My lungs and throat burned, and my muscles were on the verge of collapse.
Every inch of my skin was coated in sweat. I’d never run so hard in my life… and still, I trailed the rest of my group.
By a lot.
One by one, my classmates crossed the finish line ahead of me. When I finally reached it—in last place—again—the few who’d lingered on the track slapped me on the back and offered some pity-praise.
“Nice job, Mireya. I think that was your best time yet,” Nora said.
“Just keep trying,” Troy encouraged. “You’ll get faster eventually.”
I nodded my thanks and tried not to turn even redder than I already was. Why did we have to have mandatory ESBF class?
It stood for endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility, and I wasn’t exactly impressive in any of those areas.
Put me in a speed-reading race, and I’d stand a chance, but I was never going to run a three-minute mile. Or a four-minute one. Or five.
This class was by far my least favorite—and that was saying a lot.
I walked around the grassy infield for a minute, letting my heart rate and breathing return to normal and giving the breeze a chance to dry my sweaty ESBF uniform.
Tilting my head back, I listened to the birds singing in the trees bordering the athletic fields and took in the small patch of blue visible between the rain clouds overhead. It was about to pour.
Hearing laughter, I glanced over to the flowering shrub hedge that separated the field from the road. My best friend Ketta was there at the far end, standing and talking to someone over the natural fence.
A soldier.
She wasn’t just talking to him, based on her body language. She was flirting. And he was flirting back.
Plucking one of the bright blooms, he tucked it into her curly dark hair then stroked her cheek.
Ketta giggled again, and my internal alarm system went off, sending a surge of protective adrenaline through my veins. In spite of the lingering stitch in my side, I started jogging in her direction.
We weren’t supposed to talk to the young soldiers on the base. They weren’t supposed to talk to us.
We definitely weren’t supposed to have physical contact with them. This guy would be in big trouble if one of his commanding officers saw him with Ketta.
Just then an MP truck came into view and jerked to a silent halt near the soldier. Two MP officers jumped out, rushing the man and taking him roughly into custody.
They threw him into the back of the vehicle then one of them approached Ketta, who was complaining loudly.
“Go back to your class,” he ordered. “Remember the no-contact rule or next time I’ll report you.”
Ketta threw her shoulders back and lifted her chin in defiance.
“You’re not my commanding officer. Do you know who my father is?”
“Yes, I do,” he said in a grim tone. “Which is why I’m not reporting you… this time. Don’t let it happen again.”
Instead of being contrite, Ketta laughed in his face. She spun away and turned her back on the MP officer. Spotting me, she hurried toward me and grabbed my arm, talking excitedly.
“Did you see him? Wasn’t he cute?”
“What?” At first, I thought she meant the MP, but then I realized she was talking about the young soldier.
“What were you thinking? You know it’s against the rules.”
Her shoulders rose and fell in an unrepentant shrug. “We were just talking. It’s no big deal.”
“It is a big deal. Your dad would freak if he knew.”
“Maybe. But last I checked it’s still a free country.” Ketta gave me an impish grin. “His name is Kyle. He said I was pretty, and he wished he could take me on a date.”
“He did?”
My heart skipped a beat. No guy had ever said such a thing to me. I’d never been on a date, and as far as I knew, neither had Ketta.
“He shouldn’t have said that. I mean, you are pretty, but… how old is he?” I asked. “He’s probably in his twenties.”
“So? That isn’t so old. And it’s not like we’ve got a lot of guys our own age to choose from. I mean, how else am I ever going to meet someone new?” Ketta asked.
She had me there. Our school on the base was comprised of only two classes, juniors and seniors. There were only about a hundred of us total, evenly divided among male and female students.
We’d all gone to school together since preschool, and by this time my classmates felt like siblings to me.
The sound of a whistle in the distance caused me to walk a little faster. Our ESBF instructor stood on the other side of the track near the field house waving the class inside.
