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The Futurists: speculative fiction for the network society

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The Futurists: speculative fiction for the network society

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THE FUTURISTS: SPECULATIVE FICTION FOR THE NETWORK SOCIETY
By Leah Bailly

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2019

2
The Futurists:
Speculative Fiction for the Network Society
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
Part 1. What is a Network Society? 7
1A. Abbreviated History of Media, the Message and the Digital Revolution 9
1B. Features of the Network Society 13
1C. Impact on the Culture 16
1D. Literary Application 21
1E. Forms of Fiction in the Digital Age 25
Autofiction 25
Hybrid Forms 28
Translit 30
Micro-Fiction 33
Collective POVs 34
Electronic/ Interactive Literature 35
In Conclusion 36
Part 2. What is Utopia? 39
2A. Abbreviated History of Utopia, Dystopia and the Rise of Speculative Fiction 42
2B. Utopia for the Network Society 47
2C. Forms of Utopian Fiction 50
Archistic Utopia 51
Anarchistic Utopia 52
Utopias of Escape 53
Utopias of Reconstruction 55
Euchronic Utopia 56
Heterotopia 58
The Break 59
In Conclusion 60
Part 3. Speculative Fiction for the Network Society: three close readings 62
3A. On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee (2014) 66
3B. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (2015) 75
3C. Severance by Ling Ma (2018) 85
In Conclusion 93
Bibliography 99
Part 4. The Futurists: a novel 106
3
Abstract
This project combines communications theory, literature and creative writing to examine how we
build speculative narrative from the anxieties of our networked society. I consider the work of
USC’s Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society Manuel Castells,
who prior to the advent of the internet, predicted a new global village that would be flooded by
previously unheard voices, shared in a non-hierarchical fashion and would reveal wild hybrids of
forms. New collectives would emerge from this networking, new ways of expressing ourselves.
In light of these technological and societal shifts, this project seeks to identify the traditional
forms of utopia and examine how they are rewritten using the new narrative tools of the
information age. This project will conclude with close readings of the work of Chang-Rae Lee,
Claire Vaye Watkins and Ling Ma, to explore their new strategies for crafting speculative fiction
for our network society.

4
Introduction

“Neither utopia nor dystopia, today the Internet is the expression of ourselves— through a
specific code of communication, which we must understand if we want to change our reality.”
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy

The study of utopia is the study of the future. Since the concept of utopia entered our
discourse in the 16
th
Century, the belief that humankind could strive toward perfection resulted
in all kinds of writing that guessed at what that future could be. Artists, writers and scholars,
particularly during the optimistic Victorian age, imagined vastly different visions of utopia—from
matriarchies and communal farms to large-scale collective colonies. They reasoned, critiqued,
argued and wrote extensively on this theme: how can we best organize our communities?
But something snapped during the 20
th
Century, something that frayed our optimism for
human improvement and instead pointed to the oppression the future could hold. Perhaps it was
the rise of the modern totalitarian regime, the brutal violence and crimes against humanity
witnessed in both World Wars. Or maybe we began to see the ugliness under that Victorian
optimism. The colonies were not so sunny. The division of labor was not so egalitarian.
Technology would not save us after all. When our utopian texts frayed into dystopian visions,
writers from across the disciplines critiqued their social contexts by speculating on undesirable
futures. Our attention shifted—we feared the worst of what our communities could become.
Today, we live in a moment of virtual reality, of social media and surveillance—and yet
so many of us retreat to the online world as if that is our utopian space. Online, there is no
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uniformity of message, no homogeneous mass audience. Online, we are delocalized, free of
cultural, historical and sometimes even class identifiers. Today, we organize society
differently—Americans are online over twenty-two hours a week. This networking has resulted
in the rise of the collective, more open-sourced information, more mass self-communication.
Surveillance can go both ways. Now we can watch the powerful just as they watched us. This is
how we arrived at a Network Society—it was our quest for a new utopia, for freedom of
assembly, for freedom of information. The network thrives with more voices, more plurality of
ideas. Online, we are who we say we are, talking about whatever we want.
Since the advent of the internet, a new vein of utopian thinking has emerged. The novels
I analyze here are utopian fiction for #metoo, for Occupy Wall Street, for the Hong Kong
umbrella revolution, for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all of the big-dream, viral political social
planning that occurs online. It seems, in our social movements and our literature, we are still
interested in striving toward perfection. The belief that the internet’s horizontal organizational
structure could result in human improvement has resulted in a new wave of speculative fiction,
both refuting and exploring themes of utopia in light of the digital age.
This paper looks through the lens of communications theory, specifically by employing
the work of Manuel Castells, to examine how we manipulate traditional utopian models in digital
age fiction. Today, we can share information, we can mass self-communicate, instantly and
simultaneously. Online, our stories are delocalized, free of time restraints, full of hybrid forms
and plural narrators. This paper will examine how Chang Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and
Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus and Ling Ma’s Severance borrow from both traditional
utopian fiction and digital-age narrative forms. Their characters are delocalized, simultaneous,
speaking in the first-person plural. They are immigrants, collectives, outsiders, left-behinds in
dystopian society, the ones who survive, reflecting the widespread social and cultural
differentiation for those who participate in online story-building. Nevertheless, their characters
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still believe we can organize society according to its improvement. Still, they seek utopia within
their dystopian settings.
The Network Society increasingly brings multiple actors and voices into our social
organization. The internet is idiosyncratic, interactive and individualistic in how it shares
information—at any moment, we can read millions of unique voices, we can hear from anyone.
This dissertation will examine how these digital-age novels are asking larger societal questions
about communication power—how the network has changed our society, our ideas of utopia,
how we see our future unfold. I hope to examine exactly how utopia for a network society
appears on the page.

7
Part 1. What is a Network Society?

When Manuel Castells Oliván was eighteen years old, he was subject to a dictatorship. It was
late-1950s Spain, and Franco had a stranglehold on all communications. The regime controlled
art and artists and in particular young dissenting voices. Castells, a law student, could not write
an article in the law school’s journal without the government shutting the journal down. He could
not perform in Camus’ Caligula without being indicted for promoting homosexuality. He could
not listen to the BBC World News through the government's static interference. Castells felt he
had no choice but to join the resistance. Even at the age of twenty, before multiple political
exiles, honorary degrees and accolades, Castells understood the power inherent in controlling
information. He switched from law to urban studies, was exiled to France by twenty-one. As a
graduate student at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, he published his first book 1972, Las
Question Urbaine, which was translated into ten languages, an instant hit. Even then, as a
burgeoning social scientist, he wrote about networks and the power structures within. He
predicted a moment in which information would be transmitted to anyone, when data would
transcend time, class, societal and physical borders along a horizontal network that would be
impossible to control. (Castells, Communication Power 2009)
Today, Castells is a social scientist who has radically altered the fields of
communications and technology studies. Castells is sole author of 23 books and editor or co-
author of 15 others, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. He has been credited with
predicting the information revolution in his 1996 book, The Rise of the Network Society, the first
book of the three-part The Information Age (1996–8.) The empirical data he gathered for the
trilogy required fifteen years of global research, from 1983 to 1998, the last five years of which
8
he was battling cancer. (Castells, Communication Power 2009) He currently holds the Wallis
Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Southern California and the Research Professorship at the
Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Castells’ cancer is now in remission and he is the
most cited social scientist in academia today.
It is likely his coming-of-age in social unrest, in rebellion, that guided Castells from
economics, to sociology, to communications. As an early social scientist, he called himself a
Marxist, but quit because the lens was not broad enough—class could not explain gender roles
and culture wars he encountered in his social research. He eventually estranged himself from
sociology departments because he was the only researcher addressing the sociological
dimension of technological change. Upon leaving Berkeley, a colleague noted he was
“obsessed with communications” (Castells, The message is the medium: An interview with
Manuel Castells 2005) but Castells refutes this claim, arguing that the information technology
revolution is so pervasive through the whole of human activity, it is impossible to ignore the
power of communications when studying the economy, politics, society or culture.
In the 1990s, when Castells predicted a global information revolution, it was radical to
believe we would occupy a kind of “virutality” in our regular lives, combining online and offline
spheres in work, leisure and artistic practice. Today, according to the 2018 Digital Future Report
conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, Americans conduct most of
our business, our interpersonal communication on the internet, on average 22.5 hours per week
online. (Jeffrey I. Cole 2018), over 80% of it, on phones. We are now considering the use of
digital assistants, wearable online technology and implanted chips—likely only years away from
the mainstream. Castells was correct. Today we occupy a hybrid world, in which virtual and
face-to-face connections coalesce across all dimensions of our lives.
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According to Castells, technology does not dictate society. Rather, each social and
cultural phenomena is dependent upon, and feeds back into, the technology of the era. Thus,
certain cultural decisions or societal norms can repress technological change or amplify it. This
chapter will investigate the historical and societal circumstances that allowed for the rise of the
Network Society, the impact it has had on both our culture and literature, and specifically, the
forms of narrative that have emerged from these societal and technological changes. Castells in
fact did predict this moment, whereby information is transmitted to anyone, it can transcend
time, class, societal and physical borders on a horizontal network that is impossible to control.
This chapter outlines the narrative forms that have emerged from this societal reorganization.

1A. Abbreviated History of Media, the
Message and the Digital Revolution
The Internet was invented in 1960s California, born from a culture of freedom and intellectual
risk-taking as well as a fear of nuclear war. According to historical record, the Internet was
conceived in the 1960s by the US Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) to prevent a Soviet takeover or destruction of American communications in case of
nuclear attack. The goal was to create a computer network architecture that could not be
controlled from the top down or any particular center. Instead, DARPA’s goal was to transmit
information along an interlinked network that connected thousands of autonomous machines.
Other such digital network experiments in France (with its state-controlled Minitel) did not
succeed to the same degree, mostly due to state constraints, to top-down organization. In
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America, it took a suitably Californian libertarian view, an emphasis on freedom and flexibility, to
design a horizontal network that would be so difficult to control.
Nevertheless, the subsequent digital revolution required another forty years to permeate
and alter the global culture. We required the scaffolding of innovation in electronics, materials
and micro-processing. In addition, we needed societal openness, clusters of scientific and
technical knowledge and an open market. To the DARPA funding and research, mostly located
in California, we added institutional support: the communications labs at Stanford University and
the Hewlett Packard spin-offs at Berkeley, professors and innovators who fostered technological
creativity and collaboration, sharing their new advancements in the public sphere. We needed
role models of fast monetary success, most of whom started together in the 1970s Home Brew
Computer Club—whose ambitious members Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and others
would go on to create in the following years up to 22 companies including Microsoft, Apple,
Comenco and North Star. And importantly, we needed cultural movements including the
feminist movement, the civil rights movement and the environmental movements. We needed a
way for people of diverging identities and interests to push us toward a more highly
individualized communication strategy.
In the 1960s and 70s, it was difficult to share your message. Television technology had
swept North America, we watched TV by the hours each day. But this mass media technology
was organized in a top-down hierarchical system, in which those twelve standard broadcasters
in North America, and even fewer in Japan and Europe, could manipulate the message due to
its ubiquity and widespread use. Culture critic Marshal McLuhan saw the rise of television
culture of the 1960s as an unavoidable information maelstrom, one that would impact individual
minds and would collectively alter our society and culture. He called us ‘a Global Village’ thanks
to the wide-spread proliferation of television as a mass-media machine. As a global village, we
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could all simultaneously watch a space shuttle explosion, a sporting event, election results.
These broadcasters could tailor information for a mass homogenous viewing public.
Trained in New Criticism, McLuhan was unafraid to analyze both the high and low
aspects of this mass media culture, looking to advertisements, cartoons and major broadcasters
as producers of culture for patterns. By the 1970s, for the first time, pre-programmed television,
visual advertising and pop culture imagery all fed into the individual’s psyche by the thousands
of images each day. He warned us that the television age, with its simultaneous broadcasting
and ubiquitous message, could veer society toward misinformation and surveillance, resulting in
a culture lacking nuance. “Terror is the normal state of any oral society,” he explained, “for in it
everything affects everything all of the time.” (McLuhan 1962)
McLuhan’s observation of TV culture was one of passivity and ubiquity—the fact that
television appeals to what culture critic Manuel Castells calls “the associative and lyrical mind,
not involving the psychological effort of information retrieving” (Castells, The Rise of the
Network Society 2010, 330) implies that citizens of the television age were content to form a
passive audience. McLuhan observed the “medium was the message.” (McLuhan 1962) It was
the ubiquity of the television itself, the constant visual stimulation, the lack of typographic
information and this passive watching that influenced the culture, not the content it displayed.
Viewers often tuned in without a plan of what content they sought, choosing instead to simply
watch.
However, from the 1960s to the 1990s, the medium changed. We experienced a
massive multiplication of television channels (in most cases, from 12 standard broadcasters to
the many hundreds on cable TV) resulting in a diversification of content. By the 1990s,
programming was no longer uniform. In one example, MTV, which in the 1980s accounted for
25% of viewership among young people, fragmented programming from the 22-minute sitcom to
the 2-3 minute music video, a kind of flash fiction for the television viewer. Meanwhile, with the
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invention and dissemination of the VCR, viewers could record their programs, allowing for
higher selectivity and reduced passive viewing. Finally, these shifts all led to the mass appeal of
audio-visual recorders; with video cam-corders, individuals could create their own content rather
than depend on top-down programming.
By the late 1970s, just as Americans watched up to eight hours of television per day, the
microcomputer, or personal computer, was introduced to the market. (Castells, Communication
Power 2009) To bring that communication technology to the masses by the 1990s, we needed
the hardware to miniaturize, specialize and decrease in price such that consumers could afford
to place the chips and processors in our homes, cars and eventually on our bodies. Finally, in
order to connect those machines, to create electronics-based information transmission network
on a massive scale, we needed a clustering of innovation involving microelectronics,
telecommunications and broadcasting, optoelectronics and this common digital language of
zeros and ones.
Between 1985 and 2000 the average number of hours of cable TV watched by people
under 18 declined by 20 percent. Part of this trend was attributed to increasing time spent by
young people surfing the Internet (The Economist, 2001: 60) Broadcasters ignored the trend
while users switched. From the 1990s to 2000, as personal computers became wide-spread, as
the internet grew faster and wider and stronger, the broadcasters couldn’t ignore it any longer.
We experienced another widespread commercialization of media, in which a few multinational
companies expanded by swallowing up TV companies, news outlets, unique voices that had
sprung up thanks to the segmentation, customization and diversification of media markets. Then
they started buying internet and cable providers. From 2000 to 2010, users switched en mass.
Facebook was invented in 2004. Steve Jobs introduced the IPhone in 2007. In 2011,
Blockbuster went bankrupt. Over the past decade, business groups have increased the
convergence between telecommunications, computer, internet and media companies,
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methodically relying more and more on the internet for streaming, self-selection and app-driven
media communications.
With the backdrop of the culture wars of the 1990s, the burgeoning identities and power
shifts of the 2000s, and the rise of social media in the 2010s, we started steering away from a
top-down hierarchical model to an open network. The TV age may not be over, but the medium
has changed. We watch, but we curate what we stream. Our viewing habits continue to grow
increasingly individualized and idiosyncratic. From hierarchical information streams to horizontal
ones, we continue to evolve toward a culture of technological creativity based on freedom,
cooperation, reciprocity, and informality.

1B. Features of the Network Society
There have always been networks—social networks and communications networks. Castells
acknowledges that our current digital technology relies upon preexisting social patterns. Today,
we FaceTime or Skype the same people we used to telephone, we email those whom we used
to write. However, as individuals perform more and more tasks using the Internet, we transform
the Internet itself, which in turn alters society even further. A new socio-technical pattern
emerges from this interaction.
Importantly, networks operate on binary logic of inclusion and exclusion. The network is
not hierarchically organized but multi-nodal, which means that once connected to the network,
anyone can have access to nearly all of its information. In a Network Society, we communicate
freely on a horizontal pattern. Our network society is made up of billions of nodes, of which
there is no center; instead it forms a kind of wide and accessible web. Information moves
quickly and easily between nodes, and though certain nodes may be better at producing
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information and others excel at organizing it, there is no top-down hierarchy. Certain nodes may
become more interconnected than others, and thus more powerful, but any node can grow to be
more interconnected than any other. There is a kind of democratization in the network, both in
what is read, produced and virally communicated or ‘shared.’
As such, we no longer passively receive information. In the network society, our
individual communication—or information that is transferred to from person to person— is
interactive, instantaneous, flexible and free (according to one’s connection with the larger
network.) Most one-one-one interaction is also permanent, in that its history exists on the
cloud—a storage place for data that exists everywhere at once. We interact in delocalized
groups, and in different time patterns. This one-on-one communication can be instantly
amplified by adding more and more individuals to a communication stream. The historical record
remains, or can be altered, added to, published or erased by any member, from anywhere, any
time.
Contemporary society, because of this networking, continually brings new voices and
information into our social organization in an effort to expand the network. In the network,
localities are disembodied from historical, cultural and geographic organization. Instead, we
assemble freely based on ideas, education, politics or sexual preference, into various collective
identities. As Castell’s says in reference to McLuhan’s age, “We are no longer living in a global
village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed.” (Castells, The
Rise of the Network Society 2010) The democratization of information sharing allows for
widespread social and cultural differentiation for those who are participating in generating and
sharing content. With each individual actor customizing his or her own media input and output
online, among the billions of online users, we may find others like us and form one of the
millions of virtual communities that exist online.
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If any individual may interact with, alter, and curate the information in the public sphere,
as a result, the information that is diffused to society at large—described as mass
communication by McLuhan—is no longer one-directional as it was with books, newspapers,
film, radio or television. Rather, we live in an age of “Mass Self-Communication.” An individual
can potentially reach a global audience via YouTube or social media post, and that message
can express the “articulation of all forms of communication into a composite, interactive, digital
hypertext that includes, mixes and recombines, in their diversity, the whole range of cultural
expressions conveyed by human interaction” (Castells, Communication Power 2009, 55)
Unlike top-down hierarchal structures, a network is only strengthened by more of
members, more dissenting voices, more plurality—and in addition, more hybridity. One of the
crucial formal considerations of internet communication is that we now utilize hybrid forms,
combining text, images and sounds into the same system. For centuries, “low” audiovisual
culture (or what McLuhan called sensorial, nonreflective communication) and “high” alphabetic
communication were unnecessarily separated. Audiovisual culture, which dominated the 20
th

Century via radio, film and television could not appear in the same information stream as
literature, which only appeared in printed materials. Today, the integration of the written, oral,
and audio-visual modalities into a single information stream has drastically altered the way we
share information.
Most important for the network itself is its ability to self-reconfigure. A network, no matter
how complex, can flexibly respond to changes instantaneously. Its capacity for adaption can be
reflexive, fast, and thorough, and at the same time can ensure unity of purpose. Its goal is often
to communicate a wide-range of ideas using multiple voices instantaneously, quickly and
seamlessly reorganizing as needed. This means we can organize political movements,
academic models, social groupings and cultural production on a shared networking logic—a
dynamic, messy system of unparalleled growth, with no guiding principal, no leader, and no way
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of controlling information within—and we can do it instantaneously, simultaneously, across
geographical borders.
As a result of these changes in communications systems, we are living in the in the least
structured societal organization pattern every recorded. We are assembling freely online. We
experience a multiplicity of diverse voices on any issue. We may employ all manners of
audiovisual and alphabetic information at the same time. Whether we use the network for
decentralized decision-making and task performance, for individualized expression or mass self-
communication, whether we are members of globally formed collectives or we are simply
contacting someone one-on-one, the network provides a faster, more flexible, more effective
organizational structure for human action.

1C. Impact on the Culture
Because communication networks are disseminating around the world faster than any other
communication technology to date, and because communication is at the heart of human
activity in all spheres of life, the advent of this technology raises a wide range of fundamental
questions as to the impact on our society. In August 2000, 41.5 percent of households and 44.4
percent of individuals in the United States had access to the Internet, with 51 percent of
households having computers at home. (Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the
Internet, Business, and Society 2002) By 2018, that number had increased to 89 percent of U.S.
adults reported to use the internet at least occasionally, up from 76 percent in 2010. As of June
2018, 55.1% of the world's population has internet access. (Jeffrey I. Cole 2018) The higher
one’s income, the higher one’s level of education, the more developed one’s community, the
more likely we are to be ‘online.’
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The first question often raised by culture critics and sociologists explores the question of
communication power—whether marginalized communities experience the same distribution of
power according to their access to the network. What inequalities exist in this case depend on
one’s access to internet infrastructure. If you are isolated geographically, if you do not have the
funds to access internet infrastructure or do not have access to a connection device, if you are
living under a suppressed internet access system—like in Cuba or China—you are excluded
from the system and its information. This creates “the digital divide.” (Castells, The Internet
Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society 2002) Because the Internet is not
just a technology but an organizational tool that distributes information power, the digital divide
is not measured by the number of connections to the Internet, but by the consequences of both
connection and lack of connection. If you are disconnected or superficially connected to the
Internet, you are essentially marginalized from the global, networked system.
That said, once an individual gains access to the network—which appears to be
occurring by the millions each year—one hypothetically gains access to all of its information, its
connections, its power. In many cases, in particular developing countries, communities can skip
the established fixed telecommunication systems, leaping directly to satellite and wireless
telecommunication systems. In one interesting example, Castells describes several small
communities in Columbia that suffered economically and socially due to their geographical
isolation, relying on the narco-state and agriculture for employment, both of which were
relatively unstable. When internet access arrived in these communities in the late 1990s, the
region experienced a massive increase in kidnappings. It appears these communities could
suddenly network, organize and execute large-scale assaults on the wealthy upper-classes who
had sequestered themselves in gated communities. Isolated and fortified as they tried to be,
these high-net-worth individuals identified themselves online; thus they became easier to track,
to stalk, to kidnap and to ransom. (Castells, Communication Power 2009) As this example
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illustrates, it is true that ‘the Internet is a technology of freedom,’ but it can be used for
increasing surveillance and domination, for dehumanized war tactics, for theft, etc. The internet
can be used by anyone. What they do with it depends on the values, personal life and politics of
those users.
Next, there is question of decreased social interactivity associated with internet use.
Many critics have implied over the past forty years that our increased online presence has
resulted in further isolation and loneliness. With increasing patterns of urbanization, and the
intensified individualization and fragmentation of our traditional spatial communities, the
increase in time spent in the online sphere—and it is now possible to withdraw from the public
sphere and exist almost entirely online.
Castells would agree that our social patterns are changing, but we are not in fact more
isolated, but rather more connected, than ever before. According to his research, Internet
use has, in many cases, strengthened relationships both locally and globally. As a society we
have transitioned from a focus of primary relationships (families and communities) to secondary
relationships (embodied in associations), to tertiary relationships, or what Castells calls
“personalized communities” embodied in me-centered networks. In these me-centered or mass
self-communication models, autonomous individuals interact with a wide-spread online
community. The assumption that online relationships are not “real,” according to Castells, is not
fair. A friendship, whether face-to-face, via Facebook, via Twitter—it is still a friendship, and has
similar effects on the human psyche. Those who spend a great deal of time in the virtual world
are still bound by real-world emotional and physical reactions. Virtual communities simply offer a
new context in which to think about one’s human identity.
Interestingly, who exactly you “are” in this me-centered model depends on your online
identity. We can forge whatever social identity we want on the internet. We can construct this
identity over time. In youth culture in particular, role-playing and identity-building offer an
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opportunity for an individual to experiment, deciding what to keep to themselves and what to
share. One large-scale effect of this not just the rise of role-playing games, but the
establishment and entrenchment of cultural self-identification. In the age of the internet, we self-
identify— along cultural lines or gender identities, and political identities as well.
As a result of an increased self-identification, we have seen an increase of segmentation
of society. For example, many critics have defined our current media climate as one of “fake
news’ whereby one may retrieve information from our own individualized “silo,” one that reflects
only our beliefs. Furthermore, we may circulate those beliefs to others like us, creating an echo-
chamber whereby dissenting ideas do not enter our information streams. As a result of de-
centralizing communications sources from a handful of powerful news outlets, controlled largely
by corporate or state interests, we experience a multiplicity of news sources. Anyone can write,
publish or share information and that information can multiply exponentially to a mass audience,
regardless of it is “true.” This begs an important question. Were we closer to the truth when we
were manipulated by very few powerful information sources, or do we get closer to truth via the
thousands and thousands of information streams projecting different versions of the same
story?
This leads to larger questions about control and power. Today, though we may by-pass
channels of communication controlled by institutions and organizations, these institutions have
not lost all their communication power. For example, a networked family can communicate
online more often, across geographical space, and can stay in touch for relatively small financial
cost. And yet, they are still beholden to communications companies who control servers,
connectivity, and the larger internet infrastructure. We are increasingly vulnerable to
surveillance of our online behaviors—by what Castells calls the “global surveillance
bureaucracy.” (Castells, Neural and Social Networks: An Interview with Manuel Castells 2018)
Powerful parties can still intrude on our networks, and surveil our purchases, our contacts, our
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photographs all existing online. However, in the Network Society, we may also surveil the
powerful. Anyone with a cell phone can publish incriminating photographs to the Internet. With
the rise of WikiLeaks and hacker networks, there are more and more grassroots movements
designed to surveil authoritative figures, and to share, in open-source, information that used to
be classified.
Meanwhile, in the political sphere, the combination of mass self-communication, freedom
of access and self-identification can translate into grassroots political action, and often to
uprising. In Manuel Castells latest book Networks of Outrage and Hope, he outlines how
grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter emerged from Black Twitter, how the Occupy
Movement spread virally from city to city based on a shared dissatisfaction with the 1%. Once
an individual identifies with a particular cultural group, they may not only assemble online, but in
real life as well. The internet, despite governments’ best attempts, is almost impossible to shut
off. For example, during the Arab Spring, the Egyptian government attempted to shut down the
Internet–for the first and only time in history. While hackers kept 25% of the network open, after
five days, the government relinquished and reopened online communication channels to revive
their collapsing economy. (Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope 2015)
The consequences of this new societal organization are particularly evident for young
people, who are experiencing this interface in new untested ways. Constant connectivity means
our children are never out of communication-reach of authority figures. They often live under the
constant gaze of cameras that can publish their daily activities online without their permission.
Internet users of all ages experience unwanted sexual attention online, but young people are
particularly vulnerable. In users ages 18 to 34, 46 percent have experienced some form of
online sexual harassment this year, an increase of over 40 percent reported in 2016. (Jeffrey I.
Cole 2018) In the same study, 43% of adults polled said children in their households spend too
much time online (while only 35% said they watch too much television.) Over 66% of those
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polled monitor what their children do on social networking sites. Simultaneously, 45% of those
polled indicated that the internet has had a positive impact on the grades of the children in their
households. (Jeffrey I. Cole 2018) It is this generation who we must look to for trends in internet
use and the future of networking. As hardware If these individuals increasingly diversify their
information streams, their online identities, their surveillance and sharing patterns, than the
effect of this connectivity could be echo on our culture in new, fascinating ways.
To summarize, entire volumes will be written on the effects of internet technology and its
subsequent feedback loop with society. I list these new social conditions here—self-
identification, mass self-communication, power shifts, truth seeking and two-way surveillance—
because they reflect the greatest advancements and anxieties associated with the digital age.
Most importantly, these societal trends are only intensifying as the network society grows. As
we expand networking technology, we have less capacity to contain it or even understand the
network. As individuals have grown more dependent on wireless technology, the network
continues to shift and change us, and thus our society, in uncharted, uncontrollable ways.

1D. Literary Application
We’ve always studied the connection between technology, communications and literature. In the
Victorian Age, during the age of transatlantic crossings, to send a letter from Europe to the
colonies we needed a long string of boats, human agents and their animals, as well as weeks,
months or in some cases, years. The letter would take a very long time to get from sender to
receiver, and it only moved according to a strict wealth and power structure that dictated what
could be transmitted. As a response to this hierarchical communications system, much of the
1700s literature took the form of traveler’s logs, journals and ‘real-life accounts,’ which pointed
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to the public’s thirst for news from transatlantic voyages. With such a limited power structure
controlling information, Dickens depended on an omniscient narrator to tell the “truth” while
Austin’s characters agonized for many pages over the whereabouts of Mr. Darcy.
With each subsequent wave of technological innovation in our society, with each new
societal experiment, a societal response would trigger a new wave of new forms of fiction. With
the rising urban concentration of the Victorian age, London of the 1890s saw a wave of nervous
exhaustion—the population was overwhelmed by postal deliveries, telegrams that could arrive
at any time, newspapers published twice a day. The modernists embraced this new era of
communications; they sent hundreds of letters and telegraphs, took trains and photographs,
published widely. Then the technology of both world wars, and every subsequent war, shattered
literary forms. The 1900s literature may be defined by echo of that trauma, as we told news,
broken news, through our radios. Hemmingway reflected that emotional static and
fragmentation. By the time we arrived at Vietnam, the Gulf, we could see it all clearly on
television.
If Marshal McLuhan is correct, the “medium” of TV directly altered the way we processed
narrative. From the 1960s onward we received a constant stream of audiovisual information
from television. We became a global “village,” receiving stories that touched each of us across a
mass audience. The literature, too, could sweep over us. In 1964, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory exemplified the television age. This was uniform, simultaneous mass culture.
Because we all received the same information, we could all look for the golden ticket.
As television changed through the 1970s, as mass media grew from 12 channels to
hundreds, as viewers experienced a more individualized, curated way of receiving narrative, we
can point to the invention of new literary forms. With the rise of the 24-hour news channel, the
political novel mirrored the quick-edits of news broadcast. A book could still sweep the culture,
but they were different books: Toni Morrison’s Beloved revealed to readers a previously
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unheard voice-driven narrative, while Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient exhibited a
fragmented point of view that felt necessary, urgent. With the multiplicity of channels, we saw
more diverse voices. VS Naipaul and Haruki Murakami entered the Western literary canon.
Sartre won the Nobel Prize. By 1987, the year Sony, Panasonic and RCA all released VHS
recorders to mass distribution, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was called “meta,” when his
protagonist was named Paul Auster. To reflect the repeated ‘taped’ quality of VCR technology,
and further the self-made, self-defined quality of homemade content, the contemporary novel
experienced the rise of plural narrators and meta-fiction.
Today, we curate all of our streamed content. Today, we read 80% of our information on
a screen. (Jeffrey I. Cole 2018) As a reflection of a screen interface, we are seeing a shift in the
forms on the page. Theorist Mark Poster, in his book The Second Media Age, (Poster 1995)
explored not just what, but how digital age writers craft fiction differently than prior generations.
A contemporary fiction writer will compose her work on computer interface, editing as she goes,
shifting of timelines in a spatial way rather than linear way. This accounts for leaps in time and
space, but also, the accessibility and ability to hear plural voices (on the same device) while the
writer composes, resulting in more idiosyncratic, interactive and individualistic writing styles.
This postmodern plurality of voices allows for multiple versions of every story, creating a unique,
multi-textured version of truth. Furthermore, as storytelling became widespread with the advent
of YouTube, blogs, Internet publishing, and open source media, storytelling not only became
democratized, but appeared in multiple modes (image, sound, video) resulting in a kind of
intermodal collage. Not only did we have access to a range of voices previously unheard, we
could hear them simultaneously, in layered, interactive ways. This drastically altered the way
literature was to be formed: access to multiple voices allowed for multiple points of view and
multiple forms, instantaneously.
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N. Katherine Hayles, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Literature at
Duke University, has theorized that this shift can be attributed to a generational shift between
pre and post-electronic revolution thinking. In her essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The
Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” (N. K. Hayles 2007) Hayles points to post-internet
readers as demonstrating “Hyper Attention;” they require multiple information streams, they
prefer quick leaps between tasks, and are characterized by short attention spans and very low
tolerance for boredom. Hyper-attentives excel at accessing multiple historical periods at once.
They prefer to layer data and images over narrative to move between eras and geographical
locations. These readers may be more prone to short narrative sections and inter-textuality,
incorporating different modes such as email, photos, poetry and hypertext appeals to hyper-
attentive for its layering effect. The result is electronic literature (or typographical literature that
imitates electronic textuality) that utilizes linked layers, multiple modes and fractured
temporality. As contemporary literature moves forward, these aesthetic components may
become more and more prevalent.
As a result of this shift in thinking, literature in the last ten years sounds and looks more
and more like the internet. We have seen not only the rise of Electronic Literature and Digital
Humanities, essays and stories and novels and poetry writing is increasingly hybrid, plural,
simultaneous and networked. It comes from everywhere at once. It elegantly pinballs through
time and space. Our literature also reflects the social movements we are creating. The rise of
mass self-communication has resulted in massive sweep toward personal narrative: auto-fiction,
memoir, personal essays and creative nonfiction reflect our ability to curate and deliver our own
messages. Video games, interactive narratives and VRs represent the largest delivery method
of narrative in our contemporary society. Games deliver stories. Speculative fiction predicts
what this large-scale digitization of communications strategies will look and feel like in the
coming years. The literature of the digital age is getting shaped for and by the medium.
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Below is a list of forms that represents the wild, uncolonized, uncontrolled ‘networked’
literature that has emerged organically from internet technology. I continue to work on this non-
exhaustive list of samples emerged in the past ten years, and continue to build subheadings,
new headings, example after example. As I continue to read and learn from other writers, as I
see networked characteristics in more and more contemporary narratives, I see this in
common—writing can be simultaneously global and deeply personal.

1E. Forms of Fiction in the Digital Age
Autofiction
When Sheila Heti wrote How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, she transcribed recorded
conversations with friends, refashioned scenes from a half-written play, folded in emails, quotes
and letters from her friends and then mixed it with what the publisher calls “heavy doses of
fiction.” (Heti 2011) The result was heralded as ‘revolutionary’ by readers at Rookie Magazine
and blurbed as “nothing less than groundbreaking: in form, sexually, relationally, and as a major
literary work” by Miranda July. The New Yorker critic James Woods disagreed; he called it vapid
and gimmicky, insisting that, “The writer who is seeking “life,” who is trying to write “from life,” is
always unappeased, because no bound manuscript can ever be “real” enough. And this hunger
is shared by most writers, not just by those who are hostile to conventional fictionality.” (Woods
2012)
In Sheila Heti’s case, her novel borrows everything “from life.” The protagonist is named
Sheila Heti; she is a young writer in Toronto comfortably grappling with collegial philosophy,
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relationships and art with her three companions, Margaux, Misha and Sholem, all of whom are
real friends, real artists. Throughout the loosely assembled novel, not much occurs: she fails to
write a play (true), she initiates a sexual relationship with a man named Israel (true), she shares
time with Margaux (true and well-documented) attempting to learn how to produce art without
self-loathing. Inspired by the reality TV show The Hills, Heti openly admitted she wanted her
characters to appear more like perpetually filmed YouTube celebrities than people in a book.
She is successful: Sheila and Margaux do exhibit a kind of “episodic aimlessness” that is at
once self-centered and poignantly lonely.
Traditional critics may eschew the forms of autofiction, while online, we live in a moment
of mass self-communication, in which anyone, from anywhere, may produce and publish and
broadcast their information to a global audience. Critics find this selfie era vapid; there is a de-
centralization of power in the media, and now we decide who gets famous. Selfies, status
updates, TMI posts, all make up a kind of me-narrative, a running memoir. In literature, these
fictionalized autobiographies operate like social media profiles, like YouTube posts, like
Instagram chains. These are stories rooted in an author-narrator. This literature is known for
eschewing linear structures and cathartic resolutions in favor of ‘sloppy’ or life-like prose,
episodic plots and circular architectures. Between 2017 and today, these ‘novels from life,’
crafted by an unaffiliated group of under forty-writers including Tao Lin, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole,
and Alejandro Zambra, the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard—
all occupy what Ben Lerner calls the “flickering edge” between fiction and reality. (Lerner 2014)
As we near 2019, the lines between nonfiction and fiction continue to blur. There is a
now a spectrum of auto-fiction arranged by how close to persona an author is willing to venture
with autobiography. Autofiction is garnering prizes like Michelle Tea’s Pen American winning
nonfiction Against Memoir. Nikki Darling’s 2018 Fade Into You is a kind of pastiche of memory
and persona through a teenage protagonist named Nikki Darling. But hers is not meta-fiction.
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Rather it part-zine, part bedroom-collage of deeply felt narrative that explores her real felt
feelings through made-up scenes and alter-egos. In Sheila Heti’s 2018 novel Motherhood, the
author-narrator flips imaginary coins with herself. Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang feels like
confession. In Alexander Chee’s essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, he teaches
himself how to write the most painful material from his lived experience. Outline by Rachel Kusk
and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson are simultaneously meditation, conversation, essay,
novel and personal narrative. On this spectrum, we must also place Jami Attenberg’s All Grown
Up and Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” both purely fictional narratives that readers demand
to read as real, despite authorial insistence that these stories are invented.
Formally, these texts feature characters that share the same names as the author, or the
same occupation, the same back-story, the same lifestyle, the same life, without the intentional
irony of metafiction. They combine traditional novelistic form with other types of text—
transcribed conversations, poems, graphics and most often, autobiographical, and elusive
scenes from memory. There is rarely a resolved plot or ephiphanic climax. Instead, these
nonfictional fictions, though employing unconventional structures, can be as exciting, raw and
unpolished as ‘life’ tends to be—not just because of formal distinctions, but because it is
disorienting, almost dangerous, to be confuse fiction for nonfiction, to not know exactly what is
real.
In his New York Times review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Hari Kunzru calls autofiction “an
emerging genre,” in which the “19th-century furniture of plot and character dissolve into a series
of passages, held together by occasional photographs and a subjectivity that hovers close to
(but is never quite identical with) the subjectivity of the writer.” (Kunzru 2014) By allowing for
rumination rather than plot points, by effortlessly folding in various modes of storytelling, by
allowing for less-than-formal prose, and most importantly by inserting themselves and their
friends into the text (not in a tricky, ironic meta-fictional way, but in an honest, felt and
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remembered way) this ‘emerging genre’ of nonfictional novels may be attempting a purer form
of mimesis, a kind of verisimilitude that is closer to reality than even memoir can achieve.

Hybrid Forms
In his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, author David Shields argues that the novelistic form
that we consider ‘conventional’ is now passé. Our increasingly fragmentary culture has lost
interest in the traditional, technical elements of narrative that surfaced in the 19
th
century. The
use of past tense and a distant third person, the chronological development, the impulse toward
conclusion, the novel that revolves around a single character’s epiphany—it all resonated with
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th
century audiences comfortable with biblical tales, with objective truth, and with reliable
accounts. Shields argues that as authors eliminated the art of contemplation for the sake of a
structured plot, too much was lost. He argues the fiction genre must return to the hybridity from
its initial stages of fictional invention. When Defoe, Richardson and Fielding folded together their
stories into a kind of pastiche of various modes of text and time for rumination, they also
employed false realistic fronts for their novelistic accounts. “The novel sprang from the letter, the
diary, the report of a journey;” Shields reminds us, “it felt alive in the form of every record of a
private life.” (Shields 2010) Narrative, he claims, should and will move back toward that
intertextuality.
Thanks to social media, news media, and the internet, our stories are peppered with all
forms of audiovisual and textual communication. Every news story contains video, sound and
imagery. We read and publish hypertexts in an interactive way. The intertextuality of our own
personal narratives—a narrative we curate carefully into our own kind of autofiction—is a
pastiche of photograph, status update, events attended and trips taken. We have geotagged our
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experiences, placed ourselves with others. All is organized in a constant information stream; as
readers we are flexible with these forms.
Today, our novels and short fiction forms can fold together SMS, email, songbook,
notebook, interview, digital readout, pictures, links, videos and sound. When Jenifer Egan
added a Power Point chapter to her “novel in stories” A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won
the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, she introduced mainstream American literature to the
flattened, graphic possibilities. The Power Point presentation, as told by a 12-year old character
in the near future, relays the details of growing up with an autistic brother in the form of lists,
shapes, graphics and charts. Around the same time, in 2010, Douglas Coupland wrote his
Massey Lecture—the notable lecture series of Canadian scholars—in the form of a hybrid novel
called Player One: What is to Become of Us? His novel read something like the inside of a video
game, as four narrators experience an apocalyptic event simultaneously.
These first examples proved how flexible the novel is in this return to intertextuality.
Since, we have seen hybridity from underground poets like Keith Wilson and his graphic poetry
narratives, to the classically trained novelist Kamila Shamsie using Twitter to deliver the
climactic chapter of her 2018 novel Homefire. In online publications, such as the curated
#metoo series WOVEN by Entropy Magazine, hybrid narratives like “A Refuge for Jae-n Doe:
Fugues in the Key of English Major” by Seo-Young Chu re-invent a narrator’s past and future
trauma through scene, poetry, script and test questions. The most harrowing section of the
“Creative Nonfiction Essay” are the excerpts from traditional literary scholarship, which
penetrate her memory of her stalking and rape by a former academic mentor at Stanford
University through English lit writing prompts. The essay includes a haunting image of the
author’s student card from 1996, her placid face juxtaposed against the terrifying and violent
details outlined in the writing. The “fracturing” of her psyche, as mirrored in the form, spins out
into a compendium of lists, forms, and a utopian writing prompt from 2078. All manners of high
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and low audiovisual language are mixing up on the page. As David Shields explains near the
end of Reality Hunger, these are examples in which intertextuality trumps plot, where
fragmented pieces of story feel more authentic than single stream narrative. In hybrid forms,
“the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real
drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not
solved being alive.” (Shields 2010)

Translit
When Marshal McLuhan coined the phrase “global village” in the 1960s, we were in a cultural
moment when we were linked by a ubiquitous, simultaneous television culture. Now that
information comes simultaneously from everywhere at once, we can create media from
anywhere on earth and share it with the world. This shift from a “global village” to a globally
linked set of tribes means we have a new sense of skipping from place to place. We can
essentially see livestreams of anywhere or anytime. At the same time, people are in fact de-
localizing like never before. From 2017-2019, we are experiencing the largest mass migration of
individuals since WWII, all of those migrants depending heavily on Internet technology for
communications, navigation and survival. Place and time don’t mean the same thing any more.
The phrase Translit was first coined in Douglas Coupland’s March 2012 New York Times
review of Hari Kunzru's novel Gods Without Men. Coupland opens the review with the
observation that during the terrorist attacks in New York City on 9-11, very few people carried
‘smart phones’ by which they could record the destruction of the twin towers. He recognizes that
911 was perhaps the last mega-event that will be ‘underdocumented’ as such— unfilmed,
untweeted, and unuploaded to the cloud. Today, we receive news in realtime, in multiple
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modes. We can hop through a narrative instantly, be anywhere, research any time or place. Our
understanding of time and space has morphed as a result of this simultaneity.
“Translit” according to Coupland, “collapses time and space as it seeks to generate
narrative traction in the reader’s mind. It inserts the contemporary reader into other locations
and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of
our extreme present.” (Coupland, Convergences, A Review of Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men
2012) Coupland and Castells would agree: our communication systems have radically
transformed our notions of space and time. Castells writes of the online sphere, “Localities
become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into
functional networks, or into image collages, inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the
space of places. Time is erased in the new communication system when past, present, and
future can be programmed to interact with each other in the same message.” (Castells, The
Rise of the Network Society 2010, 395) Literary artists are shaping their work differently in light
of these new understandings of time and space, of interconnectedness, of following and being
followed.
The effect of “Translit” on literature is widespread, difficult to pinpoint, to name.
According to Coupland, “Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span
geography without changing psychic place.” (Coupland, Convergences, A Review of Hari
Kunzru's Gods Without Men 2012) So many novelistic timelines are fractured, so many settings
can exist in literature simultaneously. In Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a couple fleeing war in their
unnamed country effortlessly walk through portals from one setting to the next, mirroring the
refugee experience of arriving in a sudden and jarring new place: a Greek resettlement camp, a
squatting house in London, a shanty village in the US. The actual de-localizing doesn’t just exist
on the page, the characters move with it.
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Hari Kunzru’s fourth novel Gods Without Men does similar but different work. The novel
revolves around a particular spire in the Southwestern desert, but it skips through multiple
timeframes, hopping between the years 1775 to 2009. The narrative veers through war
simulations, internet and smart phone technology, back to Victorian times, colonial times, war
times, and through the perspectives of the characters who inhabited them: an Aragonese friar, a
Mormon silver miner, an aircraft engineer, a linguist turned hermit, a British rock star, an autistic
child and members of a UFO cult. According to Coupland, the novel is “a story filmed in different
eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same single story, echoing
and reinfecting itself.” (Coupland, Convergences, A Review of Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men
2012) Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation—a novel in fragments about marriage,
motherhood and career—plays with compressed and extended time. Julavits’ memoir The
Folded Clock reminds us that chronological order does not matter when seeking theme or
building character.
“Now Wait for this Week” a short story by Alice Sola Kim (2019, The Cut) illustrates
these spiraling timelines in a kind of Groundhog Day for the #metoo movement. A character is
forced to live her birthday celebration over and over again as it relates to her seeing a former
perpetrator of sexual assault. As the narrative cycles through the same day again and again
differently, we see the pervasive aspect of trauma, how it is felt and felt again despite the
passage of time. All of these formal examples illustrate the magic of Translit. Intertextuality,
fractured chronology, a range of de-localized settings, a narrative that elegantly pinballs around
in time and space—Translit is symptomatic and representative of the information age.

