Page 5 of Jinxed
But Zora and I are already out of the door.
‘HE’S A JERK. FORGET ABOUT HIM,’ SAYS Zora, once she catches up to me. She slips her arm around mine, forcing me back into a more normal pace. But I don’t want to slow down. Everywhere I look inthe mall, I see people with their higher level bakus – mechanical dogs and cats either trotting at their heels or leashed up on their shoulders – and it’s a constant reminder of what I can’t have. I make a beeline for the exit, craving sunlight and fresh air.
I’m still shaking, Carter’s laugh a soundtrack to my steps that I can’t turn off. I’m simultaneously humiliated and annoyed that I’ve lethim get to me. My new beetle baku is still trapped in the box in my hand; I can’t bear to look at it yet. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ I say to Zora, once we’re through the revolving doors and outside. ‘Somewhere... to escape from here.’
‘I know just the place. I’ll get directions.’ She holds her palm out as her dormouse sneaks down her arm, projecting directions on her fingers.
I shove the beetleinto my backpack, pushing it right to the very bottom. Zora shoots me a look, but doesn’t say anything. I avert my eyes, focusing on the zipper of my bag. I can tell by the gentle rattle of the beads at the bottom of her braids that she is shaking her head at me.
By the time I stand up again though, she’s over it. That’s what I love best about Zora. She’s the least emotional person I know. It’sone of the things that makes her such a great coder. She sees everything as if it’s an algorithm, including our emotions – ‘this is just the body’s inbuilt response to stressful stimuli’ she told me when we first met, while I was crying in the elevator after getting a B on a test in third grade, and I blinked at her as if I couldn’t believe I’d found another eight-year-old as nerdy as I was. She’djust moved into the same condo building with her parents and three high-maintenance sisters. I’d always been the loner kid in class – the one who took everything (especially my grades) a bit too seriously, who was always hungry to learn more about engineering, to see my name at the top of the honour roll. Zora was the first person who was as passionate about something as I was. At first, she wasjust glad to escape the madhouse of her family, but we quickly became best friends.
She knows when to push and when to leave me alone. We lock together like pieces of a very specific jigsaw. No other person has ever understood me like she does. She pushes; I pull. She codes; I build. My creations would be lifeless without her code and her code formless without my builds. And because we live inthe same building, she’s always hanging out in my unit – helping me not get too lonely when Mom is at work, and even hanging out with Mom when I’m tinkering in the basement. She’s more like a sister than a friend – she calls me a sister that shechoserather than was born with – and I don’t know what I’d do without her.
There is no specific border for when we leave ‘Monchaville’, no massive gateor wall, but there’s a definitefeeling. A gentle shift in energy from one side of the road to the other. I think it’s because of how clean everything is in the part of town that is run by the company. They took over responsibility from the city for all the maintenance of the ten-block (and expanding) rectangle in exchange for preferential planning permissions and the right to override specificbylaws. I saw an article in a regular city paper once that said the sidewalks and pathways around Moncha are embedded with anti-trademark-infringement alarms that trigger if someone attempts to steal anything, and that there are security bird bakus flying over every square inch of pavement – as invasive as CCTV. I don’t know if any of the rumours are true – I’ve never seen any unusual-looking birdsor heard the blare of an alarm, but the Moncha guard – the security team – are ever-present, keeping the streets of Monchaville safe.
Tales of security bakus and alarms go against everything I’ve read about Monica Chan – she doesn’t seem paranoid about copyright infringement. We’ve had loads of talks in school about how important it is for us to experiment and play – that’s how technology takesits great leaps forward. And no company in the world has yet been able to replicate the bakus to any reasonable standard. There was a disastrous version that came out in Germany – the animals were all based on mythological creatures (that part was totally cool) – but they bugged out and started twitching, scrambling text messages and rerouting web searches to illegal dark net stuff. One even attackedtheir owner. They had to shut down production within a week. Once again, there were rumours that it could have easily been Moncha’s ace code-creators that infected the German hosts, but viral code wouldn’t explain the weird mechanical tics.
