IRIDESCENCE: $13.99
My head pounded in the dry, late-day air. I blamed Mrs. Harris, but it wasn’t just her; it was everything. I found myself moving toward Falxo Park once again, and the bridge where Beecher killed himself. I remembered his lanky, miserable figure loping along in my mind and regretted ever knowing him. My eyes turned wet and then, like a lunatic, I laughed out loud, because I also missed him. I could laugh for free, but only if my Cuff deemed it to be genuine and “involuntary.”
Why had his grandmother approached me in the park? Did she know something I didn’t about why he had done it? What could she possibly say that would make it right?
Not far off, I saw her building. I had never actually been inside. A few times Beecher offered to take me to his place, but I assumed that was just a boy’s trick to get me alone. Thomkins Tower was not inviting. It was a dark, sloppy, printed slab scattered with tiny windows. There were no Placer handholds. There was no ornamentation. There were no overhanging eaves—even our building had those. The entire structure was slightly askew from the fourth floor up, where the building printer must have misaligned a few degrees and kept going.
I wondered if Mrs. Stokes was inside. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers to my temples to ease the throbbing. Was she just playing games? Maybe she had good reason to want to talk in private. Maybe she had an Advil™.
I decided to go up. Whether she had something useful to say, or she was just playing games, at least I could do something.
Thomkins Tower had a reputation for being rough. I slipped inside her building quickly, hoping not to be recognized, but of course I was. Two rough-looking boys came right at me the minute I was inside. I was ready to fight them, for all the good it would do, but they pulled up short and each showed me the sign of the zippered lips. The sight stunned me as I passed. I reached the stairs, my face burning a little with shame from jumping to conclusions about their intentions.
I found her apartment on the third floor. I pressed the buzzer. A moment later, she opened her door. I didn’t wait for her to invite me in. I stepped inside. I hoped she wasn’t going to tell me Beecher had been in love with me. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to believe that I’d played some part in his death. I looked up and saw the red-rimmed, haunted look in Mrs. Stokes’s eyes, and my anger at him and at her melted. I wished I had come up when Beecher asked. Now I had to imagine what it was like, the two of them living here.
Her place was smaller than ours. One wall had recently been printed over, no doubt removing the space that had once been allocated to Beecher. There was a couch and a stack of old, ratty-looking boxes along one wall. Her home had a window like ours, but too foggy to see through. It looked like it had been purposely sanded and scraped.
The other strange thing was that the room had no screen. I’d never been in a home without a screen. I stared at the blank wall where it seemed like one belonged, feeling weird in its absence. Nothing was glowing and serving Ads. I may have hated ours, but I was used to it. I found the noise and chatter of it comfortingly familiar. Her home seemed so quiet and lonely in comparison.
“I haven’t got a food printer, either,” she said hoarsely, pointing at the blank wall. “Or I would offer you a sheet of Wheatlock™.” She laughed, like this was funny. Maybe it was funny. Wheatlock™ is disgusting.
How did she eat? She couldn’t possibly afford fresh food.
“You know Randall circumvented the programming and all that?”
Randall, I assumed, was Beecher’s father.
“You know why he did it?”
I had no idea.
“Ever try to use a food printer during a FiDo? They don’t work. WiFi goes down, and pretty much nothing works. Everything has to be connected to the tether. Everything. Randall didn’t like it. He worried about it. He said the whole city would starve, and for what?”
She sat herself down on the couch.
“After they took him away, they said the family couldn’t be trusted to have any kind of printer.” She wiped the idea away with a disgusted hand. “Who needs that garbage?”
How was she able to afford all these words? Then I realized that I hadn’t heard her Cuff buzz at all. Did those thick sleeves muffle the sound?
“You know why Beecher jumped?” she asked, smoothing out the scratchy cloth on her legs. Her voice dropped to a sadder tone.
Was she really asking, or was she going to tell me? If she knew, I wished she would just come out and say so.
“Butchers & Rog bought him. Full Indenture. Said he could finish school and then be placed in servitude, or he could quit school right away, and Rog would take him.”
What kind of choice was that? Quitting school made even less sense now that I knew what had been troubling him. My heart ached for the burden he’d carried, unable to tell me. Had their debt suddenly gotten worse? Is that why he had been Indentured?
“That poor boy.” Mrs. Stokes shook her head sadly. “Boys his age need to eat, but you saw how skinny he was. We could never afford enough food, and we just couldn’t keep our debt rate steady, no matter how hard we tried.”