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Micro-Fiction
Known as flash fiction, short short fiction or microfiction, these stories are known to be 1000
words or less, they can be tweets, or they can feel like small stories if only in their
fragmentation. They suit the twitter reader, the status updater, the consumer of narrative via
Facebook or Instagram. We are used to curating our own media and reading through the
snippets of others’ lives. These writing samples represent how small, compact, contained and
meaningful narrative can be. The best samples in this subsection could be non-traditional
narratives: poems, tweets, tiny personal essays.
The confessional poetry by Hanif Abdurraqib, in particular the poems from the collection
2016 The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, reflect how much microfiction is capable of when recounting
memory. In his poem “When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left the Needle Down On a Journey
Record Before Leaving The House One Morning And Never Coming Back,” in 47 lines,
Abdurraqib ties in the most painful aspects of his parental loss with that of his friend Jeff’s loss,
Jeff’s mother’s loss, his own father’s loss—while remembering Jeff’s first sexual experience,
while watching this older woman smoking and crying, while listening to the piano line in a
Journey song. The climax in terms of plot would be when Jeff’s mother’s ring is thrown to the
side of the highway, but the theme soars another two stanzas, as the narrator’s memory
continues to travel through his own generational loss when his grandmother tells him “piano can
coax the most vicious ghosts out of a body” and his father insists he sit at a piano and “play me
something child.” All of this in 47 lines.
Whole books are crafted this way—a compendium of microfiction and fragmented
narratives making up a whole. From Alejandro Zambra’s 2014 “novel in standardized test
questions” Multiple Choice, to Melissa Broder’s twitter-sized micro personal essays about
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depression So Sad Today, our fragmented information streams are mirrored in these short,
succinct and yet networked and connected narratives.

Collective POVs
Collective story telling reflects the Network Society not only in the compendium of voices that
contribute to a particular narrative, but also in the collective spirit of the internet’s hacker culture,
the social movements that emerge from the internet, the online community building that occurs
in the network. In The Story of my Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, the author collaborated with the
workers at a Jumex juice factory in Mexico City to explore issues of globalization, immigration
and workers’ rights through multiple female perspectives. This “we” of narration can be implied
in many ways—the “we” can be one’s family (as in Justin Torres’ We the Animals.) Claire Vaye
Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus hops around in perspective, but also slips into a collective POV in
one chapter narrated by the inhabitants of a town near Yucca mountain, suffering collectively
from the nuclear waste deposited there.
The starkest example of this collective POV is in Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea,
in which Lee tells the story of his runaway protagonist Fan through the eyes of her immigrant
community. The narrative has a ghostly, all knowing quality; the narrators can know what occurs
in the community after the protagonist’s departure, and how her leaving affects those remaining.
In this way, in becomes a kind of “unreliable omniscience.” As Andrew Greer points out in his
New York Times review, “the payoff is a remarkable elasticity, allowing Lee to move from an
omniscient bird’s-eye view to an intimate exploration of inner lives to wholly convincing fantasy.
The communal voice is particularly riveting when Fan is in danger — “And we can barely
recount what was about to happen next . . . ” — adding a creeping horror to the storytelling.”
(Greer 2014) According to Lee, he says of the plural narrators: “You don’t see many examples
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of the “we” in fiction, and I didn’t quite know where it would lead me and how long it could
sustain itself. But one of the things that began to happen was that a certain tonality, of the fable,
began to arise, which I quite liked. As if it were almost an oral tradition, as if we were all sitting
around the fire. And also when you say “we,” you automatically involve the reader because the
reader becomes part of the “we,” whether he or she wants to be or not.” (Lee, "A Conversation
with Chang-Rae Lee" 2014)
By sourcing multiple points of view, by recounting the narrative in this collective, authors
and readers experience other-ness and togetherness in new ways. Like the second person did
for 1980s writing, the plural point of view implicates both the reader and writer in the stakes of a
narrative. We are all networked. The collective point of view choice reflects that pervasive
connectivity.

Electronic/ Interactive Literature
As N. Katherine Hayles suggests in her book Electronic Literature, “Literature in the twenty-first
century is computational.” (N. K. Hayles 2008) Almost all print books are digital files first. As
narrative continues to be published on a screen and read on a screen, even the most traditional
literature becomes networked. We can look up words as we read, sync with audio files and seek
our own video links to accompany texts. In many ways, all texts can now be read as “Electronic
Literature.”
According to Castells, “Electronic text allows for substantially greater flexibility of
feedbacks, interaction and reconfiguration of text, as any word-processing writer will
acknowledge, thus altering the process of communication itself.” (Castells, The Rise of the
Network Society 2010, 31) Writers like Amaranth Borsuk (Between the Page and Screen) and
Illya Sylzak (Queerskins) have taken this reconfiguration of text to the next interactive level,
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creating online and VR narratives that must be experienced on internet platforms. Eli Horowitz
in The Silent History wrote and coded a novel written and designed for the iPad and iPhone,
unsing serialization and collaboration to tell its story. Tom Bissel’s fiction video game The Writer
Will Do Something is “meta” in its search for an author—playing with the idea of narrative as it
relates a narrative in digital form. This hazy distinction between what is in print, what used to be
digital, what is digital now will be further explored. Finally, in “Redshift & Portalmetal” by micha
cardenas, a space for a queer writer of color is etched out in this digital space. This narrative
becomes a kind of online utopia where identity may be constructed according to one’s desire,
not by cultural or historical constraints.

In Conclusion
This section, as it explores the impact of communications technology on society, culture, and
ultimately forms of narrative, is driving toward a few larger themes. First, the fact that today,
most cultural expressions are conveyed via a networked communication system—this has major
consequences for our social narratives. The power that was held in communicating
information—including the transmission of that historically encoded social material like religion,
traditional roles, political ideologies—is weakened in a horizontally organized network. This
power shift emerges in both the form and content of our literary narratives. The network is
composed of hundreds of millions of individualized narratives, which are organized and
conveyed collectively. There is power in these numbers, in these plural narrators, in these
collective idiosyncratic voices. We have unparalleled access to information, to narrative, to
news, to story, all over the world. Our stories are more powerful than ever, in light of this
connectivity, this collectivization, this democratization of storytelling.
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Second, with the rise of the collective has come the rise of the individual. Digital age
writers are fluid, flexible, and free to say what they want. There is longer a uniformity of
message. There is no longer a homogeneous mass audience. Narrative forms can shift and
reflect this massively diversified cultural ecosystem. Art and literature can redirect this hybridity
and diversity in many bold and brave new ways. But as a result of the multiplicity of messages
and sources, the audience becomes more selective. With selection, comes segmentation. As
identities are forged and communities are connected and tweets and posts circulate by the
trillion every day—some see that plurality as a threat. Just as the global village eradicates our
markers in society including class, race, geography, it also establishes stronger parameters for
individual identity markers.
Which brings me to this important point: the Internet itself is not utopia. There are still too
many digital divides. Minority voices are still excluded or trolled off the internet. There is still a
very ugly narrative associated with segmented information streams, with online anonymity, with
surveillance culture—even if it does go both ways. We are still being watched, we still watch
each other. With no control over information streams, the Hobbesian critic sees all kinds of
rogue, dangerous thinking and action emerging from these new platforms. A message can be
manipulated on a large scale via ubiquitous media sources like Facebook. For every bit of data
online, there are hundreds of ads—that low audiovisual culture is still assaulting our senses the
way it did when McLuhan coined the phrase. In some ways, the medium is still the message.
Online, we are networked. When you add one node to a million, it doesn’t just add one
connection to the network, it connects millions. With millions of connections, comes
unprecedented access, unprecedented vulnerability. In 2018, according to the Digital Futures
report, 20% of users reported having their privacy violated online. In 2018, 41% of users under
18 had been harassed or bullied on the Internet. In 2018, 35% of women and 21% of men
reported unwanted sexual attention. For every trans person of colour from Ohio who finds some
38
kin in the online sphere, there could be fifteen bullies, pervasively and persistently entering their
online narrative.
But literature is ruthless. It thrives in times of peril. It digs deep into these divides and
finds conflict, story. It takes this segmentation and looks for character. Narrative from the digital
age effortlessly absorbs new forms, it finds new voices, it represents those voices in a merciless
public sphere. For every collective community speaking together, there is an individual wielding
horror. For every troll, there is a tweet. Neither utopia, nor dystopia, the Network Society is
simply a reflection of ourselves: diverse, fractured, flexible, free.

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Part 2. What is Utopia?

Utopia is not perfection. Utopia is an imagined world crafted by entirely by human design, an
attempt to exclude the undesirable elements of civilization in favor of positive societal
organization. In the Renaissance, utopia meant escaping the dangers of the medieval social
order, finding ‘new lands’ where we could build societal experiments. Victorians believed in
suburbanism, colonization and the industrial age. The modernists established feminist utopias,
free-love utopias, collective farms. When the early 20
th
Century saw the rise of totalitarian social
organization, the Italian Futurists, the Bauhaus, and the Russian Constructivists wrote about
toppling traditional power structures to create new social order from the chaos they’d created.
Each era’s utopia involves the belief that with logic and reason, we can shape the future.
Utopians believe that society is a product of the human mind and can be reformed with the right
combination of work, people and place. For every individual marginalized by restrictive power
structures, religious ideology, behavior control, the rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution—
there is a utopia. For every difficult life on earth, there is a Cockaygen, Arcadia, Atlantis,
Elysium, Shanri-la or Garden of Eden.
The term utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, never meant perfect, but instead was
forged from ouk and topos—good-place but also no place. Utopia is nowhere. Utopia is a wish;
it cannot entirely exist. Even Thomas More’s actual far-off island called Utopia showed this
combination of ethos; there is always a dark no-place present in a utopian good-place
construction. Margaret Atwood—in her book-length inquiry into speculative fiction In Other
Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination—concludes that the centuries-old tradition of utopia has
always included a kind of dystopian underside. ”Why is it that when we grab for heaven,” she
40
asks, “do we so often produce hell?” (Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
2012) It is true that charting utopian thought through even the most traditional work is largely
mapping a history of failure. In utopian fiction, characters are often imprisoned, banished,
executed and disappeared. Communes collapse. Secret worlds are discovered and colonized.
Leaders battle. Disciples flee. By the end of most utopian fiction, the community’s death is
foretold in its goal for perfection.
Likewise, in dystopian novels, despite the tyranny, inequality and degraded
environments—characters always discover pockets of utopia. Even in the even the most
disturbing, unfair, dangerous society there is an area of refuge, a place where characters may
experiment with ways of not merely surviving, but living. These pockets exist even in the genre’s
foundational texts, such as Huxley’s Brave New World, there is the relief found in the drug
soma, in a rarely felt sexual act. In 1984, Orwell’s grim thought-controlled London, utopia exists
in a sunny glade beside a stream, where for one moment, the protagonist is afforded free
thought.
In Atwood’s speculative novels, this dichotomy of utopia and dystopia is achingly
present. In her dystopian novels that critique the exploitation of women’s bodies, the collapse of
the natural environment, the unchecked threat in genetic modification, she posits hints of
utopian thinking—activists, collectives, secret sisterhoods. Around her settings, she posits
rooftop gardens, squat buildings and abandoned spa compounds that pock the geographical
map, safe-havens for those who remain in the detritus of humanity. Atwood invents characters
like the Crakers, or newly engineered humans existing in a kind of utopian harmony, equipped
with the reconfigured genetics needed to flourish. In The Handmaid’s Tale, which she wrote in
both communist-era Berlin (strained by political restriction) and Tuscaloosa, Alabama (tamed by
social restriction) the utopia lies in the occasion for telling: the story is told as a conference
presentation in a time when audiences discuss this despotic era of the past.
41
In this vein, utopian scholar Fátima Vieira argues that utopian writing has shifted from a
literary genre to a strategy. (Vieira 2010) Despite our inability to achieve perfection, many
among us believe we still must improve society, not just as individuals, but together.
Contemporary writers have spread across and genres to teach and predict what they believe is
best outcome for human advancement. They write nonfiction or poetry or film, they borrow from
all modes, all categories. These writers can imagine entirely new unknown worlds where
potential outcomes play out. Though there are flaws in these written utopian worlds, these flaws
ensure readers continue looking for alternative ways of life. By imagining a different reality,
whether a version of the present or theoretical future, utopia is fundamentally a way to question
the reality of the present.
In this section, I argue that more than a strategy, utopia is a point of view exercise, a
question of who is experiencing that “utopia.” Take colonization, one of the last widespread
efforts at utopian community building. While Europeans spread ideas of personal betterment
and freedom of religious oppression, while they established new and exciting settlements and
towns and nations across the so-called “new world,” colonization meant for many the beginning
of a new dystopian era. It is harrowing—considering the number of moved, murdered and
enslaved individuals during colonization—that colonists still believed they were organizing
society according to its continued improvement. Utopia building continues in this vein. What is
utopia to someone is hell to someone else. That utopian mansion is someone’s housekeeping
duty. That intentional community is someone’s gentrifying neighbor. Meanwhile, the dictatorship
is utopia to the dictator. Utopia will never look the same to everyone.

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2A. Abbreviated History of Utopia,
Dystopia and the Rise of Speculative
Fiction
To analyze the impact of utopian fiction, we must chart the societal conditions and converging
technologies that engendered its invention, its rise through the Victorian era, its transformation
in the 20
th
Century to dystopia, and its resurgence as speculative fiction of the digital age. In the
1500s, as Columbus and Vespucci and Poliziano explored new geographical spaces, Thomas
More poured over their letters home, as intrigued by the new land as the fraught relationship
with the indigenous populations there. Using real-life accounts as his guide, More’s protagonist
Raphael Hythloday (meaning dispenser of nonsense) suffers many arduous days of sea travel
to enter the utopist space, only to learn that the faraway island called “Utopia” is restricted to
natives; the harbor is lined with perilous rocks, set to destroy any foreign ships daring to enter
without a local pilot. Skeptical at first, Hythloday soon marvels at Utopia’s social construction.
The island’s fifty-four cities, each a day’s travel by foot, are beautiful, clean and functional. In
Utopia, there is no desire for expansion— citizens are content with what they own, do not
greedily expect or demand more wealth than that which is allotted them. In Utopia, gone is the
injustice of European society with its greedy landlords and starving peasants. Gone is poverty,
exploitation, luxury, money and even private property. In Utopia, idleness is forbidden, as are
taverns, all frivolity. Everyone requires a trade, leisure time is sensible, food is cooked
communally and shared, and bedtime is a strict 8pm. It is only much later when Hythloday
discovers that marriage in Utopia is a harsh unsentimental affair. The ritual is initiated with a
43
kind of nudist offering of the bride and groom to each other, so no surprises occur after the
wedding. Adultery is punishable by death. Worst of all, the members of this society are bound
by their place; they are not permitted to leave the island. Only the voyager can come and go, to
report back on all he has learned.
More’s and other early utopian narratives—like Al-Farabi’s The Virtuous City and
Corbette’s New Amazonia—are exercises in this utopian/dystopian world-building. The
narratives follow a pattern that reflects the technology of its day: a (male) traveler leaves his
society—he is our unreliable narrator, an outsider like us, an interlocutor between worlds. Once
away, he is completely cut off from the known geography, instead immersing himself in the
foreign ways a new group of citizens are engaged in a purer way of living. Rather than create
perfection (which was impossible in light of the Christian mentality of “The Fall,”) the citizens live
in opposition to the prevailing ideology. The traveler marvels at the many positive aspects of this
new existence, and despairs at the flaws so apparent in his own society. At the end of these
narratives, the visitor or observer or outsider departs the utopia to recount the lessons he
acquired from this alternate world. The novels’ themes almost always express hope, urging
readers to take action, or at least critically view the present society, and consider possible
alternative trajectories for the future.
From the 16
th
through the 19
th
Centuries, utopian literature flourished, perfectly suited to
the oppressive optimism of the Victorian era. Society at that time was obsessed with building
utopias of its own—colonies, new lands to be conquered and planned and occupied. The era
was one of change, writers and thinkers poured over ways of defining, altering, and establishing
both old and new places. Europe grew to be part of a transoceanic society. Advancements in
transportation allowed for wave after wave of colonization. Mass migration saw Europeans
dispersing to far-away locales where the social order involved many more players and was
continually in flux. Meanwhile, aging urban centers across Europe experienced a renaissance
44
thanks to advances in sanitation and city planning. Later, as social thinkers—lead by Marx and
Engels but mirrored by many others—developed more complex and inclusive models for the
political and economic sphere, and as both bourgeois and working class individuals increasingly
departed from the old world for the new, more people considered themselves empowered to
participate in the colonies’ social organization. The myriad ways the colonies did organize
themselves reflects the range of ideas bubbling in the social consciousness at the time. The
possibilities must have seemed endless.
Now we know all the crimes associated with that colonization, the dystopia behind the
Victorian era’s utopia building. Critic Lyman Tower Sargent says that Europeans saw colonies
as either places to exploit for labor and resources (East Africa and India) or as places to “erase
and resettle.” (Sargent 2010) The Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa appeared
to colonists like raw land where they could trample existing infrastructure—both cultural and
tangible—and build new communities from their own cultural models. The colonies were places
where colonists could improve their lives materially, where they could experiment spiritually,
socially and politically—without consideration for those societies indigenous to the land.
By the 1890s, many colonies still saw themselves in their building stages— locations
had been chosen and initial groundwork had been laid in urban centers, but as native people
were continually displaced, great swaths of rural land became “available” for all manors of
communal experimentation. Each community faced similar questions concerning the roles for
local indigenous population, women and new immigrants. In these settlements, they created
doctrines for education, religion and culture—some mirroring the ‘mother countries’ for their
systems, while others, seeking not only food abundance and access to land but also
unprecedented religious and political freedom, sought a new path. Almost no consideration was
taken for the legacy of trauma that would occur from the foundational wars, the forced migration,
the genocide, the enslavement, of millions of individuals in an effort to build a new utopian
45
society. Utopia indeed revealed itself to be a point of view exercise. For every wealthy colonist
or plantation owner or town founder, there were too many trapped in the dystopia of the so-
called “new world.”
A few literary examples from the Victorian age hinted at the distress underneath all that
Victorian optimism. Nathanial Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance was published into 1850s New
England, a place he writes was “built with a prison and gallows.” The novel is based on a
utopian collective real-life Brook Farm. Told by an outsider protagonist who witnesses the
collapse of the community’s leadership due to greed and lust, the collective dream dies with the
suicide of its female leader. Shortly after, in 1871, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The
Coming Race, a pure satire of the utopian construction of America. The next year Samuel Butler
wrote Erewhon, a futuristic glance at technology and science and its fraught role in society. Two
decades later, Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward, in which the protagonist awakes
in the year 2000 to discover socialist ideas have been realized, with mixed results. HG Wells
published A Modern Utopia in 1905, and included his socialist-utopian ideas of feminism, and
Charlotte Perkins Gillman explores this further in her utopian novella Herland, published in
1935, a critique of the male-dominated society of the era. For every traditional utopian fiction,
there appeared a dark societal malaise one had to escape in order to arrive in the newly
constructed place.
Sometime around the middle of the 20
th
Century, something snapped. Utopian writing
shifted. Two world wars had revealed that technology was not actually poised to save us after
all—but instead could be weaponized, toxified and used against civilians. Speculative literature
grappled with this disorder by turning dystopian, revealing a paranoia dormant in us, an
audience eager to witness the downfall of our not-so carefully cultivated society. Our pursuit for
human improvement via speculative literature transformed into a kind of voyeuristic cynicism.
What had been a diverse genre made up of nostalgic or primitivist utopias, sentimental
46
individualist utopias, voyage utopias, pornographic utopias, feminist utopias and philosophical
tales fractured in the mid-1900s to new interpretations of satire, dystopia, fantasy and science
fiction. (Pohl 2010) Many characteristics of utopian literature trickled into dystopian fiction.
These too were experiments in world-building. These too were examples of societies entirely
crafted by human design—even if they had turned out very badly for its citizens. There was
always an outsider narrator, someone who could act as interlocutor between worlds. But in this
case, there was no escape.
When writers of the 20
th
Century employed the word “dystopia,” it meant something
close to “an unhappy country.” The three godfathers of dystopia, Wells, Huxley and Orwell, all
built literary settings that exaggerated a “positive societal organization” to instead reflect their
era’s fears of the rise of technology and behavioral manipulation. Their worlds responded to the
rise of tyranny and technology in the 1900s—and their novels felt tyrannical, whether governed
by collectivization or unchecked individualization, unfair power structures or tightly controlled
information streams. If utopians believed in progress; these dystopians believed in failure. If
utopians offered experimentation, these dystopians issued warnings.
Today, speculative fiction, the combination of utopia and dystopia, is rooted in more than
fears of tyranny and technology. Contemporary speculative writers mine the present for deep-
seeded trepidation concerning climate collapse, resource poverty, extreme income inequality,
sexism, racism, surveillance, health crises and other power imbalances. They posit pockets of
utopia to be mined from hostile environments, or they imagine latent malevolence in their
utopian visions of the future. Nevertheless, the historical models continue to serve
contemporary utopian fiction. Speculative narrative continues to reimagine our existing society
through an exaggerated lens.

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2B. Utopia for the Network Society
The rise of internet has sparked a new interest in utopian thinking. In the early days of internet
technology, a wave of cyber-utopians prophesized that the internet would be a new space for
social experimentation. They believed internet technology would tilt the scale back toward the
oppressed. With a new horizontal power structure, we would democratize the publication of new
ideas, foster open communication, forge collectives. In May, 2000, Karen Breslau wrote for
Wired magazine, in her article “One Nation, Interconnected” the following hopeful statement:
“We are, as a nation, better educated, more tolerant, and more connected because of—not in
spite of—the convergence of the internet and public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race,
gender, and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard—wiredness—
as an organizing principle.” (Breslau 2000) In 2000, there persisted the belief that with a
computer and an internet connection, we could transcend the material conditions of our lives.
We could reinvent ways to communicate, building a symbiotic system of people and computers.
This utopian vibe was born from the aftermath of the 1960s. After the rise and fall of
countercultural experiments in the physical world, the Bay Area became home to computer
clubs, academic labs, think tanks and online communities that experimented with early digital
communication. Many alternative thinkers pivoted from collectives to computers during the
1970s. As these internet pioneers stayed in the Bay Area to build apps and acquire wealth and
ultimately expand the network, there was a ‘Don’t Be Evil’ ethos about early internet technology.
Hacker culture was guided by the belief that performance was improved if technology was open-
sourced. Knowledge was to be shared. Early technological advancements—like the dial-up
modem and early broadband engineering—were released by their inventors be shared in the
public sphere. In the 1990s, these cyber-utopains believed every book would soon be uploaded
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to the cloud, every purchase would be a click away, locale would be de-localized, data would
not live behind a paywall. Extropians even believed the human psyche would be one day
uploaded to the internet; in the 1990s, over thirty people froze their brains, waiting for digital
immorality.
Several times over, the .com bubble has burst. Today, surveillance and censorship
restrict internet freedom. Cyber-dystopians point out the danger of an online sphere governed
by capitalist greed, haunted by trolls, polluted by pornographic visual information, restricted to
so many voices across cultural, racial and economic divides. Breslau was correct: in forty years,
we have revolutionized our primary communication system. But she does not account for fake
news, digital kidnappings, online sexual harassment, isolation, surveillance, nor does she
consider silo information streams that do not promote tolerance nor education, only connection.
Now Facebook and Google have grown to be ubiquitous internet tools, it is once again possible
to manipulate the message—logarithms are increasingly sophisticated and targeted. The
internet reflects our global mass self-communication culture of diversity and heterogeneity, but
corporate dollars still prop up web celebrities, we still segment into information silos, we still
steal. Early cyber-utopians have written apology essays. Gone is the impetus to upload every
book; Google has returned to improving its advertising logarithm.
And yet, the internet is still utopia to someone. For a fetishist, there is a somatopia, an
online pornographic utopia without physical boundaries. The hacker culture lives on, has shifted
to code-cracking, opening and entering sites for material gain, for information freedom, for
libertarian values, for anarchy. Internet accessibility issues—particularly in China, where Internet
use is highly surveilled, is largely a question of freedom. The Internet gives us freedom to know
any information and freedom to share it with the world. In Castells’ research, from Iceland to
Russia to Japan to India, the more an individual uses the Internet, the more they develop
autonomy, and the more they develop autonomy, the more they use Internet. (Castells,
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Networks of Outrage and Hope 2015) As our networking gets more sophisticated, as we expand
beyond email toward social networks driven by users, we have once again returned to a culture
of sharing. Social media and social networks connect us across all dimensions of our lives. We
now live in a hybrid world, made up of millions of virtual and face-to-face connections.
This points to a deep vein of utopian thinking that still runs through the digital age. The
internet continues to collectivize autonomous people from dissimilar cultures and economic
backgrounds and transmits their messages instantly, simultaneously. From the developing world
to high-tech societies, wireless platforms like social media sites are crucial tools for sharing,
organizing and mobilizing individuals against larger institutions. This freedom of expression and
freedom to assemble online can result in real-world social movements aimed not at unilateral
change but issue-by-issue value shifts in society. These shifts are caused by flashpoints in the
culture like #metoo, a tsunami of user-driven narrative that swept across social media sites,
releasing countless individual stories of harassment and trauma, all networked with a hashtag.
These stories take hundreds of thousands of forms—from tweet to status updates to personal
conversations between friends, evolving into a movement, a new shift in power structures. In
this way, the network can give rise both to the populist insurgency and the grassroots social
movement, adapting quickly to ensure a unity of purpose.
Today, we are employing utopia as a strategy—from forging intentional communities to
airing accounts of abuse to overthrowing dictators using Twitter. As social movements flare up,
as Arab Spring and Standing Rock protests succeed or fail, virtual communities and local
communities continue to thrive in interaction. Extropians may still be frozen, but with hundreds
of thousands of photos and writing samples and voice recordings for each of us online, we do
achieve a kind of digital immortality. Utopia is not perfection. Utopia is an imagined world crafted
by entirely by human design. Today, we use the internet for the same reasons we’ve employed
utopian thinking for the past six centuries—as a space for change. For every individual still
50
marginalized by restrictive power structures, cultural ideology, behavior control, the rise of
automation or globalization or forced migration— the internet has a utopia for you.

2C. Forms of Utopian Fiction
Despite the era from which it springs, speculative fiction tends to fall under a several forms and
paradigms. Many of the forms in this list were once thought to only define utopian fiction, but
now stretch to include all speculative narratives too. According to scholars Fatima Veira, Nicole
Pohl, Lewis Mumford, Gregory Clayes and Lyman Tower Sargent, the forms that speculative
fiction may take are diverse and heterogeneous. The narratives reflect the tension unique to
their eras, and are often told by individuals who live in opposition to the prevailing societal
norms—that is, protagonists who live outside the dominant narrative. Vieira suggests that “by
inviting us to take a journey to an imagined better place, literary utopia gives rise to a rupture
with the real place.” (Vieira 2010) Thus, world-building is paramount to the speculative narrative.
Like a Victorian novel or a fantasy universe, the rules of the place must be elaborately
explained, just as the characters strain against these rules.
By mining the writing of these scholars of utopian and dystopian fiction, I am drafting a
working list of forms speculative narrative. This is by no means exhaustive, but these definitions
and examples serve as excellent tools for close reading. Like all forms, one piece of literature
can adopt more than one definition at once, folding and rewriting and reinventing the definitions
for each technological era, each new set of anxieties, each new imagined place.

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Archistic Utopia
Defined by Nicole Pohl in her analysis of Renaissance utopias, archistic utopian communities
are created and regulated by a state or governing power. The power structure of the alternative
society is top-down. In these utopian examples, the first of which was Thomas More’s Utopia,
state control often reaches past infrastructure, into information control and rule of law governs
the minutiae of daily life including housing, diet, exercise and mating. Early utopian writing often
fell into this category, from Plato’s Republic to Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, writers
imagined a society that is organized by a select few, for the many. This kind of utopian fiction
mirrored the establishment of new governments in the colonies, where doctrines and
declarations set out rules for every aspect of life in the colonies: land distribution and resource
management were as important as health, education, religious freedom. The invented
communities re-imagine a benevolent state organization that was ubiquitous, everywhere at
once, controlling everything, guiding society toward an improved way of life.
Later, after the dystopian turn, archistic dystopias exemplified the tyrannical anxieties of
the 20
th
Century. Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984 and other whole-world dystopias are
organized from the top down. The state, however, is malevolent. Ministries of Information are
insidious and ubiquitous. Government or “Big Brother” surveillance is pervasive. The rule of law
is harsh and thorough. In these examples, and the many that followed including The
Handmaid’s Tale, in which women’s rights are stripped by government forces and fertile women
are forced to bear children for the upper classes, or Hunger Games, in which strictly segregated
society is governed from The Capital, forcing young members of each district to compete for
survival— all exemplify how a power hungry state organization may punish or control its
population. More subtle examples include Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which details a world
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that is stratified between organ-donating clones and individuals who receive those organs, and
the existential crisis of a donor living in a system that governs her fate.
These archistic speculative narratives, whether dystopian or utopian, share some
characteristics. The protagonist must find ways to explore and explain the world they occupy.
She must explain it to us in the brief moments she lives outside the top-down hierarchy. It
appears the protagonist is the only one to reflect on society’s function and feasibility. Because
the rules of the invented world come from above, there is always someone for whom the world
is utopian, and someone else for whom it is dystopian. This is a point of view exercise. Had
1984 been narrated by a top Minister of Information, had The Hunger Games been narrated by
President Snow, these narratives would look like utopias. Had Never Let Me Go been narrated
by a recipient of a clone’s organs, elongating her life, the medical experimentation would appear
miraculous. This tension is apparent in the ubiquitous and yet perilous nature of top-down
infrastructure. Often, the plot is concerned with living beyond the reaches of the archistic
system. The character’s motivation is to want more.

Anarchistic Utopia
This is utopia based on maximizing freedom and self-regulation. In a depleted environment, in
post-apocalypse, in the shadow of an oppressive government or unfavorable societal
conditions—these utopias are built from the bottom up. Whether by individuals on the run,
collectives seeking alternative lives, whether communes or schools or a single character etching
out an existence in a precarious world—these utopias are experiments in anarchy, in living
beyond the constraints of societal regulation.
In early utopian fiction, these anarchistic narratives were rooted in what Pohl calls
“Arcadian Primitivism,” (Pohl 2010) which focused on the individual in light of deconstructed
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social relations. These groups were attempting to reach beyond the regulated world of
“civilization,” back to a “primitive” time they believed was more free. The liberation of sexual
behavior as told by de Sade, for example, outlined the “absolute authority of the individual,
governed only by his or her wishes or desires.” Polyamorous communes, anarchist collectives,
and Futurists bent on destroying systems in order to rebuild from the remaining chaos could all
be described as anarchistic.
Dystopian fiction tends to thrive in this vein—as the detritus of organized society often
yields a plucky protagonists navigating and establishing their own social order out of the
confusion of the dystopian setting. These include Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which children
establish their own micro-society to disastrous results, to I Am Legend in which the last survivor
of a zombie apocalypse must forge his own utopia from the dystopian setting. PD James’ The
Children of Men and Jose Saramago’s Blindness could also fall into this category, as survivors
of illness or environmental devastation must band together to form underground communities,
providing safety, structure and support in light of the outside world in turmoil.

Utopias of Escape
This classification first appears in the 1922 book The Story of Utopias by Lewis Mumford, an
American historian of technology and science. Mumford, after years of analyzing the rise of
urban spaces, turned to utopian fiction for his first book of literary criticism. As he watched the
growth of these new cities of North America and Europe, he divided utopia into two categories.
There are those who want to escape society, and those who want to build it.
According to Mumford, the utopia of escape begins in the mind of every person living a
less than perfect life. Whether the factory worker, yearning to leave the gears of his machinery,
or a crew of hippies dodging the draft, the utopia of escape calls for a complete rupture with
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one’s imperfect everyday life in favor of an idle dream, a fantasy of bliss or perfection. (Mumford
1922) In escapist utopias, characters flee an emergency, a corrupted civilization or conservative
culture, and throughout the narrative, they flee and flee and flee. The utopia does not exist in
arrival, but in transit, whereby characters achieve a kind of utopian ideal simply in leaving their
structured societies. This narrative may occur on the high seas, on unmapped terrain, or on the
highways across the new world. Beginning with Homer’s Odyssey and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
the hero’s journey is one of utopian momentum, only ruptured when the protagonist lands in the
too realistic, geographically pinned locales.
This is where the conflict lies, when a traveler stops. It is only truly utopian when the
protagonist is on the run. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road serves as a kind of utopia of escape,
retold as a dystopia of escape in Cormac McArthy’s The Road. In Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, which
is a send up of On The Road told through the eyes of four black gang members from South LA,
escape looks like a minivan trip across white America to murder a judge. The America out their
window is not the pastoral landscape they’d imagined, but the poor, burnt out Midwest, “houses
thrown up like milk cartons in lonely space — dingy, flat, unpainted cinder-block foundations.
Strips of siding hanging off the corners like bandages. In front of each waited a little collection of
beat-up vehicles like a boy would arrange in a sandbox.” (Beverly 2016) Whenever the boys
stopped, they found trouble. Utopia ended every time they opened the van door. The final
gesture of the novel is for the 15-year-old named East to strike out alone, again, with fake ID
and five thousand dollars, steering away from LA.
In Utopias of Escape, it is the act of leaving that creates an idealized space. In these
narratives, as in our imaginations, characters follow the direction of their desires, again and
again forsaking or dodging the realistic, grounding details of real life.

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Utopias of Reconstruction
Utopias of Reconstruction, according to Mumford, are tales of characters who subscribe to the
belief that human society is a product of the human mind, and they attempt to create a new
place, unlike what existed before or elsewhere, that adheres to new organizational principals.
(Mumford 1922) This place occupies a specific topography and geography, it has boundaries,
buildings, infrastructure, topos. The place where a utopist community chooses to establish its
alternative society is as important as its ideals. Mumford argues that every advancement made
in the betterment of humankind—from domesticating animals to digging irrigation trenches—has
been an effort to reorganize the environment toward our vision of the future. It was utopians who
built our first cities. Utopia of reconstruction could define all societal “progress” despite the
inherent power discrepancies within.
The idea of reconstructive utopias took root during the Victorian era, due to widespread
colonization and then migration, but also in light of advancements in women’s rights and class
reorganization. Feminists, ecologists, communists and collectivists participated in these new
experiments in living together. Whether by forsaking what Mumford calls “the crust of an old
civilization” or in creating spaces of refuge out of the chaos of what feels like a dystopian
setting, with each new society, people seek to etch out a small area of utopia for themselves.
Though rooted in individual freedom, even small groups crave new rules. It is this quality
that makes reconstruction projects borrow from both archistic and anarchistic models of utopia.
The desire for independence requires some collectivization, which eventually turns to
constructivism. In every new space, a code of conduct must be etched out. As a result, power
slips into top-down structures easily. Herein lies all kinds of conflict for narrative, as hierarchies
shift and relationships are forged in the building a new utopian community.
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From Nathanial Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, which details the power grabs and
sexual politics that turn deadly on a collective farm on the outskirts of 1850s Boston, to Lauren
Groff’s Arcadia, a novel that narrates the drug parties and leaderships changes and family life
on a hippie commune through the 1960s to the future, reconstructive utopian narratives prove
intentional communities can be equal parts dangerous and beautiful. What these utopias have
in common is the inherent disorder found in trying to reorder society. There are rules made and
broken, places are forged and destroyed, small are empires toppled. In dystopia, these
reconstructions are in shopping malls, the inside of cars, an office on the 35
th
floor of an office
building as a virus consumes most of New York City. In the future, they can take any shape at
all.

Euchronic Utopia
It took a very long time for utopian writers to leap forward. For centuries, utopians wrote at the
edges of the geographical map, on the border of our understanding. Until the 18
th
Century,
utopias were set in some territory or land that was unknown, still to be discovered. As we
mapped more and more territory, systematically charting and colonizing the remaining pockets
of geography, writers ran out of space for the utopian dream. For the first time, in the late 18
th

Century, a writer set a narrative in the future. Louis-Sebastien Mercier published the first
euchronia in 1771, a book he called L’An 2440: Un rêve s’il en fut jamais. It is tale of a Parisian
waking up 700 years in the future into a flawless France, an egalitarian society. It was published
18 years before the French Revolution, as the revolution’s architects were testing the belief that
human advancement would move beyond individual improvement toward societal equality.
Mercier’s jump forward into a new future caused an explosion of euchronias from Enlightenment
to Bellamy, to HG Wells, straight to George Orwell’s 1984. Today, science fiction and young
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adult dystopia—each aiming toward a readership hungry to analyze the rise of technology—
have taken futuristic euchronic speculative fiction to the mainstream. From Back to the Future to
Ready Player One, by shifting toward the future or by reinventing the past, an author is telling a
narrative in a setting that is both known and unknowable.
Jumping forward in time allows for a different experience of the utopian or dystopia
space. The narratives that are set in a futuristic London or New York City are known to us in a
way that the imagined space is not. The author must set the rules of the civilization, but the
geography is already etched into reality and our memories. By adding a layer of utopia or
dystopia on top of our known map, writers manipulate our hopes or fears for a particular place,
and show us in new creative ways how that place may be altered by their vision. Utopians are
writing a possible future for readers and characters alike.
Euchronia can also exist in reverse, like in the re-imagined history of Colson
Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Whitehead’s reinvention of the dystopian era of
American slavery, with its supposed utopian spaces buried within, is based on real historical
examples. There are urban experiments with forced sterilizations, there are whites-only states
where she must hide, and there is a short-lived black utopia, a collective farm built on literacy
and equality. Colson, a master of world-building, employs euchronia to layer our known
historical record of that era—of Oregon when it restricted black migration, for example, or the
medical experiments that took place in Northern ‘free’ states—which forces readers to re-
contextualize the dystopian reality of slavery in light of its reshuffling in time.
Euchronic narratives are a warning, a testing out of possible outcomes, often existing in
opposition or exaggeration of our present. As a result, there can be a didactic quality to
euchronic narratives. Though they often end with a hopeful gesture, the plot itself is a call to
action. The depicted future must either be avoided or constructed by human accomplishment; it
is our choice whether we want to move from the present into this possibility.
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Heterotopia
A re-appropriated phrase by Michael Foucault, heterotopia was originally a medical term
meaning “the misplacement of organs in the human body.” Heterotopias are now defined as
“worlds within worlds,” a small contained space within a larger societal infrastructure, with its
own rules, its own culture. Foucault used the example of the ship, or the sanitarium, as
heterotopias. These are contained spaces that hold the social dynamics, setting, characters and
rules of an entire world, even if they are only small spaces within the larger societal construct.
According to Fouclault, each heterotopia has an exact and firm function, and they may open and
close, allowing for some but not many outside forces. These act as microcosms of larger
societal problems; conflict in the heterotopia may be amplified due to the closed nature of the
system. These may be archistic, organized from the top-down, or anarchistic. They may be
reconstructions or vehicles of escape.
In many cases, heterotopias are havens for a protagonist. Though they exist in the
memory or dreams of a character, on the boundaries of the known world, heterotopias also exist
in real paces, pock-marked across a dystopian landscape. There are heterotopias of respite,
small constructions built by survivors. In Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, there a group of
characters stranded in an airport, a community etched from a character’s last known
whereabouts before and after the apocalyptic break. In Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the
heterotopia is the boarding school Hailsham, where Kathy H considers herself lucky to grow up
as a clone—an experiment in art and personhood in light of her manufactured existence. In
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, cult members who worship the environment return to
bee-keeping and horticulture on the roofs of squatted buildings. There are sex worker safe-
holds, dens of thieves, and the sequestered dome where the ‘Snowman’ remembers his gated
community of old. In Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins’ dystopian novel is pockmarked by
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heterotopias, physical spaces scattered across the battered and drought-ridden California that
provide shelter for Luz and her baby—an abandoned mansion, a caravan of tents, a school bus,
a Venice Beach apartment complex filled with hoarded supplies. But in Watkins’ fiction, like
others, heterotopia does not always occupy a lived place. She also creates an imagined
notebook of flora and fauna roaming the massive moving “dune,” the notebook’s imagined
creatures forming a heterotopian list of dream biology. These small pockets can often be a
character’s only hope, a micro-universe existing within a larger invented space.