“Let’s hurry,” I urged Ketta. “I really need a shower before final class.”
Laughing, she extended her arms to the sky as the rain started pelting down. “Why bother?”
We ran for shelter and ducked inside, walking quickly to the locker room. We only had about fifteen minutes until Biological History began.
Why daily physical torture—I mean physical education—wasn’t scheduled for last period was beyond me.
“So, you ready for the quiz?” Ketta asked as we grabbed fresh towels and headed for the showers.
I stopped short, my heart leaping to my throat. “What quiz?”
She tucked her chin and gave me a duh look. “BioHist. You just know Ms. McComb is going to give us a pop quiz on the chapters she assigned.”
At my blank look, Ketta’s jaw dropped. “Don’t tell me you zoned out again in class yesterday. You heard her assign the chapters, right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I tapped frantically at the holoconnect bracelet on my wrist, pulling up the apps which glowed colorfully in the space just above my arm. When I selected the one for Ms. Mc Comb’s class page, it was right there—the assignment I’d somehow missed.
“Well crap.”
Ketta was sympathetic. “Don’t worry. The stuff was all pretty basic. You’ll be fine. You can skim the chapters while you shower.”
“Good idea.”
It wasn’t easy with the water continually running in my eyes, but as I soaped and rinsed, I did my best to cram in the information projected on the shower wall from my holoconnect.
Giving up, I switched it to voice mode, turning up the volume so I could hear it over the splashing water.
“Pre-Calamity, people feared large predators such as sharks, bears, lions, even hippos, which killed up to 700 humans annually in Africa. Crocodiles were even more deadly, claiming an estimated 1000 lives per year,” the electronic voice informed me.
“Dogs were perhaps not top of mind when it came to dangerous animals but were actually a bigger threat, causing more than 25,000 human deaths annually, making them the deadliest animal on the planet. That was all before the lowly mosquito wiped out a quarter of the world’s population and its entire future.”
Turning off the water, I tapped my holoconnect again to switch off the digital voice and close the book.
Against the shower’s water-slicked wall shimmered the image of its bright blue front cover centered by glowing white print. Calamity Clarified, by Alexandre Yee. 2050 version.
Clarified. Clear as mud, maybe. I’d never remember all those numbers.
“Who can tell me why Zika-Two impacted the elderly population more strongly than the young?” Mrs. Mc Comb asked as soon as we were seated in her class. “Who streamed the chapters last night?”
Our teacher had that tense end-of-the-day bite in her tone, and her wilted expression told me she was every bit as eager for her last period Biological History class to end as her students were.
Lee Huber, who was sitting in the front row today for some unknown reason, actually raised his hand.
If what happened fifteen years ago didn’t qualify as the Apocalypse, this might have been a sign of its impending arrival.
Mrs. McComb’s thin eyebrows went up, and she blinked several times.
“Yes, Lee?”
“Because the elderly population was larger. Both the old and the very young were more vulnerable to the virus, but there were two-point-five billion people over sixty-five in the world in 2040 and only one billion young children. So more elderly lives were lost.”
The teacher blinked again and nodded. “That’s right.”
She sounded like she could hardly believe what she’d heard. Or rather, from whom she’d heard it.
Ketta was obviously thinking the same thing because she looked over at me and shook her head, scrunching her brows together.
She mouthed the word “Lee?” and made silly googly-eyes at me. I bit my lip to keep from laughing and trained my focus back on the teacher.
I was just as surprised as Ketta was, but as long as Mrs. McComb’s attention wasn’t on me, I was happy.
“Three and a half billion lives lost over the span of a few months,” she said. “While tragic, the Calamity did have a few positive outcomes. Anyone? Who else came prepared? Mireya?”
A tide of red heat rose from my chest to my hairline as my mind went blank. My heartbeat exploded in my eardrums, and any lingering traces of amusement evaporated.
