The Resisters Read online

  The fight was on. Meanwhile, Eleanor in her lawn chair tried to keep her voice down. “Someone is going to get hurt? Because of Gwen, someone is going to get hurt?”

  “Maybe we should stop the game,” I said.

  Mabel gave Gwen a hug and whispered something; Gwen redid her ponytail, reseated her hat, and returned to the mound. She worked some dirt out from her right cleat with her left toe. Then she did her left cleat with her right toe. Then just before she could be charged with delaying the game, she wound up and threw. A fastball, nothing fancy, but it was fast.

  Strike one.

  A drone appeared overhead. Was it a NosyDrone, or something more serious? What was it doing here? Why hadn’t my DeviceWatch beeped? And was this the excuse I needed to suspend the game? I watched out of the corner of my eye as the drone hovered overhead for several moments. Though a few people, looking up, appeared rattled, Gwen didn’t seem to notice.

  Strike two.

  The drone zipped off to the west.

  Gwen wound up one more time and, fast as the ball was moving—seventy-one miles per hour by my meter—Ondi, accustomed to Gwen’s pitches, managed to connect with it. She did not get in a full swing, but she made enough contact that her bat broke and flew off in pieces even as the ball hit a tuft of weeds at a funny angle and, spinning, bounced back in front of the catcher, who picked it up, stepped on home plate, and threw to first.

  Two outs.

  So deep were our sighs of relief, our lawn chairs squeaked, and though the Thistles went on to win in extra innings, we didn’t care. We were just glad when it was all over.

  * * *

  ◆

  “They booed me,” cried Gwen at home. “They booed me.”

  And, “How could she do this? Ondi was egging them on! She was! She was getting them to boo!”

  Eleanor and I did not—could not—bring up Ondi’s playing unhacked and its implications. Instead, we focused on how to help Gwen. For how much, I knew, she needed to hear, I’m here. And, Tell me everything. And how much I wanted to say, Of course, you feel betrayed. And, How else could you feel? You’re only human. But that had all become NettieSpeak. From humans like Eleanor and me, it was, ironically, bound to ring false.

  Meanwhile—no doubt reflecting some update—the house began to run through a list of helpful remarks: Life is hard. You never know who you can trust. Life is not fair. People are cruel because they don’t know how to be kind. Life is a trial.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Shut up is what we say when we’ve lost an argument and don’t want to admit it, said the house. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?

  And when I didn’t answer, it said, Do note that your choice is on the record. Nothing is being hidden from you. Your choice is on the record.

  Still, it did shut up, enabling us, after a few minutes, to focus doltishly on the situation.

  Gwen advanced theories as to what had happened, her voice so low it was as if we were hearing it through a wall. Maybe Ondi came back from being Cast Off and went to the ShelterBoat, where everyone was really supportive? And then one day everyone else has this thistle on her arm? So she asks, What’s that? Which might’ve been complicated in a way since the girls who used to torture Gwen tortured Ondi, too? So while they all might have become like sisters, they might not have?

  “Making the thistle tattoo one more sign that Ondi didn’t really belong,” said Eleanor. “That there was a sisterhood within the sisterhood.”

  Gwen blew her nose.

  Ondi probably knew, we agreed, that when it came to baseball she could impress her friends and knock the hell out of everyone else. As for why she hadn’t gotten hacked, Gwen was shocked to hear that Ondi hadn’t. “Are you sure?” she asked twice. But then she was both shocked and relieved. Because it was better than what she’d thought, that I had hacked Ondi and forgotten to tell her.

  “I would never have done that,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? What about Leila Clutch and Cara Jack?” Gwen gave me a withering look.

  As for why Ondi didn’t get hacked—maybe she was going to? guessed Gwen. But then realized her parents would never allow it? And then decided to play anyway? Not telling anyone because she didn’t think Andrea would be okay with it? And because she figured Eleanor and I would understand and forgive her? If we ever even found out? Having always been like that?