The Break
Though it is not an over-arching structural form, the break is a plot point that exists in nearly
every speculative fiction—whether on or off the page. When an otherwise present-day text is
struck by a virus, natural disaster, tyrannical government, or violation of human rights—or
inversely is abandoned for a uniquely constructed, egalitarian, collectively-minded community—
the narrative experiences an opening, an opportunity to experiment with possible futures. These
narratives deal in speculation. They search for potential truths. This break from reality explains
how we have arrived in this particular alternate universe.
How and when this break occurs affects a narrative’s overall construction, becoming
crucial aspect of the world itself. In some novels, the break is told in flashback. For some it is
the novel’s climax, while other texts keep this moment in the margins of the text. Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road is set entirely in the aftermath of some unspoken ecological disaster. In
the MadAddam trilogy, the narrative could be split into before and after—the novels chart the
days leading up to and following an engineered cryogenic infection erases most of humanity. In
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the apocalypse, sparked by the spread of an
uncontrolled flu virus, serves as the novel’s initial incident, fracturing the society into small
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worlds—a traveling caravan, an airport, a quarantined plane abandoned on a runaway. In all
cases, when speculative fiction breaks off from our present into a possible, everything exists in
the before or the after. Whether included in the text or relegated to the margins, readers will
seek out this break for the myriad ways it trickles into plot, character and setting.

In Conclusion
When you google “forms of utopia,” the list that emerges is not formal but societal. According to
this wiki-list, utopia can be categorized as ecological, economic, political, spiritual or rooted in
science and technology. While it is true that these ways of characterizing utopia and dystopia
are helpful, it is the blurring of these categories that makes utopian settings feel like realistic
built-worlds. What is an ecological dystopia if it does not affect the economic sphere? How can
a utopia rooted in science and technology avoid the spiritual, or the political? In any lasting
piece of literature, these categories are impossible to unbraid. A true utopian or dystopian vision
must include all of these elements.
Furthermore, there are many more examples of speculative writing I could add to this
list, in particular in nonfiction. The manifesto, the satire, the mission statement, even empirical
reportage on sociological phenomena like the Occupy movement or intentional communities—
all serve as essential writing in the fields of utopia and dystopia building. For all the didactic
qualities of speculative fiction, these nonfiction genres employ no character or narrator as a filter
against its explanatory qualities. Whereas narrative posits utopian visions behind the guise of
human experience, nonfiction simply teaches the better way.
According to Jill Lepore, critic at the New Yorker, we are living in a new “Golden Age of
Dystopian Fiction” whereby dystopia can be “apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it is
always to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a
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republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery.” She is correct that
the digital age has seen a rise of speculative fiction, in particular from marginalized voices
seeking to voice legitimate fears about the present via their dystopian worlds. But Lepore goes
on to critique this ‘golden age’ of speculative fiction by deriding the despair within:
“Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the
fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news
and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness… Its only admonition is:
Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so
little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the
company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.” (Lepore
2017)
I disagree. I argue that dystopia and utopia—or the literature now under the umbrella
term speculative fiction—is both an implicit criticism of its era and an attempt to think outside
civilization’s parameters. Stretching as far back as Plato’s Republic, writers have sought to
experiment with the reorganization of society in a kind of continuing argument for human-kind’s
continued self-transformation. For those already experiencing a dystopian reality in light of
another individual’s utopia—for marginalized voices, colonized voices, the oppressed, the
outsider—utopian thinking latent in dystopian settings is the seed for real change. The
foundational characteristic of all speculative fiction is that it expresses our hopes and fears for
the future. It is a literature that charts change, it is concerned with defining, altering, and
establishing and critiquing new ways of life for all kinds of individuals in society. Each wave of
utopian or dystopian narrative is rooted in a particular social adjustment, pointing away from the
present and into the possible. I argue that if we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t be speculating at
all.
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Part 3. Speculative Fiction for the
Network Society: three close readings

A networked dystopia is a terrifying thing. In the digital age, our tyranny is not an omnipresent
Ministry of Information, that boot ever grinding in our faces. We do not all ingest the same
Soma. Today, tyrannical forces triumph online, they are everywhere, all at once, permeating our
behavior on a global scale. There are infowars. There are live-streamed massacres. The
message is not ubiquitous, but it can be amplified and viral and pervasive. As the network gains
millions more connections every day, we are further entwined, surveilled, linked, vulnerable,
distracted and connected. We are almost always connected.
The New Yorker is probably right. We are in a Golden Age of Dystopia because of our
current state of despair. But writers of speculative fiction understand best that if the internet
increasingly looks like dystopia, it will simultaneously encompass millions of utopian collectives.
Online, we are wild and anarchistic individuals collectivizing simultaneously. Hashtag
communities can flare up. Grassroots movements can surge into mainstream thinking. Online,
we collectively writing and rewriting the dominant narratives of our culture every day. When we
are communicating together online, tweeting and trolling simultaneously across the globe, our
collective voice can see with powerful but elastic omniscience.
The three novels analyzed here, Severance by Ling Ma, On Such a Full Sea by Chang-
Rae Lee and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins all employ tools that reflect those
utopian communications strategies. The narrators, in all three books, find moments to speak
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together. As collectives—whether an immigrant community or car-full of stoner office workers or
inhabitants of Yucca mountain complaining together of the nuclear waste in their soil—all three
of these novels practice speaking as a united, watching “we.” In all three books, the effect is
haunting, ghostly. Though not every writer commits to the point of view choice for the whole
novel, the chapters or paragraphs told from the “we” point of view speak for all of us. It turns the
reader into part of the collective. We are character and narrator, complicit in the act of surviving
and in piecing together the narrative. We too are included in this elastic omniscience. A new
kind of dramatic irony emerges. Like on the internet, we may see all, but we may know very
little.
And yet, despite the connectivity of narration, these novels take place in broken
networks. These are dystopias of disconnection, of breakdown, of aftermath. In these novels,
the internet eventually dies, as does cellphone service, telephone lines. The network is
remembered but shattered. Freeways are littered with abandoned cars, boobie traps. These
novels are road trips through depleted landscapes, destroyed by drought or mismanagement,
pocked by heterotopias. In light of that chaos, characters seek anarchistic reconstruction. They
forge homes in abandoned office buildings, fortified motels, refurbished buses, cavernous
mansions in the Hollywood Hills. Communities flare up, collectives forged from hoarding or
escaping or around cult leaders. Inevitably, one character’s utopia is another character’s
dystopia. In all three novels, the protagonist is imprisoned, whether in a Sephora store, an
underground tunnel jail, a fish farm or a sex den for surgically altered girl-slaves. Ultimately,
these novels become utopias of escape. We experience catharsis when these characters break
away, wiggle free.
Structurally, all three novels follow the traditional utopian traveler structure—a character
leaves the archistic utopian world to venture outside, into the anarchy of the dystopian setting.
And yet they are of this contemporary moment too. They feature strange textual hybrid forms:
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fantasy-botony notebooks and interviews and blogs called NY Ghost on the last flickers of the
internet. Their structures reflect the trend toward microfiction and translit; they are fractured,
unchronological, in multiple heads at once. They elegantly hop through time and space. They
somehow narrate on both on a global and very personal scale.
Finally, crucially, (and this I only realized in retrospect,) the three female protagonists in
these novels—Luz and Fan and Candace—are new mothers. Fan and Candace are both
pregnant, secretly at first and then publicly. Luz finds a toddler on the beach and rescues her.
These women are inexperienced, burdened and hopeful in equal measure by their new
maternal roles. In dystopia, the pregnant woman is a particularly fraught character. She is a
mother Mary, the migrant Madonna. She is a mythic figure to us, is given enormous strength.
She traverses vast distances, able to shape-shift through segmented societies, even in her
powerlessness. She represents the end of an era and the beginning of another. As such, she is
often a cypher, a vessel. She is placed into moral dilemmas. She is tested. In all three novels,
the conflict and symbiosis between mother and child are paramount to the plot. Will she
survive? Will the child? Will one sacrifice for the other? What will that mean for the future? So
many hopes are placed on them.
As a result of these raised stakes, these novels ask what we would do in a catastrophe.
What if we thought not only of the present, but also the future? Would we reconstruct? Escape?
How will the mothers rebuild? How do they reach for improvement in light of their deteriorated
society? Thematically and formally, these novels reflect our current paradox—one of
simultaneous isolation and collective identity building. These mothers-to-be find safety alone,
but they require community. They hide out in the mall, they join cults on the edge of the dune.
They are befriended. They are betrayed. They are drugged. They are bartered. They break free.
The run again and again. Their striving futurism is tangible, embodied, belonging to all of us,
and also belonging only to her.
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These novels all end the same way—with the mother fleeing into the void, unprotected,
vulnerable to the worst of her society’s dystopian tendencies. Candace flees Bob and his
shopping mall prison, recklessly driving into abandoned Chicago. Luz escapes the dune cult,
leaping from a moving jeep, leaving her kid behind. Fan eludes medical enslavement, venturing
back into the wild Smokes with a dubious ally. By the final pages of all three of these novels, we
don’t know if these mothers survive. Things don’t look good. All we can do is hope.

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3A. On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae
Lee (2014)

On Such a Full Sea, Lee’s fifth novel and first speculative fiction, is a complex exercise in the
segmentation and subsequent collectivization of society. The speech from Julius Caesar that
serves as epigraph opens with the quote, “We, at the height, are ready to decline.” Brutus is
speaking about Rome’s precarious moment— how the end of empire loomed, how the powerful
had become too powerful and the scales would soon tip. Brutus continues: “On such a full sea
we are now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.” This
novel, Chang-Rae Lee’s fifth book and first speculative fiction, argues that America’s present
tendency toward social segmentation could lead down a very dark dystopian path. “I wanted to
speculate on the endgame of certain trends in our society,” he explains, “and what that would
mean for how our civilization was partitioned and run.” (Lee, "A Conversation with Chang-Rae
Lee" 2014)
To speculate on our rampant capitalism, our extreme class segregation and our ‘end of
empire,’ Lee intentionally set this euchronic dystopia in an unspecific time period 150 to 200
years in the future. America’s industrial and communications networks are broken. The country
is strictly stratified, split into three echelons. The middle-class workers are immigrants, shipped
in for their labor from a now destroyed New China. They farm communities like B-Mor, the
empty shell of the former Baltimore, which is now a fish production facility destined for the rich
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“Charter” class sequestered in gated communities. The Charters are the one percent; they have
resources, education, good health care, and that loose morality attributed to wealth rather than
ethics. In the Charters, the very wealthy can have servants, but only the richest have human
pets. Outside in the open counties is where everyone else lives. These are called the Smokes,
an Appalachian-type environment with no oversight, no government, no laws to follow, no safety
net. This environment may be peppered with utopian farms and markets and circus performing
families, but those families are occasionally cannibalistic.
“I’m always interested in aftermath,” Lee explains. “When the thing happens—a crime,
an act, some cataclysmic event—it is overwhelming. We have to experience it, take it in, and
there’s this kind of quiet afterward. And it’s in that quiet that the most interesting questions
arise.” (Lee, "A Conversation with Chang-Rae Lee" 2014) Chang-Rae Lee is a Korean-
American fiction writer whose five novels all seem to play with this concept of aftermath— the
great quiet after a cataclysmic change such as immigration or displacement. Born in 1965 in
South Korea, Lee’s family immigrated to the United States at age three. His father was a
psychiatric resident and later established a successful practice in Westchester County, New
York. Lee describes his childhood as "a standard suburban American upbringing," in New
Hampshire private schools before earning Bachelors in English at Yale. He tried to work on Wall
Street for one year before moving to the University of Oregon, where he wrote his first book,
Native Speaker, as his MFA thesis. Since Native Speaker, Lee has published four additional
novels, has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and has won a Hemmingway Pen Award and
a Guggenheim fellowship. He now teaches at Princeton. The experience of crossing great
cultural divides haunts his fiction, which typically explores themes of identity and assimilation.
As he explains, “All immigrant novels are dystopian novels; they’re just not dystopias for most of
the readers.” (J. Fan 2014)
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Like most utopian journeys, Lee’s novel is both global and remarkably intimate and
modest. Fan, the pregnant teenager who is Lee’s protagonist, is just searching for her
boyfriend—the father of her unborn child. Fan is described as “tiny, good girl, who never
crossed anyone or went against even a convention of B-Mor, much less a regulation, until the
moment she did.” (Lee, On Such a Full Sea 2014, 10) Fan is often vomiting. She is wounded
early. And yet her vulnerability makes her more heroic to her immigrant community. After her
boyfriend is kidnapped for his disease resistance genes, and after Fan escapes to find him, the
residents of B-Mor look to Fan as a mythic figure. Their television stars start wearing her hairdo.
Their lunchtime gossip revolves around her latest adventure. By saving her boyfriend Reg, and
by birthing his disease-resistant child, she could save them all.
Because Fan—a cypher, a ghost, a Madonna, an outsider heroine—is the only one to
leave the archistic utopia of B-More for the anarchistic utopias of the outside world, the novel is
both a picaresque and a coming-of-age story. Even as she moves through each strata of society
in a way that so many others are limited, Fan is never safe in any of the reconstructed spaces of
refuge. There are no heterotopias here. A doctor’s backwoods commune and a circus family’s
farm may resemble utopias etched out of the chaos of the Open Counties. The Charter village,
too, with its villas and fancy boutiques and security and protector figures, is supposed to be
sanctuary, but all of these environments reveal themselves as deeply flawed. In the dystopian
landscape, Fan must navigate the unique narrative architecture of each anarchistic utopian
space, with its shifting rules, leaders, currencies and motivations. They want to eat her, they
want to trap her, they want to sell her, or they want her baby. The more promising a pocket of
promised utopia appears, like Miss Cathy’s mansion in a Charter Village, the more dangerous.
At first, Miss Cathy’s appears to be the antidote to the chaotic life of shortage and loss in the
Open Counties. But this pocket of utopia, with its rich food and opulent trappings, reveals itself
as a kind of prison for the rich and their “obsessive neurotic tendencies.” Miss Cathy, a depleted
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wife to a pedophilic husband, appears heroic when she murders him during his first advances
toward Fan. However, when we discover she is the “keeper” of seven young women, prisoners
in private quarters pretending to be her “children,” Miss Cathy quickly morphs into an
antagonist. Fan, always the outsider, lends the narrative a reader’s perspective on our worst
tendencies, and how perverted they could be in practice.
As such, Fan’s utopia is one of escape; she evades impossibly grim scenario after
scenario, returning to the road again and again with her few allies. The novel even opens with
escape—the first scene is a collective memory from her cultural home in New China, as her
village burns and Fan’s people are trucked off to begin again. “In America,” Lee explains in an
interview with the Missouri Review, “our manifest destiny is always about a frontier. It’s not good
business to look backward. That’s one of the things the book has anxiety about: this constant,
unsustainable striving that has led the society to break down.” (Lee, "A Conversation with
Chang-Rae Lee" 2014)
In Lee’s future, no amount of striving or affluence can buy you utopia. As Fan moves
between the rich and powerful and poor and powerless, the novel becomes a social portrait as
an individual one. Every character is torn by society’s segmentation. Quig, a former veterinarian,
and the first to help the runaway Fan in the Open Counties, was removed from his charter
community after a drug dealing scandal. Now a health care provider for people in the counties,
he must barter for every transaction. Quig accepts young women, labor and food in exchange
for his services. Even after being saved by Fan from the group of cannibals, he exchanges Fan
to a pedophile in exchange for a well-digging drill for his commune. Loreen, his wife, and
knowing participant in the trade of Fan. She is a selfish character, but too has personal
motivations, an ill son. Mala and the six other imprisoned girls at Miss Cathy’s struggle between
service to Miss Cathy and their desire to help Fan. They don’t realize, with their poor
backgrounds and malnourished childhoods, that they don’t live in utopia until Fan points out
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their imprisonment. Thematically, Lee is testing the idea of striving for perfection, of utopia
building, and how individual need and greed inevitably results in a dystopian end for these
collectives, and thus to a further breakdown of society.
Lee experiments with this tension between the individual and the group through point of
view. Reflective of the utopian tendency toward communal society-building, Lee has taken the
idea of reconstructed utopia one step further by having the B-Mors—the immigrant society from
which Fan has absconded—narrate together. The citizens of B-Mor speak in a shared voice, a
collective point of view relayed as “we.” The novel opens: “It is known where we come from, but
no one much cares about that sort of thing anymore.” (Lee, On Such a Full Sea 2014) After their
“gravel-colored town of stoop-shouldered buildings on a riverbank in China” is destroyed by
unnamed forces, the citizens of B-Mor built community from the wreckage of old American
cities. In B-Mor, they rebuilt the empty houses and buildings, they repaired the inoperative
infrastructure. Now, several generations later, they farm. They watch the same television. They
suffer the same shortages of food and electricity in their underground shopping malls. And they
follow the pregnant Fan through the open counties and the charters with a kind of obsession,
fixated as they are on any member of their society who transcends their social stratification, who
moves away. As a result, the narrative has a ghostly, all knowing quality that becomes mythic,
that eventually comes to involve the reader.
This collective voice is what characterizes Chang-Rae Lee’s book as a ‘networked
speculative fiction.” Like the communications systems of digital age, Lee’s point of view choice
is flexible, pervasive, and shared. B-Mors may surveil Fan with an omniscience that is
everywhere at once, and yet the narrators also represent a new voice in the social organization
of society. This is not a narrative told by the hierarchical “top,” an omniscient gods-eye-view
narrator nor a Charter with power, but rather a collective that has sprung up in the network and
is able to voice their version of events. This reflects the trend toward mass self-communication
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as well as collectivization. Like the network, the narration is stronger with more individuals; it
means institutional history, shared memory, more eyes, more ways of seeing, more ways of
projecting the narrative into the future. In many ways, the narrative choice is an examination of
communication power—how by recounting her story in this way, the citizens of B-Mor are
gaining power by uniting against the dystopian forces outside.
The narrators, speaking together as one, reflect more than their desire to tell stories
together, they also seek to explore the concept of the individual. After Fan absconds, the
narrators acknowledge that compared to the Smokes, their collective identity, not the conditions
of their lives, that makes B-Mor a pocket of heterotopia. In B-More the young and old eat and
farm and fish together as a collective. They fix each other’s homes. They care for each other in
a way that counters the cut-throat individualism in the open counties. “We’re no longer fit for any
harsher brand of life,” the B-Mors explain, “we admit that readily, and simply imagining
ourselves existing beyond the gates is enough to induce a swampy tingle in the underarms, a
gaining chill in the gut. For there’s real struggle for open counties people, for in a phrase the
basic needs are met but not much else.” (Lee, On Such a Full Sea 2014) In B-Mor, if you are
very lucky, your child is very clever, he or she could be of the two percent allowed to ascend to
the Charters. For the rest of them, communal work and shared free time is reward enough.
Nevertheless, B-Mor is an archistic utopia. It is planned from above; the experience of
living in the controlled world of B-Mor feels increasingly Orwellian as the novel progresses. The
slow degradation of rights, the decreasing food, the inability to speak freely, the increased
controls on behavior, all point to a small number of faceless/nameless individuals in control
while this class of workers are increasingly restrained. Lee builds this tension throughout the
book—between a certain utopian striving in the B-Mors’ tone, and what they have traded away.
The middle-class trappings of a life aren’t enough, decent food isn’t enough, second-rate health
care isn’t enough, when you don’t have freedom. The community, at some point, traded security
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for a chance to choose their own futures. They will never leave the walls of their community.
Their fates are decided. As Lee puts it, “The scariest dystopias are those of the soul.”
Meanwhile, the citizens of B-Mor still are proud of all they’ve come to accomplish, their
escape from the now ruined New China, their safety, their built world. “Let them try to shake our
walls. Our footings are dug deep,” they explain. For generations, they have survived. The
driving force behind the narration is to explore characters like Fan, who reflects their striving for
betterment in light of the dystopia of their immigrant experience. “Have we not lasted long
enough to dare say all the hopes of our forebears have come true?” they ask. “Have we not
done the job of becoming our best selves?” (Lee, On Such a Full Sea 2014) They know of Fan,
and later Betty and Oliver, as individuals who have surpassed the production facilities to join an
elevated charter life. Fan’s tale is both cautionary and aspirational.
This tension, between the desire to transcend communal thinking versus the desire to
stay safe and anonymous within its confines drives the narrative into a complex analysis of the
individual’s role in a segmented society. “We can talk about Fan openly because hers is no
grand tragedy, no apocalypse of the soul or of our times,” they explain early in the first chapter.
“But more and more we can see that the question is not whether we are “individuals.” We are
not drones or robots and never will be. The question, then, is whether being an “individual”
makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.” (Lee,
On Such a Full Sea 2014) In B-Mor, the outside world’s disease, famine, fear and insecurity are
all reasons to remain locked in the oppressive society. To the citizens of B-Mor, Fan exhibits “a
special conviction of imagination” because she thought to leave the confines of their community.
“We wish and wish and often with fury but never very deeply. For if we did, we’d see how the
word can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That I and we are, in fact, unbounded.
Free.” (Lee, On Such a Full Sea 2014) This cleavage of the “I” from the “we” is what they fear
most, severance from community, the vulnerability of the singular. In B-Mor, one may strive, but
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only in the prescribed way. One may transcend their station, but they will do so alone. For this,
they chide Fan as much as they revere her.
By the conclusion of On Such a Full Sea, Fan may be free, but we do not know her fate,
if she is heading north or south or west. We never learn if she finds Reg, where the baby is
born, or how. We only know she has escaped apprehension once again. She has her suitcase,
she has her unborn baby, she is in a car with a friend, driving into the open counties. The B-
Mors hope she is safe, “much closer than we know, waiting out word of Reg in some modest but
nice place.” But there is both yearning and defeat—a kind of communal hope and the sting of
abandonment—in the final words of the novel. “Don’t hurry Fan,” they tell her, “Stay put for now.
We’ll find a way. You need not come back for us.” Even though Fan is free, the B-Mors are not.
They don’t know how things will turn out. They have reached the limits of their narration.
The novel is full of this guessing. We don’t how exactly America has stratified so strictly,
how the Charters have resources, or what occurred in New China to spurn the mass migration
of the B-Mors to America. We don’t know how society functions in light of the fragmented
network, a detail that bothered critic Ursula K. Le Guin in her caustic review of On Such a Full
Sea in the Guardian. “In a broken, sporadic civilization,” she wrote, “where does all this stuff
come from? Neglect of such literal, rational questions in imaginative fiction is often excused,
even legitimized, as literary license… But Lee uses essential elements of a serious genre
irresponsibly, superficially. As a result, his imagined world carries little weight of reality.” (Le
Guin 2014) Crucially, we don’t know exactly how the citizens of B-Mor have surveilled Fan’s
adventure, and what has cut them off now. We are left to believe their elastic omniscience is
one of oral tradition, myth and history dashed with heavy doses of imagination. We have to
guess at how they knew so much, and why they don’t know any more.
I believe this was both a formal and thematic choice, a result of Chang-Rae Lee’s
decision to locate the narrative in the aftermath. At the end of the novel, after freeing herself
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from B-Mor, from cannibals, from Quig’s care, from Miss Cathy the keeper, and ultimately being
freed from a future in a medical lab, Fan has been rescued by her friends and confidants. Once
again, it is community that saves Fan, not the ideology of individualism that guides the outside
world. "There is no overarching system we subscribe to anymore," the narrators explain, "No
devotion to a deity or origin story, no antique Eastern or Western assertions of goodness and
badness to guide us.” In the depleted landscape of America, like in the dystopia of the internet,
collectivization is our only solution. It is only by uniting across the broken network do they thrive.
After Fan’s cautionary tale, these narrator-citizens return to the collective. Though she has
escaped, they never will. They must remain in the aftermath. In B-Mor there is only the quiet
after the cataclysm. They are left with questions, and only each other to answer them.

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3B. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye
Watkins (2015)

If desert were to crust over the American West, if the moisture were to drain from the farmland
and aquifers and the Sierra Nevada snowpack, if a giant sand dune were approaching, erasing
every edifice and landmark and road and tree—what would remain? Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold
Fame Citrus depicts a future that is pure anarchic utopia. The leftovers are called Mojav;
gangbangers, AWOL soldiers, burners, ravers, surfers and skids holing up in burnt-out motels
and thorn-infested bungalows. The American government has pulled out, launched a mass
migration away from the West for the first time ever. The respectable have been trucked away.
The Mojavs are trapped in the aftermath of a devastating climate crisis. Drought, heat, and
mismanaged water has crippled California. The remaining economy is based on barter.
Collectives organize around dwindling resources. The place is thirsty. They drink ration cola,
bathe with wet wipes. Only dried up poop and dust and scorpions rattle around all those empty
swimming pools.
In Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins not only points to the anxieties that plague the
digital age from celebrity culture, to the climate crisis, to worldwide mass migration, her writing
style is pure Network Society. Her utopian predictions about the future reflect a flexible, fast and
free network of ideas that can function in the aftermath of great disaster. She experiments with
translit, hopping elegantly through geographical space. When her narration instantly fractures—
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into an interview, a psychiatric report, a list, a primer on the Neo-Fauna of the Amargosa Dune
Sea—the novel reflects the complicated hybridity of her information stream. And looking closer,
on the sentence level, her descriptions somehow include the present, past and future all at
once. Her ability to zoom in and out of focus quickly and succinctly to include geological time,
learned and invented history, imaginary futurism and possible futurism, all with lyrical and yet
precise language—Gold Fame Citrus locates Claire Vaye Watkins in the multi-modal network.
Born in 1984 in Bishop, California, Watkins grew up in a different kind of network, in a
string of worn-out houses and trailers around the Mojave Desert. Her father, a follower of
Charles Manson’s, testified against him, YouTube is full of footage of his interviews. After years
floating around Nevada while they tested nuclear weapons, he died of cancer in Malibu when
Claire Vaye Watkins was six. She spent her childhood in a stone shop on the edge of the
Mojave, and eventually studied at University of Nevada, Reno where she waitressed and still
went broke, barely making it through undergrad. The essays and short fiction she’s written to
describe it—her dystopian upbringing in poorest parts of the American West—depict a string of
collectives across a battered, poor, beautiful landscape. There are overdose stories, lists of
childhood houses in states of “dissolve.” They are set in miners shacks and whorehouses and
out on the open desert, where you could find anyone, doing anything.
Battleborn, Watkins’ first short story collection is a kind of multi-dimensional desert
history, containing all the layers of a geological dig. The story “Ghosts, Cowboys” is a kind of
veiled autofiction; she traces the history of Reno via the walls of her shabby apartment building,
overlaying historical events with her ailing neighbour’s “Razorblade Baby’s” complicated story.
The layering of paragraphs is just like the apartment’s wallpaper, peeling away to Watkin’s own
genealogy, her father’s fraught position in history, her mother’s “toxic and silver-gilded love.”
Another example is “Man-O-War,” a linear story in which a prospector finds a pregnant girl in the
open desert. “Though he knew better, deep down in the bedrock of himself, he couldn’t help it.
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He thought, She will need a stroller. She will need a car seat. How the barren cling to the fertile.
We, he thought, we will need a crib.” (Watkins, Battleborn: Stories 2012) Here, the future and
the present exist simultaneously, while the past is buried deep in the prospector’s narration—it
carries thoughts of his dead wife, his years of solitude. “She” turns to “we,” even if in the
prospector’s magical thinking, his dread.
Her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, is combination love story, motherhood story, history
lesson and futuristic literary dystopia set in her desert home. “It’s just a projector in my brain
beaming onto a wall the fear and hope I have for the American West given its blood-soaked
soils and the ravenous, arrogant appetite of white American patriarchy,” Watkins explains in an
interview with LitHub. (Watkins, Writ in Water: Interview with Claire Vaye Watkins 2017) In Gold
Fame Citrus, they tried everything to drain the water, then fix the drought. They haul icebergs
from Alaska. They drill a hole in Lake Mead and pull the plug. “Who had sucked up the Ogallala
Aquifer,” the novel asks, “the Rio Grande Aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the
Cascades? If this was God he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power...” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015) Like Chang-Rae Lee’s
segmented society, Watkins writes that the sins of our colonial past and capitalist present will
destroy our chances at a healthy future. The idea of manifest destiny haunts both of these
anarchic utopias, rooted in “reckless consumption and absurd, corrupt public policy representing
our mastery over nature.” (Watkins, Writ in Water: Interview with Claire Vaye Watkins 2017) In
Watkins’ childhood home Owens Valley, Mulholland’s Department of Water and Power did drain
the lake to feed LA. She predicts it is this kind of constant striving that will drive us to a society
that repeats trauma.
The title of the novel comes from this early scene, when the protagonist’s boyfriend,
speaks of the remaining in the dregs of California like this:
““It’s just you’ve got restlessness in your blood.”
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“I don’t,” she said, but he went on.
“Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They
were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That’s why no one wants them now.”” (Watkins, Gold Fame
Citrus 2015)
When Ray is talking about the Mojavs, he’s talking about the protagonist Luz: former
child model, former propaganda tool, currently stuck in a ‘laurel-less canyon’ mansion, still
feckless, still scheming. The Mojavs are shunned all over America, evacuated into internment
camps that feel just like Manzanar. Luz is content to wait out the apocalypse in a starlet’s
mansion. Her surfer boyfriend Ray does most of the food collection, the murdering of vermin.
She is left with her “projects” like trying on the gowns in all of the closets, or stealing a baby
from a beach rave and insisting only she can take care of it.
Of course, with this abducted baby, she must light out into the desert, and so begins
Luz’s utopian motherhood journey, through the wilds of the desertified California, seeking refuge
for her child. Though the novel appears a utopia of escape, Luz and Ray’s flight with the baby
“Ig” doesn’t last long; they flee recklessly into the desert, eventually running out of gas, stalling.
When Ray abandons Luz and Ig for days in a broiling car on the desert, they are rescued by a
cult leader—enigmatic, wounded, “spiritual” Levi, leader of a tent city on the edge of the
Amargosa. Here is the novel’s reconstruction, it’s heterotopia. Levi, cult leader, is a wizard with
machinery, able to rig dune buggies with solar power. He is also a dowser, able to find water in
pure desert. Levi’s dune camp is inhabited by strange and complicated individuals: Dallas,
Levi’s past lover who has recently delivered a still-birth, who can nurse the baby Ig when Luz
arrives. Jimmer, the old timer, is a healer. Cody is able transform upturned VWs into hot
houses. When you ask Watkins who would survive in the post-apocalyptic West, she responds
that we all imagine ourselves there, it is an act of ego to imagine it. “We in fact reaffirm our
eccentricity, and it’s actually quite comforting to think that you might be a survivor of the
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apocalypse. What that means is you’ve reached the end of humanity. Like you’re the pinnacle.
Like you’re the last most important person when the reality is you just die and go to dust and the
earth will not care about you.” (Watkins, A Vivid New Novel Takes On the California Drought:
Claire Vaye Watkins Talks Gold Fame Citrus 2015)
Also like Chang-Rae Lee, Watkins explores both the eccentric individual and the
collective voice via these heterotopias. In the dune camp, there are the Girls, who speak
collectively in short sections: “We come from all over. We’re here because we want to be, our
contribution. We don’t use money, not in a five-senses form… The Rambler is not a brothel.
Think of it as a bathhouse. Think of it as a sanctuary.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015) Other
collectives exist too. One chapter is narrated by the inhabitants of the gambling town Yucca
Mountain, where the government is storing nuclear waste using unmanned machinery. They are
the embodiment of government control and corruption, witness to a bullet train daily positing
pellets of radioactive materials into a repository buried under their mountain. “Ours is a town
where tourists stop on the way somewhere else. Ours is a way station where visitors doc in the
dark and then, in the hammering sun of morning, look around them at the burnt husks of muscle
cars, at the dented trailers welded together, and say, Who lives here? They move on to the
national park, the sin city. We become a story they will tell, the freaks in the desert, the mutants
at the mountain, the wasteland.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015) Again, this is a question of
utopia as a point of view exercise. What is dystopian to tourists is home to this collective.
The strongest force of the novel, the most compelling “collective” character is the
Amargosa Dune Sea— a giant sand dune slowly moving across the American West removing
all traces of humanity. The dune is pure nature, pure destruction, it is myth and setting and
antagonist, all at once. If traditional utopian narratives, with their far-off lands and islands to be
visited, existed on the border of our understanding, the dune is that border. However terrifying
and deadly, the ever-changing desert of Watkins’ “cli-fi” or (climate fiction) is never dead, never
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empty, never lifeless, never blank. The desert blooms, it shifts. The dune is both alive with
fauna, flora and myth, and it is also a form of erasure. “From space,” she writes, “it seems a
canyon. Unhealed, yet scar-tissue white, a wound yawning latitudinal between the sluice grafts
of Los Angeles and the flaking, friable, half-buried hull of Las Vegas. A sutureless gash where
the Mojave Desert used to be.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015) The Amargosa speaks to the
wound suffered in the land, a wave of natural destruction more powerful than human
development. “Buried beneath,” she writes of the Amargosa, “Quartz country. Talc country.
Arrowhead country. Petroglyph country. Rain shadow country. Underground river country… I-
15, I-40, I-10 and all the unincorporated pit stops astride them: Zzyzx, Ludlow, Essex, Needles,
Victorville, Barstow and Baker…The eerie auroral throb of Palm Springs swimming pools, dry
but with solar lights charged to bursting and ablaze. Each of that city’s 2250 holes of golf a
tinderbox begging for flame.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015)
This above passage exemplifies the range—from pinpoint focus to wide-angle-view—
Claire Vaye Watkins employs to describe the American West. “Drought is fascinating to me,”
she explains, “because it’s a collision of human time with geologic time. We’re saying, There’s
always been water here! But geologic time knows: not so. Or we’re saying, This aquifer will
sustain us for fifteen years, and geologic time tells us, That’s nothing.” Claire Vaye Watkins says
that as a child, she obsessed over nature documentaries; she tries to mimic that way of
narrowing in and out on a particular creature, character or place adding perspective, context. “I
zoom in on the person who is getting all sandy — what would that feel like? What’d it be like to
have sex or go to the bathroom, or try to raise a kid, when you’re living by this sand dune?
When I spend a bit of time in that, I’ll come zooming back out, eager to discuss the history of the
region, or the formation of a rock which influenced the natural history of a place. The thing I’m
interested in is movement.” (Watkins, The Dizziness Of The Natural Sublime: An Interview With
Claire Vaye Watkins, Author Of Gold Fame Citrus 2015) The effect is a playful perpetual motion
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machine of a novel, the structure of which narrows around Luz and the baby, but quickly cuts to
Ray’s imprisonment in a talc mine, with only bad television and a lifelong prisoner for company.
It jumps to past theatre classes, to a list of inner thoughts of the characters in the camp, to
personal reference questionnaires, to a field guide of invented fauna.
This multilayered approach, this folding together of all kinds of text and genres, reflect
the multi-layered, plural voiced narratives of the network society. In a scene in which Luz
remembers her acting teacher telling her to analyze a character by what he does, he says, and
what others say about him, Luz’s narration snaps into an instant list of Ray’s warning signs:
“1. WHAT HE SAYS…
Drink this.
Be careful.
You’re drunk.
You’re paranoid.
You’re crazy.
You’re all right, tell me.
Babygirl, don’t get like this.
You just do your best.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015)
There is a pattern to this fracturing; the text diverges from traditional chronological
narrative in moments of great emotional strife. Just as a character gets demonstrative,
overindulgent of their feelings, the text ruptures, makes us see both that character and its
counterpoint, for context, for a sense of scope. The best example of this is after Ray’s reunion
with Luz at the desert camp, as she explains why she’s sleeping with Levi, about his special
powers, Ray hears two voices: that of Luz explaining her attraction to a cult leader, while
simultaneously hearing a Sunday morning newsperson, relaying the facts of the Amargosa
Dune. On the page, it looks like columns:
“He’s a scientist, a naturalist. But
those words are so deficient. You
know that sense we always had that
we were missing something? That
there was something fundamentally
wrong in the way we approached the natural
world? You said that, once. The Amargosa
looks barren but it’s teeming with life. He’s
the reason all these people are here…

Citizens, I come to you today from the
Mojave Desert. Behind me lies the
Amargosa Dune Sea, the only known
landmass of its kind, what geologists
call a pseudo-spontaneous phenomenon, a
superdune, a symbol of the drought that has
wrecked the American West. It has
collapsed agri-business as we know it,
sending millions of refugees, known
collectively as Mojavs, fleeing the
Southwest…“
Ray tries to listen to both of these narrators simultaneously, just as readers make sense
of the columns double meanings, conjoining phrases, the interwoven nature of truth in our
online lives. We are used to assessing, revising and critiquing our information streams as we
read—our communication is multimodal, both macro and microscopic simultaneously. In
another hybrid form, Levi’s psychiatric report appears much later in the novel, a kind of
omniscient objective document—that foretells his fate as a prisoner, a patient, a criminal. It is in
this document where we learn that Levi is in fact an arsonist, a liar, a murder. He does not
dowse for water in the desert, he highjacks Red Cross trucks and steals their supplies.
“Repeatedly denies premeditation,“ the report concludes. “Says he had no plan but pain”—says
he “just wanted them to burn.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015)
This report also points to the novel’s unhappy ending. After Luz rejects Levi and returns
to Ray, Levi takes the rejection as a reason to shove a burning two-by-four under the nose of
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the bus. He lights the sleeping Luz and Ray on fire. They beat Ray. They steal the child Ig. The
symbolism is rich: the baby is the future, the colony will raise her. As Levi provides a truck and
food and water, a trade to send Luz and Ray loose on the desert, Luz only feels, “beyond the
painful range of Ig, was the astonishing relief of quitting. Taking her rightful position in that long
line of runners and flakes. Those were her people salting mines, jumping claims, forging bond
certificates, fudging the rail route, sending dudes searching for lost gollers. Following the plow
and yellowing the news. Antsy pioneers, con artists and sooners, dowsers and gurus,
Pentecosts and Scientologists. Muscle heads, pill-poppers, pep talkers, drama queens and
commuters. Fluffers, carpet baggers, migrant pickers disappeared, entrepreneurs in never-were
garages, all those servers. She was all of them, at last. Malibu Barbie and Manzanar.” This
layering of historical and tangible and material and geographical details reflects our networked
way of building character. Online, we are everything we purchase, every place we visit, every
facebook friend, every tweet, every historical connection and contextual detail that layered
together makes a kind of pastiched online identity.
Luz is all of this, and more. She tries to ignore it, but she’s now a mother too. She can’t
not see Ig reaching for her as she turns from the tent city, back into the desert, away from the
cult and the dune and the baby she’d mothered, if only for a short time. In the novel’s final
gesture, Luz leaps from a moving jeep. Ironically, it is a flash flood that consumes Luz, in the
novel’s only rainstorm. “I’d be okay,” she revised, smiling before she slipped forever under, “if I
could just get my feet under me.” (Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus 2015) Though Ray is allowed to
survive, the earth is not so lucky. With Watkins wide-angle lens, we see that the damage is
done, could already be done today. “The book, while pretending to be about the future, is
actually about the past,” she explains. “Its gaze is over the shoulder, particularly as it applies to
the identity of people living in the American West.” (Watkins, The Dizziness Of The Natural
Sublime: An Interview With Claire Vaye Watkins, Author Of Gold Fame Citrus 2015) In this
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novel, the California scrabbling, the American striving, the human need for destruction in the
guise of development is what causes our end. Once again, our reconstructed utopia is
dystopian to the earth, the poor, the displaced, the disenfranchised. In her debut novel, Claire
Vaye Watkins simply traces the way this dystopian vision is purely of this moment—
encompassing simultaneously our past sins, our present ignorance, and our future doom.

