it was so funny. Then she got the hiccoughs and couldn’t stop.
“You’ll have to scare them out of me,” she said.
“How?”
“Tell me a scary story.”
“I don’t know any scary stories.”
So, she tried to tell me a story about some dead guy who had a deformed hand and haunted the woods waiting for unsuspecting campers but she was hiccupping so badly that she couldn’t get the words out, and that made her laugh even more which made the hiccoughs worse.
“Try holding your breath,” I suggested.
Well that didn’t work too well because she kept erupting into giggles. It was not an unpleasant sound.
“Scare me, Z-man! You haf to scare me!” She said that last part in some strange dialect. “Tell me what’s the scariest thing you can think of.”
So, I told her. “Rick.”
That seemed to do the trick although I don’t know why she would be scared about Rick. They were co-workers after all.
# # # # # # # #
The sun had already disappeared behind the hills and the sky had become a mass of purples and pinks. She suggested that we walk to the edge of a bluff, which would give us a better view of the sunset, and so we did. We stood there just looking at the sky. I was going to say something about refractions of light and how that created the colours, but she stopped me just as I opened my mouth.
“Don’t explain it, Z-man. Just enjoy it.”
So I watched for a while, wondering what I was supposed to enjoy.
When the colours faded away, we walked back to fire pit and flopped down on the ground, leaning up against our separate logs. She disappeared for a bit and came back with our two sleeping bags. “Pillow or blanket – whatever you need,” she said. We watched the stars come out and took turns trying to stump each other on names. She had to shift her bag over to my log so that I could see where she was pointing.
We were side-by-side, both in our bags, watching the stars twinkle due to the impurities in the atmosphere that I assumed I wasn't supposed to explain when she surprised me with a question.
“Are you really scared of Rick, Z-man? Or were you just making that up?”
I didn’t see any reason not to tell her. “I’m really scared. I think of Rick all the time. But what scares me the most is the interrogation. I don’t know how to lie and so I’m going to get the hard interrogation. They’ll keep doing whatever they’re going to do to me until they find out how I learned the truth. Then, they’ll know how to prevent anyone else from finding out what the IOF really is.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “I agree that's scary.”
I thought for a while too before blurting out. “I don’t understand how there can be people like Rick and Abby and Gary in the IOF. I don’t understand how they could do their job – hunting and capturing dissidents and making them disappear. I don’t even understand how they could get angry at each other at their camp. Why didn’t their brain-bands stop that? They all were wearing them.”
“Z-man, you’ve assumed that all the IOF brain-bands have been programmed in the same way.”
“Aren’t they?”
“If they were, how could people like Abby and Rick exist?”
“But, if brain-bands were programmed differently, kids in school would notice that some kids weren’t behaving like the others. I never saw any kids acting differently.”
“You’ve assumed that everyone goes to the same infant-care centers and schools.”
“They don’t?”
“We agree that Rick is a murderer, right?”
She waited for me to nod before continuing. “If Rick had been raised in your care-center and school, he would have been conditioned to not hurt others. Changing that conditioning afterwards so that he would enjoy murdering people would be nearly impossible. Logically therefore…”
“He was programmed from birth,” I conceded, but something still wasn’t right. She gave me the time to think it out. “I’ve known other Rs outside of school and none of them looked or acted remotely like Rick. Same with Abby. The A types can be bossy, but …”
“Z-man, you have to throw out every assumption you’ve ever made about the IOF. You can’t assume that anything they’ve told you is true. In this case, you’ve assumed that they are telling the truth when they say there are only twenty-six gene types.”
“A twenty-seventh gene type, with its own form of brain-band programming, and educated apart from everyone else?”
“More than twenty-seven. You’re forgetting about me. I’m not one of the twenty-six gene types either.”
# # # # # # # #
We both slept well past sunrise. I woke first, started a fire, and had a pot of water turning powder into edible food when the smell must have roused her. She peered over the edge of her hammock. “You’re actually domesticated, Z-man. I’m impressed.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re proficient, I guess.”
“Better than you.”
“Only with your sky-rope. Worse than me without it.”
“You have your night goggles.”