  “Or maybe this was a way of SpritzGramming animal smells at us,” said Eleanor grimly. “Because it wasn’t just her parents who believed we had steered her wrong—because she blamed us, too. For her family being Cast Off. For her grandfather’s death.”

  As for which was right—did Aunt Nettie, with all her data, know?

  “I’m never going to pitch again,” Gwen said, in any case—her voice serene and determined now—her after-the-storm manner. “I am going to burn my glove.”

  “Please don’t say that,” we begged. “Please. Please. Don’t say that.”

  But the more we told her it was Ondi and the Thistles she should put out of her mind, the more they occupied her. It was our voice she shut out with the special resolve of the perverse.

  Said the house, There’s no forgetting what you can’t forget.

  And—picking an odd moment, I thought, to wax poetic—We always rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  “Shut up, please,” I said then. “Please!”

  At least you said please, said the house.

  * * *

  ◆

  Vintage Ondi. Whispering in bed, Eleanor and I agreed. What surprise was it that Ondi had thought she could get away with not being hacked? She had also thought she could get away with SpritzGramming Enforcers with farm smells. A wishful thinker if ever there was one. As for her spitefulness—was this an anger toward her parents, directed toward other targets?

  “Remember that story she used to tell us about her family’s houseboat?” Eleanor said. For one of the strange things about the Flotsam Towns was that they looked rather like plastic versions of the floating villages we once saw, many years ago, in IndoChina. This was hardly a coincidence: the designers who had been tapped to design them—delighted but dismayed to realize that, yes, they possessed the requisite expertise—had been Cambodian. But the result was that Ondi’s family’s houseboat had been modeled on a floating school on the Tonle Sap. Twice the size of its neighbors, it had featured a half-court basketball court and served as a constant reminder to Ondi’s mother that Aunt Nettie had once wanted Ondi’s father to Cross Over. It was a reminder that he had in fact been given the boat as a sign of favor, and that he would not have been deemed Unretrainable had he not flunked EgoShrink.

  But for him, the boat was a reminder that before Aunt Nettie had learned, first to help humans read scans and then to read them entirely on her own, he had been a big-deal radiologist. And so he liked to invite his friends over to use the court sometimes. Ondi had said that the whole boat shook when they played, even if they put down the special anchors—that, in fact, Enforcers had slashed the Nickelhoffs’ pontoons in part because of the shaking and the noise, which bothered their neighbors, one of whom was an Enforcer’s brother. But also, she said, her father and his friends lost balls in the water all the time because of their drinking. And since the HouseBots were not watertight, a human was always needed to dive in and retrieve the balls; and that human was Ondi.

  It was something she hated. The water was so cold—like a sink full of ice cubes, she said. And yet her father would play, and have a few more drinks with his buddies, and if after a while none of them could throw anywhere close to the hoop, never mind. They continued to throw, and Ondi continued to fetch the balls out of the water. And if she cried, her father would just laugh and say, Where’s that going to get you?

  Recalling which, Eleanor and I felt for Ondi even as we stared into the darkness.

&nbs
p; “We have to tell people their security has been breached,” said Eleanor finally.

  And, of course, that was right. What’s more, we needed to inform them before word of Ondi’s getting away with playing unhacked got out, if it hadn’t already.

  “Because how many more kids will try to do what Ondi did, if they hear?” I mused. “How many more will think, If she did it, I bet I can freeload, too?”

  “That’s assuming that the League continues,” said Eleanor.

  Neither of us slept.

  * * *

  ◆

  Aunt Nettie, meanwhile, had not forgotten about AutoAmerica’s new Official National Pastime. She not only put out a call for pitchers in a GovernorGram but, when Gwen did not respond, sent a Special Enforcer to our door.