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3C. Severance by Ling Ma (2018)

Remember New York City in 2011. It is a geography and time that is not only etched into our
memories, tangible evidence of New York in that moment can be summoned instantly from the
Internet. We can read the menus from Williamsburg’s new diners. We can watch YouTube
footage of Occupy in Zuccotti Park. We can see photos of Hurricane Irene, list the
neighborhoods that lost power, chart the subways that flooded. Severance, by Ling Ma, is a
euchronic speculative novel that borrows from that known history and blows an imagined Shen
Fever—spread by microscopic fungal spores—on top of our known map. In her novel, the
subway tunnels are never pumped out. Occupy is not a collective cultural movement flaring up
across the country; it fizzles out as occupiers contract the virus, health care is traded for
evacuation. Soon nothing is left of the movement but cluster of tents and placards reading “Eat
the Rich.” The city, the one we know, does not take the same course as our known history. In
Severance, the real dissolves into the possible, networking the past and present into an
alternative, empty, fevered future. By combining the known with the apocalyptic, Ma asks
readers how would we behave in this particular catastrophe? How would we fill our days if we
were the pinnacle of humanity, as far as we were going to get?
Candace Chen, the millennial protagonist of Severance asks herself this question daily,
and she decides, in light of Shen Fever, in light of her recent break-up and her unplanned
pregnancy, she will continue to work. She manages a global production chain of bibles,
production that begins in Shenzhen, China and ends in the homes of millions upon millions
around the world. First Candace reads internet rumors of the fever, then she sees her first
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“fevered” person, an old lady who Candace catches repeating her daily routine with a sick
vengeance, slowly rotting, starving herself as she repeatedly waters and waters her drowned
plants. Soon, the fevered are everywhere. They are officemates, clicking and clicking through
email. They are shop girls folding sweatshirt after sweatshirt, trapped in a purgatory of Juicy
Couture, doomed to perform retail tasks until they collapse and die. Around her, New York of
2011 thins. Of the final survivors in her office, her parents dead, her boyfriend gone, Chen takes
a ‘severance’ deal in which she must maintain operations of her publication company until the
virus ‘runs its course.’ Her world gets smaller, transportation disappears. She is soon the last
remaining person in her office building, itself a trap of stalled elevators and locking doors. When
Candace realizes she is the last occupant of midtown, of Manhattan, of all of New York, she
steals a yellow cab and launches her utopian journey into the wilds of post-apocalyptic, empty,
fevered America.
This action, however, does not occur chronologically. Severance is a “Translit” novel; we
hop around the “break,” experiencing the beginning, the middle and aftermath all at once. There
are nostalgic pre-fever scenes and anarchic dystopia post-Shen Fever scenes, all cut together.
These before-and-afters are fractured and then layered in the novel into a kind of collage. There
are scenes of the “fevered,” falling victim to lizard-brain routine, setting the table or washing the
car until they fall unconscious and die. There are scenes from a near-empty New York City.
There are scenes driven by the city’s last taxi driver, eating from the last coffee cart. Amid this
slow erosion of normalcy, the scenes set in pre-fevered 2011 seem like a kind of utopia, in
which we throw 80s parties and have affairs with artists and take jobs we barely want and go on
business trips to Hong Kong.
Other layers of the time-pastiche include Candace’s time with a roving group of
survivors, who scour the remaining stores and houses for “inventory” they hoard for their future
at “the facility.” In this anarchistic dystopia, this group, guided by their domineering leader Bob,
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attempts a kind of reconstruction project—they will hoard as much “inventory” as they can from
stores and fevered houses and make their way in a caravan to “the facility,” a shopping mall
Bob has invested in for just such emergencies. In these narrative sections, Ma falls into that
network society tendency to narrate using a collective point of view. The book opens with a
description of how the group manages in their early days together, wandering the countryside,
raiding homes and stores and gas stations, murdering the remaining fevered:
“We Googled maslow’s pyramid to see how many of the need levels we could
already fulfill. The first two. We Googled 2011 fever survivors, hoping to find
others like us, and when all we found were the same outdated, inconclusive
news articles, we Googled 7 stages grief to track our emotional progress. We
were at Anger, the slower among us lagging behind at Denial. We Googled is
there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.
In the twelve rings it took for us to hang up, we held our breaths for someone
else, some stranger’s voice confirming that we weren’t the only ones living,
despite Bob’s adamant assertions. There was no answer.” (Ma 2018)
By alternating between the first-person singular and the first person plural “we,” Ma
demonstrates how easily an individual comes to identify as part of a collective and how hard it is
to have that group fall apart. By uniting with Bob’s group, she is investing in the future of
humanity, even if the group leader is a control freak and the other group members have limited
skills. They often muse together on the Internet as a form of “collective memory.” Whenever the
text returns to the “we” point of view, the tone gets increasingly dire, resolved, a kind of weary
retrospective narration we are all part of.
Shen Fever, this novel seems to say, is just another way to connect us. It represents the
ubiquity of our technology, of our supply chain, on the breadth of capitalist greed and the
impossibility of denying its touch on your life. Shen Fever originated in Shenzhen, China, the
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global capital of electronics manufacturing. Just as we are all connected, the virus seems to
say, we are all infected. The Shen Fever also reflects this retrospection. There is something
about remembering, about nostalgia, that triggers the fever in people. When Ashley returns to
her childhood home, she quickly becomes fevered, trapped in a fanatical pattern of trying on the
dresses from her teenage closet. Bob, Candace’s jailer, eventually succumbs to the virus while
strolling his childhood mall’s corridors at night, smelling familiar smells, pained by nostalgia.
However, the past traps Candace too—her immigration to the US, her parents’ deaths. She
narrates this way: “Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the
fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the
fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay,
unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like (the fevered) continue in an infinite loop. We drive,
we sleep, we drive some more.” (Ma 2018)
The most poignant way the Candace Chen remembers the city and its former life is by
posting her photographs to her blog: NY Ghost. When she stalks the city, often for hours a day,
she takes pictures of New York for survivors, for anyone who is still alive and who cares about
its flooded subway tunnels, the “ghetto palms” now sprouting from boulevards, the deer
returning to feast on the Greenline’s greenery. This project points to the work of Nan Goldin—
who’s work Candace peruses early in the text—who photographed the HIV epidemic in the
1980s, another era in which New York was being destroyed by a virus. Like the NY Ghost, Nan
Goldin photographed AIDS victims being kissed by their loved ones, dancing in clubs, dressing
in drag— the last trappings of their utopian world before their dystopian break. Goldin’s work
refracts the AIDS virus into equal parts pleasure and pain, like NY Ghost refracts the Shen
Virus, reflecting on the past while looking to a bleak future. There is a kind of networking in her
blog—later when she is discovered by Bob’s group, she learns they have all been checking NY
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Ghost for updates, until that too went dead. They’d known Candace, they’d collectivized online,
before they’d known her in real life.
The translit novel, then, becomes a version of NY Ghost. It is a kind of infinite loop of
memory, both the long and short term kind. There is her time in the facility, really a shopping
mall, after Bob murders the fevered Ashley and her friend Janelle, then imprisons Candace in
the facility’s Sephora store. Interspersed are memories of affairs, with a rich older man who
secures her job, of the “art girls” at work with their coltish bodies and impeccable taste. Saddest
are the memories of her boyfriend, and baby-daddy Daniel, a hipster frustrated by the repeating
capitalist patterns of gentrification and douche-baggery of New York City. As he leaves her, pre-
fever, he justifies his departure as his disgust with the future: “In a timorous voice, he said he
could see clearly now, could see the future. The future is more exponentially exploding rents.
The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the
global wealthy elite…The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums. Something
something Rousseau something. Manhattan in sinking.” (Ma 2018) In this novel, the future we
now know occurred never materializes in this narrative present. Each of these sections serves
as a kind of micro-fiction, rich with dramatic irony, as the possible future and real past are
layered in a collage of Candace’s personal apocalypse.
In particular, Candace’s memories of her family’s immigration from China mirror the
before-the-break vs the aftermath structure of this apocalyptic novel. Her parents’ immigration
story—tracing her mother’s rich family life in Fuzhou to her isolation in Salt Lake City—is an
exercise in calamitous “severance,” in disconnection. After migrating to the US, her mother
cannot pick up the language, she hoards useful items, she is religious about routine: cooking
routines, moisturizing routines, Candace’s study routines. As such, Candace’s memories of her
parents serve as a kind of survival mechanism. She depends on routines to survive in a
dwindling city alone when everyone else seems to have someone to cling to. Upon learning the
90
ritual of burning small offerings for dead ancestors, burns images of opulent clothing, cars and
food for her parents in the afterlife, so they can experience maximum American comfort in
death. In her lowest point, as a prisoner in the mall, feeling the baby move and fearing for its
future, she sees her dead mother, a new version of her, one who speaks perfect English. It is
her mother who coaches her on how to escape Bob, how to flee the mall. “May you live long
enough to see what your children think of you,” her mother quips when Candace critiques her
mother’s methods. But it is her mother’s methods that save her—only in retrospect does
Candace understand how her immigrant parents taught her to survive in their dystopian version
of America.
In one vivid memory, Candace recalls her childhood in China, buried deep in the
architecture of her identity. “When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It
is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement
tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it
precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Felling were a sound, it would be early/mid-
nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny
alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter,
of crawling inside an undressed, unstaunched wouldn’t that has never been cauterized.” (Ma
2018, 98) Later, when Candace returns to Asia for her production job, she cannot summon that
same feeling. Instead, she experiences a hybridity that is simultaneously both cultures and no
culture at all: “I paced up and down the tidy aisles, stocked with American products in Asian
flavors. Squid-flavored potato chips. Cherry-blossom Kit Kats. From among the orderly rows of
lychee juice cans and soy-milk cartons and neon aloe vera juice bottles with floating pulp, I
selected a Pepsi. Thank you, come again, the cashier deadpanned in English.” (Ma 2018, 103)
As critic Claire Co writes in The Raised Brow: “The act of severance is never clean. It’s a world-
ending act; a traumatic excision of familiar connections and deep-rooted ways of life. It leaves
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wounds that refuse to cauterize, sprouting new flesh that melds grotesquely with the old.” (Co
2018) Just as these two cultures—the old and the new, the West and the East—co-exist in our
globalized production stream and our fusion of cultural signifiers, both societies exist
simultaneously inside of Candace. In this way, the past and present exist inside her
simultaneously too, constantly informing and refracting one another in her experience and in her
narration.
“The internet is the flattening of time,” Bob tells Candace. “It is the place where the past
and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally because the present calcifies into
the past, even now, as we speak.” For Bob, who is all for eliminating the past and pretending
they are “selected” to guide the future, wants to control his followers access to time. He destroys
iPhones, he imprisons Candace when he discovers she is pregnant, like she is their only living
chance. But the past will not be erased, even as the internet disappears, as the living dwindle to
the very few. Ling Ma’s language speaks to this simultaneous time by experimenting with verb
tense, shifting into an eerie continuous version of present tense when she’s locked in the facility.
“Day passes into night,” she narrates near the end of the novel from her Sephora bed. “It gets
dark early in the winter. The skylight above us grows dim… the entire mall is once again
submerged in darkness so complete and absolute. It is a primitive darkness. It has always been
here, after all the city lights have gone out, carrying its own time with the sun. And as I lie here
in a vacuum, it feels like a miracle I exist at all. And I realist that, given the odds, with New York
wiped out, it is indeed a miracle I am still here. I am alive, I think to myself, and my baby is
alive.” (Ma 2018)
Again, the hopes of the future fall on this pregnant mother—hapless, unsure, burdened
and blessed by her coming maternity. Like all new mothers, she feels the weight of the past—of
legacy, of genetics, of her own childhood and the childhoods of her parents. She thinks often of
the severed world. She thinks of the possibilities. In this way, Ling Ma explores her version of
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reconstructive utopia inside her own body. Like Watkins, like Lee, Ma sends her protagonist into
the wilds of the anarchistic dystopia alone, without support, driving into the anarchistic
landscape without much hope for survival. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city,” she
writes to finish the book. “I get out and start walking.”
There is something so fatalistic, so defeatist, about these mothers venturing off into the
unknown without a hope in hell. How will they deliver these babies? How will they survive the
first days, collect clean water, food, find shelter? What does it say about our futuristic
projections, that the female figure cannot depend on men, on society, on current conditions—
That we cannot, as a society, care for future generations? Will Candace lean on her parents’
wisdom? Will she meet up with other survivors? It seems unlikely. It seems impossible. But then
again, her survival to this point is impossible, the future, like the past, is rolling in an infinite loop.
Maybe the author is telling us that this pattern will repeat itself. We will grow until we cannot,
and then we will recede. We will consume only until we cannot consume any more. Maybe the
only person equipped for the severance between the old intact world and new dystopian one is
the new mother—adept at adaptation, caregiver and translator and interlocutor for both
generations past and future.
“Still, I keep pressing on,” Candace narrates. Gone is the collective. Gone is civilization.
Gone is the group. Gone is her family. And yet, in light of the network, the flattening of time, they
exist and they don’t, she is alone and she is with them. The past and future already exist for
Candace. She must simply endure the present, until the future arrives.

93
In Conclusion

Lately, we’ve been looking for utopia. In 2018, we left Los Angeles with our two daughters, four
and one, and returned to Vancouver BC. We were full of hope. We wondered at what free
health care would look like, good schools, gun control, a city free of freeways, full of family and
friends living in ‘the greenest city in the world.’ What we discovered: Yes, Vancouver uses
carbon-free hydro power, public transportation, bike networks and tyrannical recycling.
Nevertheless, Vancouver’s soil is as blood-soaked and oil-soaked as any across North America.
The economy is based on mining, shipping oil and lumber and other natural resources away in
tankers. The territory is unceded, the city is on stolen land. No proper treaty was signed with the
xʷməθkʷəy
̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx ̱ wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl
̓ ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh)
peoples, their communities remain the poorest of those peppered across the city. To maintain
control of the “Greenest City in the World” or the “Safest major city in Canada,” the City of
Vancouver spends 285 million dollars on policing—22% of the city’s annual budget and twice
the budget for fire and rescue services. (Pablo 2017) In Vancouver, money matters. By the time
we arrived here with our daughters, most of our friends had moved to the outskirts. The average
home price is 1.1 million dollars, compared to the rest of Canada’s $455k. Meanwhile, we are
on camera nearly everywhere we go. We are being watched, presumably for our safety. And
indeed, in Vancouver, some of us are particularly safe: the wealthy, the white. This city must be
utopia to someone.
To respond to this dichotomy, this archistic utopia we now occupy, I wrote the first draft
of The Futurists between 2014 and 2015, while pregnant with my first daughter. The novel,
which incorporates both utopian and dystopian elements both in Canada and the American
94
West, tests the moment of fissure between my daughter’s present and her possible futures. The
title The Futurists is borrowed from the 1920s Italian art movement fueled by youth, violence
and technology rebelling against tyrannical governance. This novel tries to echo that spirit of
revolt over a culture of surveillance and pervasive connectivity.
In doing so, I experiment with ideas of escape and reconstruction in a future both here in
Canada and in the US. In building this speculative fiction, the settings in this novel are
particularly important when hashing out these ideas. The euchronia is set thirty years in the
future, and begins in our “most progressive” city Vancouver, BC. Four teachers, Eavan, Samuel,
Meg and Parker, open the novel in a high-end boarding school—a school that is branded as a
‘child’s utopia,’ but in reality is an oppressively high-performing, digitized, regimented learning
environment. Like all point of view exercises, Evergreen is a utopia for someone: parents,
administrators, the Headmaster Dr. Mike. And yet students live in a perpetual state of anxiety,
required to pop fizzers and beta-blockers to control nerves, living and studying under ‘peeps,’ or
surveillance cameras and microphones, and even submitting bodily functions to be monitored
by vita-bands. The oppressive force behind this system are the well-meaning ‘proxy parents’,
who control the temperature of the school from afar by demanding constant updates on the
children’s grades and live-stream footage from every class or meal or evening activity.
The four protagonists each experience this high-tech environment differently. Eavan, the
youngest and most apprehensive of the teachers, adheres to the oppressive system, starves
away her anxiety and ingests drugs as a way of controlling her moods. Meg, older and bougie-
bohemian, attempts a kind of super-natural approach, initiating small acts of rebellion and
pressuring the others to flee, while Parker manages his technocratic world by hacking his way
through the digital maelstrom. Samuel, the most privileged, tries to ignore the indignities of his
day job by pursuing a rule-less, sexually deviant art world by night. Still, in a time of
95
unprecedented isolation and alienation from family and friends, these characters cling to one
another. In this high-tech society, loneliness pervades.
The opening chapter ends in an emergency at the school, after which these four
characters unite to travel across the border into a more militarized, socially segregated United
States. Upon arrival, they join an intentional community, a reconstructed utopia: Rapture,
Arizona. Run by a leaders Sonia and Hollings, the residents of Rapture craft for themselves a
lifestyle free from the burden of the digital footprint, open to the mystery of the land, and fueled
by physical labor and interconnectivity. The teachers are initially drawn to Rapture as an
educational experiment—its children are separated from parents at age five to live alone in
Grom City. There, they are responsible for their own nutrition, cleanliness, and societal order.
Only with gentle coaxing and cooperation are teachers meant to deliver a child-centric
education, a concept particularly attractive to the over-policed teachers.
Of course, Grom City is utopian to some, dystopian to others. It is my hope, with this
text, to explore the strain of being an authority figure—even just a teacher—who is
simultaneously an emblem of power to the children and a tool of a larger control platform. I also
process some of the cultural pressures placed on parents and children in the present digital age
in order to examine how and why we accept such oppressive surveillance in the name of
protection and well-being. I have placed this narrative in the near future to better analyze our
present tendency toward unmitigated surveillance of our children, our bodies, our cities and our
lifestyles. Eavan, Parker, Meg and Samuel represent our children’s generation—individuals who
have lived an entire lifetime with a digital footprint made public and accessible for consumption,
manipulation, and capitalization. By analyzing this second layer of societal surveillance, that of
the online sphere, this novel investigates the result of this pressure on individuals, how we
embrace, manipulate or reject our online personas.
Like the speculative fiction I discuss in this dissertation, I’m also concerned with
96
emergency as a backdrop, how we live in a moment of real and manufactured crisis, and how
we behave in more impulsive, often dangerous ways in times of strife. Lurking behind the plot,
this futuristic society is destabilized by hackers systematically erasing our connectivity.
Blackouts are prevalent, often caused by cyber-attacks, which in turn results in higher levels of
surveillance imposed on the general population. In the final chapters, Parker is drawn to this
hacker community, The Futurists, while the rest of the group is flung to different areas of society
at the moment emergency strikes: on the road, the off-the-grid community, and a hospital room.
Each character, relegated to different strata of society, are afforded different means to navigate
the ensuing chaos. Organically, themes of escape and reconstruction surface as these
characters flee one heterotopian space for another, only to discover the latent dystopia beneath.
Likewise, the traditional traveler narrative was helpful here, as each character experiences the
‘strange new world’ differently, and reports back according to their own bias and flaws.
Like other contemporary speculative writers, I also play with the collective voice,
experimenting with the ways cooperatives rise up from our networked society. In this case, the
ubiquity of “fön” technology results in a kind of elastic omniscience. The Futurists may hack our
föns, they may watch the characters using peeps all over the setting, and they may narrate
together in a kind of chorus. I’m also curious about simultaneity, and the ways these storylines
can be told at the same time, causing breaks in the network, moments when we can’t know
everything that occurs. These narrators may see everything, they cannot necessarily know
everything.
It is my hope to explore intersections between form and content, just as I hope to look at
the intersection of utopia and dystopia in speculative fiction. These characters, each managing
the before and after in unique ways, represent more than just type. I hope to embody the real
fear and anxiety of living under oppressive surveillance, and the ways in which digital
connectivity both ensure and eliminate our ability to really connect. By exploring multiple
97
characters through an elastic point of view, I hope to explore both the universal and unique
ways we encounter oppressive forces. By setting this narrative thirty years from now, I hope to
expand on our present, to speculate on a possible, potential truth.
This novel is my response to the work of Manuel Castells, of Chang-Rae Lee, of Claire
Vaye Watkins and of Ling Ma. I too want to experiment with the wild, uncolonized, uncontrolled
‘networked’ literature that has emerged organically from internet technology. I too believe there
is power in our plurality, in collectivizing idiosyncratic voices. I too want explore utopia as a point
of view exercise, a question of who is experiencing that “utopia” and who is seeing it as a
dystopian reality. Can networking be a kind of utopia? Can our collectivization feel utopian, if
only in fleeting moments? In one of the final gestures of the novel, the Futurists turn off the
peeps around Grom City, one by one, erasing any trace of the events narrated there. And yet,
as they turn them off, they close their own eyes. As successively turn off the peeps, they
recognize that disconnection leads to isolation. In the end, if they can’t watch, then they are
alone.
It is true, literature is ruthless. In times of surveillance, oppression, pervasive
connectivity, literature delves into our society’s anxieties and finds conflict, story. Grom City is
not utopia. Neither is Evergreen. Neither is the Futurists lodge at the now snowless ski resort.
Nor is it utopia to be connected to everyone but ultimately alone. My pregnant protagonist may
not keep her baby. But she doesn’t walk off into the anarchic dystopian setting alone. She
leaves with her collective, her friends, her people.
These two dissertation projects seek not only to name our digital-age anxieties but
extrapolate from them. I want to explore the Network Society’s version of utopia, and also
employ it. Our utopian stories are more powerful than ever in light of our pervasive connectivity,
our collectivization, our democratization of storytelling. From collective communities speaking
together, to layering of hybrid forms, to playing with utopia as a point of view, as context, it is my
98
hope that both this fiction and nonfiction is a reflection of our network society: interconnected,
flexible and free.

99
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The
Futurists

A Novel

107

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.

Manifesto of Futurism
Le Figaro, 1909

108
1:

We are not starved. We dine regularly, always to the tune of spoon on dish, the clatter of cutlery
on trays. The little crystal bowls circulate with dessert and tea and mineral waters and we can
always have seconds, thirds if we want. The treats melt in our mouths and we feel a warm
sugary surge afterward. Our levels are monitored by the vitabands so we don’t have to worry,
they will pulse or vibrate or light up RED if we get too much sodium or sugar, too many calories,
too much fat. They will always stop us from going too far.

109
We appreciate the large natural areas visible from every window; we can always catch a
glimpse of that green. Unlike our home countries, the mountains here are still dark with swaths
of forest and the ground is blanketed by ferns and the trees drip. It rains every day in winter. In
the summer, we’ve been told, the sun stretches through the leaves and the ground steams and
the sky remains cloudless for days at a time. But we never see the summer here. They ship us
home on international flights. We return to cityscapes, to large apartments, to parents and
nannies and baby sisters. We take shopping trips and visit pediatricians and we send thousands
of VRs and test questions to our classmates all over the world. The summer is the only part of
the year we miss. And we do miss it, because if you’re in a place for ten months a year, maybe
that’s home.

We wouldn’t describe our quarters here as luxurious or elysian, but the art and furnishings are
quality. The monitors are new-tech. The floors are temperature controlled. They launder our
bedsheets every four nights and the smell is almost edible: vanilla and sweet lavender. Each
dorm’s windows stretch from floor to ceiling and can open several inches. Some of us prop our
windows ajar all day and all night and the rain splatters in and leaves our pillows sodden. Our
minders allow us this and many other little freedoms: we may choose our meals from the buffet,
we may read anything— there’s virtually no censorship—and we can wear our föns all night, as
long as we are up by second buzzer and we are visibly attentive in class.

Our nighttime fears are few. Of course, we concern ourselves with the ticks, they’re always a
possible threat. They occupy the tall grasses and get rubbed off on our short pants or socks or
cuffs. Even manicured areas like the south lawn are restricted because of the ticks. When the
sun twinkles off the blades of grass, we stare through the windows and through the screens and
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we sometimes think we can see them crawling up to ankle-height. The disease they carry could
paralyze us. We wonder, is that why it’s called a palsy?

The teachers clarify these topics. And they’re frank. Unlike the minders, the teachers will
discuss things. They teach us communications, science and code. And after class, we can ask
them anything so we inquire, without prying: How can we grow up to be excellent? When did
you stop taking tests? Are there parts of the city where there are no ticks? Kidnappers? Peeps?
Sidewalk music? Are there wooded areas that are free for roaming? What is your profile name?
How can we find you?

We decorate. We populate our rooms with stuffies and artwork and our own smoothie pods. We
share an excellent signal and our föns are unrestricted, so we can talk to our parents or sisters
and brothers or waste the whole night with our heads in a VR pretending we’re in other lands.
We often create VRs of our own to post. We play with interactive toys of all varieties, but
everything employs a hot microphone just waiting for a voice command, so we must be really
careful. For example, we could just say TURN ON in a random sentence and all the stuffies in
the room could power up and start speaking, things programmed by the administration like
encouragements or surprise test questions. And they store the recorded data on the cloud, so
there is the chance that someone could hear us. There is the chance the devices record what
we say.

On flights home, those are moments when no peep looms over us, so these are the best times.
Peeps surveil the plane and the airports and sky bridges. But it’s not like our coding class live-
streamed to our parents’ föns so they can count exactly how many times we raise our hands. Or
when we’re practicing for showcase, so they can ensure our voices are on key. Or when they
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monitor our table manners, or observe our debates, to ensure our hands don’t fidget as we
argue. Our parents love peeping Test Day, our backs hunched over our tablets. They love
watching our brains work. When the results tabulate, they like to know precisely where we place
on the spectrum, subject by subject, skill by skill—those are their best times. Our numbers
always indicate success.

We imagine even more best times. For example, playing hide and seek in the woods. Or tag. Or
kick the can. Or king of the castle. So we implore the teachers, can’t we ever go outside? They
agree, the situation is so difficult. All that green space out the windows and we remain trapped
in the hallways, in the stairwells, the classrooms, the gym. Between buildings, we can walk
briskly down the secured paths. We can always jog on the FastTrax in our dorms or stretch in
the studios. Or, when the blackouts occur, if the timing is perfect and we can locate a nearby
exit, we can slip outdoors and duck around corners and sprint across the tick-infested fields, so
fast that the minders cannot catch us and the mics cannot record us and the peeps cannot film
us and send the VRs to the cloud. And the best part? The teachers watch, but they do nothing
to stop us. You see, underneath, they want us to run.

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Eavan

Very late that night, Teacher Eavan and Teacher Samuel and Teacher Parker and Teacher Meg
will watch the footage, the VR that has since been shared and clicked and commented on tens of
thousands of times.
How Eavan runs headlong across the school grounds clutching June’s twitching body,
just as the first of the school’s buses lurches down the lane. How those little terror-stricken
groms watch through the smeared bus windows as Eavan sprints by. How they all see, cradled
in Eavan’s arms, the convulsing child.
The peeps do not catch the moment a parent in Saudi Arabia or Singapore checks their
livestream, when someone correctly infers that an emergency has occurred. They cannot see the
alert go out, newsfeeds and comment boards flashing with wild speculation: Whose child fell
ill? What is being done? The parents don’t have to speculate for long, they simply tune in to the
peeps— those hundreds of peeps placed in every high-traffic area around campus, surveilling
every corner of Evergreen Prep.
When the ambulance-drone arrives, it appears with its sirens on full, knifing through the
still afternoon. In the nucleus of the emergency, Eavan receives the medical gear from the
drone—which delivers care so much faster than a vehicle would—but for over a minute she
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holds the meters of tubing attached to the stomach pump and she stares at it. Finally, the drone
automatically starts the VR that informs her how to perform the procedure, but she can’t quite
begin. She is still holding the hand of little June, whose face is obscured from the peeps but
whose twitching body and dangling legs make a macabre tableau on the screens of those
parents all over the world. The VR starts again and again, but it isn’t until Dr. Mike runs to her
with the school nurse, who opens the drone’s medical gear and expertly inserts an IV into
June’s now blue-tinted wrist, the spasms stop. The nurse threads a tube down June’s throat and
pumps the child’s stomach, just as the VR prescribes. Eavan can see many pills suspended in a
runny puddle of bile slurped into a transparent bag.
There are only a few seconds left for her to hold the grom. The nurse uses both strong
arms to scoop her into the school’s vehicle. Dr. Mike taps the nurse to accompany little June to
the hospital, actually standing in front of Eavan, obscuring her view. Eavan is left to watch as
the van rolls away, proceeded by the ambulance drone—broadcasting their urgency in bold red
lights. This is how the VR ends: with Teacher Eavan staring off into the woods.
It probably doesn’t occur to her until Dr. Mike stands before her with an open hand,
until she removes the fön from her face and gives it to him—she has filmed the whole thing.

There is no peep watching that morning, when Eavan wakes to birds. After her mind clicks on
but before she opens her eyes, she tries to listen to the whistling, the flitting around of real
sound.
Her first formed thought: Blackout. The people-stacker is usually alive with tech, but
today she hears no pinging hallway music, no yoga VRs, no smoothie pods set to grind-and-go.
She tastes tinny sleeping pills, grey light—all normal. The chemicals in her bloodstream usually
twang her awake after a certain number of hours, which combined with the vibrating alarm and
the pleasant clamor of the people-stacker means she never sleeps too long. But today, no
vibrating alarm, no music. Instead of clamor, birds.
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Her second thought: Test Day. She mouths the words, then says them out loud. This is
the thought that should have woken her; the blackout is secondary, sketchy. Test Day means
she will put on her Test Day suit and she will spend her next eight hours calming nerves. She
will supervise breakfast, then showcase and then five hours of grueling question-answer in the
Testing Theatre. But a blackout means everything linked to the cloud is cut off—no peeps, no
föns, possibly no test. In the people-stacker it means no heat, no lights. Maybe someone is stuck
in an elevator, halted mid-tower, possibly trapped inside?
Eavan fakes sleep for no one. She listens to the twitter, the quiet that is not quiet. On her
bedside: disinfectant mouthwash, caffeine kick-starters and anti-anxiety fizzers in their sleek
little dispenser. Her pretty white and black mouse clock is the battery kind that still works
through the blackout, so she knows it is 6:47am. The mouse’s eyelashes still batt, her eyes wide
and seeing.
Out her tall windows, the twin people-stackers are concrete, unlit, grey. The windows
mirror her own tower so it’s impossible to see if there’s anyone over there. Rain washes
everything dark. Beyond the campus walls, North Vancouver’s coastal forest blankets the
nearby mountains. They built Evergreen International Preparatory Academy on the very edge
of the development permit. It was an incentive for the students to live just-that close to nature—
but Eavan is staff and staff is relegated to the interior view. She likes the room. Her only
complaint, a wasps’ nest concealed somewhere in the dormers, how once a week, a single wasp
wiggles its way in. She waits until they seek escape, buzzing against the fresh air seeping in
through the screen and then slams the window shut, trapping the creatures under the glass. It’s
a pitiful thing, watching them starve to death, over and over. Today, the husks of their bodies
shiver in the wind.
Next door, someone coughs, a thing she wouldn’t usually hear over the usual newsfeeds
and NRG machines. But coughing, air trapped in another human throat—that is strange,
singular. At least, Eavan thinks, I’m not alone.
©
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Right away, as soon as she wakes, Eavan likes to put her fön on her face. Her new model is still
pleasing to her, like cat-eye glasses with elegant buttons on each arm. It fits snugly on her nose,
then scans her retinas and her pupils snap open to its flashing light. She doesn’t have to readjust
the bone conduction earpiece every time, she just toggles the button at her temple.
The morning of the blackout, the feed is blank, blank, nothing. Eavan usually likes
stories on current friends first, then old friends, then school news, then newsy news. She admits
she veers toward the light stuff, top-ten lists or DIYs for tempeh fries, plug-in perms. She voices
a few quick texts to cache until she finds a connection, but they come out clumsy:
Cached: 7:03am
Blackout Bitches.
Cached: 7:03am
I can actly hear birds
Cached: 7:04am
WHO IS WITH ME?
She records the sound of birds to post later, then erases it, then re-records. In the quiet,
the fön keeps blaring nothingness, everything on pause without a connection. She thinks up a
status update, types it into the void:
Never seen campus SO PEACEFUL! ©mindful ©quiet ©fonsoff
She removes the fön. She’s not obsessed, it’s just that Eavan doesn’t mind the interface:
the pull-down menu on her left lens, the maps and interactives on the right. Put both together
and you’ve got a VR, which her new model streams particularly well. She can see through it
and at it simultaneously and she can be discreet about her toggling. Eavan doesn’t live with her
finger on the buttons.
At first, when wearable föns came to market, most of her friends rejected the idea
because who trusts a continuously streaming camera? Who could be secretly filming, manning
a hot mic or peep? Fights erupted on the subway, at parties and schools. But that anxiety
disappeared after the riots, when everything was filmed and the instigators were fingered and
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everyone saw the upside potential. Employees and politicians and cops and doctors and
teachers and nannies would perform better under peeps. They would be accountable for their
actions, liable. Lives, saved. Every incident recorded from multiple angles. Soon enough, the
föns were ubiquitous and Eavan couldn’t be the only one bare-faced and out of it. Plus, most
companies offered them to employees as a perk. She would never afford this latest model, so
she wears the school-issued fön appreciatively. She posts several daily VRs of the grounds,
paired with affirmative captions. Some have been featured in marketing materials, a small
source of pride for Eavan, a taste of virality.
On the school grounds below, a few keener groms begin filing down the pathways—
clusters and pairs and some alone, drifting toward the cafeteria. Their faces—bare of föns—are
younger, dewy. Their hands dangle awkwardly beside their lanky teenage bodies, nothing to
toggle. On the window, Eavan finger-traces their web of trails through the green. She calculates
her walk up the leafy lane to the main building, how to aim her face just so. She knows that
beneath the second lamppost and the fifth are peeps, buried in the foliage are highly sensitive
mics. Usually, under the tinned sidewalk music, she can hear the electric fence around the
campus perimeter, the whir of its wires just beyond the veil of green.
She imagines posting:
©fences off! Run for your lives!
But of course, she never would.

In her head, she runs a test. Her Test Day will be full of them. The oral section comes after the
written section, after multiple choice. The groms stand at her desk one at a time and they
perform an answer for her, in response to a canned question she reads from a tablet then places
in front of them. Evergreen curriculum dictates they respond according to a certain structure, an
organizational principal she has taught them to repeat. She is the debate teacher, she likes to
build arguments, she likes to see the groms build them for themselves. They can find evidence.
Thanks to her, they can question the dominant narrative. But they know how to taper it down,
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whittle their ideas into a four-sentence pitch. They discuss issues that are not pressing—school
uniforms, proportional representation. But she also gets them to look at Evergreen closely:
groms who have never taken the city bus, who have never cooked themselves dinner and put
themselves to bed, who have never done a degrading, repetitive task for money. Try to see
privilege, she says, and they try. But they are so good at argument-counter-argument, they
convince her that doing an oral test is its own kind of degrading—cramming four sentence
ideas together in front of your teacher, your peers, the peeps. She agrees, to a point. Groms are
very good at explaining why being a grom is so hard.

Her feet and hands turn clammy in the unheated room. Outside, there is a shuffle down the
carpeted hall, footsteps. A piece of actual paper slips under her door like a bottled message
from another century.
Message from Dr. Mike:
Life goes on here at Evergreen despite the chaos outside.
Test Day will engage as planned.
Thank you.
Eavan nods to no one. She has a near-perfect attendance record, no sick days, no early
departures. Dr. Mike has publicly praised her twice for this performance. Still, there is
something about the human-delivered note that sends Eavan’s vitaband into vibrate at her
wrist. Low blood sugar, racing heartbeat. She has to shower, she has to steam her Test Day suit,
she has to brush teeth and hair. She has to prepare for that ever-important set of tasks
associated with the Test: in particular, her pep talk, the one she’d stayed up late practicing and
rewriting, which will be broadcast to the parents in Taipei and Caracas and Los Angeles and
Copenhagen, which she must deliver to her homeroom at exactly 8:30am. But she cannot move.
She cannot drop the paper and go. The paper shivers in her hand, as she shivers, standing there
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half-dressed, her breath coming in ragged and weird. At her wrist, her vitaband numbers flash
at her in red.

Many times a day, she tries. She presses her cheek against the window and pauses there for at
least thirty seconds, attempting to breathe it off. She practices some mindfulness, breathing into
her belly and humming through the bones in her face. When that doesn’t calm her she paces to
the bathroom and splashes her hands around in the unheated water. The mirror is no help, she’s
never thin enough, not striking. All Eavan can see is the dirty blonde hair at her roots, the
expensive highlights growing out. Her chin and nose are blotchy. Her lips too narrow, her
forehead a too wide. She smears concealer—better. Bronzer—a marginal improvement.
She tries not to think about it, but that doesn’t stop her eyes from slipping back to her
bedside table once, twice. Her purse. Her medicine cabinet. The floor is so cold, her feet almost
hurt as she steps back toward the bedside table, toward the bathroom, to reach for her chems as
if apologizing. Her mind can only fit around a fizzer. Then her mouth fills with that weird
salivation, just as the dispenser nestles perfectly in her palm, as the pill pops out between her
fingers. A second more and the fizzer is under her tongue.
The chemical melt sends waves of calm through her bloodstream. Her eyes glaze. Her
vitaband numbers lower, visibly.
Then she just goes: she drops gel into both eyes and rinses her mouth and sprays out her
hair and smudges makeup over her nose and chin and buttons up her Test Day suit and then
floats down the many flights of the people-stacker, out the service door and into the grey, the
look on her face broadcasting to the students and teachers and peeps: this is exactly where I
want to be.

“Happy Test Day bitches,” Samuel says out the side of his mouth as he plunks into his seat, late,
all leather jacket over his Test Day suit, both pulled over his laser tattoos. Eavan tries not to look
at his wrists, his expensive watch.
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In the cafeteria, the vibe is metallic. Whenever Eavan whooshes through the auto-doors,
she is reminded how the glassed-in dining area had pleased her on her first campus visit, with
its colanders of nutritionally balanced food, the many-forked place settings, the greens
hydroponically budding up the walls. Everything at Evergreen still feels minty and expensive.
Today, she’s poking at a plate of imitation salmon on toast, sipping keto-coffee with MCT oil
and grassfed butter. She wishes it all didn’t taste like panic.
“Rumpled today, I like,” Samuel says, his eyes raking over her wrinkled slacks and
blazer, her face, her hair. She wonders if he notices her thrifted blouse, her hand-sewn buttons.
Sitting at her staff table, with Teacher Samuel, the lusted-after, is Teacher Meg: her face free of
makeup, her test day suit tailored in pure organic wool. At the buffet is Teacher Parker,
confidant, fellow friend on fizzers. It is only 7:43am, but Eavan is already tracking her friends,
trying to flirt, poking her breakfast, reading over her pep talk notes and attempting to appear
calm while watching three hundred students and thirteen staff and administration clinking
dishes and slurping NRG drinks around her.
The groms nod politely as they pass by, each of them murmuring “Good morning
Teachers,” as they have been trained to do—the same way they greet their housekeepers and
nannies and night-nurses at home. Usually, the groms keep one eye on the peeps, one on them.
But today, in blackout, they speak more freely. They touch each other on the arms, each other’s
faces. In a swoop, Samuel leans in for a mouthful of Eavan’s salmon toast, wrapping his lips
around her fingers. Eavan rolls her eyes, but her fingers tingle where his lips had been.
“No touch,” Eavan says, her eyes flicking on and off the peep in the north-east corner of
the cafeteria.
“The peeps are off, relax,” he says to Meg. “Blackout, right?”
“Ask Parker,” Meg says.
“I doubt they even switch off,” Eavan says. “Even in blackout, they would just keep
them running on aux power.”
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“Fucking psychos,” Samuel says and slings an arm over her shoulder. Eavan rolls her
eyes again, doesn’t lean in. She’s grateful for the chemical trace of the fizzer in her bloodstream,
her heart is regular, her cheeks unflushed. He’s not sexy, she’s told Meg a thousand times. He’s
just a cynical pretty punk-boy with his moneyed mother and his pornographic taste in women,
his stink of tobacco, his cavalier attitude about a job that she depends on. Exactly the type of
rich kid she should find repellent.
Then, with a strange lightness, an instant lacking—the weight of his arm is gone from
Eavan’s shoulder. Across from her, Meg unpacks six little glass containers: live bacterial food
items, raw nut butters, sprouted grains. At the buffet is Parker, wide stomach pudging over his
Test Day suit, his tray loading up with plates of pancake and pudding and sugared fruit.
Already a few of his coding students are crowded around him, trying to impress him with their
new VRs. The cafeteria line-ups grow; students jostle for position before juice injections with
HGH. In their culturally diversified assigned seating, in their wrinkle-free uniforms, their
school-issued tech, the groms shovel food, their mouths spilling crumbs. In blackout, there is a
certain buzz about them, their fingers twitching around their temples with no föns to toggle.
The monitors, placed at ten-meter increments around the cafeteria, are dead now, cloudless.
Everyone has a hard time knowing where to place their eyes.
“Eat,” Meg says and offers Eavan a bit of breakfast bar. Then she leans over and lifts her
fön from Eavan’s face. “There,” she says, like a mom. “You don’t need it in blackout anyway.”
“Weird vibes,” Parker says sourly as he slumps beside Samuel at the staff table. Meg
reaches for Parker’s face too but he swings away from her, keeps his fön squarely on his face as
he works on his mouthfuls of pancake. He wears his fön perpetually, even when teaching, but
Meg is always switched off.
“Happy Test Day to you Parks,” Samuel says and kisses Parker on the cheek wetly.
Parker pushes him away. “Dude!” he says.
“See,” Eavan says. “Parker thinks they keep them on too.”
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Parker offers her a pancake from her stack. She shakes her head. “Skinny bitch,” he says.
Genetically, Parker is stunning—the perfect combination of his mother’s Finish green eyes and
his dad’s short afro and dark skin, but he’s heavy, twenty kilos over regulation, though he’s
hacked his own vitaband to show a standard BMI. Meg is almost translucently white next to
him, see-through eyebrows and frizzy ginger hair. Samuel is just Samuel, expensive floppy
haircut, those sad bedroom eyes and too-long eyelashes. Eavan wills herself to stop looking at
him, to stop noticing his bouncing knee under the table, just centimeters from her own.
Then, in a totally undramatic moment, the sound of revving machinery washes over the
cafeteria. The chip kiosks light up, music sails out of the cafeteria’s many invisible speakers. The
groms emit a weak cheer. In seconds, a fön is planted on everyone’s face. Eavan’s vitaband dials
into her fön and her tiny speaker starts trilling her name, always pronouncing it wrong: EEE-
van—your calorie count looks low! Remember, healthy fuels feed the mind and the body.
Balance is life! Try some protein packs, some bran germ, an extra shot of NRG in your morning
beverage!
Eavan adjusts the vitaband at her wrist. Parker, genius hacker that he is, reprogramed
her vitaband to register total sobriety: a perfectly acceptable toxin count, adequate calorific
intake and vitamin mix. She would never be allowed the street-strength fizzers she’s into lately.
Still she promises herself she’s had enough today, that she’ll actually consume her requisite
number of nutrients, despite the nausea building with every bite.
There is a distant hum, like a buzzing of insects approaching, then a parade of moto-
taxis files up the entrance lane. The students hush, sit erect. The doors of the taxis bing open
and sixteen minders—one administrator/babysitter for every student’s origin country—step
into the cafeteria, dressed elegantly for Test Day. Eavan plasters on her practiced smile. She
tries not to think about sweat slowly leaking through her uniform. Test questions. Performance
quotas. Across the cafeteria, the Swiss minder snaps his fingers in a grom’s ear to prod him
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awake, then scans the groms’ breakfast plates, pointing at any uneaten vegetable or vitamin
pouch.
“I think she’s the hottest, don’t you?” Samuel asks Eavan. He’s pointing to the Danish
minder, tall, cheek-boned, teetering around on very high heels. They watch as she checks
vitabands, as she administers a caffeine kickstarter and betablocker to a Bangladeshi seventh-
year with clearance. He is careful to take the pills without touching her hand.
“More chems, perfect,” Meg says, this time slipping a napkin from her place-setting and
raising it to cover her mouth.
“Intense headlines today,” Parker says ignoring the minders, the groms. Instead he’s lost
in the architecture of his fön, his hands drifting toward Eavan’s fruit salad. “This new group
claiming the blackouts are orchestrated. And we had to buy bandwidth from the US grid at
twice the normal price.”
Samuel coughs, “Incoming. King clone.”
As if summoned, the striking form of Dr. Mike appears at the end of the cafeteria, his
spiked hair and beefy shoulders and pastel suit, spotless, gleaming. Eavan automatically
reaches for her fön and places it back on her face.
“Morning all!” Dr. Mike nearly shouts.
“Morning Dr. Mike,” ninety little voices reply.
Dr. Mike taps the fön on his face, his conduit to parents in Dubai, India, Brazil. The
groms bristle, smile. “Here we have all of Evergreen strategizing for another successful Test
Day!” His gaze sweeps around the cafeteria. A quiet boy, around twelve but not yet caught up
to the girls in height or maturity, leaps from his chair and storms him and grips Dr. Mike by his
meaty forearm. Dr. Mike is the only one who eschews the No-Touch policy without
repercussions, his authority his permission.
“You want a Dr. Mike ride, well, lucky you,” Dr. Mike chuckles, the diamond in his ear
twinkling. In a kind of distasteful bicep curl, Dr. Mike hoists the grom off the ground. His neck
bulges, his cheeks puff out with false exertion.
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Samuel simulates gagging. Meg shoots him a look.
“What does it look like down there to you? Shaved? Snipped? You think he’s had an
extension or what?” Samuel says sly from under his napkin.
“Stop,” Meg says.
Samuel eyes Eavan. “Come on, tell me you can’t imagine that dickwad under the knife.”
Eavan wants to say something. Doesn’t.
After the Dr. Mike ride is over and the boy has returned to his seat, eyes shining, Dr.
Mike signs off, removes his fön, then looks straight at the staff table, straight at Eavan.
“Do not let him punk you,” Samuel warns, but still she can feel her stomach boil up as
Dr. Mike crosses the crowded cafeteria and zeroes in. He is a close talker. Eavan can smell his
minty breath. She sits on her vitaband. Her eyes water, but she’s almost afraid to blink.
“Good hustle today. First teacher in the cafeteria! We could all learn from Teacher
Eavan,” he says. Dr. Mike pats her on the shoulder, not unkindly. He steps closer and in a
practiced way, lowers his voice. “Finally found you on your media, girl. You’re not easy to find.
Friend me back, won’t ya?”
Smile smile, she pleads with herself. She watches Samuel watching her, nodding like a
grom, but she does not have the ability to please both of these men at once. Now Dr. Mike will
have access to her photos, her location check-ins, her posted purchases.
Dr. Mike returns to the students and beams. “Test Day is everything,” he asserts to their
many faces, trained on him. “Every day we are tested. And every day we must prove ourselves
winners.”