In the decade that bakus have been around, there haven’t been any major glitches. The neuroleash technology is no more invasive than an ear-piercing (althoughthe law still makes people wait until they’re entering their final year of high school before they can get one). The best part is that even older bakus can be upgraded, incorporating any developments in the technology, under lifetime Moncha warranty. Their spread around the world has been so rapid and prolific, there isn’t any need for competition. And if you want to work for a cutting-edge technologycompany, there is only one choice: Moncha.
There has only ever been one choice for me, that’s for sure. Except now, the spark of hope is accompanied by a wave of crashing disappointment. I wonder if that feeling will ever go away, or if I’ll be left with this regret for the rest of my life.
When Linus indicates that we should turn left, I realize where Zora is taking us. I grin with delight.The Don River valley trails. The Don River valley splices through the city centre like a river of green, an oasis of calm in the busy metropolis. It’s one of my favourite parts of the city. You can look down into it and pretend you are in the middle of the wilderness. I have a blurred memory of being on my dad’s shoulders as we hiked down through towards the tracks and—
I immediately curse mybrain and scrub it of all mention of my dad. I do not need to go there. Not today. Today has been filled with enough disappointment.
‘Everything all right?’ Zora asks, and Linus tilts his head in strange synchronicity. He’s only been hers for a day, and yet already he’s adopting her mannerisms, and becoming as much a part of her as the line of earrings dotted up her earlobe.
‘What do you mean?’
She stares down at my hand. ‘You’re rubbing your ring.’
Heat rises in my cheeks and I snap my hands apart. But she’s right. Whenever I touch my dad’s old engineering ring – the last piece of him I have left – something is up.
The iron rings are a Canadian engineering tradition. Supposedly forged from the iron of a collapsed bridge, it’s a reminder of the immense responsibility borne by engineers,and to keep the safety of their work in mind. It’s supposed to be worn on the left pinky, but my hands are much smaller than my dad’s. I wear mine on my thumb. Besides, I’m not an engineer yet.
And maybe now you never will be, not for Moncha Corp anyway, says a small voice in my head.
I dash the thought away.
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I say. ‘This was the perfect place to come. I love it here.’ I throwmy arms wide and twirl around under the canopy of leaves, hoping to distract her.
It works. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. ‘It’s pretty great. And if we head across the bridge it’s a short cut downtown, so we can get some bubble tea.’
There’s a suspension bridge in the middle of the park that crosses over the high-speed rail tracks. ‘Excellent plan,’ I say. I stare down at thepattern of shadows created by the leaves on her face and arms, her skin shining burnished copper where the sun hits it. I feel a twinge of sadness that she’s off on an advanced coding course this summer. It’s an amazing opportunity for her – Zora’s wanted to be a coder ever since she programmed her first ‘Hello World’ in BASE – and this course will give her a leg-up on the competition before she appliesfor an actual computer technology degree next year.
‘When does your course start?’ I ask, wanting to know exactly how many days I have to hang with Zora before she leaves me for two whole months.
‘Hmm?’ She opens her deep brown eyes and levels her gaze at me. ‘Oh... end of June. Are you going to miss me?’
‘Are you kidding?’ I stop in my tracks. ‘What am I going to do with my summer withoutyou?’
She pokes me in the ribs. ‘Maybe you’llenjoyyourself. It’s the summer. You’ve worked hard all friggin’ year. You’re allowed to take a break and relax.’
‘Right...’Except that you get to do the thing you’ve been wanting to do your whole life.The words balance on the tip of my tongue but I don’t let them spill off the edge.
Laughter reaches us from behind, the low chuckle of insidejokes and bad puns. Zora looks over her shoulder. ‘Oh no,’ she says, her shoulders tensing.
‘What is it?’ I turn around too, and immediately see the source of tension: the twitch of a robotic boar nose coming up behind us. Their bakus must have directed them down the same short cut into downtown.