“Uh…”
Lee’s hand shot up in the air again. Without waiting for the teacher to call on him, he started spewing information, saving me from certain humiliation.
“The expeditious, massive loss of life halted global warming, relieved the food crisis, and caused government restrictions on the development of genetic engineering and cloning to be lifted, which gave rise to rapid advancements in life-saving synthetic biology and an unprecedented surge in cybernetic technology,” he said. “Where would we all be without our ocular implants?”
Lee looked around and laughed, and the class joined in, either at the ghastly thought of sticking a plastic lens to the outside of our eyes on a daily basis—or more likely, at the way our class clown had suddenly turned into a brainiac.
Of course none of us remembered the Calamity—it had happened when I was only two years old. But I saw its aftereffects every day here on the base.
Though I found it hard to imagine, my parents remembered when soldiers like my dad, who’d lost limbs, had to simply live without them or use crude prosthetic replacements that barely functioned.
Now synthetic DNA and nanotechnology made it possible for replacement tissues and even entire limbs to be grown and harvested in a matter of weeks.
Unfortunately, the technology couldn’t stop people from aging and dying, which meant unless something changed, we were all going the way of the dinosaur.
The kids in this classroom and high school classrooms like it across the globe were the youngest people alive in the world—the last generation to be born.
In addition to killing billions, Zika Two had caused universal infertility in humans and animals alike.
“Right again, Lee,” Mrs. McComb said. “The U.S. is still struggling to reconstitute all of the lost work force with robots, but scientists predict we’ll be there within the next decade, long before your parents’ generation ages out of vocational viability. And that will give geneticists time to remedy the reproduction conundrum.”
“My dad says A.I. is going to replace all of us and make humans obsolete anyway,” Ketta announced.
Her father was all about the artificial intelligence that abounded on the base. My dad couldn’t have been any more different.
He detested the robotic chef-assistants and servers he was obliged to work with in the kitchen of the base’s main dining hall.
Matt, who was sitting in the desk directly behind Ketta, stage-whispered, “We could use a little more artificial intelligence around here—at least then Ketta would have some.”
Without missing a beat, she responded, decidedly not whispering.
“Too bad they don’t come out with a line of synthetic balls. At least then Matt would have some of those.”
Warmth flooded my face again. Ketta would say anything.
Giggles scattered throughout the room. I darted a glance at Matt to see if he was angry, but he leaned back in his chair, nodding and laughing and even blushing a bit.
Clearly pleased with herself, Ketta slid her eyes over at me and grinned.
Those two had been teasing each other mercilessly since about the fourth grade. I wished they’d go ahead and admit to the mutual crush and get it over with.
Mrs. McComb quieted the class. “Okay, settle down. Ketta, your father might be right—in a few hundred years—but we’re a long way from that. While computer programs started passing the Turing test thirty years ago, none has ever shown real sentience. Even the latest generation of Genesapiens can’t pass the AI Consciousness Test. And scientists have still not been able to move human cloning past the persistent vegetative state. So for now… our anthropological dominance is safe.”
She punctuated her last remark with a smirk.
Throughout the classroom, electronic tones sounded. Like my classmates, I tapped my sleeve to silence my holoconnect and reached into my backpack.
Extracting a small pill container, I popped it open, removed one tiny red tablet, and swallowed it dry.
Another lovely consequence of the Calamity. Daily meds.
The adults didn’t have to take them—they’d survived the pandemic easily. But anyone who’d been under seventeen when it struck had to take a precautionary anti-viral twice a day.
No one really knew for sure, but the theory was that the kids—those of us who were shielded from Zika-Two and lived—might potentially still be affected by any lingering traces of the virus in the environment.
A monumental joint effort by world governments had eradicated the mosquitos, but it was possible there were still a few elderly animals around or even some people who were carriers, and no one wanted to take any chances with the youngest generation alive.
As soon as the pill boxes and water dispensers were put away, Mrs. McComb attempted to restart her lecture.