Eavan’s favorite students are the knuckleheads, the loudest and last to arrive to homeroom,
who smell raw like running, who slant off a group of boys, all smirk. It is Derek, who in seventh
year drop-kicked Jimmy, forcing her to pin his skinny body against the wall while Jimmy
limped down the hall to get Dr. Mike. The No-Touch policy is complicated if it is a question of
student safety. Still, it made the other groms gawk when she held him by the shoulders, as
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Derek’s hot little body writhed, then calmed. She privately smiled when the peeps revealed
Jimmy was more the culprit, had moved his chair when Derek tried to sit down. Derek was still
in trouble, but it was reactionary—Eavan argued in his favor: Jimmy deserved his drop-kick.
She was loved by Derek’s whole squad after that. By ninth year, he cracked jokes, spoke low in
the back of his throat, collected a fan club of boys up close and girls from afar. Eavan, he tried to
impress. He tested out charm. But he gave only the requisite energy to Evergreen’s rituals and
tests. She had to work hard to get Derek his As.
Her least favorite students decorate her smart-walls with their unexceptional digital art
projects. They hold her hostage during lunch to confess of family problems, crushes on faculty.
They regurgitate answers from the texts in their fathers’ groomed accents. She acknowledges
their raised hands but grades them harshly for critical thinking. Eventually, she learns of their
weakness, their one foolish thing, their way of hurting and being hurt. Eventually, she loves
them all.

“Hello?” a timid voice calls over automatic fans and digitized plumbing. Eavan coughs, chokes.
It is only 8:43am on Test Day and she is hiding in the handicapped stall of a bathroom
on the second floor of the classrooms building, inhaling deeply from a strawberry canna-pen, a
fog of sugary fruit finished with a dull, hazy high. Meg and Eavan are very careful this is not
captured on the peeps; the bathrooms are not peeping zones, even school issued föns cannot
record in the privacy of the stalls. It is Meg’s idea to vape, Meg who doesn’t know Eavan is
already on her second fizzer, which she dosed minutes before her pep-talk, which was
delivered perfectly, if a little quickly, then simultaneously broadcasted to parents föns by
8:38am. She is watching the VR of her performance, noting a slight tremor in her hand, but
otherwise, acceptable. She posts it to her media with the caption:
Posted: 8:44am
Pumped and pepped for Test Day! ©EvergreenSucessStories

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The first drag from Meg’s canna-pen is a biochemical blossom. This is a small hang, one
they try to do every other day. The handi-stall is big enough for both of them, the window open
an inch so they can blow smoke out, smell rain, breathe. Back in her homeroom, her students
are singing along to the official state-sanctioned VR of national anthems, supervised by the
peeps. They have exactly twelve more minutes of singing. Then Eavan has to be back. Meg
thinks one small inhale of a canna-pen will calm their rattled Test Day nerves. Eavan does not
say no.
“Hello?” the grom voice says again.
“Yes?” Meg says, her voice low. She drops a honey candy into the waterless toilet. The
chems in the bowl hiss. A bleachy smell puffs up at them.
“Is Teacher Eavan here?”
“Sure,” Eavan says, her vitaband pulsing. She steps out of the stall and nearly tumbles
right on top of June, a skinny fifth-year girl in a too-long skirt. At seeing both Eavan and Meg in
the handi-stall together, the little girl bursts into hot, snotty tears.
“What are you doing in here?” she says.
Eavan coughs again. What she is supposed to be doing: taking attendance, standing
through national anthems, entering hourly grades for performance, attention, participation,
evaluating the groms’ downtime, their pre-class behavior, their cafeteria behavior, their hallway
behavior. In exactly ten minutes she will be standing at the podium at front of her class,
coaching them through their last test prep of the semester, their last practice questions.
What she is in fact doing: adjusting eye make-up, shopping for shoes, posting
motivational quotes about Test Day, blowing canna-pen fumes through an inch of window, into
the shadowy forest, the mossy floor releasing a mist of its own.
“Hey,” Eavan says into the mirror as she drops more bleach into the red glaze of her
eyes. She turns. Kneels. She’s stoned, very stoned, but still she tries to look into the little girl’s
sunken eyes. “What’s wrong?”
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“I failed the practice,” June gulps, staring at her hands. “Even this morning, after
studying all night.” Her voice is high, her nose is running almost into her mouth. Like most of
the girls, her bangs are fluffed, her fön is bedazzled with pink gems, her socks have pom-poms
up the shins. But closer up, she doesn’t appear well. Her scalp is greasy, her blouse is stained
around the neck, yellow from sweat.
“It’s ok,” Meg says.
“It’s not!” June says, then swallows hard and looks at Eavan. “I need to go to the nurse. I
can’t see straight. I need… I need...”
“Wait, they already gave you a practice test this morning, after not sleeping?”
“I failed. Again.”
“Let’s get you a glass of water,” Meg smiles.
“No!” June says, then looks to Eavan. “Please, please, can I have my own scrip? It’s not
fair, everyone else is on chems, they have an advantage.”
Meg interrupts. “You’re fine, you’ve had lots of time to prepare, you can take some deep
breaths and—“
“Please,” June says, blinking at Eavan.
“Are you sleeping?”
“No,” June says.
“How’s your heart rate?” Eavan asks, peering at the girl’s vitaband. June holds it out,
her arm limp. The numbers are unhealthy: Not enough calories. Adrenaline high. Hormones
unbalanced.
“I can’t think when I’m in that Test Theatre, I get all panicky, I can’t…”
Eavan eyes Meg, then drops her head and reaches for the girl’s fön, toggling through her
options until she finds the NURSE admission and MEDS.
“Explain your symptoms clearly to the nurse. The doctor should be able to prescribe you
something that will help. Are you going to be OK?” Eavan asks but June clips away, wiping her
face with her sleeves, not saying yes or thank-you or good-bye.
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By 9:25, Eavan is on a bus leaving campus. In the footage, Eavan does a quick head-count. Her
voice is audible, mumbling the words. Beside her is Meg, filling in her grades from that
morning’s supervision. Around her, her homeroom’s groms are contented; this is one of two
times each year they actually leave Evergreen Prep, a showcase of singing and dancing
designed to burn off unnecessary anxiety before the concentration of the Test. Without any
minders on the bus, Eavan would expect the groms to hop around in the aisles, play clapping
games, shout. But they remain seated, equable, fastened to the föns plastered to their faces.
In the audio, it is clear how Eavan loses count twice during head count, how she mis-
counts, gives up. Finally, she calls out SMILE to compel the groms to lift their eyes and paste
practiced smiles on their faces, instantly dropped once the pic is snapped.
Delivered: 9:26am
First the fun! Every Test Day starts with song and dance ©singitoutloud
Delivered: 9:28am
Ready for showcase! ©EvergreenRocks

She knows it is her job to make this fun for the groms. So she stands, wobbles around in
the aisle, then plops beside Simon and Daniel, one Irish one English, clearly in love and
squeezed together in a bench with their knees up.
“You guys look awesome, let me take your pic,” she says.
They both nod vaguely, moving centimeters apart, so their shins aren’t touching. “No,
no— föns off, look cute,” she says. And they lean their heads together just a fraction, they let
their eyes smile. “Perfect,” she says and she forwards the pic to their private accounts. Daniel’s
nose is big and growing bigger. His eyes are blue and watery and his hair is too long in the back
but his skin is clear and he’s funny, deadly funny, especially with his accent—everything he
says sounds wicked smart. Simon is tall, with his shoulders always stooped and his arms
pinned close to his body so as to not take up too much space. He’s charming, a cute young fop
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with his pants jacked up, ankles showing. “Won’t post that one,” Eavan says. “That one’s
yours.”
“Can we take one with you?” they ask. Her heart lifts a little. Meg is the one who snaps
the pic, Eavan between the boys, no one touching, but their shoulders nudged together, their
faces loose, Daniel’s mouth open like he’s saying something and Simon laughing at his joke.
This is the last posted pic of Eavan on the Evergreen site, before she is scrubbed from the roster,
from their list of esteemed faculty. She’s showing her teeth. Her eyes look clear, her hair not too
dull, her nose not too blemished. It is published with the caption: A moment of chill before the
big show ©

Evergreen is full of tests. The curriculum is wired for Test Day; the semester peppered by daily
quizzes, weekly debates, monthly exams and essays. Every hour is punctuated by a test—
Eavan sends grades via fön to parents every 60 minutes—participation, attention. She tries to
give As, but not too many, not enough to get noticed. Evergreen’s rubric is grueling, even
getting hired was a test. As new recruits, Meg and Samuel and Parker and Eavan had to
perform acts of memorization, had to execute mock teaching exercises, had to edit and grade by
timer. All of it in the Testing Theatre. All of it for Dr. Mike. All of it peeped and broadcast to
parents if they wanted to tune in and feedback was provided by comment board. A parent
could give notes; tilt the teaching style one way or another. It was Eavan’s first experience
teaching under peeps. From behind the lectern, she delivered passionate lessons on World
Schools Style Debating while the cameras burned at her from the ceiling. In the audience, the
new teachers hunched in the too-small desks, pretending to be groms. It was a long month of
teacher training. They had started as strangers but after two weeks of it, after two weeks of
insomnia in unfamiliar dorms and politely conversing through breakfast and hammering away
all day on lesson plans for a wide public audience— they cashed their first checks and got
wasted. That was a test too, how cool, how disaffected. Until they cracked. It was the first
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summer of the ticks, when the epidemic moved through the Midwest to the coast forest. After
dinner, after lights out on the fourteenth night and all the nights after that, they would slip
across the baseball diamond to where the grass grew above their ankles, probably full of
disease, and they would skull bottles of vodka. They knew how to sit just beyond the range of
the furthermost south-side peep. No one thought they would risk infection for a chance to hang
out. The school had a perfect record back then, no dismissals. No accidents. The tests had been
proven effective. The results were consistently excellent.
Three years later, this is Eavan’s sixth Test Day, her sixth showcase. Eavan gets it, why
Evergreen parents demand the showcase coincide with Test Day, another prized exhibit, to
flaunt artistic and performance skills. But she can’t figure out why the students don’t hate the
showcase too, the difficult routines, the videographers adjusting their auto-tune, recording
twice to edit out any mistakes. The groms treat it like a supposed reward, when it is in fact
another set of tests, another set of skills a child can lack completely.
This morning, 9:43, even from her designated stool in the auditorium’s wings, where for
the next two hours she is responsible for changing costumes and pinning ponytails for girls
years five through nine, she feels their nerves. Eavan’s earpieces pulse with the latest electro-
hits, soundtracks from the blockbuster VRs the groms play religiously. The fizzers barely dull
the ache of all that fear. The music doesn’t stop throbbing until Dr. Mike crosses into the
spotlight, when it fades. A polite applause ripples through the auditorium. “We’re all especially
excited for this semester’s theme, the future! We’re starting off with a first number, a slam-
dance by a class of robots!”
Eavan’s head buzzes with lingering chems. She languidly helps the robots out of their
silver tights, scoots a sextet of purple-wigged tap dancers on stage just in time for their ‘floating
skateboard’ scene. It all seems manageable. It isn’t until the fifth number, a selection of furry
animals returned from extinction, when the lights flicker, then fade, then pop. An impenetrable
blackness smothers the auditorium.
“Blackout,” the groms say.
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Then they start to scream into the black. The sound is deafening, an ocean of little
screams. This is their only chance to let go, Eavan thinks, in the dark of an auditorium,
unpeeped.
She launches her fön’s light, which works without the cloud, and illuminates the change
room cubicle. She helps shove articles of clothing over the half-costumed girls and ushers them
to the stage where they huddle together. Then, a hot palm lands on her shoulder. “Shine your
light on me, now!”
There, center-stage, reassuring to someone, is Dr. Mike. His neck is red, beaded with
sweat. He raises his hands and the effect is magic, Dr. Mike is the only lit thing permeating the
fast darkness around them. The crowd hushes.
“Thank you people, thank you,” he says, his voice straining without a mic. “Another
cloud blackout and it appears our lights and music are all wired to the cloud. Lucky you! Two
in a row.” The crowd titters and he raises one hand before the groms descend into shouting.
“Unfortunately, our showcase can’t go on today. We’ll have to stop there, that will have to do.”
The crowd of groms groans, then goes quiet when Dr. Mike raises a meaty hand,
cautioning. “I want every teacher to collect the ten students closest to them and we’re going to
slowly file out the back doors to the buses. Orderly evacuation procedures please. Line up with
your class when you’re there. Slowly now, no rush.”
She feels the groms deflate. Two squares of light open at the far reaches of the
auditorium, tunnels to walk through. They, they slowly move, reluctantly edging their way
toward the squares of light, slowly feeling their way out of the black.

Outside, the drizzle has ceased and the sky is punctured by a humid sun. Eavan eyes Meg and
Samuel and finally Parker, leading her homeroom students toward her. Her groms look rattled,
sweaty in their heavy costumes and cake makeup, so she smiles kindly to calm them and lines
them up against the bus, saying each name and making eye contact as she counts. It is not
apparent until she’s counted twice, then three times—someone is missing.
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“Who is it? Who isn’t here?” Eavan asks her class president, who makes her bend down
to whisper hotly in her ear. Outside the auditorium, the students are lined up according to class,
twitching and restless in their extinct animal costumes. The rain clouds have peeled away and a
few fingers of hot spring sun pour over them. Eavan squints, feels the many sets of child-eyes
watching her.
“June, I think,” the girl says.
“June.” Eavan says, dumbly. “She’s at the nurse.”
“She came back,” the girl says and shrugs.
Eavan will not let herself think about skipping that head count on the bus. About June’s
first fizzer. About the starter pack the nurse gives new prescribers and the myriad ways her tiny
body could reject those drugs. Instead she maps out the auditorium, imagines the many places
where a girl as small as June could be, maybe trapped in a bathroom or hiding behind a piece of
scenery, her bangs still fluffed, that ponytail still on top of her head.
She tries to look at her class reassuringly, then walks to Meg.
“June’s missing,” she says.
Meg’s eyes widen. “I thought she came back after the nurse? Didn’t she line up? Wasn’t
she on our bus?”
Eavan’s heart thunks. Her memory is blurry, unclear. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she whispers,
stricken.
“She must be somewhere near the stage,” Meg says. “She wouldn’t let herself get left
behind.”
“Oh God,” Eavan whines. Tears spike her eyes.
“Go back inside and do a sweep.”
“Come with me,” Eavan whines. She has to fight the urge to hold her friend’s hand, to
walk quickly, steadily away.
“Don’t panic. I’ll watch your class,” Meg says, nudging her toward the door.
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She nods and watches herself rush into the dark auditorium, descending the steps
without feeling them under her feet. In the audience area, she meticulously checks every seat,
scanning every corner for June, June, June. Then she runs backstage, where another light is
stabbing the black, sweeping across the curtains and set pieces determinedly.
“Any luck?”
It’s Samuel, there in the dark.
“Not yet,” she says, her voice the smallest thing. She lets out a low moan and kicks open
the bathroom door, shouting, “June!”
After the bathrooms have been scoured, after the lobby and change-rooms and lighting
booth have all been swept over by their lights, after she returns to the audience seats to check
again, she finally feels Samuel’s touch on her elbow. “We’ll find her,” he says. “She’s just not
here, but she’s probably back at the school, she probably never even got on the bus—“
“I almost don’t want to.”
“She’s somewhere.”
“I’m so fucking dead,” Eavan whispered.
“You want?” he whispers back and she looks up at him with her vision swimming. This
is another test. A test she fails, again and again.
She opens her mouth like a baby bird and he drops the fizzer onto her tongue. Then she
waits a second before she lets him take her hand and lead her toward the square of light at the
edge of the black.

It is Samuel who taps Dr. Mike lightly on the shoulder, but when the headmaster swivels
toward them dangerously, it is all left to her.
“We might,” Eavan whispers, “we might have a problem.”
“A what?” he says.
Eavan’s capillaries are firing, her vitaband is flashing RED RED RED.
“I’m so sorry,” Eavan whispers and it is the truest thing she’s ever said.
133

Dr. Mike won’t speak to her the whole way. The taxi is the old-timey kind, took forever to
arrive, only takes cash which they’d had to pool. Dr. Mike still wears his fön despite the
blackout; likely filming for the official record. Eavan doesn’t want to say anything
incriminating, so she wills her mouth closed.
His eyes scroll down the roadside manically. Eavan scans the bit of bush and tree left in
the freeway’s ditch, probably infested with ticks, with disease. She can’t shake the image of the
child’s body out in the campus forest, her skin blackened by blood-sucking ticks, her eyes dried
open.

Eavan cannot trust her memory. That morning, she remembers, that group of seventh year girls:
Tonya and Laila and Lisa and Brie—and hadn’t June been with them?—approached outside the
cafeteria.
“Good morning teacher AY-VAN,” they’d called to her. It was right before the bus, after
roll call and costume check, in the bus-loading bay as she stood beside three bins of showcase
costumes and makeup, a stack of tablets, boxed lunches. Her only thought at the time was that
the groms were performing for the peeps, that later Eavan will beam their test results straight to
their parents’ föns along with their semester reports. Only Laila, about twelve, really looked at
her. The girl broke off, nudged so close Eavan had to shift slightly to avoid her. The No-Touch
policy is strict and the peeps are pervasive—she could get fired for as little as a poorly filmed
hug. The grom paused, then tilted her head away from the peeps and whispered, “I had a
dream about that class you taught yesterday.”
“Me too,” Eavan said loudly, a grin pasted on her face. “I mean, I dream about history
all the time.”
“The riots,” she whispered. “Before peeps, when people just got crazy and nobody got
filmed.”
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Eavan, instinctively checked the peep over the north exit. “It’s a good debate topic.
Whether significant political change can come from civil unrest.”
Laila’s hands twitched, but she kept them on her knees. “I definitely think so. I definitely
want to argue that side. It’s not scary to me anymore,” the girl said. Over her shoulder, Eavan
could see that cluster of girls boarding the bus, Brie and Lisa and Tonya (and June?) while Dr.
Mike filmed and Meg and Samuel discussed something through the gliding glass doors and her
vitaband trilled at her to increase her protein count and her head buzzed with fizzers. But she
cannot trust her memory. Wasn’t June with those girls getting on the bus? Her face will not
appear in Eavan’s head. It’s like she has been erased.

Behind the people stacker, on the perimeter of Evergreen Prep, Eavan is running down a path.
In her mind, a map of peeps, the cameras buried in the landscape like landmines to be skirted
around. The blackberry brambles tear at her Test Day blazer. The fruit smells are cloying and
sweet in the too-hot sun.
Eavan is trying to think like a twelve-year-old—distraught by a failed test, abandoned at
school, stoned for the first time in her life. Where would she go? At the end of one path, a
locked gate. At the other end, a side entrance to Tower 3. It helpfully swings open, another of
Parker’s hacks, a sensor he’s disabled so he can come and go late at night. Everyone knows
there are peeps in the lower-level student sleeping areas, but in the upper staff quarters, there
are not. The administration considers this a privilege; the teachers’ dorms are left dark.
Up the five flights, there is a forest quiet; the windows are streaked with pollen, the
skylights shrouded with pine-needles. With everyone off campus, the dorm is still. A few doors
have popped open, their fingerprint locks defunct in the blackout, slackers like her who don’t
manually set their bolts. Eavan pushes open doors but the staff rooms are not anonymous. She
doesn’t want to barge in and lifts sheets and open closets, peek under beds. She soon realizes
she is aiming for her own room, knowing exactly what she needs—a way to calm down and see
things clearly.
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She finds the dispenser. Releases the top and pops another fizzer, then two, then three
under her tongue. Only then does she see June. It shouldn’t surprise her, but it does: tucked
under her comforter, in a precious ball, the grom is sleeping, her eyelashes long over her
cherubic cheeks.
“No,” Eavan says to no one.
Then she yanks the girl’s wrist free from the sheets and checks her vitals: 1632 steps, 609
calories, heart rate slow, like any other sleeping child. Maybe it is the fizzers that convince her
June is really just asleep, despite her raspy, shallow breath, her body a bit too cold. Eavan
shakes the girl’s shoulders and then her whole torso, but June does not stir. Beside the bed,
there is a buzzing, which at first Eavan thinks is June’s wheezing but she realizes is a wasp
stuck against the window, tapping the screen again and again. She knows she should be
panicking, but the fizzers keep her eerily calm.
Eavan reaches for a glass of water on the bedside and throws it over June’s face. She gets
nothing but a splutter around the mouth. In the wet, Eavan smells something foul and sees on
the floor beside the bed a small pile of vomit, half-chewed breakfast and several little tablets
from Eavan’s extensive collection.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Eavan whispers before scooping June up in her arms, the No-Touch
policy be damned. “Please wake up,” she hisses, but the clammy little body will only curl
around Eavan’s chest, an infant returned to her mother’s arms.
That’s the moment the blackout ends. That is when the lights and hallways music and
monitors and smoothie pods fire up with a whir, populating the people stacker with all
manners of mechanical company.
That’s when Eavan starts to cry and shake the child frantically, shouting near her face,
“June, wake up, wake up.” But rather than wake up, June vomits, a stinking pool of bile down
the front of Eavan’s Test-Day blouse.
That’s when the seizures start. That’s when everything, the forest, the peeps, the staff
quarters, it all falls away.
136

When she first accepted the job at Evergreen Prep, Eavan actually believed some of that money
would rub off on her. Living in a climate-controlled dorm, eating nutritionally balanced meals,
stretching on designer pilates machines, wearing suits tailored professionally with her
biochemistry in mind—it is a life that approximates wealth, that imitates it perfectly.
Her mother had clapped when she told her she’d scored the job. She helped her move.
And so the story Eavan tells herself and her mother is elaborate and nearly true— if she stays at
Evergreen, if she follows the curriculum, if her groms test well, if she curates her media
perfectly, she may one day see real money. In two years, she’s paid off her first student loan,
only two left to go. Just last week, they celebrated with a too-lavish dinner downtown; Eavan’s
stoic mother with tears in her eyes. Later that night, Meg and Parker surprised her with access
to the roof—the peeps and the door security jammed by Parker’s hacks. Even after the drizzle
started, they sat up there and crushed pills into sugary drinks and they whispered things into
the dark over Deep Cove until they had to pee and only then did they tilt back down toward
her dorm.
All along the hallways, the costly art objects said to her: work hard, work for this. When
she stumbled and nearly swiped a large canvas from the wall, Parker hoisted her up laughing,
“Chill. No peeps on the teacher’s floor.” But Eavan couldn’t find it funny. Her heart hammered
so hard she almost vomited. She wanted to go immediately to bed but didn’t want to appear
cowardly and small.
“It’s hard wanting things so badly,” she explained later. They both nodded, not quite
understanding.

After it is over, after the school van and the drone and the convulsing child who is no longer
convulsing have driven away, Eavan follows Dr. Mike to the administrative wing. They make
her wait in the waiting room while they prepare. The receptionist is speaking to someone in
Korean. It is a sales pitch, she can tell from the tone.
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Then, as soon as she enters Dr. Mike’s stately office, Eavan is subject to a test. She gets a
quick jab on the finger. Then they make her sit on Dr. Mike’s couch, looking out to the school
grounds spread out his floor-to-ceiling glass. She’s shaking so hard, she stains Dr. Mike’s couch
with a spot of red from her finger. She places her purse over the spot, then sucks her finger,
unable to put her hand down because she’s so worried about it staining her Test Day suit.
Nearly an hour passes, the blood dries. Her hands get very cold, her mouth pasty.
Finally, Dr. Mike’s computer generates a list of chems that appear in her bloodstream—a list he
orates for the record, which includes several prescriptions, anti-anxiety meds, beta-blockers and
some mood-altering chems, some of which are banned substances, some of which are street-
grade. “We test students all the time,” he says, tilting the monitor away from her. “But it
appears we should start regular testing of staff as well.”
Then Parker and Meg and Samuel are called in. They too have been tested, but it
appears they have passed. Still, there is a certain doom about them when they sit beside her on
the couch, they raise eyebrows at her. She tries to smile but tears keep coming to her eyes.
“Parker,” Dr. Mike says and Parker flinches. “You are accused of tampering with
school-issued technology—hacking Eavan’s vitaband, the peeps on the doors—which led to
little June going undetected, alone on school grounds while the rest of the school was away. Do
you deny this?”
When Parker says nothing, Dr. Mike looks to Samuel and Meg.
“Do either of you want to substantiate this story?”
Neither speaks, so Dr. Mike makes them watch the footage, her private narrative, stolen
from her school-issued fön, now edited into a reel of negligence and broadcast from a wall-sized
monitor above Dr. Mike’s couch. His office fills with clips of that morning, the headcount, the
campus-wide search, that little grom body seizing in Eavan’s arms.
Then Dr. Mike leans into his speech about negligence, dereliction of duty, specifically
the consumption of narcotics and hacking school tech—that is grounds for dismissal. Unless
anyone else wants to claim responsibility for this morning’s debacle, Dr. Mike could not be
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more clear: Parker and Eavan are terminated. Effective immediately. No, they are not allowed
to visit June in the hospital. No, they cannot address the parents, to describe how their daughter
trembled in Eavan’s arms, incapable of waking up. No, they may not return to their classrooms,
to collect their prized materials. And they may never contact those groms again— not to
compose some paltry farewell, not to wish them luck on Test Day, on their return home, in life.
No.
Of course, Meg interjects, putting her whole body between Dr. Mike’s desk and the
loveseat cradling Eavan and Parker. “Bullshit,” she counters. “This is just a response to so much
anxiety, the lack of sleep, the Test Day regimen, the diet, the peeps, the chems, the sick
insistence that they stay indoor for fuck’s sake, can’t you see what you’re doing?” But Dr. Mike
just sits there with that slab of cold marble between them, waiting for her to finish. Then, she
too is fired. That kind of attitude is toxic in such a closed environment, can poison the student
body. Meg can vacate her room with the others.
It is only Samuel, sitting too carefully on Dr. Mike’s rigid furniture, who says nothing.
He is not fired. He watches contritely as Parker and Meg and Eavan all sign away their futures,
one after another, their electronic signatures burning into Eavan’s eyes.
Later, Eavan will have a hard time watching the last VR. By 2:16pm: she is escorted to
her dorm to remove belongings, supervised as she packs her small room. The minders watch,
but do not assist. Not much belongs to her. She leaves behind the Test Day suit, the sheets, the
NRG machine and monitors and fön. Her pills are conspicuously missing, her data drives.
Someone has thrown a sprinkle of disinfectant beside the bed, over June’s vomit. The hallway
once again tinkles with music.
She leaves via the back stairs, her clothing and shoes stuffed into purses indelicately
hanging off of her arms. She tries to skirt the classrooms building, the cafeteria, the school
workout room, but it is impossible to avoid them, beneath the second lamppost and the fifth,
buried in the foliage by the buzzing fence. The peeps don’t stop until it’s just the three of them
crammed in the back of a moto-taxi, Eavan’s tarnished record of employment now popping up
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across her media. Soon her mother will see it in her newsfeed, will click through the video links
to watch little June bucking in her arms.
As she’s leaving Evergreen Preparatory Academy, Eavan is thinking: June was not a
grom that stuck out to her. Like Eavan, June didn’t want to be noticed. Eavan holds on to bits of
Meg and Parker, a sleeve, a hem. She tries some mindfulness. Collects last glances: her last
coastal forest view, the last of the sword ferns and blackberry bramble. She remembers how that
morning, she woke to birds, real chirps from little bird throats. She wishes there were a drug for
that—to occupy one muted memory and erase the rest—like tasting the sweet grains of sugar at
the bottom of a bitter cup.
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Parker

Parker walks the dreary city, touching things. He knows this must appear incriminating to the
peeps on street corners but he can’t make himself behave. Lurking around him like a creepy
perv—the night is muggy, dark and dull. It’s three in the morning and he’s plodding around in
the wet. Maybe he’s still drunk. He can’t help it, his hands want to stroke the place. He wants to
lean his cheek against all that glass. For hours a day, Parker teaches code, long strings of
instruction, which he builds into a larger design, an architecture. He tests that architecture over
and over, looks for confusion, stalls, places where the code can freeze. Tonight, he sees no larger
design. Tonight, it is a simple command question: better to stay or better to go? But a computer
would not be able to distinguish between the choices. A computer would say: True—one is true.
The rain goes through his hair, fills his shoes. Kilometers move under him. His numb fingers
reach out and brush any surface that will take his touch.

Nothing about that night had made him feel better. Not the East City Lounge. Not the clichéd
velvet booth. Not the many glow-in-the-dark martinis. Parker hated their strict no-fön policy.
He hated to check his tech at the door. Unlike the west-side bars full of scrollers, people here
had nothing to do but eat and drink and scream over the music. Samuel loved that place.
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Without föns peeping everyone, the dykes and nerds and punks were sloppier, recklessly drunk
on pills, eating bowls of turkey wings down to the greasy bones. But with nothing to toggle,
nowhere to put your hands, Parker found it gross. The black light does something to everyone’s
teeth and eyes, turning everybody into jaundiced skeletons. All night, Parker watched Samuel
feed drinks to Eavan, who managed to hold them in with heroic cool. Meg drank too. They all
did. They’d gone through three rounds of bourbon and NRG in low glass tumblers and now
they were on to martinis it only got Parker more depressed.
They were fucked. Their media blared the news of their firing, no matter how many
times he did the erasure. It stuck like a digital barb on their profiles—the vid was attached to
their records of employment, updated automatically. Ads for jobs evaporated as soon as they
entered their names. Renting could be tricky, his credit would be plunging. Of course he could
go abroad, far abroad, or take some creepy coding job for a web company who didn’t
discriminate against shamed teachers. They needed a plan but all they could talk about over
and over was the accident, again and again like a viral loop.
“Tell me this, why did he demand that you go find her?” Meg said.
“He’s a class-A fucker,” Samuel said. Meg gave him a withering look.
Earlier, Meg had pulled Parker aside and warned him not to be upset when Samuel
doesn’t quit for him, remember he would probably stay at Evergreen, he was a coward, a fraud,
a rich kid, remember that.
“He always chooses Eavan, for everything,” Parker said and reached for a clay pot full
of noodles.
“June was my student.”
“She was my student too,” Meg said. “And it was Parker’s hack and their fucking
system of chems and meds and tests and accelerated education that drove this grom off a cliff.”
“Why can’t you visit her?” Samuel asked.
“They made us sign a restraining order too, because we supposedly caused the girl
harm,” Meg said.
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“She’s in a coma,” Parker said, quietly this time, but loud enough for Eavan to look. “I
just poked around the medical records. Her parents aren’t here yet; they’re still flying in.”
“I would press charges,” Meg said quickly. “I mean, what parent wouldn’t sue the
school. Who wouldn’t want to shut that place down?”
“A coma?” Eavan said softly.
Parker didn’t want to tell her about how he peeped the pediatric intensive care: a ward
lined with motionless bodies and clammy grey skin where children should be.
“It’s medically induced,” Parker said.
“She’ll wake up soon, it’s just the drugs,” Meg said and rubbed Eavan’s hand.
“If she dies, I could go to jail.”
“Stop, just stop,” Meg said. “OK this is what I wanted to tell you about. We can get out
of here. I have a thing.”
Samuel moved his body closer to Eavan’s body and Parker watched her curl up next to
him on the bench.
“We’re fucked,” Parker said eyeing Samuel.
“No,” Meg said, “I refuse to admit we are fucked.”
“I’m feeling pretty fucked,” Eavan slurred and in his head, Parker counted for her—
three vodka NRGs, two new-fashions with bourbon, then she had switched to bubbles, which
made her giddy, tippy almost. Still, Eavan looked at Meg with a kind of reverence. He tried to
do the same.
“Rapture, Arizona,” Meg said, as if that name held weight. She opened her woven purse
for a stack of documents.
“Really? Printed paper?” Parker pretended to gag.
“We need a whole consciousness shift, a new way.” Meg distributed to each of them a
small stack of actual pages. He rolled his eyes and took them. “They have an alternative
teaching model,” Meg started.
“This is a teaching job?” Parker said.
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“It’s volunteer. It’s an intentional community with a school that’s looking for teachers.”
“Yah right. Our records are poison for teaching jobs,” Parker said.
“These people hate peeps, that’s the whole point. They want teachers like us.”
Parker’s first impression from Meg’s stack of pages: cartoonish cactus, old Spanish
architecture, blondes. Lots of leggy, pretty blondes. He thumbed through the profiles of nubile
agricultural workers and their equally wholesome children, lots of people of color, not just
white muscly men. It looked clean: whitewashed domes and bio-sensitive yurts. A sweeping
rancho house with solar, hydroponic gardens, tiled terraces and a big shady oak. Looking at all
those tanned bodies, Parker just felt hungrier.
“It’s a no-tech world. No peeps, no föns, totally free range. It’s the complete opposite of
the schools out here. I mean, come on, we are all so over that panopticon bullshit.” Meg pointed
at the last page, a list of specs and case studies and photos of groms performing a range of
outdoor activities.
“Wait, it’s volunteer?” Eavan said.
“They cover room and board. It’s a volunteer job so you can defer your student loans,”
Meg said. “Your June vid is going viral. Don’t you want to just turn that off?”
Parker went back to attacking the rice at the bottom of the bowl with slippery
chopsticks.
Meg kept at her. “Remember, you were so over talking behind a piece of paper. Imagine,
no chems, no tests. Total creativity. Total autonomy.”
“That obviously will work for you teaching natural sciences. Or history. But I teach
code,” Parker said, pointing his chopstick to a cluster of groms on top of a cliff, staring
expectantly toward the camera, their faces open, patient, waiting. “I see no lab here.”
“You can teach math,” Meg offered. “Physics.”
“And they can take all of us?”
“They’re looking for teachers. To be honest, I’ve been in contact with the founders for a
few months.”
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A look of hurt slashed across Eavan’s face. “Were you even going to tell us?”
“At Evergreen, we were inflicting as much pain as Dr. Mike inflicted on us.”
“This place is off the grid, like, completely?” Parker said, his voice climbing. “So what if
there’s an emergency with the groms. What if we have another June?”
“I have my mom’s van,” Meg continued, facing Eavan. “If you’re really tripped out, you
can drive away, or fly back, there’s no contract, that’s the whole thing, do what you feel.”
“And what, you’ll team-teach these sixteen groms? With no tech, no föns. You’ve never
even—“ Samuel stopped himself.
“You have some problem?” Meg said.
“I’m just saying that this seems pretty dramatic, a hippie commune. It’s not their thing,
Parker and Eavan, they—“
“Not their thing. Who’s thing? What about you?”
“Arizona?”
“Are you staying? Or going?” Meg said. They all went quiet.
Parker fondled where his fön should be, felt its lack. “Look,” he said, glancing quickly at
Samuel. “No offense or anything. I’m not interested in a giant fuck fest. I can’t deal with a cult. I
can’t deal with some hippie and his tripped out sex town.”
“It’s not about escaping the world. It’s about reconstructing a community in harmony
with the environment, to alter the world, not run away from it.”
“You just read that right from the literature,” Samuel said.
“This will be exactly the break you need, Parker, no föns, no chems. Think about the
exercise, the healthy food, the first time in your life without screens. It’s going to be perfect.”
Eavan looked at Parker, her eyes cloudy. “I never left before...” Samuel hugged her thin
body to his chest and as she leaned closer, her eyes rolled slightly back in her head.
“Whoa, take it easy,” Parker whispered and moved her drink away from her, just an
inch. All that afternoon he had watched as she clicked and clicked the VR of June and popped
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fizzers and drank and drank. Things she didn’t do: call her mother, eat a meal, change her
clothing.
“Parker, fuck,” she slurred. “She’s in a coma, I mean, she could die. She could die….”
“June’s getting the care she needs. We need to look after ourselves, we all need to go
tech-free, chem-free. Imagine how a good long cleanse will feel,” Meg said, reaching for Eavan’s
hand and giving Parker a look. “Right?”
Parker felt nothing except beside him, a small vibrating, a buzz as gentle as a ringing
fön. It was Eavan’s vitaband, her calorie count for the day too low, her heart-rate too erratic.
“Hey,” Parker said and then he removed the vitaband from Eavan’s slender wrist and
dropped it straight into a tub of spicy beef. Meg laughed and copied him, lobbing her vitaband
up and letting it plop into the dregs of someone’s drink. Eavan held her empty wrist, her fingers
rubbing the smooth pale skin where it had gripped her so long.
“It’s just us now,” Meg said.

Now, three in the morning, not drunk anymore but sick, insomniac, he haunts the wet streets.
He’s drenched. The rest of them had piled into a moto taxi back to Samuel’s loft, but he couldn’t
sleep, the sugar, the alcohol, it all had him buzzing. He’d told them he was still hungry, would
meet them back at the loft. But by three am, everything was closed except bars. He needed no
more liquor. He could calculate exactly how fucked he is: seven ounces of liquor, three pills,
two sips on Meg’s canna-pen which only made him woozy.
As if proving it, Parker’s foot slips on a patch of wet leaves, sending him into an oily
skid. His heart pounds but he has no vitaband to prove its pulsing. He picks himself up,
swiping mud from his raw hands.
Then, a car pulls up behind him. Stops. Its lights are especially piercing through the
scrim of rain. Parker turns and sees a community services trolley, manned by an officer and a
dozen peeps, the spotlight burning a space around him through the drizzle.
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He tries to imagine what they see: short afro full of rain, jacket and pants sodden. Dirty
hands, slowly raising into their lights. The only person walking at three in the morning.
“Are you feeling inebriated? Are you able to get yourself home?” The voice is
professional, cool, broadcast through a kind of loudspeaker, mechanizing anything human
about it.
“No, I’m fine, I just slipped,” Parker says.
“Glad you are well, sir. Please. Can we assist you in returning home for the night?”
Parker shakes his head, but doesn’t bend to wipe the mud from his knees for fear of an
unwanted advance. This isn’t police; Vancouver has graduated to civic surveillance—
exceptionally good peepers, curbing any errant behavior with courteous officers who ensure
peace before chaos. Maybe he doesn’t get special attention because he’s black, but community
services would do anything to avoid racial profiling, such that they seem to stop and help him
more than anyone else he knows.
“Just heading home,” he says, pointing west.
“Based on your balance and agility at the moment, we assess it would be dangerous for
you to walk alone. Please, step into the vehicle and allow us to escort you.”
“I’m good, I’m—“ Parker stops himself.
“Do you intend to drive a motor vehicle?”
“No.” He squints into fortified golf cart, through the bullet-proof glass encasing the
driver. Through the tinted glass is a woman, though he couldn’t know it by the digitized voice.
The officer has lightened hair pulled into a ponytail and her chest is barreled, vested, South
Asian maybe. Her mouth moves and then a second later the voice is digitized through the
speaker, genderless, no trace of an accent. “Please tap your fön for identification and the proper
address,” the voice says.
“I um, the address is wrong on my ID. I just, um… I just moved.”
“Traveling without updated identification is a violation of our civil code, as you must
know.” The voice is stern now, deeper.
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“I’m, um. I’m sorry,” Parker says.
“Please change your identification in a prudent manner,” the voice scolds. The driver
stares straight ahead, her lips moving out of sync with her voice. “Please enter your new
address manually into the monitor and we will escort you home.”
Parker has to stoop to climb in. He avoids eye contact with peep hovering over the back
seat. This vid will be particularly hard to scrub—community service files almost impossible to
hack. He worries about the footage leaking back to his media, another annoying thing to try and
erase. Still, he plugs in Samuel’s address into the machine, doesn’t argue, doesn’t apologize. He
is instantly clammy against the trolley’s air-dry heaters. The heat makes him legitimately sick
now, trying not to throw up as community services carts him all the way from East to West
Van, three kilometers below the speed limit, slowing through every yellow. He can’t help but
squint in the lit backseat, the rain falling around him carelessly.

