I can still hear my father’s voice. Even though we were poor, he was a talker. When the WiFi would fail, his face would light up. This was his chance. He could say anything, untethered from the system.
I remember one time, he said to us, “I can make you think of zebras.” Sam laughed his playful, cherubic laugh. I listened, delighted.
“All I have to do is say the word: Zebras. The idea goes from me to you. Zebras. See? It’s unavoidable! You’re picturing one now!”
He smiled, knowing he was right. I saw the zebra, with stripes and a bristly mane—a wide-open plain behind it. Words were like magic.
I don’t remember all of it, in part because I was so young, and also because it was hard to concentrate. My mother would go wild during the outages, hugging us without the $2.99 fee, kissing our heads and saying, “I love you,” a hundred times. It was like an animal attack, but a loving one.
I remember my father claimed there used to be places called “liberties” that would let you read any book, and all you’d have to do is show them a card.
“How much did the card cost?” I asked. He smirked. He said it was free. You just had to promise to return the book when you were done.
I loved his stories, even ones that ridiculous. I knew what he described was impossible. How could people who wrote books, or published books, ever make any money if “liberties” just gave them away? It made no sense.
He also said words had once been free. I believed him about that. Laws were made of words, so the words had to come first, right? My father said it took thousands of years for humans to figure out they could control the rights to words. They started by controlling how certain words were used, so that you couldn’t just write a word like Coke™ or Disney™ or Candy™ without fear of getting sued, especially if you had something negative to say. It only got worse from there. He didn’t know when it all started.
“I only wish I knew how to make it all end,” he said.
My mother got upset when he said things like this. She worried about getting flagged, sued or even Indentured.
“Everyone around here gets Indentured eventually,” my father said darkly.
“What if the WiFi came back tethered?” my mother pressed him, like the WiFi was knocking at our door.
My father looked abashed and zipped his lips, as a joke. My mother didn’t find the gesture funny, even in jest, with the WiFi down.
“I hate that,” she said. “They want us remembering how low we are. I don’t want any of you to make that sign, understand?” She looked at the three of us, then at her Cuff, worried the WiFi might have kicked back on when she wasn’t looking.
* * *
Now I had made that very gesture, the one she despised, in front of the entire city—maybe the whole nation. Why had I done it? What was I thinking?
We had to call our parents. We didn’t know if they had seen me on the news. Their company controlled what access they were allowed, and most of their time was spent in the fields. Saretha managed to contact them through the Internment Bureau, and we were able to set up a call. Mrs. Harris insisted on being present. She was still Sam’s Custodian, and she stood behind us, arms crossed, with a disapproving scowl.
“Speth,” my father said, amplified, but distant. “It’s okay.”
His voice was low and calm. He looked tired. His skin was like dusty leather. My mother’s was, too. She sat beside him, her eyes downcast. The room was dark behind them, insufficiently lit by a dirty fluorescent coil. From the worry on their faces, it was clear they had heard plenty.
“Sam,” my father said with a slow nod, meaning Sam should tell them everything.
Mrs. Harris clicked her tongue. She had explained many times that it was bad etiquette to make the youngest do all the talking, just because they did not have to pay. “It’s perverse,” she said in a low aside to Saretha. Saretha pretended Mrs. Harris was not there while Sam explained about Beecher, the speech and what I had done. My body tensed as I waited for a reaction. Sam described the sign of the zippered lips. My mother’s mouth twitched. She closed her eyes.
When Sam was finished, my father nodded again. He looked older than he should have. They both did. They had to drink a liter of Metlatonic™ twice a day just to survive under the brutal sun. I didn’t know if this was because the work made them thirsty, or if the sun burned their skin. I didn’t know if the Metlatonic™ was helping or harming them. The hefty cost of it was deducted against the Indenture.
It still looked like the sun was killing them.
My father took my mother’s hand. She barely moved. The fee for their affection scrolled up the screen. $6.
“I know this must be hard,” my father said. I tried not to cry. I failed. I wiped away the tears, desperate for something in his words to guide me. Below him, on-screen, scrolled the cost of his handful of words, the WiFi tax, the fee from Agropollination™ Inc. for use of their room and equipment and time off from the fields.
I ached to ask them what to do. The silence was killing me. I needed their help, and I hated that everything about this world seemed to conspire to keep their guidance from me. I didn’t even know how far away they were. I’d asked, but my parents, Mrs. Harris and even the teachers at the school couldn’t say how far it was from Vermaine to Carolina. Geography is proprietary information.
Please, I begged them silently in my head, tell me what to do!
“Did you have anything to add?” my father asked my mother slowly.
That was it? I blinked back more tears. Couldn’t they see my face? Couldn’t they read it, even if their eyes were bleary? I had no idea how far they were from me.
My mother looked up, first at him, then at the camera, the screen and me. She looked so beaten. Her eyes were rimmed red. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to take everything back, but then my mother did something I never thought I’d see. She raised her fingers to her mouth and slowly, deliberately, made the sign of the zippered lips, twisting at the end, like a lock. She stared at the camera, straight and clear, and she smiled. Pins and needles shot up my spine. No one seemed to breathe. Mrs. Harris’s mouth hung open. My father nodded, pressed a button and the image of my parents flickered away.
I was an agitator. I was a fool. I was brilliantly devious. I was a mental deficient. I was an unpatriotic threat to the nation. I was a pathetic symptom of a generation with no soul. “Kids never used to be like this,” interviewees said.
But my mother approved.
I was seditious, a word I’d never heard before. It meant I wanted to destroy the government. They said I’d driven the price of the word up to $29.99 this month, but I had nothing to do with it. Rights Holders changed prices each day as much as they could, depending on what the market would tolerate.
One news report claimed I had tricked Beecher into killing himself to cover my tracks. (What tracks? I wondered.) Another report, the most flattering of the bunch, claimed I had a brain tumor that rendered me mute. I was a sad, worthless little girl.
Three networks offered bounties to the first person who made me speak. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that might mean word had gotten out of the city. What did they think of me out there? I knew, at least, what my parents thought, and that made things a little easier to bear.
On my first day back to school, I was on Fuller Street, just away from the roar of the outer ring, when two skinny rich girls in gold corsets and Transparenting Mood™ coats approached me. They wanted me to talk—to talk,