  The Special Enforcer did not fit the stereotype. Quite the contrary, what with her white Afro, flowered cardigan, hanging reading glasses, and big-pocketed skirt, she looked for all the world like the formidable moving force behind a legendary bake sale. Her name was Mimi, and before she said a word about baseball, she took a turn around our garden, planting her green cane firmly with each step.

  “Marvelous,” she said. “Are these going to be cherry or full-sized tomatoes?”

  And, examining a label, “Sugar snap peas! My favorite.”

  And, “So the earthworms are for aeration and the red wigglers are for their castings?”

  We nodded.

  “I see something’s already eating your marigolds.” She pointed with her cane.

  “Earwigs.” Eleanor gripped a trowel as if she were in the middle of transplanting seedlings and was not inclined to chat.

  “Ah, yes. Because you sit a little low. It’s damp.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is that why you have the boardwalks all stacked up over there? So you can put them down when you need them?”

  “Pretty much all winter.”

  “Before the summer heat and forest fires dry everything out but good.”

  “Yes.”

  Mimi’s right hand being occupied with her cane, her left hand wielded her reading glasses. Now she pointed with one of their arms, the other arm moving in hapless parallel agreement. “And you’ve got cold frames, too, I see. For the wind, no doubt, as much as for the cold.”

  Eleanor relaxed her grip a bit as she nodded.

  “The wind is a challenge,” said Mimi. “But, you know, what you need for the earwigs is diatomaceous earth. Do you know what that is? I have some I can give you.”

  Eleanor did not refuse.

  Mimi’s shiny face shone yet brighter as she described her own garden. Mostly perennials, she said—she loved a fresh flower bouquet. But she did do vegetables, too. All sorts of herbs and greens and, of course, potatoes and carrots and onions and tomatoes—the staples. It wasn’t a large garden. She had to budget her space, just as we did. But she did allow herself one indulgence—a giant pumpkin that took up a lot of room but that she entered every year in an agricultural fair.

  “Takes constant feeding, but I’ve won three times,” Mimi said proudly. Adding, “I know it’s at odds with optimal consumption, but honestly? It’s astonishing how little room a garden takes up, and if planned right, it doesn’t need to take much time away from consuming. As for whether an occasional salad cuts down on one’s appetite for NettieSnax, I’m not convinced. Plus, it’s a little punitive, isn’t it, to make you Surplus consume so concertedly—as if the granters of the Basic Income couldn’t help but charge its recipients something. As if they couldn’t quite see their way clear to their own largesse.”

  If Eleanor wanted to point out that our garden, unlike hers, was to protect us from winnowing agents, she didn’t. Neither did she bring up the likelihood of her filing a suit over the mall-truck food once she was done with the Surplus Fields case. Instead, she offered Mimi something to drink.

  “Some of our homemade hibiscus tea, perhaps?” she said. “We make it with wild mint.”

  As Mimi drank and marveled, I explained our hay-bale composting. I demonstrated our expandable trellis, too, as well as our summer shading system, both of which I had fashioned out of scraps. Anti-consumption as these activities were, they were a bit dangerous, frankly, to describe. Mimi, though, sipping her tea, did not seem to care. We discussed heat-resistant cultivars and discovered that she had some we did not, and vice versa. We agreed we would trade seeds. And what a shame it was that every last vegetable was now being crossed with a succulent.

  “There’s a sacrifice in flavor, no question,” she said.

  “Not to mention the peeling!” complained Eleanor. “The Bots just can’t handle it.”

  Finally Mimi turned her shiny face toward Gwen.

  “Is it true you like to pitch?” she asked.

  Gwen, twirling a braid around her finger, admitted, “Yes.”

  “A pitcher needs a team,” Mimi observed. “Have you ever played on a team?”

  “No,” Gwen lied.

  Mimi looked sympathetic. If Aunt Nettie had figured out that Gwen played and had told Mimi, it didn’t show. “It’s a great feeling,” she said. “You and your teammates all trying your damnedest to win and knowing how much you depend on one another. Wouldn’t you like to try it?”