Parker knows things. He knows that Vancouver is miserable. Evergreen was miserable, even if
it was a place he understood—the taste of breakfast through clenched teeth, the churning of
caffeine pills and beta-blockers through your veins on Test Day. His friends didn’t get that—
even if their parents were angry or bored or clingy, they attempted some semblance of support,
affection. Parker had performance quotas, goals met or missed.
At Evergreen, Parker saw groms just like him, whose parents would suggest extra time
on campus over the holidays, who relentlessly surveilled the CCTV. The groms crowded his
monitor, begged for extra help. In class they would follow the way he strung code together so
intently, he could see their fingers trace invisible lines through the air, they were listening that
hard. It always surprised him when their focus would break, when they melted again into their
bodies, itchy with teenage need.
He was no longer fourteen but he could summon it, just watching them. The endless
schedule of preparatory lessons, programming, science fair. It was only the rides between
classes he could stomach, strapped into the backseat, staring out the window at nothing. He
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wore ear-buds, but wouldn’t listen to classical music or language tracks his mother pressed on
him; he needed the silence. He remembered Test Day: mother waiting outside in her vehicle,
asking him to recite whole word problems or break down his minute-to-question ratio. Then
steam-therapy restaurants where she would order him lemon-vapor soup, chunks of greens and
fish. With all the stimulants in his bloodstream he’d have difficulty spooning up even the broth;
the noodles would blur to form the image of a brain.
There was no sanctuary, nor respite. Summers, he was shipped off to his mother’s native
Finland, to cram-schools in unglamorous suburbs where Parker was the only grom who hated
Russian pop and first-person shooter games. Those never-dark nights, he read actual books,
rarely leaving his mute grandmother’s dim tea-colored condominium. Then back at Canadian
prep school, he was treated like a foreigner again—the only American, the only black kid (half-
black, but they didn’t make the distinction)—he was ogled, then mocked for his lack of
American-ness; he had never been to Disneyzone, he couldn’t crash-dance. They asked to touch
his hair and then left him alone, clumping together and toggling their föns and giggling at some
indecipherable joke. It got worse, of course it did. They would go further, pushing into his quiet
and his crushes on boys, his many ways of being too visible. When he researched others like
him it seemed like a string of brown gay-boy suicides.
His father—black, American, workaholic—was no help, rapt as he was with closing door
handles with tissues, or walking around the car four times before setting off. An immigration
lawyer, highly functional, he spent a hundred hours a week in an office Parker had never seen.
His mother’s full time job was escorting, driving, cooking and cleaning for Parker. She hired
tutors, coaches, reduced his class schedule and then doubled it. Most perplexing to his mother
was the fact that Parker couldn’t perform. All extra-curriculars and the coaching—it yielded
nothing but a long string of weak Bs.
At sixteen, things finally changed when Parker’s father woke him one morning and
insisted they walk to a café. It terrified him, it was their first time together at a table without his
mother, this stranger-twin, the same skin and hair and face as Parker. His father wondered out
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loud if he drank NRG drinks yet, if he if he were a vegetarian or had ever thought about it. It so
unnerved Parker that he couldn’t eat, he just pushed his fried oatmeal around his plate until his
father confessed.
“You probably already know what this is about,” he’d said and of course he did, he
knew, but he wanted to make his father say it: that he was leaving them, that he would be soon
marrying another lawyer in the firm, a Jewish litigator with curly hair and no children. “It will
be a good thing, for you especially,” his father eventually said. “Might get your mother off your
back.”
“Wait, where do I go?” Parker asked. “With you?”
His father had looked at him in the eye. “No son. You won’t be coming with me.”

Post-divorce, Parker discovered that computers do not know nuance, nor emotion, nor ethics.
They only know zeros and ones, present or absent. His father: present. His father: absent. Then,
his mother: absent too. Sixteen years jobless, his mother took the alimony and bought an office
in the suburbs where she started an after-school enrichment program, poaching many of
Parkers’ best instructors. “I couldn’t help you,” she’d say to him, “but I’m helping these ones.
They love me like a mother.”
That’s when Parker taught himself to hack. Coding, trolling, invading the online sphere,
he wasn’t gay or biracial or boring or furious or heartbroken or quiet. He was invisible. He
could be a fly on any wall. He could just peep. He set up cameras around his father’s new
condo. He hacked the school’s staff room, their CCTV. He had tried to peep Samuel before he
met him, tried to hack his webcam, his files. For weeks he had avoided eye contact across the
lobby at their Test Prep school—a boy who like him wouldn’t shorten his name, wouldn’t try
out for sports teams, who had a difficult father that by sixteen, had also disappeared. It was
only funny later, when they figured out Samuel was trying to hack him too. Peeping was what
they had in common. Samuel wasn’t gay but he had his kink, didn’t care about Parker’s. Their
second time hanging out, they’d sat silently together watching his culinary arts teacher fuck his
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debate coach in his school’s photo lab. Peeping cute girls, then boys, then strangers. High school
became bearable and then it was over.
It was too easy to stay in the city for university, take the scholarship, follow Samuel to a
dorm-room on campus. He didn’t expect to love it: the sound of those hundreds of other bodies
in the people stacker around him, coughing, boiling water, showering, snoring. His professors.
The eat-anytime meals in the extensive cafeterias, gorging on foods his mother would never
permit him, kung-pow pizza and sushi soup and bowl after bowl of sweet-tea gelato. He gained
five, ten, twenty kilos and he felt better with the weight, not worse. School was so
uncomplicated without his mother’s surveillance. He wasn’t an introvert after-all, he was
boisterous at parties, he drank sting punch and kissed boys. He let a grad student take him to
an apartment downtown to watch vintage porn and jerk him off. Twice, an RA snuck into his
bed and started sucking his dick his to wake him. He treasured his dormitory life. He swore
he’d never grow tired of the smell of other bodies in beds, nestled like baby burrowing animals,
dreaming their small, safe animal dreams.
After graduation, he’d stayed again, signed up for an easy job in big-tech, trucking one
dorm room to another on a sprawling campus in New West. He purchased the full meal-plan,
worked 60 hour weeks. In tech, he shone, he wrote beautiful lines of indelible code, he was
promoted four times in only a year. He learned how to test the larger architecture, prod the
system for ways it could freeze, fail.
His only consistent weak spot: Samuel, who lamented, wrote sentimental poetry, drank
too much and blew his parents’ fortune in small doses of pay-as-you-go tittie flicks. Parker tried
to pull him together, spent nights drinking vodka and touring clubs as Samuel tried to set him
up with all kinds of bears and queens and twinks. He had encouraged Samuel to apply to
Evergreen and then he’d followed him there, like it was nothing, like following him home after
the bar. Yes, Parker had been writing Samuel’s lesson plans for the past two semesters. Parker
had graded his long responses. He’d covered for his being late, lied to the girls he fucked and
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peeped and then watched the footage with him later. For years, Parker loved him insatiably and
Samuel just took all of that love and ignored it.
Tonight, as he’s dropped off by community services—Parker insanely thinks that
Samuel could be watching the peeps of his building, that he sees him reaching for things in the
cold wet: the rhododendron, the intercom, the freezing brass door handle. But of course he is
not watching. No one is. The rain has stopped and Parker misses its touch. His clothes are
soaked, clingy. Parker’s retinas are scanned. The door buzzes open.
In the loft, they try to hush their voices, but it is impossible not to hear Samuel and
Eavan together upstairs in Samuel’s California King. He wants to say: Eavan, don’t be stupid,
it’s peeped. Don’t be gross. But there is no one to talk to. Meg is asleep on her mat by the potted
plants.
In the bathroom, he strips off his clothing and pulls a musky shirt from Samuel’s
hamper. On the couch, he rubs his goose-bumped flesh against the blankets. Then it’s just back
to quiet. Another hour of lying there, then another, staring at their föns charging wirelessly, side
by side by side. The dismal sky lightens the room through the high industrial windows. It’s
nothing emotional, nothing nuanced. It’s just gray, gray, gray, white.

Meg shakes him softly awake with a cup of agave tea and a breakfast of butter and eggs they eat
cross-legged in a square of sun on the studio floor. They wipe their plates with toast and they
whisper:
“Does it have to be now?” he asks.
“No point in waiting.”
“Can we just like stay here for a bit more?”
“Not here in the loft. You know he’s going back to Evergreen, that he wouldn’t stand up
for you, it’s just so…”
“Did you hear them, last night?“
“Disgusting.”
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“She’s wanted it forever.”
“It’s sick, fucking her now when she’s so upset.”
“Samuel’s lucky, he doesn’t have to leave,” Parker says, defensive.
“I wouldn’t stay. I wouldn’t stay another minute at that school, not after the way they
treated you and Eavan,” Meg says.
“Yah, thanks.”
“He will never take a hit for us. For you—“ Meg says, leaning very close.
“Maybe we can stay a bit longer, just to—“
“Let’s just leave. It will feel so—“
“Weird.”
“Validating.”
“Hard.”
“Worth it.”
“For you maybe,” Parker says.
“We have to get Eavan out of here too. He’s going to fuck her over,” she whispers,
pointing her spoon at the loft.
“Don’t we have to say goodbyes?”
“To who?”
“Pack?
“I’ve got everything right here. So do you, you just emptied your room.” Meg points at
his valise slumped by the bathroom door.
“Do they even know we’re coming?” Parker asks.
“I’ve been messaging Rapture for an hour. I sent in your profiles, your teaching
statements. They want you.”
“Maybe I need time to think about it,” he says.
“Fine, fine, but I’m going to work with this momentum, I’m going to grab the van right
now and when Eavan wakes up, we are going to just drive to Arizona.”
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“Ugh, you don’t even know if she wants to,” he says.
“I’d really like it if you came with us,” she says. It’s quintessential Meg, holding both of
his hands, trying to penetrate his eyes with hers.
“It’s just so fucking—“
“Come on,” Meg says, hoisting Parker to his feet.
“Sad,” he says, but she is already elsewhere, gone.

He feels nothing at Meg’s mother’s Victorian house, as he slogs her many cartons of books in
the back of her mother’s old Eurovan, her backpacks stuffed with scarves and floaty dresses and
sweaters. When they return to the loft, he feels nothing packing his own sloppy duffel into the
van, but when he finds Eavan lying in the middle of Samuel’s massive bed and Samuel is gone,
he feels something—a piece missing, a chunk of normalcy removed.
“Where is he?”
“Evergreen,” she says dully. “He went back.”
His mouth twitches. He turns and says too loudly to Meg, “He’s back at school.” When
she says nothing, he tries calling Samuel twice. Scrolls through his media, gets no clues.
“He’s not coming back,” Eavan says to the ceiling. “He’s not saying goodbye.”
“So you want to leave too, then. You want to try this Rapture place too?” Parker says,
his voice getting high. He knows he shouldn’t shout through Samuel’s loft, his voice bouncing
off all of Samuel’s casually fancy things: a bicycle hanging from the ceiling, expensive rugs,
peeps in every bookshelf. Parker had been hoping Eavan would convince Meg to slow down.
“Fuck this place,” Eavan says. Her eyes are glazed; her mouth is flecked with white at
the corners. Distraught as she must be, she’s medicated herself into action. She slumps down
the stairs and places her box of items by the door. Then she just waits there, scrolling. Parker
swears under his breath, texts Samuel again.
PAR: 2:09pm
© U sure you’re not coming for this mish?
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Parker slowly washes their last plates, closes windows. Looks around for his old tech,
stuff he’d usually leave around the loft. The buzz, when it comes, brings a teenage jolt to his
gut.
SAM: 2:14pm
Sorry bro. No go.
PAR: 2:14pm
No interest in the blondes?
SAM: 2:17pm
Don’t let da blondes punk u. Staying here with ur groms. I’ll keep watch for u ©
He doesn’t tell Meg, or Eavan. He doesn’t talk, just let’s Samuel’s little emoticon heart
pulse in the center of his lenses. He’ll go then, fine. He can’t look at the loft any more, where just
last week he had eaten out of cartons on the couch, drunk vodka and NRG from tubes, rolled
around the floor laughing so hard he nearly vomited all over the rug. Like a string of
commands, he wills himself to go. Parker: present. Parker: gone. He steps toward the entrance,
types in the door code and lets the giant glass door ease shut behind him. He rides in the
elevator with his back to the peep over the door. He climbs into back-bench of the van. Then he
pops a fizzer as they exit the East City streets onto the freeway. He says it’s for carsickness, for
his hangover, the blazing headache across his eyes. Soon enough, his sadness is reduced to
fuzzy spot deep below his navel, still present but untenable. Zero, not one. Who cares. He’s
relieved he can let it all float by.
In shotgun, Eavan won’t look out the window, instead squinting and plucking at the
ends of her hair. Meg blasts eco-tunes, gentle waves and extinct whale calls and she drives fast,
a solid ten over the limit. And Parker, high on pills, nods out the window. Goodbye to the clean
suburban exits, the well-tended signs framed in green, the slow Canadian speed limits, the
peeps up and down every kilometer of highway. Parker brushes his fingertips across the cold
glass window, as if touching it all.

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To enter the United States of America, they must wait over eight hours. The Peace Arch is
flanked by massive interrogation booths with semi-opaque glass, disembodied hands reaching
for passports. The lineup is endless, until it’s over, until they pull up to the booth and the
tentacle peeps reach around the car, stretching under and up and around the van sniffing out
criminal content. Then each passenger is subject to retinal scans. Behind the semi-opaque glass,
they see the silhouette of a guard, no facial features a clear and present semi-automatic weapon.
The voice is digitized, but still twangy as the guard fires off questions.
“Intention to work?”
Parker speaks into the ceiling, knowing immigration has commandeered the van’s
peeps. “Volunteer,” he replies and Eavan and Meg nod. There are dozens of peeps aimed at
them, all up and down the rows of traffic, recording any conversation leaking from any open
window.
“No salary at all?”
“It’s a communal living space. We get room and board,” Meg says.
“Is this a religious compound?”
“It’s educational,” she continues.
“Mr. Lewis, I’m addressing you. Your father’s American, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“But he rescinded his citizenship.”
“Yes,” Parker says.
“And this commune, there a bunch of anti-Americans down there too?”
“He was a pacifist and I’m not,” Parker says quickly.
The guard doesn’t seem to have a prepared answer. Parker closes his mouth, notices
things. His knuckles are dry. Beside them, a long chain-linked electric fence hisses slightly in the
drizzle. Finally, Parker says, “My dad’s from Arizona, but I’ve never seen it. It would be nice to
see.”
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The van is silent. Then the lights click green. They are promptly stamped, processed
and released. They have six days to cross Washington, Oregon and California—they may not
enter the migrant-closed states of Idaho and Utah, adding three hours to their trip. Any veering
off course, any extra time will be considered unlawful residency, their group subject to
deportation. Their GPS is set with a timer. They drive off as the digital tracker ticks down their
first few minutes.

At the first exit, Parker pulls off the freeway, already feeling the American differences. Faster
speed limits, rougher roads. He steers the van down the near-vacant Main Street toward a
glowing box store, the town’s new hearth. A fine rain shrouds the lot. Rusted food trucks line
the perimeter, halos of light throbbing around their warm interiors. The smell of greasy pork
hangs in the mist.
He waits in the driver’s seat, won’t step out in the rain when Eavan and Meg run
through the wet to buy paper plates of carnitas and hot sauce. He just feels like staring ahead, at
a cluster of workers huddled under an awning, scooping bites of steaming tortilla into their
mouths.
After a few bites of hot meat and sugary juice, he feels marginally better. He doesn’t like
Meg’s plan: drive south to California, take the bullet train straight to Los Angeles, then point
east through the desert all night. LA’s megapolis has been haunting Parker’s fön lately: the
migrant riots, the gun battle that erupted in Palmdale, the military tanking straight through that
labor dispute in Boyle Heights despite the street-peeps, the victims’ cameras, those hundreds of
föns capturing the images and simulcasting them world-wide. Most of the city was under
curfew for weeks, then slowly workers returned to their posts. Those twenty dead protesters
seemed irrelevant. More gates went up. More deportations went down.
Meg and Eavan eat under the awning of a food truck, but Parker remains in the driver’s
seat watching a migrant family huddled over their food in the mini-van across the parking lot.
He dips his head toward his plate of spicy pork, pushes himself toward the grease, the last tang
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of hot sauce burning his lips. A hot rush of blood washes over him, coating his skin in a thin
layer of sweat. To calm himself, he scrolls his fön, tries to ignore the trappings of a border town,
which will be a border town until the end of time—garbage lining the ditch, a line of
cinderblock buildings beside the farm fields. In the rain beyond, he tries not to look at the
workers hunched over rows and rows of blueberries growing out of the bog.
“Look,” Meg says through a crack in the window. “It’s a detention center.” She points
and Parker has to peer through the screen of drops on the windshield. “A camp.”
What he thought was just industrial agriculture has electrified fencing, a giant ICE sign
framing the entrance. The sodden figures hunched over the fields are not just workers. They’re
deportees, undocumented migrants, acres and acres of them. His body twinges, he can’t
imagine working stooped over, boot-deep in mud. Parker opens his door and steps outside only
long enough to chuck his greasy plate into the trash. It’s cold. His hands ache just thinking of
reaching again and again into wet bush. Worse, at the far end of the lot, the camp’s school:
wrapped in razor wire, windows veiled by a mesh of bars. He starts the engine. Releases the
brake. “Get in,” he says. “Please.”
It’s not until he pulls away that he notices the peeps hoisted on tall poles at the end of
every row—so someone can watch these so-called illegal workers working, while they remain
legal, safe and dry.

Out the rain-streaked window, the landscape is marshy then mountainous, scars of logging
scraped down nearly every slope. The rain comes tearing at them in sheets and rivers of mud
rip down the culvert beside the freeway, a torrent the color of earth. Then there are startling
moments of clear, the clouds peel open and a hot sun carves through the holes in the gray. Then
the sky closes, heals, then the rain comes again, pelting the windows and washing the road
black.
Meg is driving when they enter Seattle. The dark of a tunnel wakes Parker like sunshine
would at dawn, an oily black pierced by LEDs in long organized rows. When they burst out of
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the dark, a silver streak of people stackers lines the horizon, sleek and modern in the dusk, but
the freeway itself is lined with tents and shanties and tarps, a metropolis of vagrants. Some
move out into the rows of vehicles whenever the traffic slows, then are marshaled back by
police tanks manning the freeway’s outer edge.
He’s not stoned anymore but fuzzy, hungry, missing Samuel so badly in that moment—
the people stackers burning holes in the fog—he could cry. He does. He lets it go out the back
window, facing his whole body to the road unfurling behind them. He tries to do it silently but
at some point he makes a gulping sound and Meg reaches back and squeezes his knee. Thank
God, she says nothing, just drives on through the sticky dark, the heat in the van mounting
despite the cracked windows.
“We’re gonna get you a suntan, Parks,” Meg says. “We’re gonna get you a boyfriend
too.”
Her smile is real and he calms. Then Parker forces himself to look at the photos of
Rapture, Arizona and he tries to enter Meg’s fantasy, willing it to be his fantasy. Around him
the music roars and the rain sheets down the windows and the puddles in the ditch fill and
drain. He will not cry any more. He will stare at these pics of domes and yurts and muscled
groms and will try his best to summon something new, a life as clean and hot and possible as
the Arizona sun.

As they are about to cross into Oregon, their tracker starts to beep, directing them to exit right
toward an immigration check, to validate passports, transport papers. The tracker is linked to
their van, it even commandeers the steering and the stereo, chirping at them to exit safely,
immediately. Speaking to no one, only swiping their trackers and föns over the terminal, they
are issued the WA-OR transit pass for three days. It’s nothing, but it has them rattled, how little
control they really have.
After that border, they finally concede and steer toward a night-inn: cubicle rooms, a
high-powered server, free NRG smoothies in the lobby at eight. While Meg and Eavan shower
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in their small room, Parker tries leaning against the balcony’s railing, tries looking across this lot
to the other string of lots. The night-inn is twinned on both sides by similar chain hotels, their
properties lined by iron fences. Each door is peeped for safety. Beyond, the freeway hums.
Everything he can see is parked or driving, he reads nothing in the patterns.
A mother in shorts and bare feet with a thick ponytail flopping off the top of her head
comes outside too and lets her two kids run the length of the balcony, back and forth. Their
pants slip slightly down, cuffs sluffing against the plastic floor and Parker can’t help thinking
they would inevitably trip. “Y’all here with family?” she asks Parker.
“Friends,” he says, puts on his teacher voice. “How old are these guys?”
“Two more inside, all under seven” she says. The lady is not scrolling, not filming her
groms. She is just drinking a soda, letting them run.
“Hi guys,” he says to the groms, but they ignore him, run backwards, then forwards,
their bare feet thwapping the plastic.
“We’re heading north, any fires up that way?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “Lots of rain.” She nods, satisfied, and sips soda from a
tube. Like he’d planned it, the younger child trips and slams his chin against the balcony’s floor.
The wailing child rushes to his mother, who crouches and lets him mewl into her chest. “Shh,”
she says and Parker stands over them, staring. Living so long under the No-Touch Policy, he is
very moved by the shape of her hand in the groms’ hair.
“G’night,” she says.
“Sleep well,” he says as he leaves, something welling in his throat.

That night, he dreams of Mason, the only Evergreen grom that ever tried to peep him, though
the attempt was easily detected, thwarted immediately. Mason was a pale sixteen, trapped in
dental correction, one for lists and long biographies of past presidents. The other groms mocked
him for his queerness, but more than that—his weird opinions about everything, not
conservative but working his way up to it. Parker wanted to feel an affinity for him but sort of
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hated the little hairsplitter: not a wrinkle in his uniform, his homework always flawless, his
opinions long and rehearsed and boring everyone. He had worked very hard on his final coding
project before Mason had switched on him, stopped, left the project useless, an unfinished
construction worth a sub-par C+. “What are you trying to do?” Parker had asked, but Mason
had shrugged, faking a conceited, too-good-for-everyone air. It was the first time Parker got
emotional with a grom; he had nearly yelled, nearly berated him if only to break him open and
then like him just a little bit. But that grade didn’t matter—Mason graduated a month later
without comment, his attentive parents filming the whole ceremony and the socializing
afterward. It was obvious, they expected their son to be lavished with goodbyes from other
groms. Instead, Mason shot everyone evil looks and sulked out, trailing his parents like an
embarrassment.
Last year, Mason had tried to DM Parker, sent him a long confession about coming out
in college, an apology and a come-on all at once. Parker was relieved the kid was still alive.
Never wrote him back.
In the dream, Parker discovers Mason naked in the back of the van, beckoning for him.
Parker wakes up nauseous, embarrassed, like he’d done the wrong thing, not just dreamt it up,
his body hurting and stiff and tired out from wanting something and not knowing exactly what
it is.

Onward—town after town after American town, each more depraved. Each follows a pattern.
North of town: manicured gated communities bearing vid-boards of white senior citizens, some
carrying oxygen packs, drifting between golf tees and pools and private hospitals. South side:
there are camps, industrial grey prison complexes with identical ICE signs, each with pleasing
Spanish names—Vista Hermosa, Cielito Lindo—and drones patrolling the perimeters.
Vagrants line the highway’s entrances and exits. Many stick out thumbs, their faces
bearing scars or cancer growths or lines from fatigue or age or weather. Outside every camp’s
gates, under every overpass, beside every box store, behind every charging station are
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hundreds of thousands of shanties. They are a collage of discarded materials, family heirlooms
crammed under tents and tin.
In car windows, in half-cafs, in freeway diners built over the passing cars, travelers
hunch over platters of fried food, ignoring the migrants, the camps, the vagrants—incessantly
scrolling föns. Through Oregon, Northern California—what used to be forest is mud. What
used to be town is just a clot of box stores, fast food, gated suburbs and prisons along the ten
lanes of asphalt.
Somewhere around San José, Meg convinces them that they must hook into the new
bullet train, a double-decker for motos and vans, that links California’s north and south— a
miracle transportation device relying on magnets and federal funds. The docking station is
gleaming, all glass and flashing signs, but the line-up is short, lacking cars, lacking passengers.
“Too steep for most Californians,” Meg scoffs and Eavan grimaces at the price, hundreds of
dollars for the short trip. The cars in front of them glitter, the owners are coiffed, wealthy. The
billboards announce greetings in multiple languages, welcoming them to a clean-energy future.
They buy tickets from a surly clerk with old fading neck tattoos, steer the van up a set of ramps
and park. The train is set to depart in one hour, leaving them to stare at the half-empty cars, the
heavily secured docking area, its armed guards, peeps on every post. When the alarm blares,
when the train finally lurches forward, Parker feels a wave of nausea slide through him. No
way to stop now, they’ll be in Los Angeles in two hours.
As the landscape ticks by, Parker won’t think about Hassad, the grom in eighth year at
Evergreen who is nearly done the app for detecting skin cancer after his mother died of it. The
circles under his eyes darker and deeper, his appetite waning away, no one to help him finish
the app. He won’t think about Graham, the procrastinator, who designed a data board that did
his homework for him, requiring ten times the programming skills, all the slacker spirit. He
won’t think about Brougham the sheltered, or Kilophot the excitable. He won’t think about
Samuel, left alone with them all.
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Parker lets a train of violent images scroll through his fön instead. ICE agents kicking
that migrant mother. Skid Row burnt down by LAPD. Smoldering tires across the I-5. Out the
windows, the earth seems to drain of its moisture. The green of replanted forest is sucked away
in a blur of fruit trees in blossom, vines on rows of fencing and irrigation culverts intersected by
clumps of worker shacks. Soon enough, the sun rips through the cloud, shredding any gray,
leaving only a blazing blue above. On the passing hills, soil shows through the scrub, the
landscape turns treeless, the bushes are rendered brown and thorny. Yellow pervades. Parker’s
never seen such waterless terrain.
And then, approaching too soon, low stucco housing, then two stories, then freeways,
clogged, rows and rows of vehicles nearly at a stop, on both sides of the searing train. The
people stackers of downtown Los Angeles race towards him. The sky is a thin veil of yellow
under burning blue. When the train eases to a stop, Parker’s stomach heaves.
His fön points them to the nearest freeway. Meg manages to wedge the van into the clog
of traffic on the on-ramp. But this freeway is hardly flowing freely, it is a mess of junk trucks
and moto-taxis and super-limos and semi-trolleys. Any signage is masked by graffiti; any speed
limit sign has been vandalized beyond meaning. The lanes are indistinguishable, making the
jam more staggering, more difficult to read. Most vehicles inch forward, then jerk in front of
another just to vie for another few feet.
“Is it rush-hour?” Eavan whispers. Meg leans in, tries to change lanes, stalls again. There
are honks. An empty plastic bag pushes itself between cars in the hot wind.
Then beside the van, a loud thwap. There is someone looking into the window—a grimy
kid, an old sixteen—holding a stick tethering a swell of helium balloons. His face is round but
already worn, speckled with new whiskers and sun-sores. Parker shakes his head at him,
meaning no we won’t buy balloons, but the boy lingers, sprinting after the van for a few feet
and then knocking on the window again when it pauses. He grins with an unbearably glinty
smile and Parker is surprised, jealous almost, of his perfect teeth. They edge away again, but the
boy won’t relent, it’s like he’s laughing at them. Along the rows of stuttering traffic, more
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migrant vendors rush at the windows of other stalled cars, their baskets full of cut fruit, flowers,
bottles of water, blankets and plastic toy guitars. It is a game of speed, the young men hoping to
catch drivers at a halt, while the vehicles attempt to thrust further away.
Parker tries to smile at the grom but he can’t. “Does this traffic ever move?” he nearly
says shrilly and then more quietly, “Where do the vendors go then?”
Eavan stares at the boy outside, giggling. “I think this is exciting,” she says. “I mean, we
could not be further away from Evergreen.”
Parker’s mouth falls open, dumb. “Exciting?” he says.
“It’s pretty full on,” Meg says.
Just then the vendor starts tapping his broomstick on Parker’s window, smiling wildly.
It is a crescendo of taps, a building sound. The boy’s eyes are red rimmed. Drops of sweat bead
along his forehead. Parker doesn’t want to think it but he does: the boy is beautiful. Fuckable.
“Get rid of that guy,” Eavan shrieks, but Parker is hypnotized by the rhythm, by the
glistening skin.
“Buy a balloon or something Parker,” Meg says laughing.
“No no,” Eavan chides.
“He’ll break the window,” Meg says.
Parker goes cold, but still he gawks, unable to look away. Then, in a strange gesture that
is both fluid and menacing, the boy starts gyrating—air humping really—at Parker, a crude
seduction. “Stop,” Parker says to the window, but he won’t stop; the boy presses his thumb to
his waistline and tugs down, revealing his cock. It is a dark swath of hair and skin, a small show
just for Parker, a sexy boy come-on. Parker, silent, feels a red torrent run through him. He can
almost smell the unwashed clothing, his dusty hair. To his horror, he feels his groin stir. With
everything up close like that: those crusted eyes, the cracks in his lips, that thirst, his crazed
ability to do anything for dollars, to debase himself, to dance for a carload of tourists—this boy
is Parker’s tormenter, his murderer, his fuck.
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Above, the sun is a burning eye. Through the window, the heat is palpable, a reaching
thing. Throbbing, furious, hiding his hands in his lap, for the millionth time he needs Samuel—
who would pay this boy off, who would shout or wave or dismiss this kid so effortlessly. Then
he realizes, Samuel could be watching, could have commandeered the van’s peeps, could be
following this whole thing. Parker straightens up, wipes his eyes, the corners of his mouth. Meg
is just driving. Eavan looks at him through the glowing lenses of her fön. Parker tries to force
his thinking into a sensible pattern: zeros and ones, variables that can be calculated. But like bad
code, he’s stuck in a loop, even though the van is twenty feet away now, thirty and by now
balloon-boy is harassing another carload of motorists, Parker is a burning thing and nothing
will make this easier, this new life rushing at him like so much untouchable hot wind.

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Meg

Four in the morning by the glow of a box-store. Meg is parked, too tired to drive, too wired to
sleep. An hour ago she watched Eavan and Parker lie out on the bench seats and pop sleepers
and fall into a programed, synthetic slumber. She worries about them. In healthy attachment
models, one is content both alone and with others. In a healthy attachment models, one is
adaptive, at ease with change. She’s done the research: scarred after separating from parents,
people with attachment disorders remain in unhealthy relationships too long. Evergreen was
full of unhealthy attachment models: groms that would allow for a certain degree of abuse, of
peer pressure. Of course she sees the signs in Parker, in Eavan too: Doubtful self-worth.
Paralyzing worry. They are addicted to Samuel, to Evergreen, to chems, to tech. Sitting there,
staring into the light of the box store, she goes over her strategies, her ways of helping. Open-
ended questions. New settings. There are subtle ways for Meg to mention new paths to
wellness, ways they can rewrite the narrative, feel the pain and let it burn off.
She tries to recline, tuck under a shawl, close her eyes to the pulsing parking lot. But it’s
like her body won’t shut down. Beyond the lot, the highway won’t stop. The store itself doesn’t
open until six but the lights are on. The whole lot radiates with it.

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At four-twenty, she sips on her canna pen, decides to stroll the lot. The night air is still
sultry, warm. She can’t believe it: she’s in sandals, a nothing shirt, walking at night along a rows
of RVs. Probably sketchy, but it’s well-lit. She holds her keys a certain way, takes a few pics of
the tin-mended vehicles, welcome mats patch-worked around the pavement. Almost Arizona,
she thinks. By the loading docks, a line of bolted-up food trucks wait for morning, their plastic
tables hunched into piles.
On the north side of the store, shoved against a row of cinderblock toilets are rows, a
pleasant cluster of RVs. These have decorative lights, turf, paper flags. Meg squints, sees a real
campfire surrounded by old-timers, a little courtyard made of their parked Winnebagos.
“You stealing something?” a voice calls to her from the flicker.
“Oh, um. No.” Meg steps away from the firelight.
“Selling something?” the same voice says and it is woman’s voice, cracked. The lady
laughs. Four of them, three women and one man in fold-out chairs wave to her from around a
campfire, frowning with their deeply wrinkled eyes and mouths. The fire is made of old
palettes neatly sliced into boards. Each set of knuckled knees is tucked under a card table
littered with old-model tablets. Each clawed hand nurses a steaming cup. “Can’t sleep,” the
lady says. “You should come work with us.” She laughs again.
“They’re looking for recruits in warehouses,” says the smallest of the women, her hair a
siren red, thinning around the forehead. Meg can hear a ranchero moaning from inside her RV,
the screen door propped open, the iron steps folded down.
“Oh no, we’re heading up state, to volunteer,” Meg says.
“Volunteer,” the redhead says, wincing campfire smoke from her eyes.
“Only the young and the foolish work for free,” the laughing lady says. She points at a
bottle of liquor toward Meg from its place on the card table. “You foolish?”
Meg takes the shot of cheap rye in a coffee mug. She introduces herself to Phyllis, a night
owl, who just finished the evening shift, four pm to four am. “Stocking shelves,” she says
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proudly, pointing at the loading dock. “And free as a bird on the road between contracts. Best
life I could ask for.”
Meg has heard of this army of retirees, their golden years unplanned after the end of
social security. Instead of gated communities and senior art classes, they travel from warehouse
to box-store, doing stock-work in exchange for doctor’s visits and minimum wage, squatting on
raw desert between gigs. She’s heard of Quartzite, now the third largest city in Arizona but
without sewage hook-ups or lights or piped water, just a massive tumor of settlement between
the saguaros, hundreds of thousands of squatters in vans and shanties and RVs, their numbers
blistering to a million each winter.
“I’m a teacher,” Meg says. “We’re going to an intentional community. To the north.”
Meg could see Phyllis wasn’t listening, that nobody was, they all seemed too busy fixing drinks,
their arthritic hands tapping through digi-brochures.
“Intentional community,” someone scoffs.
“E-tail’s got a Flagstaff warehouse starting up,” Phyllis tells Meg. She hands her a tablet
with a glossy set of images—a doctor checking a pulse, a grinning granny in spectacles, a
cheerful contingent of white-haired workers in matching purple T-shirts. “If that back-to-the-
future business don’t work out.” Phyllis spills more rye into Meg’s cup without asking. She still
hasn’t been offered a chair so she stands, the smoke drifting her way no matter how she shifts in
the circle of faces.
“Smoke follows beauty,” a quieter lady says, no longer dozing in her lawn chair. Her
face is swollen on one side, red around the cheek, with what Meg guesses is an inflamed tooth.
“That Etail’s got good insurance,” the redhead adds.
“No,” Meg says. “We’re teachers, not…” she stops herself, but not before Phyllis raises
her painted-on eyebrows at her.
“Not warehouse types? You think teaching is so special?” Phyllis lets out another laugh
that ends in a dry cough.
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“Lots of teachers here in camp,” the tooth lady says over the sound of hacking. “She was
third grade, am I right?”
Phyllis nods. Her eyes are still watering from coughing and a few smudges of make-up
get swiped into the wrinkles in her cheek.
“Well, insurance is always a good thing,” Meg says. “Might help with—” she points to
the quiet lady’s inflamed cheek.
“Oh stuff it,” the lady snaps and hoists herself up from the chair, shuffling toward her
open RV door. Phyllis waves the grimace away like a buzzing fly.
“She just got rejected for coverage today. They’re going to pull it, they won’t do a root
canal or anything,” Phyllis tells her.
In the corner of the lot, for the first time, Meg spots the peeps leering over the
ramshackle collection of RVs. Their little blue lights blink at her through the clear warm night.
“You running from the law?” the old man says, the first thing out of his mouth. “’Cause
they gonna catch you with that business,” he says. He isn’t pointing with his hand, but with a
beautifully carved cane. “They’ve got facial recognition, retinal even from this distance. Lots of
us up Quartzite way can’t work down here for that reason alone. Gotta be clean, even for these
jobs.”
“If you’re crossing the AZ line, you better go,” Phyllis says. She rolls her eyes a little at
the old man, just like she rolled her eyes at Meg.
“Sorry?”
“There’s a line-up by dawn at that border,” Phyllis says.
“Thanks,” Meg says and puts her mug down on the nearest card table. “Well, we better
go then.”
“Welcome to the open road,” Phyllis calls out. As Meg steps out of the light, she sees
Phyllis stand with some difficulty to reach for Meg’s last swallow of rye.

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All along the darkened highway, there are signs of more RV rats. It’s like they swarm Meg in
every direction, squatters in the burnt shells of diners and souvenir stands, the husks of
farmhouses gone to drought. She wonders if she could do this alone, if she didn’t have Parker
and Eavan asleep in the van, would she have the nerve?
Meg always considered herself a model of healthy attachment, despite the fact that we
all have our shit. Meg’s shit was over-exposure at a young age. Meg was birthed on a live-
stream, no medical personnel present, only her mother writhing and dancing and pulling down
on a giant silk rope while midwives chanted around her and rubbed her thighs and belly with
oil and her father filmed. They had problems with boundaries. She could go further back—
through the pregnancy, her four brother-sister groms’ week-by-week growth blogs. As groms,
harvesting family meals from the vegetable garden, practicing Kundalini. Everything was
posted online. Public. Every breast-feed in nature. Every home-spun dress.
Click-famous naturopaths, cookbook authors, radical vegans and models—her parents
were careful about backdrops, they draped hand-dyed linens over the windows, took
sponsorships from furniture companies. They made profiles for each of their groms, filled pages
with VRs of Meg homeschooling her siblings, Meg asleep in the plush family bed. There was
always close-up on those organic sheets.
In a healthy attachment model, she would not have become a surrogate parent. Yes,
Edward and Carol wore their toddlers in slings until five-years-old, they shared everything:
plates, beds, clothing. But her parents wouldn’t medicate a fever, wouldn’t vaccinate, wouldn’t
teach a kid to read, insisting they would ‘catch’ the language themselves. This why Meg is a
perfectionist, why she feels she was parentified. She taught them all to read. When Meg’s
youngest sister caught the viral strain of polio that snuck through the cities of the Pacific
Northwest, when her parents fought back with an arsenal of pro-biotics and immune boosters,
it was Meg who checked the toddler into the Children’s Hospital. Meg learned things after
that—what mattered and what didn’t. After that, she started their schedule of vaccinations. She
erased their profiles. She took two buses to the Soviet-style administration building and
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enrolled them all in public school. Her littlest sister still bore that twisted leg. Meg never was a
grom, not really, she’d always been grown up.
In shotgun, one of Eavan’s eyes is slightly open, the white of it is exposed. Meg can’t
look, but still sees it flicker, roll back in her head. She keeps driving, promises her friends
something just as the sun peels over the east, something about this being better for everyone.
Promises herself she can look after them. Always the grown up, she thinks, but sometimes it
feels good. Up and down the hillsides beside the highways of Arizona, the crack-shacks and RV
lights twinkle back at her, as if saying: Yes.

At the Arizona State Line, she gets more good omens. Meg expects a line-up, those militarized
immigration agents, K-9 search. But there are only two cars in front of her, waiting for their turn
at immigration. She wakes Parker and Eavan, whiny and dazed, and insists they prop
themselves up for the little window.
“I hate you,” Parker says.
“Wake up,” she says. The drugs are still in him, he has trouble keeping his head from
sinking toward his chest. Eavan won’t move, she’s mute, body a rag-doll thing on the back
bench. “What would you do in an emergency?” Meg says. “Sleep?”
“Good luck with the cops,” Parker mumbles. He stays awake, but his blinks are long.
When she pulls up, there are no digitized voices, no initial retinal scans. The booth’s
glass slides open and the agent is just nice, wears glasses and a tie. He nods at Parker and Meg,
at Eavan in the back, curled around her backpack like a grom. Then he smiles like a human
being with a small shaving nick on his cheek and a fresh coffee on his desk. He barely points the
peep between the wheels.
“You staying for the length of your visa?”
“Yes,” she says and it is decided.
“Come back here for extension, in person only. Good luck,” he says and they are given a
new tracker, this one with a three-month timer.
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As she pulls away, Parker says, “No shit,” and Meg is giddy with this new ability to
make decisions quickly and definitively. Eat here, pull over there. Move to Rapture together,
now. So this is what it’s like, she thinks, to act instead of speak.