She was interrupted by the chime signaling the end of the school day and the immediate flurry of activity as we grabbed our bags, preparing to leave.
“Stream the next two chapters of Calamity Clarified tonight and be prepared for a quiz tomorrow,” she warned. “You got off easy today, but I’ll expect stellar scores tomorrow since I’m giving you ample warning.”
A collective groan accompanied our mass exodus from the classroom.
As I passed her desk, our teacher added, “Some of you need a good score on it. Desperately.”
I darted my eyes away from her laser-like gaze, my heart slinking down and withering somewhere near the pit of my stomach.
She hadn’t said my name, but I knew who the remark was directed toward.
Ketta and I headed for the South exit together. A hologram over the doorway reminded us to take our meds before bedtime and have a “happy, healthy day” as we stepped outside into the muggy air.
The rain had dissipated, though puddles lingered on the sidewalk. We veered off it and crossed the school’s pristine green lawn in the direction of the base’s residential district.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ketta said. She’d been my best friend since pre-school and could read my body language like a streaming book. “BioHist just isn’t your subject.”
“I’m not sure what is. I’m also tanking in Calc.”
“So, you’re not the top student—big deal. You’re good at lots of other things. You’re the nicest person I know. And you’re trying, right? You don’t have to be perfect.”
“You only say that because you’re great at everything. And your parents think you hung the satellites.”
You’re normal.
“Your parents think the same thing about you. They’re just not hippy dippy motor-mouths about it like mine are.”
That was an understatement. Visiting Ketta’s house, where praise flowed like water and hugs were dispersed freely, was like stepping into a different world.
Not really wanting to talk about it anymore, I changed the subject. “So what’s up with Lee?”
“I know.” She opened her mouth in a wide O and laughed. “He’s like Mr. Serious Student all of a sudden. I didn’t think he ever turned on his streamer much less memorized stats from the chapters.”
“It’s not just today. He did the same thing yesterday in Calc.”
She performed an exaggerated double take.
“What? That is in-sane. He is like a different person. Maybe he contracted the genius virus when he was out of school last week,” she joked.
“Well, if that exists, I’m going to beg Dr. Rex to inject me with it. It might be the only way I’m going to pass Calc. And I am dreading that quiz tomorrow in BioHist.”
My tone was light, but I was more upset over the change in Lee than I let on. As long as he was dogging it, at least I wasn’t dead last in the class rankings.
In spite of Ketta’s faith in my parents’ unconditional love, I wasn’t sure it could withstand that. They were going to be less than thrilled on the next academic reporting day.
My stomach twisted into a familiar knot. I had to do better, but I wasn’t sure how.
I’d been trying my best, but somehow I still missed assignments, forgot to study for tests or that we even had a test coming up sometimes.
Often I felt like the tests covered things we hadn’t even gone over in class. I was pretty sure I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t exactly feel smart. Let’s just say my memory wasn’t the greatest.
Ketta and I stopped when we reached the corner. Because her dad was an officer and mine worked in food services, we lived on different quadrants of the base.
There was a gleam in her eye that told me something wild was about to come out of her mouth.
“We could ditch.”
“Ditch?” I asked.
“Yeah—skip school tomorrow. We could go into the city like that old vid about the kid who played sick and spent the day with his two friends running around pre-Calamity Chicago.”
My head jerked back, and my mouth fell open. This was a little wilder than usual.
“You’re serious? We’re not allowed off-base.”
She rolled her eyes and did this bouncy bobble-head thing.
“I know that, but I was watching the East gate the other day. It’s super slow. When the transports and delivery trucks come in, it takes forever to close behind them.”
“And?”
“And the guards never even leave the guard hut. They’re only there to make sure whoever’s coming in scans their credentials first, to keep out unauthorized visitors, you know? They’re not even looking to see who’s leaving. We could walk right out—okay, well, maybe not walk out, but we could totally slip out of that gate without anyone catching us. Don’t you want to know what’s out there?”