She shrugged helplessly. “He signed a contract. Rog made him use paper and ink. Ink on his fingers. I should’ve asked about that. I didn’t find out ’til later that Beecher agreed to go right away to keep me out of servitude.”
She shook her head pitifully. “That was the choice they gave him. He agreed to go early to protect me. He barely wanted to say that. You know what he was like after his fifteenth.” She sighed. “He knew what would happen if they found out my secret.”
She put her hand on her thick sleeve and pulled the coarse fabric up. Underneath, the skin of her hand and arm was a shiny, red, mottled mess. Her Cuff was black, charred around the edges. The glossy screen was warped and eddied with a purplish iridescence.
“It happened years ago,” she said. “Long before Randall and the printer. I went in to get my overlays—I got mine late in life, because they didn’t have them when I was fifteen—and when they presented me with Terms of Service, I clicked DECLINE. The administrator was shocked.”
My eyes must have gone wide, because Beecher’s grandmother laughed at me. “She looked a little like that! Dear, you always have the legal right to decline. Did you know that?”
Could I have refused my overlays? Her advice did me little good now, but still...
“The transition specialist didn’t know what to do. Apparently neither did the Cuff, because it started to get warm. I thought it was a feedback loop. Randall wondered if it was purposeful—the government’s punishment for not agreeing to the ToS. Whatever caused it, the Cuff got hotter and hotter. It probably would have gone molten, like most do, but once we got home, Randall hacked it. That boy was clever, and was he ever mad. Burned his fingers some. My arm didn’t fare too well, either. But all the inputs were fried.”
She held the Cuff a little higher, as if I could see what had gone wrong.
“It still puts out a signal, telling them I’m here. That’s about it. It can’t record a thing. I can say anything I like,” she sighed. She looked sad. I would have expected her to be happy about it. “Beecher thought I could do more good than him because of this.” She held the Cuff higher. “As if I had something useful to say. Truth is, I talked too much already. I complained about the Rights Holders, and look where that got us. I got Randall so fired up with my talk, he got too bold. Now my son and his wife are out tending crops so rich people don’t have to eat printed food, and my grandson...” Her voice broke off, and she wiped her eyes.
“As far as those Rights Holders know, I haven’t spoken in years. Doesn’t attract any attention, though. I’m sure lots of old ladies give up on talking, so I don’t show up as special or strange. You, though—silence at your age is awful conspicuous.”
Her story, and the reminder of Beecher’s fate, was almost too much to bear. I clenched my jaw to hold back the tears, but they still came.
“All you kids without your parents—it’s tragic—so much worse than it used to be,” she said, wiping my cheek. “Seems like they wait until you kids are just old enough to stick you with a Custodian, and then they yank your parents away.”
She tussled my pixie cut, and I hurriedly smoothed it back into place. She was right, of course. How many friends did I have who still had their parents? It had somehow seemed normal—just the way things were—even if the idea of it twisted a knot in my chest.
“Sorry,” she said. “I should be careful not to tussle you into a Copyrighted do.”
She paused and closed her eyes for a brief moment. I felt my hair again. I’d have to cut it soon, hacking it back with the dull pair of scissors Sam and I used for trimming hair. It was weird to think her Cuff wasn’t watching, recording, scanning her haircut and mine and comparing the scans against what little was free.
“They just keep taking all they can, right up to the breaking point. It’s odd how everyone seems to end up right at the edge of Collection, don’t you think? You can’t do any little thing to protest it, or they’ll sue you right into servitude. I suppose that is why I like your tactic so much. Technically, you aren’t doing anything. I hope you realize how clever that is.”
I didn’t. I hadn’t. Another tear fell. I felt like a complete fraud. Did she really believe I’d worked this out—that I’d planned for all this to happen?
“I hope you know I’m proud you did it,” she said. The wrinkles on her face crinkled up.
I realized I was still standing, looming above her, my posture still full of anger and frustration. My heart was a different matter. I could feel the sadness and regret in her. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault. Whatever she’d stirred up in Beecher, that was no cause for him to take his own life. But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t take her hand. I didn’t know how to bring her any comfort, and that need welled inside me. One more tear slid down my cheek.
She took my hand instead. Then she stood and hugged me, and I did not move, because I could not hug her back. I just let myself soak it in.