It is the smell of the place that snares her first— a smoke, that burning sun-baked sweet-grass
full of oil and medicine, lit with mesquite and lifted on a hot wind. Meg smells it from their first
turn onto the Rapture property. Possibility.
Everything seems to slow, to calm, after exiting the Interstate to the secondary highway
to the single lane to the gravel track. The van almost shudders with pleasure as it brushes over
the threshold of the property—a Texas gate underfoot and a hanging sign above, hand-painted
in aqua-blue lettering Sanctuary Now.
It is past dawn, but the clouds are still powder pink and the breeze gentle, an auspicious
time to arrive. Meg tries to memorize this first look at Rapture, Arizona—the cacti lining the
road with its arms reaching skyward, the low-lying manzanitas, dotting the hills. As she drives
up the long lane, past an old punch-buggy with a hood full of blooming flowers, she tries to
make out the figures of her new neighbors, her students, the citizens of this new place, but the
land feels vacant. She can only make out fence posts, small white domes on a faraway ridge, a
watchtower on the south side of the property—a lean silhouette against the pinky horizon. Meg
turns onto the driveway that leads straight to the rancho-style house they call the hacienda,
parks the van next to two bio-diesel trucks. Bougainvillea and palms canopy the roof, a spot of
electric pink against the surrounding sage.
Eavan, when she lifts her face from the bench seat, is all bloodshot eyes and lined cheeks
from the rumpled sweater she’d used as a pillow. Parker is still slouched in shotgun but his
eyes are open, his finger tapping his fön. The skin beside his eyes looks puckered and red from
where the toggle pressed against his face all night.
“They have a signal jam,” he says after only two taps on the fön’s toggle. “Over the
whole place. No point.” Parker tosses his fön back on the charger, smacks his sticky mouth.
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“Permanent blackout,” Meg says squeezing his shoulder. She hops out, but they don’t
follow.
“Maybe see if they’re awake?” Eavan says, adjusting her make-up in the mirror.
“It’s six in the morning,” Parker says. “Can you find us a bite to eat?”
“Ask if we can use the bathroom first,” Eavan says. She opens the side door and raises
her face to the sun. “Maybe a drink of water?”
“Thank you,” Parker calls after her as she walks toward the terrace, alone. After the
sprawl of tin shacks and RVS and the camps and the roadhouse cafes, Meg is almost ashamed
by how grateful she is for Rapture’s quiet order: the manicured grounds, the orange trees in
neat rows. The hacienda is more green-tech than she’d even hoped: cooled by pale stucco
shaded by an acacia, the south-facing aspect lined with solar panels. Down an adjoining
walkway is a streak of whitewashed domes, bigger in life against the pale sky. All of it, tech
free, she thinks. All of it, unpeeped. Up close, the hacienda’s walls are living gardens, dripping
wisteria. She brushes her fingers along a succulent’s spines. More gentle, blooming smells come
at her, a private welcome.
“That’s called an Engelmann’s Hedgehog. In a few weeks they’ll bloom—huge and
magenta.”
Meg squints, looks. Past the dappled shadows, in the far corner of the terrace, is a man,
not large, not loud, not gruff, hanging in a kind of hammock chair, his figure almost levitating.
The lines of his body meld into the dark spots around the door, rendering him opaque.
“Beautiful,” he says.
“Sorry?” Meg says. Her voice is scratchy, like she’s been teaching for hours without tea.
“The Engelmann blooms,” he says. Meg squints again and sees in the shadows around
him, a hundred small tin cans filled with tiny succulent cuttings, vines, bits of green and flower.
She knows the voice from the interviews, the VRs. This is Hollings, a Rapture founder. But here,
in person, he is so much quieter than she expected. When he steps into the sunlight and reaches
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out his hand, he doesn’t even say his name. She has to cross the terrace to touch him.
“Margaret,” he whispers at her. “Maggie. May.”
“Meg,” she says back and he nods.
“Meg,” he says. Hollings looks her age, his hair is sandy-blond and long and his
shoulders strong, until he smiles and is suddenly twenty years older, his eyes crinkly. “I
researched your career and I was the one to sign your documents. Your work is startling,
really.”
Meg starts noticing things: His feet are in leather chanklas, his toenails are clean and cut.
His hair keeps shaking loose and he has to tuck it behind his ear. His body looks comfortable
coiled up, but when Hollings stands, she sees he’s very tall. His hair is receding slightly, pulling
away from his face, giving him an open expression, innocent, unlocked. “We’re so excited
you’ve come all this way and left such an enlightened society for this place, this…. Experiment.
You’ll have a lot to teach us.”
“Not sure about that,” Meg scoffs, trying to brush this man’s sincerity into a joke. “I’m
here to learn too.”
He doesn’t release her hand right away, but squeezes it, so gently, before letting it drop.
“Brilliant,” he whispers.
There is a moment, a puff of air that passes between them. After four days of driving, no
sleep, dirty water and greasy food, after immigration tests and trackers and directions and
freeways, of retirees and squatters, she’s just susceptible, that’s all. “I’m so glad to be here,” she
says. She thinks she hears Eavan or Parker on the walkway behind her and she turns to look.
At this, he turns away too and reaches for a little can filled with plant, starts wriggling a
stem from a clump of dirt, allowing the leftover soil to fall to the tiles below. Past the hacienda,
the desert looks cleaned out, washed in the morning sun.
Inside the hacienda, a door slams. Hollings keeps his eyes on his plants, but Meg can
feel the calm, like the smell of sweet-grass, is diminishing, drifting away. She wants him to look
at her again.
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“So,” she finally says. “Should we bring our stuff out here or back to the —“
“We will welcome you and your friends on the terrace. This area is private quarters,” he
says.
“Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” she says, backing away.
“It’s lovely,” he says. “You’re welcome any time. I’m always up at dawn,” he says softly,
repairing that frisson of noise between them. His fingers work a small cluster of roots free of
soil, his eyes on their small threads.
“Me too,” Meg lies.
Hollings finally fixes his eyes back on her before he nods. Then he leaves through a set
of billowing curtains, a set of French doors. Meg sees real glass in the lanterns hanging in the
acacia tree. She recognizes the rust and cream linen her parents helped to make famous. They
have money, she decides. He likes me. This could work.
As she walks back to the van, she keeps stepping back and forth between the sun and
the shadow. It’s like two different worlds to her. Next to the hacienda is dark and cool, while
the morning is white and bright in her face. It’s a ten-degree difference, just one step apart.

Establishing boundaries requires work, but Meg is willing to do the work. Yes, she has learned
some hard lessons along the way. She was a too-harsh teacher to her brother-sister groms. She
took too much money from her parents. She should not have fucked Amanda that single mom,
or Lisa or Jeremy or that older couple at the mushroom party in East City. And obviously she
shouldn’t have fallen for that Social Studies teacher Terry just because he wrote one-man plays
on civil disobedience for environmental causes. She knows that now, but back then if felt
flattering, the way Terry copy-edited Meg’s university applications. He let her star in the opera
he wrote about boycotting meat. It felt pretty grown up when Terry dissed the other students,
all of them helicoptered, surveilled to the point of idleness. They would text all night about it.
Yes, pictures. Yes, of her. She knows now, it wasn’t OK when after eight months of it, he invited
her to his apartment to watch a livestream flash mob at a factory in Shenzhen.
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It could have gone wrong in Terry’s apartment, but it didn’t. The bedroom door stayed
closed, the dank sheets untouched. At the time, she was disappointed when he sat a foot away
on his sagging couch, when he made voices for this action figures and offered her lemon bubble
instead of wine. She was sixteen and perpetually the oldest person in the room. But at that point
she should have gone back to being sixteen. Instead, she threw herself into organizing Terry’s
Tar-Sands protest. He introduced Meg to his friends from a local theatre troupe, middle-aged
actresses who eyed Meg skeptically when she arrived with signs and buttons and gas masks for
herself and her teacher. They didn’t approve. But fuck them, Meg had thought. Maybe that’s
why she screamed so loudly, why she shoved to the front of the march, right into the
community services officers holding a barrier for the crowd.
The footage is hard to watch. Meg screamed in a peace officer’s face, was arrested,
thrown dramatically to the cement face-down by a cop with a tight ponytail and rock-hard
thighs. Terry was nowhere. But the protesters wore föns, the scene was peeped and shared and
spread virally hundreds of thousands of times. They don’t see her mother bailing her out,
paying her legal fees, advising her to accept the plea right then: one year of community service.
They didn’t see her march out of jail in less than an hour, how relieved she was, how she didn’t
turn back to acknowledge the unkempt, unclaimed women left behind in the holding cell.
But Meg screaming, getting thrown to the ground: that footage they shared again and
again—through school and theatre club and on a few feminist vlogs. By then she was one thing.
Her meme was pure: cheek pressed into the pavement, BAN OIL written across her spotted
forehead.
The next day, Terry had recast the meatless opera. Terry had canceled office hours.
Terry wouldn’t answer her texts. Only once in the staff parking lot did she corner him and he
went pale, looked terrified, but he put on a teacher voice and insisted they keep a professional
distance. Now Meg can see Terry was establishing boundaries. Then, she fell apart. She fucked
the opera’s stage manager then the new female lead. She erased her profiles, tried coke, buzzed
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her ginger hair down to the scalp. Meg disappeared from her parents’ feed like she’d died, not
just hidden away at a local university, a lesbian until graduation.
Maybe, she shouldn’t have gone back for him, third year university, at that rally in front
of city hall. Terry was probably thirty-five by then, still good-looking with his hair grown out.
She was twenty-one. It took two dates, a coffee then a wine-logged dinner, to get back to his
yeasty apartment and she surged with some old feeling climbing the steps to his walk-up. But
the place had changed so little. Piles of unproduced plays littered the coffee table and couch, the
mildewed bathroom stunk of sandalwood over piss. Still, it felt good to remove his plaid
button-up. To request he sit back, lick here, kiss her right on the mouth. Maybe she should not
have stayed in his walk-up for two days naked, drinking his brewed coffee and ordering pho
and reading his bad, bad plays. Establishing boundaries requires work and Meg is willing to do
the work. So when she left, she said she wouldn’t call and she didn’t call. But this is part of her
narrative that is worth acknowledging too. How for one fleeting moment, Meg actually let
herself think: I will get what I want from this world.

On the terrace at Rapture, Meg watches Eavan inventory the crafted and bought and harvested
things. That brass fire pit. That bowl of oranges, stems and leaves attached. The long tablecloth,
a scrubbed indigo cotton. She had hoped the place would be more grassroots, but something in
her is also relieved. In the middle of the table is a loaf of bread and bowls of butter and jam and
three jars of orange juice. Parker doesn’t ask, he just tears into the bread. Meg splits an orange
but gets the juice all over her thumbs. It runs down her arms, the flesh won’t break away from
the rind.
She is licking the juice off her wrist when Hollings floats out of the hacienda door, a
woman with him, a thin, muscled woman with a rope of grey braid down her very straight
spine. Her eyes are blue, the sheer flame kind, and her skin is so dark Meg thinks she must be
Central American, or Native, but that’s probably wrong. She is Meg’s opposite— the jeans low
on her hips, no bra, sinewy neck. Meg, with her clumpy stomach, her cotton pants always
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bunching in her ass. She can feel Eavan beside her, assessing these people on looks, on their
carriage. She’s proud, for a second that she’s chosen this so well.
“Hi wow so nice to meet you I’m Meg,” she says in one breath.
“Welcome to sanctuary.” The woman’s voice is clear and her eyes are clear and her skin
is finely creased around the eyes, mouth. Once she speaks, Meg sees a gap between her two
large front teeth; the lack of orthodontics gives her a disarming, unfussy quality. “I’m Sonia.”
“This is Eavan and Parker,” Meg says.
“Welcome, welcome,” Sonia says. They fall silent and it is everything Meg can do to
keep herself from filling the silence.
Hollings takes over. “Parker. Eavan. Meg. This is a very special place, but we’ve got
rules to protect those here. We’ve got to get some things out of the way right now, right away. I
hope you’ll forgive me.”
“No, of course,” Meg says a bit shrilly. She watches him repeat that gesture of tucking
his hair behind his ear, how he stoops a little when he does it, a tiny, humble bow.
“For a start, when you enter the property, from now on, we’ll ask you to close up behind
you.” Hollings waves toward the entrance and Meg can see there are two tall men rolling the
bright blue Beetle in front of the gate, its hood full of flowers. The iron gate swings shut behind
that, a key in a deadbolt lock. No thumbprints. No digi-info at all. One of the men waves a key
at them, then puts the string over his head, under his shirt.
“This is not a retreat where you hide-out from your other life.” Sonia says. She seems
like her mother’s older, classy friends. Dark hair streaked with silver. Tiny turquoise stones in
each ear. A crisp man’s dress shirt almost like a tunic, not expensive but classic. “This is your
life,” she says. Along her forearm are three keys on strings, which she holds out to them, letting
them jingle. The rub of the hemp is rough around Meg’s neck.
Hollings takes his cue. He lies his hands down flat on the table and their eyes are drawn
to the strong fingers, like that’s their map. “First—the föns. You realized, I’m sure, that you
won’t get a signal here. But that also means no pics, no VRs to cache for later. We are tech-free.
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That’s part of the deal,” Hollings says. Eavan removes her fön, tries to hide it in her lap. “You’ll
have to lock those in the van, or surrender them now. And your chems. Those you’ll have to
give us too. You have to think of this a full cleanse. That’s what you came for, am I right?”
Eavan looks dubiously at Meg before she says, “Maybe we’ll keep these in the van.”
“Most important,” Sonia says, not waiting. “You should know about our education
model.”
“You’re the teachers after all,” Hollings says kindly. Like a compliment.
“Here at Rapture, our children are free range. Completely. For years, we’ve been
experimenting with what that means and we have come to the realization that it isn’t just letting
groms roam for a few hours a day. But rather, they must live free to feel completely free.”
Meg looks at Hollings. His eyes are shining, a deep furrow of sincerity between his eyes.
“And so, at a young age, the groms inhabit part of the community that is entirely their own.
And no adult may penetrate that area, except for you. We call it Grom City and it’s theirs, to
create, to build, to occupy. A place they can call their very own.” Hollings says.
Meg can see Hollings and Sonia wait for a reaction.
“Oh, so no parents allowed at school?” Parker asks and Sonia shakes her head.
“It’s a revolutionary model. Groms here at Rapture begin to live independently, on their
side of the property, at age five. We have an intermediate area for gradual entry, for parents to
ease their groms over to the other side at three, at four. And by five years old Rapture groms
sleep, eat, bathe, play, learn, all their own way, in Grom City. It’s a way to find one’s own path,
naturally, from a place of deep connection.”
“It’s groundbreaking,” Hollings added quickly.
No one fills the space that follows, until Parker says: “Sorry. They live away from their
parents?”
“These free-range groms live independently from all adults,” Hollings replies.
“The groms choose this? At age five?” Parker asks.
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“It’s a choice everyone makes. Everything is provided. Grom City is a safe and healthy
community. We give them food and fresh water and laundered clothing and bedding. And
Grom City is safe, well constructed, cleaned once a week. While their primary needs are met,
groms can explore and learn entirely in freedom and nature,” Sonia says placidly.
“It’s a dream we both had as groms. In fact, that’s why we’re so excited about all of you,
because Meg wrote about this in her teaching statement when she first contacted us. What is it
like to parent one’s self?” Hollings is looking at her, admiration shining in his eyes.
Meg is trying to keep her mouth closed, her face still. She is listening, but cannot quite
absorb all of it. She knows this model exists, groms away from parents, but they are usually
raised by den mothers, caregivers, or they go home to mums and dads at night. But here, it’s
groms caring for groms all the time? Is it safe? How do they self-discipline? Don’t they cry?
What of their attachment? To whom do they attach?
“We need teachers, of course, for the education component—which is why you’ll play
such an important role here, all of you.”
“You will be the interlocutor between worlds. It’s a special thing, for adults to enter
Grom City.” Sonia says.
Meg nods, but sees Eavan and Parker are still perplexed.
“So teachers come and go, but no parents,” Parker says.
“At a certain point, once they are fed and safe, groms don’t need policing their day-to-
day choices. And you’ll see it’s a marvelous, creative space. When groms choose what they
want for themselves, the results are remarkable,” Sonia continues.
Hollings beams. “Groms never get enough credit to manage their own lives, that’s why
we trust them to govern themselves.”
Eavan shifts beside her. Parker wears a confused look, something between terror and
hilarity. Compared to Evergreen, where every grom is peeped and controlled and regulated and
measured, this feels hazardous, sketchy. But she’s always believed in free-range. Hates the over-
policing, the tech and chems governing young minds. Meg wants to press pause and consult
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her friends, sort through some emergent curriculum theory and see how this model fits. She
wants to read a study, someone else’s study, she’s not sure she’s ever read anything that covers
this ground: groms taking care of groms. That’s their whole world—no parents, just each other.
“This is how they want to live,” Sonia says, eyeing Meg. “And everyone deserves to get
what they want, don’t you think?”

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2:

In Grom City, groms cannot bash heads. They cannot drive the vans. They cannot pour water
freely from the hoses, as they do in the books they read again and again. The groms cannot let
a scraped knee stay dirty or it turns the whole leg rotten. They cannot cross the fences, nor
leave through the front gate. They cannot climb the watchtower. They cannot enter the
hacienda. They cannot leave the littles too long on their own or they scream so hard it’s
impossible to get them to stop. They can trap baby birds but they cannot trap each other and
keep each other prisoner, even if it is just a game. They cannot eat meat. They cannot sleep
boys and girls together. Otherwise, they can do whatever they want, anything in the world.
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In Grom City, any grom can gobble all the food. Or they can choose to share. They can invent
rules and break rules and decide who is leader and then change their minds, right away. They
can battle with sticks or rocks or fire and they can draw blood, but just a little. Anything too deep
will draw the attention of the adults, who cross into Grom City with their bandages and stitches
and medicines that sting.

In Grom City, they share toys, they share books, they can choose to wear anything from their
collective trunks: wedding dresses or old-man pants or capes or bodysuits. Or they can go
naked, though no one does. They need protection from the elements. They would all wear
snake-leather boots and broad-brimmed hats if they had a more abundant supply. In Arizona,
the sun scorches all day long. The wind roars at dusk, a handful of dust in your mouth. The
morning is crisp and clear but it’s hard for the olders to wake up in time to attend the littles and
fetch the food. If they sleep late, their food is gone by the time they leave the covers. So they
miss the blue air and they’re ravenous and then the heat comes strong. And then they’re stuck
until lunch.

In Grom City, they try to make shade many hours of the day. They construct shelters very well;
they can craft from sticks and cloth any manner of forts that can last many weeks. But they
cannot sleep in the forts; they always sleep in the yurts, which are secure and tile-floored and
equipped with air-cooling and lights and insect screens. In the yurts, they are protected from the
hunting creatures and the dust, though they are not protected from each other’s fists, kicks and
occasional bites.

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In Grom City, they can sleep all day if they want and they’ve all tried it. Nobody does it for long
though. Sleeping all day alone? No thank you. All groms know, nights are better together. The
desert encroaches at night, whereas in the day it retreats to small dens and warrens in the
shade. They build fires for warmth, to help them to see the hunting creatures. At the fires,
though the groms get tired, they don’t peel off one by one. Instead they wait, they doze off on
shoulders and laps in a pile of blankets under a flickering of stars. Then, when the fire is almost
ash and embers, they depart together, to the air-cooled yurts. It’s important that no one go
missing.

Sometimes, a grom wanders away. Those times, luckily, an adult can track them and wrangle
them back. Once, the groms unearthed three small terrier puppies in a greasy box under the
south fence. They concealed them for a while. They offered bread and honey, orange bites,
goats milk and cheese and yogurt. But the puppies wouldn’t eat—not for anything in the world—
and they howled with tiny howls as sharp as their teeth. Soon an adult came to take them. The
groms never got to see them grow.

Once the groms tried to occupy the hacienda and no one can even remember why they
stopped. Maybe the adults gave them more books. Or more feathers and leather straps and
strings. A new solar shower, one that works night and day. A bathtub for the littles. An orange
tree to water and care for, that would make fruit and shade and fragrant blossoms in the spring.
New costume pieces. Jars of preserves. Flour to make maché. Another mirror, one that reaches
their toes. Better hunks of bread, of cheese, of tofu or honeycomb. A large wooden stage by the
schoolroom to make plays. Old cameras to dissect. Small plastic habitats for the creatures they
snare and entrap and keep prisoner all day and night in the schoolroom, that are fed other
creatures smaller than themselves. The groms dangle these creatures by their tails for a long
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time before they drop them in. It is a game for some of them, a cruel game that they know they
should not do but they reenact it again and again and again.

In Grom City, they love their teachers, even though they are always coming and coming and
then leaving. The teachers have all the ideas in the world and the groms pursue the teachers on
walks, they snuggle up to them, even when they’re just reciting books they’ve already read
many times themselves. They crowd them. The littles hang off their wrists and cry when they
depart. But they have seen so many teachers come and go, why do they cry? Why do they
stand at the fence and watch the vans drive away spitting dust in their eyes? What did the
teachers give them? We know, the teachers give them everything: Stories about castles. About
lakes. Pictures of the cities. New musical instruments to hang on the school wall. Posters to line
the yurts. Sweets with crinkly plastic wrappers they can glue to sheets of paper to make a forest
of flowers. The words to a song they will hear years later and be surprised by the sudden fear
that the song, like the teachers, will go away and they’ll never know exactly how it was
supposed to be sung.

In Grom City, sometimes groms go away too. When they turn sixteen and are called to the
hacienda. When they try to cross the fence or climb the watchtower and are caught. When a cut
goes really deep or a bone is crushed or poking out. When a girl and boy have snuck into the
wash-shack after dark. When an eye is lost, or a finger. When a little is left too long in the sun
and their skin erupts in blisters and they can’t even lie down without shrieking. When a mother
or dad actually misses one of them and finally scoops them into a van and drives away. Until
then, they live the very best life in the world. They’ve got fires at night and woody little oranges
and blue mornings when they have thrown off the covers and pushed into the dawn to eat all the
breakfast and leave the others to wake in the scorch. They’ve got kisses and caresses. They’ve
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got creatures to feed and care for. They’ve got all kinds of supplies to cut and saw and drape
and pin. And they’ve got all day long every day to do their best to make shade.

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Eavan

Here is a moment, day one: In the shadow cut by the canyon’s wall, a small mob of groms are
seated in a semi-circle on a worn woven rug. They plop on top of one-another. Hair is straggly,
unwashed. It’s dusk and the sunset-yellow yurts flicker from the inside. The air is cool and the
groms are lounging on cushions and beanbags, scooping spoonfuls from tin plates and paper
cartons. Eavan is eating too—a grain salad with homemade cheese and sweet vinegar, tomatoes
that taste like sun and greens that are sharp and mustardy. This, she could eat and eat and eat.
Eavan’s finger drifts to her temple but stops. If she were wearing her fön, she would film
a quick VR of this schoolhouse, what used to be an adobe stable but is now an open classroom.
What used to be archways for animals are now sliding doors, mouths open to the outside. She
thinks up a status she’ll never post:
A perfect Arizona welcome: whole food and warm skies. Welcome to Rapture!
©gratitude ©openhearts
She’s got no device to record it, so she takes a memory-pic, chews as slowly as she can,
tastes everything on her spoon. She can’t ignore the headache prodding between her eyes, the
shaky hands. How long without a fizzer: twelve hours? She won’t think about the stash she
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handed over to Hollings yesterday, the shape of the bottle, how it fits perfectly in a palm. She
can ignore the sweat and unquenchable thirst, but the headache sharpens everything. Eavan
thinks: fizzers would make it better. Thinks: Stop it. Stop.
A girl, maybe nine, stretches her finger out and says, “C’meer.” Eavan moves to the edge
of the circle of yurts where they have thrown a rug right onto the dirt. The girl is wearing a rust
colored T-shirt with the face of Ganesh placidly staring from the front. A fedora, jean shorts, too
big hiking boots. The kid’s got a laser tattoo of the OM symbol on the back of her calf but it’s
stretched from growing. “I’m Luna,” she whispers. When she talks, Luna turns younger than
nine, seven maybe, her teeth growing in jagged. No eyeteeth yet.
“I’m Eavan,” she whispers back.
“I know,” Luna says. “Look.”
Eavan crouches beside her. Looks. From that spot, a wall of sandstone rises up behind
the yurts like a rampart. Eavan can see where the groms have peppered the walls with holes,
tiny caves etched out with shovels and picks. In each notch there is some ephemera from the
outside— a bottle of pancake syrup, an old timey light bulb, a flip-phone. The effect, a
honeycomb made of hundreds of small caves, each hole an aperture into the world beyond
Rapture’s wire fences.
“It’s our story land,” Luna lisps loudly. Eavan sees a film camera, a stiletto, a metal
watch around a styrofoam wrist. “Someone copied it from a movie about mermaids so the idea
is only partly original. My favorite is the dice.”
And then, uninvited, Luna folds her moist fingers into Eavan’s hand. It is the first time
she has touched a child since June’s convulsing body was pulled from her arms. She winces. She
hasn’t thought about June all day but this touch launches the vid in her mind, sends the little
girl spiraling through her thoughts again.
“Don’t worry, you can make a story up too,” Luna says.
“You guys staying?” a boy asks, plunking beside her on the rug and toeing the dirt.
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“That’s Miles,” Luna explains. Miles sniffs. His scuffing makes a small cloud of dust, a
screen in the low slanting light.
“Hey,” Eavan says.
“Not everybody stays,” Miles says.
“I know,” she says. But right then, she wants to just say—Yes. Why not stay. For the first
time in so long she is not hungry, she’s got no vitaband to remind her. She’s not watching Dr.
Mike, Samuel. No one is filming her and she’s filming no one. It has been so long since she has
seen the night sky without clouds—a broken net of stars. The outside is the same temperature
as breath, the air still hanging with warmth. That’s what she’s thinking at the end of her first
day at Rapture, Arizona: to be out at night without any bite to the wind. How inviting.

Day two, the withdrawal is irrefutable. She wakes at five with only a glimpse of her dream,
hundreds of convulsing children, none of whom she can scoop up and save. She lies there and
tries. She stares out the skylight. Lets her heart race and then slow down. Her muscles feel
hollow. Her stomach pangs red with hunger but the idea of food is nauseating. She hears Meg
slip out of their dome at the first 5:30 gong, then she hears Parker leave for breakfast. But Eavan
just can’t. She skips morning mediation, skips the solar shower. Stares at the skylight past 7:04.
Past 8:22. Past 10:33, she sleeps in fits. Wakes up perspiring. Lies there and involuntarily
reiterates the things Samuel said before she left:
“I can’t help you.”
“We’re both fucking messes.”
“You don’t want me, you just think you do.”
Flipping between her back, her side, her damp chest, she tries. She breathes. She stands
up and tries to stretch but has to carefully lie back down. Her head is ripe with pain. There is a
tin awning over the outdoor shower and the roof ticks as it warms up, pure sun twisting its
shape. The buzz of the air-cooling was a ban-saw through her skull, so she’d flipped it off. Now
the dome is shadowy and airless, as hot as outside, just darker, quiet.
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“You need a detox,” he’d said.
“You need a cleanse.”
“Your perfect body needs a break.”
Already, Eavan feels fatter. She can feel ribs under her probing fingers, but there is a
layer of puff between her hip bones and her touch. Between her thighs, sweat. In her armpits,
vinegary musk, like someone else’s body, a smell she’s never smelled. The back of her neck is
itchy and burnt just from one afternoon in the desert.
“You deserve a fucking hero,” he said.
“You need to be a hero to yourself.”
She hopes she didn’t flail, that she moaned just right, that when Samuel looks at the VR
of them fucking she looks skinny, alert, athletic. After waiting for two years and waiting and
waiting and then on her very last night finally riding him for a minute and then getting flipped
over and pretending to come, then pulling the pink sheets over their intertwined legs, arms,
faces—a pink cave for the two of them, only breath and bodies.
“You need better,” he’d said.
“You could do so much better than this.”
He went on and on.
“But what if I detox here?” she finally interrupted him. “What if I stay.” We could get
better at fucking, she wanted to say. I could look after you. Clean up. Grade your papers. I
could make elaborate dinners for your rich mom.
Samuel opened a breathing hole into their sheet cave. “You always want to do the thing
that does the most damage,” he said, into the dark of the room. “You always want to hurt
yourself.”
Then he rolled out of bed but wouldn’t get up, just sat on the mattress and stared ahead.
She wished, even then, she could stop wanting him. She tried to see him as pathetic: his half-
hard boner, the wiry hairs on his chest, and worst of all his shoulders hunched over, near-crying
there on the edge of the bed, crying because everyone he loves eventually goes, like she should
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feel sorry for him. But she did feel sorry for him. It was the worst. She pulled the pink sheets
back over her head and held her breath until she went dizzy. It didn’t stop him.
“It’s scary to see you this fucked up,” he had wept. The words still taste tinny, like blood
from a torn cheek.

The lunch vibe at Rapture: the opposite of Evergreen Prep. There is no cafeteria line up, no
hologram, no extra HGH powder to sprinkle into a prepared cereal. At Rapture, they eat under
the gnarled tree, little spots of sunshine across the tablecloth. The people her age are mostly
laser-tattooed mixed-race city kids, with half-shaved hawks and banger shirts and old cowpoke
paraphernalia. There are a few older men, white, stringy muscles under pajama-style clothing,
who never ignore her. In the kitchen, she is hugged hello by two of the lumpy mommies who
do most of the cooking. They press their breasts to her. Gloria and Sailor—a big Mexican mom
and a skinny blonde lady with old timey eyeglasses—both ask her if she’s OK and then they
make a show out of putting bowls of grains and fruit into her hands. Their babies look out at
Eavan from their slings, still too young to range free.
At the table outside, she lets a feral twenty-something named Fresno pour iced coffee
into a hand-thrown mug, shares his platter of ripe tomatoes and cheesy eggs. He’s skinny, with
a skateboarder’s hunch. But he flirts freely, his body hard and reaching for her hand, her
shoulder. Eavan can tell he was the lippy kind of grom, hungry for people, willing to say
anything to fill the space. With Eavan, he likes to explain the place. “Hollings is just the body,
Sonia’s the brains,” he says. His accent is pure California, long vowels, doubly long pauses.
Eavan wonders if he can hear an accent in her. “There have been other leaders, leadership is a
rotating position. But I’ve been here almost a year and no one has talked about switching. We’re
ten years through our twenty-year lease from Rasta Bill’s maternal grandfather.”
“How do they get so much nice stuff?” she says. She points her fork at the platters of
food, the table runners, the rough-hewn silver.
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Fresno shrugs. “They make it, I guess.” Eavan sees on the easel beside the hacienda door
a long list of tasks that members sign up for: baking artisanal food or welding jewelry or dyeing
linens or hand-pounding cheese for bougie markets. The closest dome is getting whitewashed
now by two tall women in rubber boots and long smocks—so some of it is labor. But solar
panels, hydro-coolers; someone here has money. Eavan eats her grain bowl. Then her fruit.
Then his eggs. Then eats his tomatoes. Fresno drinks more coffee.
“Anyone can sleep with anyone else in the rotating bedrooms in the hacienda—each
with a different colored painted door,” he says. “You’ll hear it after dinner: Meet me in the
orange room. Find me in purple.”
“Weird,” she says.
“Free love,” he says, not looking at her. “You’re lucky here, you have status,” Fresno
says. “Because you see the groms and they can’t.”
“Why not?” she asks. She makes a game of trying to make eye contact, but he’s nervous,
his eyes twitch around. She realizes after a second one of Fresno’s eyes is slightly crossed—an
easy corrective surgery at home, but in the US, she has no idea. “Why don’t they let them see
their parents?”
“Part social experiment, part slacker moms maybe,” Fresno says, flicking his head at the
olders sitting across the table. “Lots of these parents got problems, so this is therapy, they’re
working through their own shit.”
“I could have used some space from my parents but—“
“Plus, you don’t pay to stay if you have groms,” Fresno says, a hint of resentment in his
voice.
“You pay?” Eavan asks.
“Planted trees in Oregon all summer so I could pay for the winter here. Probably do it
again this year too.”
“Wow, lucky, I guess,” Eavan says.
“Seems like heaven over there to me,” Fresno says, pointing his eyebrows at Grom City.
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Then, across the terrace, Rasta Bill lights a joint. She sees it immediately, smells it. The
joint is an old smoky thing, dank and heady. She can feel herself salivate as Rasta Bill passes it
to another older guy, Iggy. Fresno sees her watching. “You smoke?” he says, flashing a missing
tooth. She nods and Fresno waves to them and Iggy passes the thing from his stained hands to
Fresno, who inhales deeply. Finally, Fresno, presses his fingers against hers with the joint in the
middle. When Eavan finally puts her lips to the paper, the end of the joint is wet and hard to
inhale but she sucks hard and she gets smoke and holds it in and does it again and then again
and she coughs and coughs until her brain starts to fizzle.
“Whoa,” Fresno says and rubs her back. She sniffs, wipes tears from her cheeks. “You
OK?” he says and she nods, better than OK. It is like someone turned the snow globe and set the
sparkles loose, but the sparkles are behind her eyes and in her veins and through her roaring
chest.

Grom City. Awash with grom laughter and screams and footfalls. Blood in her ears. She is
sprinting across the scrub, dodging little balls of mesquite growing out of the dirt. Around her
are sixteen groms, age five to fifteen. They are hollering. Grabbing at her. They run the
perimeter of the property, beside the long line of barbed wire stuffed with thorn and
tumbleweed. As they speed by, they shout and point at every spot where there is a whole in the
tumble and they could conceivably crawl out.
In a ponderosa pine grove, they scatter. Their little bodies find ropes and ladders and
branches to climb. Then they are running above her on a series of platforms and rope bridges
from tree to tree, suspended around the dry-needled ground. They make her climb a rickety
ladder and shove her head under the big sign they painted with large blue letters: Ewoklandia.
They lead her to a flying fox and they make her take the highest point of entry and they push
her off the top. She holds to the trapeze and flies down the cable to the ground, a whole crew of
groms running beside her, holding to her shorts so she slips off and lands with a thud on her
ass and they all laugh and laugh.
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They climb along the top of the coulee to the south edge of the property where they run-
jump down a small set of dunes and their boots fill with sand.
They call to the sheep and the sheep come to them and they feed them oats out of their
hands and the feeling of sheep lips kneading her palm sends a deep shiver through her spine.
They take her to a far western corner of the property, the janky side they call it, where
there is an old shipping container a trucker must have ditched long ago. The groms have spray-
painted every centimeter of the thing, outside and in, bubble letter graffiti and tropical flowers
and cartoon pandas and mice and hedgehogs. A few old spray paint bottles pile in the corner.
The container smells pungent, like animal.
“This is Boxcar,” an older girl says. “Every grom that’s lived in Grom City tags here.
That’s me,” she says, pointing at a tag high in the corner. “Daizy.” She is striking; a woman’s
body stretched out over a thirteen-year-old girl. Already Eavan’s height, her hair woven into
long bleached dreadlocks strung with shells and beads and thread, her face is tiny, with dark
eyebrows and eyelashes and skin.
“That’s my sister, Lady Pink,” Daizy points. “She’s gone now though.”
“A legend,” Miles says and Daizy nods, appreciatively. All over the walls of the
shipping container, names pop up from the cartoonish letters. Grom City legends. Graduated.
Gone.
Outside in the sun, Eavan can see Daizy’s got three blue lines tattooed over her perfect
ski-jump nose, where glasses would sit. Her eyes look turquoise, then gray, in different light.
“You’re chill,” a very little girl, Estrellita, says to her, as if doting her with the highest
praise. Then Vasquez, a beefy nine-year-old with straight long hair pulled into a ponytail, drags
her by the wrist outside, pointing to all the growing things around Boxcar: manzanillo, saguaro,
bunny-ears, barrel cactus. A smallish grom named Manuelito needs a piggy back ride.
Donatello—one of the oldest, his legs and arms long and lanky—wants her to watch as he hops
to the ground from the roof of the boy’s solar shower. Sometimes they are shy to speak, but no
one is shy to move. They can run, jump and kick higher and faster and stronger than any groms
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she’s seen. There are no ticks here, no invisible illness. Instead they battle thorn, sun, scorpion,
snake.
“You’re like, less serious or something,” Estrellita says.
“Thanks,” Eavan says and does not tell them how she woke up weeping that night, her
mattress soaked, her breath caught on a kind of pant-sob. Her hands thrashed around, looking
for some tube of chems, until Meg and Parker held her and calmed her with sips of water until
she’d stumbled back to sleep. Amazing, just a few puffs of cannabis and she’s better?
They are doing slow circles now, honing in on the center of Grom City, the settlement.
Daizy rematerializes inside the art hut, where she is bent over a small canvas, a scatter of
metallic and pastels, not unlike the interior of Boxcar.
Then Luna grabs her wrist and drags her to the small grove of oranges and almonds.
Then Miles calls to her from a group of boy-groms around a small pool made with hand-
painted tiles. There is a trickling tap and fountain where spring water fills it up. The boys have
wet their hair in the fountain and are flinging it at each other.
“You’re teaching us books, right?” A girl named Owl grabs her hand with sticky fingers
and points to the little library just south of the whitewashed school house.
“Sure, I love stories,” Eavan says, letting the girl guide her to the shack’s door, Let There
Be Light painted in silver over the windows. Eavan expects board books and chapter books and
grom stuff. Instead, the homemade shelves are filled with adult materials: poetry, heavy foreign
novels, engineering and anatomy textbooks—one massive table-sized book of painted viscera
three groms pore over on the dusty floor.
“Isn’t this exceptional?” Hollings asks from behind her.
Eavan jumps. His man-voice cuts through the groms’ voices like something metal.
“Yes,” she says, swallowing. His eyes are shining and his callused hands are open, like
he’s offering the place like his gift. Beside him, Meg is beaming. Parker is sweating. Sonia stands
beside them too, groms clinging to each wrist. Eavan raises her eyebrows at Parker, at Meg. She
wants to know what this all means to them.
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“Twice a week,” Hollings explains, pointing at a fire pit surrounded by dusty carpet,
“we have a happening. A report on how they’re holding up. It’s usually around this fire. They
talk about fear and love, whether in fact the outside world has gone astray.”
“We don’t have many rules but you must comply with the ones we have,” Sonia says.
Eavan watches as Sonia’s hands stroke the groms’ hair and backs, as their eyes close in a kind of
pleasure. “The groms never handle money,” Sonia says sweetly and they nod with every
statement she makes. “The groms never touch tech. The groms never ingest chems. The groms
cannot leave Grom City. And most important, there are no tests, no grades. We aren’t
evaluating our children; we are living alongside them in harmony.”
Eavan snorts out loud, cannot believe this is real. They don’t murder each other? They
don’t kick teeth out, abuse the smallest, slaughter animals, fall off dangerous heights, poison
themselves? For Eavan, who grew up alone with screens and föns behind a locked bedroom
door, Grom City is a fable, a never-never-land of friendship and forts and raw land. She sees no
disdain or fear or even reverence on the groms’ faces around these adults. They just want to
know: what is their idea of fun?
Eavan thinks: fizzers.
Thinks: fizzers would make this fun.
Thinks, for the hundred millionth time: Stop it. Stop.

Eavan can evoke, clearly, the first time she popped a fizzer. Sixth grade. Test Day nearing, about
to launch the beginning of summer like a blast from a starting-line pistol. She hadn’t cared
about Test Day until suddenly, she did. It was all consuming. It was pressing. She displayed no
athletic ability, no buoyant interview skills, no real ability in drawing or dance. So tests did
matter, she was grouped with the smarts, she was reminded often that her whole future
depended on a label that could stick. But she hated them, nerves consumed her. Numbers swam
in front of her eyes and jumbled and reversed themselves, refusing to add up.
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Worse, her mother had wedged her way into her study routine by cultivating a deep,
angry hatred for Eavan’s teacher. For years, her father worked “away,” a middle manager stuck
in manufacturing in Asia—first Bangladesh, then Taiwan. An astronaut, they called them, the
fathers who worked abroad while mothers and children remained at home. In his absence, her
mother’s way of caring was to hate. She hated Eavan’s enemies, Eavan’s teachers. Any crime
against Eavan, perceived or real, was a genuine crime against her mother. These crimes were
carefully recorded, remembered and reared until they bore some spiteful fruit.
The two months prior to Test Day, her mother had perceived a slightly sexist comment
against Eavan by her teacher, a doddering fifty-year-old with hairy knuckles who mentioned
that girls Eavan’s age were easily distracted. But to Eavan’s mother, this set off a tirade,
comparing him to the worst sexist offenders from her own school days. Eavan was to film every
class and report back. Each evening, her mother would pour over his lessons for further
offenses. Unbidden, she went deep-web on his media, stalked his pics, his updates, his wife and
grown son. Soon, a list of his other statements was compiled, slightly exaggerated and
published on an education blog as a cautionary tale. He was promptly transferred. Eavan was
blamed. Teachers distanced themselves, refused extra help. Students grew wary—what else was
this mother capable of?
For the first time, Eavan saw her mother as a person. She lacked friends, real ones.
Socializing was only a vehicle for gossip. Alone with her resentment, her growing catalogue of
bitter acts performed against her, this hatred was as consuming as love was for others. Eavan
could see her flesh redden with the mere mention of a forbidden name. She would go over and
over past conversations, exaggerating them each time. Eavan realized that her mother was
deadly smart, trained in litigation but interrupted early-career by Eavan’s birth, something she
holds against her still. She had returned to the workforce as a paralegal, despite her constant
complaining about being overqualified, but her position was automated when she was 45, too
late to retrain, embittering her more. Eavan sympathized and tried to listen and agree and
gossip just enough, while promising herself she would never harbor an enemy.
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The afternoon before sixth grade Test Day—after two months of her mother’s stalking
her new teacher, obsessing over friends and their mothers, over Eavan herself (her diet, her hair,
her outfit choices all wrong)—Eavan was depleted, spent. She remembers quitting the last
practice test half-way, lying her scalding cheek on her desk, the tablet flashing in her bleary
eyes. She obeyed when the new professor leaned into her desk and suggested a visit to the
infirmary. The school nurse took a cursory look—noted the dark circles raccooning her eyes, her
slightly elevated blood pressure—and swiftly passed her off to the visiting doctor, luckily in the
school that very day. Yes, the pediatrician was from a pharma-corps that repaved the staff
parking lot and provided the new smart-screen technology, school-wide. It didn’t matter to the
groms. It was relief the children sought, a growing line-up of them outside his office, those tiny
bodies rattling with nerves, kicking at the walls of the hallway under the gaze of the peep above
the door.
On the long medical table with the crinkling paper under her bum, he shined a light in
her eyes and re-took her blood pressure and that was it. “You should try the beta-blockers, with
something for your nerves and a kick for your attention span,” he’d said in a voice that was too
floaty for his full beard. “Doesn’t that sound fun, a fizzy thing under your tongue?” The fizzer
would quiet that clanging in her ears, the adrenaline that makes her heart beat so quickly when
she really needs to be calm and focused. It would clear up her vision, like a window washer,
he’d said, clearing away the dust and muck so she could see what she needs to see. Could she
return this parental release, signed, first thing, before the test?
It took some manipulation, something about the former teacher forbidding her these
special performance enhancing medications (probably because she’s a girl) and her mother
signed the release without even skimming the print. At school, there were dozens of year-olders
and a few sixth-graders and even some really small kids lined up at the nurse’s desk, each
receiving their own little envelope sealed with a bear-and-balloons sticker, the powdery inside
smelling sparkly and tart. Eavan had folded the prescription into her backpack, walked down
the hall toward the testing center as slowly as she could and waited by the double doors,
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watching her classmates chattering nervously as they filed in. At the bell, when she couldn’t
wait even a second longer, she ripped the envelope between her incisors and slipped the little
purple pill under her tongue.
It wasn’t a rush. Or a wave of calm. Or any one feeling at all. She only knew that as she
floated to her seat, the test tablet waiting for her on the desk, she did taste bile, or panicky blood
from a chewed hangnail. What came instead from her mouth was a small, silent, grape-flavored
laugh.