“I do know what’s out there. I see it on the vids.”
I’d never left the base—never even thought about it, which now that I thought about that was kind of strange, maybe.
It’s just, I’d lived here my whole life. None of my friends had ever been off-base, never mentioned wanting to leave. It was against the rules.
“What would we do?”
“I don’t know.” Ketta threw her arms out to the side, palms up. “Look around. See the world for ourselves instead of watching it on vids. Do something different.”
“What about the truant officers?”
She snorted. “What truant officers? Have you ever seen any?”
“Well… no… but…”
“The headmaster made that up to keep us from skipping class. Everyone on this base has more important things to do than go chasing after a couple of kids for ditching.”
I shook my head at Ketta, amazed. She’d always been fearless, but I’d never seen her this bold. I could never be that brave.
“I don’t think so. If you get caught, your parents will tell you they’re disappointed, and y’all will hug it out. Mine would probably disown me.”
Sighing, I said, “I’ll just stream the BioHist chapters a few times and take my chances on the quiz tomorrow.”
The enthusiasm leaked out of her posture until she sagged visibly.
“Okay. I’ll talk to you later. Beep me on the holoconn tonight if you want to go over the chapters or whatever.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
Ketta turned to go then whirled quickly back to face me. “Oh—I’ll be at school late—I’m missing first period for a doctor appointment.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just a checkup.”
“Okay. Well, don’t you go and get the ‘genius virus.’ I’m going to have to hate you if you get any smarter.”
“Please.” She laughed, and I watched her for a minute as she walked away.
I was kidding of course. I could never hate Ketta. But it wasn’t always easy to be the best friend of someone who was so good at everything when I was so… not.
Which brought me back to the Lee situation. I couldn’t—Could Not—fall to last in my class.
The thought of it soured in my belly as I trudged the few blocks toward home. I vowed to buckle down and study harder. Harder than I ever had before.
Maybe I could manage to raise my grade before my parents checked the academic portal. I had a Calc test at the end of the week and that quiz tomorrow.
Those would give me a chance to—
“Warning. Collision alert. Warning.”
The loud electronic voice reached me a second too late. I’d already stepped off the curb into the street and directly into the path of a delivery van.
A flash of white and chrome filled my peripheral vision as the bumper made contact with my left hip, sending me to the pavement with a wince and a yelp.
The good news was I wasn’t flattened by the thing.
The nearly silent electric vehicles were programmed with collision-avoidance tech that slowed them automatically in case of a sudden obstacle, which meant it hit me hard enough to knock me over but not hard enough to crush bones.
The bad news was I could already hear the shouting of the obviously perturbed operator through the van’s closed windows.
No doubt the accident had surprised him as much as it had me.
He’d probably been relaxing in the back of the self-driving vehicle watching vids or reading when he’d felt the jolt and sudden stop.
Now he was storming around to the front of it, spewing a stream of profanities.
“What the hell are you doing? Didn’t you see me coming?” the van operator demanded.
Before I could respond or get up on my own, a pair of strong hands slid beneath my arms. He plucked me off the ground and set me upright. I would have protested the invasion of my personal space, but it all happened too fast.
Brushing off the seat of my uniform, I tested my footing, lifting and wiggling one foot then the other.
The ache in my tailbone told me I would be sporting some very colorful bruises tomorrow, and my butt couldn’t have been any wetter if I’d cannonballed into a swimming pool.
Lovely.
“So are you okay? Say something.” Anger still emanated off the guy in waves, but his deep voice now held a note of concern.
What could I say? I felt like an idiot.
“Of course I saw you. I just thought getting run down would be a good way to score some tech augmentation in my lower limbs.”
I finally glanced up at the man—who hadn’t responded and was not laughing at my joke.
My hair was in my eyes, still disheveled from my fall. I pushed it from my face, and the sight in front of me nearly knocked me backward again.