“Wanna trade? I’ll give you my goggles, you give me a piece of your sky-rope and show me how to work it.”
“Are you crazy? I’d never see you again.”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
# # # # # # # #
It was an hour after breakfast. We were both lying in our hammocks. I was studying a bot. She was listening to a music bot and singing along with it. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound.
“Hey, Z-man, have you thought up a name for yourself yet?”
I was trying to study and she was going to start talking again. “No, I have better things to do.”
“Like what? What’cha doing?”
“Reviewing the characteristics of poisonous plants.”
“I have an easy way to identify them.”
“How?”
“Feed them to you. If you get sick, they’re poisonous.”
“I thought the DPS wanted me alive.”
“Sick is still alive. You’re easier to control if you’re sick.”
I let it drop. No point in rising to her bait.
“Hey Z-man!”
I ignored her.
“Hey, Z-man, you want to do something together? I’m bored.”
THAT was abundantly clear.
“Hey, Z-man. I know you’re trying to ignore me. You can’t. I have this skill of getting underneath people’s skins.” She paused. “You’re supposed to tell me that I’m good at it. Then, I get to say, Thank you. It’s a pleasure to accept this honour. I’d like to thank the members of the academy... Remember, we’ve done this before."
I remained silent.
“Hey, Z-man? Are you up for a challenge? I’ll bet you that I can beat you at chess. Loser has to clean up after every meal while we’re here."
“That’s not much of a penalty.”
“I plan to burn porridge for lunch. It’ll take you an hour. You up for it or not?”
I retreated into my silent Please go away shell.
“So, you admit I can beat you at chess?”
“No, I don’t admit that. I’m better at chess than you.”
“Prove it, Z-man!”
So, of course, I had to. She didn’t want to play mental chess. Said it was too much of an advantage for me. So, I told her to pull out a set. She gave me a bot and said there was a game on it. It was a general access bot, so I was able to look at it. You could turn off the computer opponent, but we didn’t have a console that allowed the two of us to play against each other. I told her as much and
figured that would be end of it. I went back to reviewing poisonous plants.
“You could use your filament to hook our two brains together, I bet. Just so that each of us could see the game console.”
She just wouldn’t give up. “That’s never been done before,” I reacted without thinking. It wasn't much of an excuse, especially since in the back of my mind, a schematic was starting to form.
“So, you’re saying that you’re not smart enough to figure a way?”
I ignored her. Couldn't ignore the schematic though.
“I bet'cha you could. You’re probably just chicken about getting beat. Tell you what I’ll do, Z-man. I’ll spot you a pawn in our first game. You should get some reward for fixing it so we can play a game with just one bot and no console.”
I ignored her some more. She started making these obnoxious sounds, which I suspected were chicken sounds, but since I had never seen or heard a chicken, I didn’t really know. It took me the rest of the morning to adapt the filament so that it could connect our brains to a single bot. But, it worked first time. Like I said, Never been done before is not much of an excuse.
# # # # # # # #
“Fifteen out of twenty games for me, Z-man. You ready to give up?”
“No, but I’ll admit you’re better at speed chess than I am right now.”
“You’re catching on real fast.”
I had won three out of the last five, so she was right. “I've never played it this way before.”
“Yeah, I figured. I kinda suckered you into that bet. I knew you weren’t good at thinking fast. I’ll give you a chance to wipe out your debt after supper. Which you are going to make and then clean up afterwards, right? I made lunch.”
“Yeah. What are we going to do tonight?”
“It’s a surprise. My brain is tired right now. You wanna listen to some music?”
“I don’t have a music bot.”
“You could listen to mine. Your brain connection thingy should still work right? We could listen to the same music. Maybe even sing along. You CAN sing, right Z-man?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never sung before.”
“But you’ve listened to people singing before, right? On your bots?”
“Sure, but I always got brain-zapped if I started to sing, so I stopped. I wasn’t supposed to waste good study time on frivolous activities.”
“I have some 1960’s music here. You could give it a try. I won’t brain-zap you. I may smother you if you’re way off key, but only if you really mangle it. I go off-key too on the very high notes. Have you ever heard of Sonny and Cher?”