  Gwen fit the misting wand to a hose.

  “I kind of thought so.” Mimi winked at us as if to say she knew how teenagers could be. “Well, this may be your chance. I can’t make any promises. But we’d love to see you try out for the Netted League team. Will you come?”

  Gwen began her misting but, after a few moments, her back still to Mimi, nodded.

  “Even if you don’t make the team, I think you’ll find it a good experience,” said Mimi.

  “I don’t need to make the team,” said Gwen’s back.

  “I don’t mean that you won’t. But in any case, the thing to do is to try.”

  Gwen’s mist sent up little rainbows in the spring sun.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say no.” Mission accomplished, Mimi let her reading glasses dangle by their chain as if they, too, could now take a break. “And you might try consuming more, by the way,” she said, turning to Eleanor and me. “Your Living Points are a bit low.”

  “Low for what?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say, better to bring them up.” Mimi had the inclined head and concerned look of someone genuinely trying to be helpful. “Why raise questions.”

  Out by the door, we held Mimi’s cane for her as she donned a daffodil-yellow rain jacket with a ladybug-print lining. “Because I am nothing if not pro-ladybug,” she explained.

  We had to smile.

  “Of course, if Gwen makes the Netted League team, she will be automatically admitted to Net U,” Mimi went on matter-of-factly. Then she left the house, only to turn around before stepping onto the walk. “The cutoff for pitchers is going to be around seventy miles per hour,” she said. “Control matters, too, naturally. A pitcher must throw strikes. But seventy miles per hour should do it.” With that, she continued down the walk and out onto the street, shooing the geese with her cane.

  * * *

  —

  Was that a coincidence? The HouseBots might be reporting our movements and sound levels and living patterns generally, but between our A/V shutoff, deflectors, white noisemaker, and voice scrambler, we had been reasonably confident words and images were not making it to Aunt Nettie. Now we weren’t so sure.

  We frowned and puzzled as Eleanor sprayed weeds with a vinegar solution; the weeds were the first thing to come up in the spring and it was good to get ahead of them. Early in the growing season as it was, the wind was hot, as if summer had already started.

  “Say Gwen pitches for them,” I said, sweating. “What then? Does she go to Net U?”

  While Eleanor sprayed for weeds, I sprayed for pests, coating
the tops and bottoms of the leaves with a mixture of canola oil and detergent. The results were drippy and decidedly inelegant, but tidy Eleanor seemed not to notice as she set her sprayer down.

  “I was the one who organized the Underground League, wasn’t I,” she said. “So that Gwen could play.”

  “You were.”

  “I mean, with your help.”

  “We couldn’t have predicted any of this, Nell. The insurrection in ChinRussia. The Redoubling. The related fixation on the Olympics, if it is indeed related, and on, of all things, baseball. Who could have imagined it?”

  “Do you think Aunt Nettie did? With her millions of people, and millions of situations, and her algorithms?”

  I hesitated. “No,” I said.

  “And now what? Do you think Aunt Nettie knows what we’re going to do? Do you think she knows what Gwen is going to do?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Because either we’re makers or just made.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which makes all the difference.”

  “Yes.”

  She sprayed around the base of a tomato plant. “So should we try to raise our Living Points? To at least make sure that if Gwen’s life is determined by something, it’s not by us? To make sure she has a choice?”

  It was a choice we wanted her to have on principle. A choice we could not in good conscience block. And yet, I here admit that had it been up to me, I might well have blocked it anyway. Even if it proved us no better than Aunt Nettie, I might well have said no. Gwen could not try out for the Netted League. No.

  Married as I was, though, to noble Eleanor, I said yes.

  Her hair lifted and settled.

  As for whether I really wanted the best brought out in me, never mind. I eyed the mist from Eleanor’s sprayer as it bounced up from the soil; like it or not, it rose.

  * * *