After five days at Rapture, Eavan has been hoarding the cannabis, a small pile of roaches she
has pilfered from the oyster shell ashtrays around the terrace, stubs of black and paper. She
found a coil lighter, then a thin metal tube for inserting small balls of charred bud into, one toke
at a time. She’s rationing, just a little after breakfast. A puff before teaching in the afternoon.
Her fingers smell like skunk, her eyes are usually itchy, but she’s basically just maintaining. She
can usually find a joint in the evening after dinner and dessert. She is working up to asking for
her own stash.
Last night, she’d happened upon a whole bottle of white wine and two joints and then
three or four tumblers of malt liquor, just by sitting next to Fresno. But she didn’t eat enough,
had vomited into a composting toilet then stumbled back to her dome where she’d flopped on
top of the mattress, clothed. She knows she’d gotten into the emergent curriculum debate, got
heated with Gloria, can’t remember everything that was said. Only, when asked, “Why do they
even need teachers?” Eavan had smugly replied, “Honestly, it’s a beautiful symbiosis, they’re
teaching me as much as I’m teaching them.”
Now she’s woken to grom voices. The air inside the dome is already hot. Meg is gone
and Parker is gone. Her eyes are sticky, don’t want to open. She remembers that Luna and
Daizy had painted her eyes with thick cat eyeliner that afternoon and she’d never washed her
face. It must be all down her cheeks, ground into her pillow.
“Dank,” a grom voice says. “Totally dank.”
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The smell of charred pot has filled the dome and now she looks up she can see that the
little cough-candy tin she’s been using to collect roaches is open in the circle between Daizy and
Miles and Donatello. They crouch on Meg’s mattress, emptying all of Eavan’s little joints into a
pile of char on Meg’s notebook, brushing it into a pile with a pinky finger that turns black with
the ash.
“Hey,” she says. “No no, this is trespassing. You’re not allowed here.”
“Whatever, Meg crashed in our yurt last night, so we’re not allowed here?”
“That’s mine,” Eavan moans and rolls over and starts crawling toward them. Pain jabs
behind her forehead. The groms scramble to their feet.
“Wait,” she says and Donatello backs up, just out of reach. Then he licks the little rolling
paper and spins the joint expertly and then Daizy swoops down and grabs the tin and the
lighter and the little metal one-hitter and they are up and out the door in a second. The wooden
door slams.
“Scavenger bastards,” Eavan hisses and pushes out the door behind them.
They are running now, all of them, their legs pumping down the trail toward Grom
City. They are fast, very fast, but Eavan is still an adult and has a wider stride and it doesn’t
matter that she’s wheezing and cramping. Or maybe they slow so she can catch up.
“Smoke with us,” Miles calls out over his shoulder. He’s fourteen, one of the oldest,
broad in the shoulders with a shock of blonde and blue hair flipping over one eye like a skater.
Green eyes. Freckles. Square jaw, blond eyebrows. He’s very good looking, knows it.
“Give that back,” she shouts.
“Bitch,” Daizy screams and keeps running. She’s in short-shorts and combat boots with
no socks and they flop around her shins, slowing her down.
Donatello is faster than all of them. Tall, an afro that puffs beautifully around his small
face. He’s got a fuzzy mustache over his upper lip, dark skin and giant black eyes with curving
feminine eyelashes she would die for. And muscular legs that pump and run way faster than
the rest. He is the one who guides them back to Boxcar.
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When Eavan gets there, they have already plunked into a circle in the stinking dirt and
they have already lit the skinny, crooked joint and are puffing it comically, big clouds of smoke
out Miles’ nose. He coughs, his whole face going red and his eyes watery.
“You get more stoned if you cough,” Donatello says, taking the joint and demonstrating
how to pull the smoke into his lungs and hold it there.
“Pass it bitch,” Daizy says. “It’s not a microphone.”
“Do you smoke all the time? Like, is this allowed?” Eavan asks.
“Just don’t get all high and ask what we want to be when we grow up,” Miles says. He
passes her the joint carefully, like he’s been practicing, placing the skinny moist thing between
his finger and her thumb. Eavan takes it.
“Fucking crazy,” she whispers and inhales deep, past her mouth and throat and into her
lungs. The first hit always takes a second to reach her, so she inhales another. Then, clumsily,
Eavan tries to jump up and run away with the little burning paper thing between her fingers. It
is a futile attempt. In just two steps, Miles has her by the ankles and Eavan is tripped and
toppled and winded, sprawled right at Boxcar’s entrance. The three of them hold part of her
down, a wrist, a knee. Daizy straddles her back and has wrangled the joint and is puffing and
blowing it in Eavan’s face.
“I’m not your cat,” Eavan says and tries to roll over around with the groms piled on top
of her. When a tiny drop of drool plops from Daizy’s lip to Eavan’s face, she screams and cries,
“Mercy. Mercy.” and only then do they roll off and scatter into the heat of the afternoon. She is
left there alone on the dusty floor of Boxcar, the taste of charred pot in her mouth and her
clothes itchy with dust and straw and her headache almost gone under the buzz of the drugs.
The word keeps turning around in her head all day, even though Miles and Donatello
and Daizy have retreated to some unknown burrow in the shade with the rest of her roaches
and her one-hitter and her lighter. Mercy, she thinks. Mercy.
©
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Her only big fuck up is that night, smoking a pilfered joint on the threshold to Grom City. After
a giant cookout with the groms and then baths and pajamas and songs and stories with ten
littles wrapped in dusty blankets, curled together on a raft made of mattresses. She’d waited
until they all slept, their breathing, her own private music. Then she plucked herself up from
the pile of them without waking a single kid. At the gate to Grom City, under an upside-down
black canoe that marks its threshold, she feels she deserves the little personal smoke. But Eavan
is careless, doing it right by the entrance, then instinctively hiding it as soon as Daizy walks up.
“Oh so you think you’re so badass?” Daizy says. She is sniffling, for whatever reason.
Eavan can see a small trickle of blood running down her knee.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Eavan says.
“You probably never even did real drugs,” Daizy said. “You just a fucking square.”
“What happened?” Eavan says, quieter.
“No. You are not allowed to pretend you know shit. Don’t pretend you understand
junkies or groms or badass shit because you fucking don’t ok, you fucking don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Eavan says. “Is this about—“
“You don’t know anything about my sister,” she whispers, unbidden.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Eavan whispers back.
Then Daizy leans her whole body over and cries, this perfect creature, sobbing wet tears
into the desert floor. She has to prop herself up, hands on knees, like an athlete who has run a
long way. She’s gasping. She won’t be touched by Eavan, won’t be consoled. When Eavan leans
her head down to see her little face, Daizy can walk away so quickly, in seconds the girl has
disappeared into the black.
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Parker

Of course, only he would be mortified by a place that pleases everyone else. It’s something out
of a magazine: the glassware and the linen and the colorful food. He finds no comfort in it. It all
looks fake, too styled, down to the massive tree shading the terrace, probably transported from
California and perpetually thirsty. He can’t search it up though, he thinks for the millionth time.
Because he can’t wear his fön.
What Parker notices: There is no one to introduce him at meals. Everyone has at least
one dreadlock. Everyone is dusty. Many boys will grin at him, no one will speak. No one else is
black except for Rasta Bill, the very old timer who used to own the farm, who is afforded a no-
work position because of his connection to the land. Hollings doesn’t return all that first
morning, not to walk them to their dome or to give a tour of the men’s and women’s shower
rooms, or the animal pens or chicken hutch or the watchtower out back. This walk-around is
performed by a couple of sandy-haired kitchen workers named the Ignacios. They make Parker
call them ‘the Iggies,’ and they are expecting a new Iggie, the man giggles, though it is obvious
Lady Iggie had a big round stomach she rubs the whole way around the property.
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Full sun by two, they are guided across a very dry field, some tufts of grass and a path
worn down to hard earth, to a dome the Iggies call TeacherLandia. He can barely see. The sun is
coming down in liquid waves, a tangible throbbing thing.
“Jesus,” he mutters. Is ignored.
Their dome isn’t large, but it’s whitewashed on the outside, with four small shuttered
windows and a ring of cacti around the perimeter. It is air-cooled. That is all that matters.
“Small,” Eavan says.
“What, this isn’t what you expected?” Parker asks Eavan, a small spear of anger in his
voice.
“We didn’t even get to see the school,” Meg says. “Or the groms. Where are the groms?”
Parker steps through a sealed door to the composting toilet. The smell is earthy, piss and
shit. Parker looks at his reflection in a shard of mirror nailed to the outside wall. He’s shiny. He
has drips etched in the dust down the side of his face. His toe kicks a lump of dirt, which poofs
into powder on impact.
Inside, the little dome feels clean, lemony, with the sun pouring in yellow and the floor
recently scrubbed. The sheets are washed. Someone has dragged a few pieces of their luggage
and mismatched belongings from the van and across the dusty pasture, but they’ve done it
dirtily; their suitcases and blankets are layered in a filmy yellow. Parker lies down in one of the
short cots and waits.
A fan hangs from the ceiling but it doesn’t seem to work; there is no switch, no plug.
Meg falls asleep. Eavan turns toward the wall. Parker keeps thinking of Samuel. Thinks about
how much easier this would be with a fön. He could peep a pic of everyone, do facial
recognition, cache it with notes, traits, search them up privately. If they’re really interesting, he
could infiltrate their cams. But not with this signal block, everyone bare-faced. Fönless. Like
this, he’s blind, can’t remember names. With his eyes closed, he scans through the faces he’s
met, tries to map the place’s machinery, tries to calculate its patterns, its personalities.
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Then, a figure in the door, a shadow. “Should close this during the day, keep it cool
inside,” a woman’s voice says, jarring him awake. Parker’s neck is stiff. He’d somehow crashed,
curled up on top of the sheets. The heat blankets him, thicker than wool. “Anyway, that’s the
gong for dinner.” It is Gloria with the pigtails and a ratty tank top, the one who served them
breakfast. Now she’s staring at their suitcases flayed open, his toiletries now gathering a thin
line of ants from outside.
“Oh,” he says, “But I didn’t hear a gong.”
“Well, that’s it,” she says and walks away.
That’s it, he thinks. A whole day I’ll never get back. He looks out to the terrace lit up like
a stage, people crunching up paths, assembling at the table. He knows he’s got to wake both
Meg and Eavan, a shaken shoulder, a too-loud cough. But he waits for one second more. Can’t
retreat to a newsfeed or a scroll of pics and vids. Instead, he stares blankly at the purpling sky,
wishing for some pattern in its peppering of stars.

At dinner that night, he talks to a woman from Vancouver, the only Canadian at Rapture
besides them. She introduces herself and eats beside him and forces him to converse for over an
hour. Bernice. Short grey old. Her mother had been a real grimy hippie. Her mother before that
had protested the Port of Vancouver to build pedestrian bridges over the train tracks after some
groms got hit by trains. This was the 1970s, she explains to Parker. Vancouver was full of
radicals back then. It was dirty, lousy with drugs.
“Pretty low tech,” she says. “Nothing like today, all glass and gleam.”
“At least your Prime Minister was hot,” Parker says and that is the only thing that
makes her really smile.
“He was a fascist,” she says, laughing.
Bernice is at Rapture working on pottery and she’s serious about it, has two lines deeply
edged between her eyes. She’s lived in housing co-ops all her life, says she’s the last of the
butch-moms of Commercial Drive. When she wishes him good night, she holds both of his
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hands in hers and says she’s going to look out for Parker. Bernice’s groms have grown up and
she doesn’t have groms in Grom City, so she has to pay. Before Arizona, she was in Oaxaca five
years, San Miguel before that, New Mexico. She doesn’t have papers for the US right now
because she crossed as a tourist on a motorcycle from Mexico. That was seven months ago, she
says. Since then she has sold the Honda Shadow and given the money to Rapture, to stay for a
long while.

The next day: sun. They retreat to the school and its air cooling but Parker sweats all the same.
All he can see is whispering, legs sprawled on legs, groms interrupting and getting up and
leaving whenever they feel like it. He can’t stop imagining all those boys living together in a
yurt, how many ways of getting hurt: sticks, the hammer hung on the wall, the shards of glass
from the broken mirror. Parker thinks over and over— who actually wants no rules?
After many minutes of organizing, of arguing to the point of shoving then pulling back,
the groms vote on who gets to ask a first question to the teachers. It is a sort of entrance
interview. Around them: feathers in a jar, tubs of paint, puppets and costumes and piles of
lumber and buckets of nails and saws and a doll-sized people-stacker filled with figurines.
There are no desks, no screens or monitors, just squares of hemp rug.
“Do you believe in peeps?” someone finally asks. He’s a ten-year-old nerdy kid with a
scarred forehead, matted hair. This grom is really skinny, with almost no muscles in his
shoulders and arms but his tan is oaky, rich. He’s really looking at Parker, frowning at Parker’s
moist body, the sweat stains bleeding through his clingy shirt.
“No, well sometimes,” Parker says, after a pause.
Meg turns to the grom. “Maybe you can tell us your name. It will help us to get to know
you.”
“Theo,” the grom says, without looking at her.
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“Theo,” Meg continues. “I think we all have the same philosophy. Peeps have changed
society in a way that is oppressive, so we are here to enjoy a life without that kind of
surveillance.”
“Won’t you miss computers and föns?” Daizy says to him. Parker immediately
recognizes her as a rememberer, someone who lived outside and knows what it’s like. He’s
terrified of her, really, those lines of tattoos over her nose, her very small breasts and creepy
powder green eyes. She picks at a nasty scab over one elbow. “Like those glasses, or whatever.”
“Again, I—“ Meg begins.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Daizy shouts and Meg closes her mouth and nods. At this, the
groms shuffle on their haunches and face Parker.
Miles, an older grom clears his throat, another gesture borrowed from adulthood. He’s
popular. The little groms look when he talks. “Everybody says you’re gonna be the one to freak
out. Like, no computers and you’re a computer teacher, so…”
“My mom says teachers need peeps.” Donatello says. He’s the only black kid, Parker
noticed him right away. He’s older than everyone, or just taller. He stands facing him with fists
at both sides, swinging his arms and punching himself rhythmically in the thigh. “That you
guys spy on everybody using cameras and then you punish groms for what they do in private.”
“We hate peeps,” Eavan says defensively.
“My mom said the peeps caught her and my dad doing some small stealing, but then
the peeps followed her everywhere until we came here and now we can never leave,” Theo
interrupts.
“The peeps caught my mom naked in a park,” Donatello says, accusing Parker. “When
she was high. Like, they’re watching you all the time, even when you think you’re alone. But in
here, you can just go naked and nobody gives a fuck. But you, your whole job was peeping. You
love peeps.”
Parker won’t nod, won’t agree. He sees that Donatello is looking for an enemy, wants it
to be him.
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“They can watch you from the sky,” one very small grom tells him.
“They can ruin your life,” Daizy informs them all.
“Everybody’s mom or dad did some kind of peep crime,” Donatello explains. “Like,
Sonia got peeped banging that student. And Rasta Bill stole from his big computer company.”
“And the illegals are peeped everywhere they go! Like Manuelito and Isabella, they’re
here forever.” Miles does not look at Manuelito cruelly when he says this, but the little one
looks crushed. His eyes sink, his mouth furrows but he does not cry.
“I got peeped,” Eavan says after a long silence. “There was a girl at my school who got
sick and it was my fault and I got filmed trying to save her, but I couldn’t. And the VR got
shared and shared so much, it’s like, everywhere I go.”
“What was her name?” Daizy asks.
“June.”
“How did June get sick?” Miles asks.
“It wasn’t Eavan’s fault,” Meg interjected. “June took some bad medicine because the
school and the peeps were making her feel very stressed, very confused. She didn’t have the
freedom that you do. She felt watched, constantly watched.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was in a coma and now I don’t know,” Eavan says.
There is an extended, breezy silence as the groms process the coma, until Donatello
bursts out suddenly. His fist clenches and he starts first punching his thighs, then his chest, then
his own head.
“See what I mean, we can never go out there, people are just bad. Those computer guys
try to steal your soul that way. Everywhere we go, they peep.” Donatello’s hands go still after a
particularly hard blow to the forehead. Then he just runs away, out of the school and into the
wide, hot outside.
“You’re a computer guy,” Miles says, as if nothing happened. “So—“
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There is a long silence, but the groms, used to waiting, allow for a pause so protracted, it
almost spooks him. He’s still thinking of how hard Donatello just punched himself. But the
groms stare at him. Wait. At Evergreen, the kids wouldn’t have lasted a minute without some
new question, or image or VR, some test question mentioned and then repeated in an alarmed
tone. But these groms wait and wait until finally his voice surfaces from under the blanket of
quiet.
“I hate the peeps,” Parker finally says. “It’s true, they watch you all the time and I hate
being watched.” He doesn’t say that at Rapture, he feels watched in a more personal way—
without föns obscuring people’s faces, people demand eye contact. So much conversation. He
knows he must appear fleshier than ever, his hair greasy without a daily shower, eyes droopy
without his night-time meds.
“Is it weird looking at yourself?” Theo asks. “Later, in the movies?”
“Are the governments watching you all the time?” Daizy asks.
Parker holds up his hands. “You’re lucky, without the peeps looking over you all the
time... Like, as a kid, my parents had peeps in my room, over my bed, in the back seat of the car
and in all my classes. They counted how many times I raised my hand. They recorded
everything I said. And I—I don’t think that’s fair. So that’s why I learned to code, so I could
control my own peeping.” The groms nod.
“I’ve never even seen a computer,” Vasquez says, half-proud.
“I won’t lie. I love computers. I’m not going to pretend. I…” Parker drifts off, sees one of
the small caves carved into the wall, beyond the open wall of the school. “But your story wall
here, that’s a kind of computer. It’s just a system of ideas, of files, and it has an order, an
architecture.” The kids, almost every one of them, nod. “So you understand systems. Maybe if it
doesn’t break any rules or whatever, we can build something new. We can scavenge, live wires
and lights and a chip or something and we can build it, our own kind of…of…”
“Machine,” the smallest girl volunteers.
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As if to punctuate this last word, Miles, then Luna and Vasquez and then all sixteen
groms start to clap. Someone starts repeating the word: Machine, Machine, and then someone
stomps and soon enough they all open their mouths and caw like crows. At first, it feels fun, the
little groms chanting and clapping, their throats open, but soon they are running in crazed
circles, cawing and flapping like wild birds pecking at the sky.

After four days at Rapture, he’s developed a rash. He’s itchy up the backs of his legs, in the
crooks of his elbows, behind his ears. Starving, he cannot possibly get enough to eat. He can’t
get full, he needs meat, another serving. At dinner, Bernice is talking to the Iggies over plates of
chickpea stew. Eavan is beside Fresno, who Parker finds gross—all ropey muscles and bad skin
and shaved scalp, perpetually rolling a joint for a girl he likes. Meg is deep in conversation with
Hollings and Rasta Bill and other old people. He knows he could sit with them but it would
only be grom talk—a revolution in child rearing—and he’s not sold on Grom City, not yet.
His hands full of stew, his rash raw, he scans the terrace for a place to eat. And of course,
he sees the empty seat beside the new arrival—the only one who’s newer than Parker— Kye. He
knows the boy is named is Kye because it is a perfect name. Freshly twenty, Kye is muscle,
hormone, tan and teeth. He looks just like the hot guys did in Finland, the cheekbones wide and
pronounced, the lips puffy as if stung by bees. His clothes are very shabby, a down vest losing
its feathers, torn long underwear shirts, jeans with no cuffs. To Parker, it means he’s a rich kid,
his backpack of privilege or whatever. And he’s from the desert, or somewhere hot. No one
wears a down vest in this heat.
Parker approaches Kye’s end of the long table and balancing his bowl of stew, he pulls
the seat out carefully, the pottery burning.
“You’re hungry,” Kye says, as soon as he sits down. Parker hasn’t taken a bite, can’t
figure out why Kye would say such a thing.
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“Not really,” Parker lies. He wants to say something else. He wants to scoop the burning
food to his mouth. He does neither. He just calmly drinks water. It’s not like Parker has been
avoiding him, it’s just he often says unretractable things around people like Kye.
“Are you, a uhmm. Vegetarian?” Parker asks.
“Naw,” Kye grins. “I’ve been craving meat since I got here…”
Parker pushes his stew around. He wills himself to say something else, thinks of a
million topics. Dismisses them all. Around him, everyone is deep in conversation, different but
not, voices low and weirdly reverent about every topic. Gender seems a little more fluid with
everyone dressing the same, the women are so strong, their bodies unshaved, pockets of hair
sneaking out from body crevices. The men are leaned out too, faces full of animal whisker and
crows-feet, even the very young.
“I heard you’re from Canada,” Kye says. Did he wink? His eyelashes are shadows
flickering off his cheeks in the candlelight. “Feel different?”
“You could say that,” Parker says. He forces the words from his mouth. “The vibe
changes right away, as soon as you cross the border. The food, the way people—”
“Peep?”
“No, that’s the same,” Parker says. “Maybe worse at home.”
“Incarcerate? Deport? Fuck the poor, elect degenerates…”
“We do that too. I mean, a lot of things are just different at Rapture. I’m used to wearing
my fön,” Parker says. “I guess it’s been harder than I thought getting rid of it.”
“Totally,” Kye says and scoops a big spoonful of stew in his mouth with a hunk of
bread, his jaw working it at. When he’s politely finished his bite, he leans in. “I’m not even
really against föns,” he says. “It’s the peeping I hate. If you use the fön as a tool for good…Like
you’re a teacher right?”
“Right,” Parker says.
There is something conspiratorial in Kye’s voice. “Like a tech teacher, right?”
“I teach code mostly, but it’s not just that, it’s systems. Architecture, machines.”
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“Yeah,” Kye says. “That shit, I love.”
A wave of tingles passes through him. Parker thinks for a second Kye is flirting with
him. He wills himself to flirt back. “It’s—yah.” Parker says, grasping for something. “The groms
here love machines, they crave them. They’re all about jacking solar panels open and toasters
and microwaves. I used to be like that, as a grom.”
“But they live in here,” Kye says. “Out there, you need a fön to scramble your facials,
they can track you everywhere, you know? Out there, you can’t live without the cloud. In here,
it’s just fun. But out there, I won’t unplug, no way.” Kye is breathless when he finishes.
“Maybe it’s good to take a break,” Parker says. He sees Kye’s bowl is empty and but he
does not stand up to clear it.
“It’s my record I want to scrub. My indelible mark,” Kye says.
“It’s pretty easy,” Parker says. “To erase, to control your media. Once you figure out
how erase things. Like, with a signal, of course. Depends what kind of record too.”
“Everybody here’s got a record,” he says.
“That would make me crazy, I’d want to erase it, or mask it. Something. I mean, I’m
tripping about it now. What are they saying about me out there? Like my media is pretty dead,
but don’t you want to know? Aren’t you worried they’re like—“
“You’d rather peep than be peeped,” Kye says. Parker feels crazy. It’s always like this,
saying too little until suddenly he’s said too much. He didn’t say this, did he? He can’t
remember anything he’s said to Kye, the words swallowed up now, gone.
“I just, like to control the message,” Parker says quietly.
Kye laughs at this, not as a joke on Parker but as if he’s said the funniest thing. “I feel
you Teacher Parker,” he says finally, dabbing his eyes and then his mouth with a napkin, his
manners impeccable. “Excuse me,” he says and Parker nods. For the millionth time, Parker
wishes for Samuel, who would crack a joke or speak of some depravity and suck the oxygen
from the fire burning inside Parker’s brain. Instead, he burns. He bows his head. And once Kye
has disappeared into the hacienda Parker eats and eats all the way to the stew’s salty bottom.
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©
Day Six, he is approached by an older mom with sad blue eyes. He’s just spilled a thermos of
tea, a warm splash down the front of his pants. He’d arrived late, had to walk around the table
to pick the platters clean—wet pants on display—and all he could glean is a handful of
almonds, a few crumbles of salty goat cheese and a hunk of what everybody calls breakfast
bread—a hard, heavy multi-grain that lumps in his throat. He’s still working a piece of it in the
side of his mouth when this parent approaches.
“Parker, hi! You’re not rushing off, are you? I wanted to talk to you about Donatello. My
son,” this mom laughs and points to Grom City. “He’s an older boy, twelve years old. We’ve
been here for four years, some of the oldest here!” she seems proud of this fact, but also
exhausted. She looks so much like any other white mom—her braids thick and messy and
hanging past her shoulders, her skirt flowy, her blouse just loose enough to hide her braless,
sagging breasts. She wipes her forehead absently, revealing dark yellow stains in the dingy
cream embroidery.
“Donatello, of course.” Parker says. Donatello who been watching him all morning, who
is nearly six feet, who has real abs and biceps and who Parker had watched punch himself
cruelly in the head. That boy is only twelve. “I know him, of course. I didn’t know he was so
young. He told me he was fifteen.”
“He’s like you,” she says and smiles, then raises her hand to his face and then body.
Parker thinks, gay? But she immediately says, “Black. He’s half-black, like you, am I right?”
“Um, yes,” Parker says. “My father is—“
“Donny’s never had a teacher like him before, so I was hoping you can seek him out. I
mean, we lost his dad a long time ago and coming here has been such a blessing, all the time
and the freedom….” She squints, as if trying to see her son through the wavy afternoon heat.
“He was wild from the start. He refused to see the doctors, refused to go to daycare and
playschool, I mean, he refused to wear clothes!” she laughs at this and winces too. “So physical,
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even inside me, always pushing and kicking. So coming here was so special because I just
couldn’t love him into submission. He needed to love himself…”
Her words float off again, this time with her hand against her abdomen, as if feeling
where Donatello had been inside her those twelve years ago.
“I just want him to see…” She says and then nods, as if Parker totally understands her
message. “Thanks, for reaching out to him. I just can’t imagine smothering him like they do on
the outside. His little spirit would buckle. He would die, he would just—” She touches Parker’s
arm gently and he can see concern, pride, fear, love—all the sure signs of mothering—in her
weathered face. He nods and watches her move away, his body feeling leaky and wide.

Day Eight: Donatello appears at school with his jaw bruised, his cheek gashed and one eye,
silently swelling. Won’t answer anyone about what went down. He won’t hang around Miles or
Daizy any more, refuses to talk to Eavan or Meg, but he will let Parker perform some minor first
aid. He cringes when he swabs alcohol into the cut, when he swipes dirt and blood from the
tender area under his eye. He won’t speak, but he lets Parker bring him lunch, a box filled with
grilled cheese and veggies, and tuck him in to his bed in the older boys’ yurt. Parker keeps
checking through the window as the grom sleeps all afternoon. Someone is going to die here,
Parker thinks, watching Donatello’s hurt body, all curled up. A grom is going to get killed.

Day Nine: the rash has spread, turned sticky around the armpits, the waist of his shorts, the
damp neck of his shirts. Theo and Luna and little Vasquez have committed themselves to the
construction of a machine. They swarm him when he enters Grom City and they show him little
tins filled with wires, two solar panels, an old timey clock radio, some ASU board that they
scavenged somewhere. Out of this detritus, a computer is impossible. He wants to say that,
right now, reduce hope to a reasonable level. But they bring him into the air-cooled older boys
yurt and they bring him boxes of fried potatoes and homemade ketchup and the feel of chilled
air is so exquisite, he stays. Starts twisting wires. Wonders what he tech he can glean from the
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van, from his fön, his charger. Donatello watches from a window, then from the doorway. He
disappears frequently. His fists constantly clench and unclench into undelivered punches.
After a few hours of tinkering, Parker is making lists of things they need: PSU, CPU
when Theo, nearly ten, plops his hand on his shoulder. Parker, who has never touched a grom,
not in eight years of teaching them, of sharing classrooms, of living in a people stacker dorm
just one floor above where their little bodies would lie. The hand is hot, a moist heavy thing.
Parker stares ahead until the hand is gone, his breath ragged with worry.

Something about Theo’s touch sets a memory loose in his veins:
Ninth grade. Nobody was generous, everyone was taking themselves very seriously.
Any too-smart or too-dumb answer got you turned into a meme, instantly shared with all of the
freshman class. Parker tended to say things he immediately regretted. The snickering would
start seconds after you shut your mouth, the vid of you passed around fön to fön. His only skill,
that Parker could cut, paste and share a new vid-loop faster than anyone in his year.
The day he nailed a few smart answers about the Gulf Wars, he re-looped the vid that
someone tried to use against him by turning the back-and-forth into a rap battle between
himself and a Warrior for Jesus. That poor Evangelical kid didn’t even have a profile, so yeah,
he threw him under the bus. But it was worth it.
Parker got momentarily school-famous. He orchestrated three new rap battles between
teachers, nerds and the headmaster himself. Then at the peak of his fame, Teacher Kevin took
notice of him. It was in social studies—Parker was still in his Gulf War phase and the teacher
had been alive back then and knew of cached TV footage of Baghdad under siege. Parker asked
for extra reading after class and Teacher Kevin’s face scrunched up with real joy. He actually
brought him books from home, a list of vids to search up.
Parker only stayed once more after class, to go over two things he had questions about,
but it was long enough for Teacher Kevin’s hand to brush Parker’s shoulder and upper back
and to hover just centimeters over his backside. He swore to fucking God, that hand never
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touched his butt, Parker felt nothing. It was probably just an accident of placement, his hand
swinging low and away harmlessly. But the girl who watched from the doorway and filmed
and cut the meme—she caught the hand. She launched the assault, quickly, perfectly, looping
that gesture over and over and over, that hand over Parker’s shoulder, Parker’s back, Parker’s
ass.
It was shared, not just from class to class, but school to school. A few groms had open
accounts, a few parents had hired IT guys to spy into profiles. The groms thought it was a joke,
but the parents did not. The no-touch policy had just been instituted nation-wide and they were
looking for violators, scapegoats.
Teacher Kevin was fired.
Parker was turned against quickly, succinctly. He had to write a statement for the
headmaster, then the cops. He told the truth: it was nothing. But the meme morphed, acquired
new headlines, went viral not once but twice in three days. Soon enough, girls looked at him
with pity, like a cancer kid. The guys branded him as gross. The teachers refused to
acknowledge him, not that he was raising his hand anyhow.
After a week, Parker tried to meet with Teacher Kevin, messaging him on burn-through
formats, vids that self-destructed after viewing, but he didn’t respond. And he tried to stop
himself from thinking that in this one very small terrible case, he wouldn’t have minded. All
that and Parker still couldn’t even get touched. For weeks, he watched and rewatched the loop:
those images of Bagdad burning on one monitor, his ass on the other, not-being-groped again
and again and again.

After ten days at Rapture: Finally.
Parker’s already in bed, nine. Lying topless on his mattress trying to jimmy a signal.
He’s failing, stabbing into the data block using an old car battery, three föns and Grom City’s
shoddy machine. Now he likes the bathroom door open at night, likes listening to the roof tick
as the cool twists it back to its former shape. Parker decides then, maybe he wants to transform,
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will wait for it to happen. He doesn’t want to scan every building exterior for a peep, to drags
his eyes along the corners of a room, seeking mics. When talking to Eavan and Meg, he is still
compelled to cover his mouth with his hand. He still reaches for his fön sometimes, the space
where it should be lodged on his face.
Parker thinks he hears someone outside, hoists himself up, opens the door an inch. And
in that inch, his eye prodding into the dark, he sees two men coming toward him. He rushes
back to his bed, throws on a shirt. Looks again. They walk, they arrive. Parker presses himself
against the wall when they knock.
“Hey, Parker?” Fresno says.
“You sleeping already man?” the other voice says and it is Kye. Long body, shoulder-
length hair. Pretty mouth saying his name: “Parker?”
Parker checks his breath— right out of a movie and he’s the nerd—and opens the door.
“Nice,” says Kye.
“We weren’t sure you heard about the happening. So we wanted you to know. You
know?”
“Right,” Parker says, not knowing.
“It’s a party.”” Fresno says and actually holds his hand out to Parker. Should he grab the
hand reaching for him? Hold it? Shake it? Slap it? He steps toward him and Fresno reaches for
his shoulder, brings him in for a side-hug. Parker leans into it.
The boys walk quickly, kicking up gravel that pepper the others’ ankles. Parker tries to
memorize the route but they’re going a way he doesn’t recognize, through the coulee and up on
top of a cliff. They both lithely scramble up a crack between boulders and disappears. Parker
panics slightly, but the rock is grippy, he pushes up easily to their spot. They are both sitting
crisscross applesauce, looking out over the view over the Grom City, as close as they can get
without penetrating its borders. “Nice,” Kye says again, seeing him.
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Sitting on haunches, his long arms between his knees, Fresno lights a joint, kinked from
getting stuffed in his jeans pocket. Kye goes next then passes it quickly to Parker, like he’s
scared of it going out. Parker sucks hard, doesn’t even cough.
“Woah, BC kids,” Kye says, nodding appreciatively. “It’s all canna-pens and candies
where I’m from. Nice to taste the real smoke.”
Parker’s eyes swim. The grom village flickers at him from below. There is a small
campfire at one far end. The lights inside some of the yurts burn a pleasant yellow through their
curtained windows. Two figures walk toward the fire from a yurt and Kye and Fresno try to
hush their giggling. Parker recognizes them: Daizy and Miles.
Kye mutters, “Weird, kids with no parents.”
Fresno nods, says: “That’s how I grew up. Street-styles. Some fucked up shit went down,
but good for me in the end.”
“Better than parents on my ass for everything,” Kye says.
Parker feels a wave of affinity for Kye. Then a wave of dizziness. The joint is back to him
and he takes it.
“What’s it like down there?” Kye asks.
Parker blows out again, swallows. He’s very stoned. Has trouble finding words. “I guess
I don’t know yet. Sometimes it looks kind of fun, groms living with groms. In a yurt,” he says.
Parker tries reconfiguring Grom City into a kind of camp experience: bunks and ghost stories.
Maybe it’s something like the dorm, Eavan and Meg down the hall, huddling on the roof,
hiding cans of malt liquor under blankets.
“I didn’t have this kind of thing— this kid town,” Fresno says, a crackle of hurt in his
voice. “I was flying solo, nobody looking after me from a distance, bringing food or whatever.”
Kye shakes his head and reaches for Fresno, squeezes his shoulder gently. “You’re really
amazing man, like a little warrior. Took me twenty years before I could run away.”
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Parker swallows again, his mouth and throat desperately dry. All this confession and
touching, he’s waiting for the insult or cynical quip latent underneath. Then he hears a child
cry, loud and high.
“Shit,” Fresno says and ducks. Parker’s heart starts. Thinks: trouble. And no adult is
running to save that grom.
They watch from above as Daizy stops, listens and turns toward one of the yurts. After a
minute, the crying stops. “Puts a lot on the older girls, I think. They grow up pretty quick,”
Parker says.
“That’s real life though man, kids taking care of kids. Or everybody taking care of
themselves,” Fresno says.
“No parents,” Parker says again. It is like a puzzling hallucination: cleaning oneself,
clothing oneself, mending cuts and bruises, staying alive—at five?
“They develop some pretty rowdy personalities,” Fresno says. “Real entities, you know.
Little snowflakes.”
“No one ever gets hurt?” Parker asks carefully.
“That one time, those older girls jumped off the watchtower, they had a pact or
whatever, and they broke both their fibs and spent some time in the hospital. We almost had a
CPS intervention, but we’ve got a homeschooling permit. Priss and Pink, heard of them?”
Fresno shakes his head. “The rowdy ones leave anyway. Better equipped than I was at 16.”
“You’re so lucky. You’re guiding, like, a real-life revolution,” Kye says and places a
hand on Parker’s shoulder. His touch sends a texture of shivers across his skin. Parker feels
very, very high.
“But what about the parents? Don’t they miss their groms?” Parker thinks of his own
mother—who lived for Parker’s highs and lows.
Fresno shrugs. “Parents visit once a week. So they’re not like totally separated. But it’s
policy.”
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“They get to live for free in this utopia,” Kye continues. “Just for following the model,
amazing.”
“Heavy trade,” Parker says.
“When kids grow up without the influence of adults… what do they call it? Self-
actualization.” Fresno is unused to the sound of these words in his mouth. They come out
mispronounced.
“A few of them hate adults though,” Parker says. “Like they know, they’re missing out
or something. Like Daizy, I saw her spit on Sonia last time they did that big pizza dinner. They
had Hollings come in and do a mediation, but still. Fucking rowdy.”
“All kids should be rowdy. Rowdy for life.” Fresno stands and yells and starts running.
“Go go go,” Kye shouts and yanks Parker to his feet, away from the ridge, the little
caves, the groms and their small grom city. He can’t help but laugh and surge ahead, blindly
running after them as if he were a grom too.

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Meg

Night, insect cries. In front of her, a crackling campfire. Here in a clearing they call the Heart,
Hollings is seated on a kind of driftwood throne, all kinds of bendy sticks tied together with
twine, all the faces of Rapture trained on him. The firelight gives him a kind of halo, his cheeks
are warm and golden, touchable. The vibe is celebratory. A big jug of wine is going around and
around. Everyone’s lips press against its opening and everyone draws deeply from its sweet
red. Everyone seems drunk, warm. The branches loom like a net around them, a cluster of
squirming fish.
Meg’s lower back is damp with sweat. She’s also drunk. Restless. Her mind flickers. Like
something said on the deck of a ship, each thought seems perfect until it is whisked away into
vapor, breath.
Across the campfire, she smiles at Sonia, is not seen. What rushes at her: the many times
she has felt like an imposter—during teaching college, the second day, upon insisting a certain
philosopher was a Marxist, wrong. Her sister’s wedding, that poorly tailored sleeveless dress,
constantly tugging it over her breasts. At the border, just two weeks ago, explaining that no, she
has never left the country, a kind of humiliation in her stampless passport. Work meetings
where she is the hippie in too-loose cotton pants, dirty sandals. The opposite feeling at the
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workman’s table at Rapture, her hair too trimmed, her clothes still clean and intact. She cannot
pull off casually beautiful. When she gets dirty, it isn’t dust but grime, grease.
Now a sincere, unexpected desire to call her sister: four years older, an academic at a
fancy American university with her third degree in Art History, then hired. She’s not a radical
vegan any more, she just shed it naturally, like an old coat. Instead she has tenure, a book under
contract. A three-year-old son. Lawyer husband, someone to cover the bills, who can
telecommute, who can travel with her to conferences and watches Frances-the-nephew when
she’s delivering papers to panels of her peers. They just function with such levity: those cheerful
early dinners, then the whole family tucked under hotel sheets, watching a children’s book-vid
before kissing Frances on the soft impression on the side of his skull, housing his perfect,
unformed brain. Her web of guilt grows: to her two brothers, both finishing naturopathy school
themselves. So busy, of course, so easy to forget to fön. To her father, in a silent meditation,
according to his profiles. Shit, what of her mother? Almost no desire to fön her until now, but
now, a need. “Mother,” she whispers into the night air, crisp, her nose cold now, wet. When she
looks up, she sees Hollings watching her. He raises his voice with the smoke from the fire. Then
it is all Hollings, all hair behind ear, chest under shirt, tanned arm attached to bicep, lilting
voice. The mere idea of mother is just as quickly vaporized, wind-blown, gone.

Meg is suddenly in the Grom City school, cross-legged in a circle of littles, fives and sixes. It is
one of her first evenings, they are about to retrieve their boxes of dinner from the cubbies at the
black canoe. But first, she is teaching them songs from preschool, baby songs really, but these
groms are singing with a kind of abandon, their gestures and bodies and voices reaching way
up. “There are seven, there are seven, there are seven days a week,” she trills. The littles know
the words asylum, sanctuary, haven. They know about invasive technology and flora of the
South West and how to build a solar shower and the angles of the sun at its apex. But they do
not follow a calendar. They’ve never learned the days of the week. “Sunday Monday, Tuesday
Wednesday, Thursday—“ she stops, hoping they will finish the verse, but they don’t. They
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watch her lips, copying, but they can only hum the tune. None of them knows what comes. She
waits. Waits longer. Until she can’t any more. “Friday Saturday,” she yells and they applaud.
One of the boys whistles with two fingers shoved between his teeth, a stadium whistle, loud
enough to stop traffic. She points to her hand-drawn calendar, uneven squares on a piece of
canvas, painted with acrylics. And she sets them up again. By the second time, Vasquez is
beatboxing and Estrellita is skipping and the others are screaming the days of the week to an
audience of stuffed animals like it is a real revelation hidden from them, all this time.

Meg, in the wash shack, bathing seven-year-old Estrellita with soap while she giggles so hard
she screams, soap in her hair, between her fingers and toes, behind her ears, laughing, laughing
in the steaming hot. Beside her is Daizy scrubbing little Owl while Luna washes herself
meticulously, each centimeter smothered in a rich homemade lather. The smells of childhood,
mint, beeswax. Soap in the armpits. Ha ha ha.
Later that night, she doesn’t go back to the cots in the teachers’ dome, she stays in the
littles girl yurt. They beg her and she stays, itchy blankets over her ankles, candle smoking from
a saucer in the center of the room. Meg lies there past ten, past eleven, smelling and smelling
the mint oil left on her hands. At midnight she sort of sleeps, sort of listens to them sleeping.
One at a time, they wake and shove their matts closer, pointing their little heads toward her
head, so they take over her pillow, her blankets, her bed. Those cheeks. Those eyelashes. The
little twitching hands reaching for other twitching hands. Finally, she thinks, it is ok to love and
keep loving and give it all away.

Meg, outside the older boys’ yurt. Yesterday. A kind of group meeting, a circle formed in the
dust. “I haven’t lived with an adult since I was five,” Donatello is shouting. “You can’t tell me
what to do.” In the center of the circle, Parker’s half-junk mother board and wires and a few bits
of computer debris all splayed out, crushed, battered as if with a bat.
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“Donatello,” Meg says softly, but he spins to face her, spit flecking around the corners of
his cracked lips.
“Maybe I did wreck it,” he says, his jaw grinding, “What are you gonna do? Huh,
fucking tell me. What can you do to me that I can’t do to myself?”
Meg is seated with Hollings crisscross applesauce on a dusty square of rug, with groms
piled all around them, leaning on shoulders or seated in laps. Parker leans against the
doorframe, staring out. Donatello has recently shaved half his head. Flapping around in his
hands is an old bowler hat. He’s livid, his eyes roving. “You treat me like a baby but I’m not a
baby. I can wash my own clothes, cook soup and our yurt is clean.”
“Bullshit,” Daizy scoffs at him. In one gesture, Donatello shoves her off of her stool.
“Whoa there,” Parker says and leans toward him but Donatello swerves away.
“That’s bullshit,” Daizy shouts from her place in the dirt, the feathers hanging from her
left ear shivering. “This yurt is disgusting, you and Miles haven’t swept in a year and only the
dumb boys will live here. It smells like piss all the way around the outside. It’s like a pig pen.”
The other older girls snicker at this and Donatello, eyes streaming tears now, turns and slaps
Daizy once before Miles leaps in the way, pulling him back. Meg raises her eyebrows at Parker,
then at Hollings, but they all refuse to intervene.
“Ugh you’re such a pig,” Daizy shouts at him, but the other girls hold her wrists,
stopping her from swinging at his face. One of the littles, Estrellita, dressed in a crop-top and
men’s basketball shorts, goes to Donatello to talk. She is so small, but when she takes
Donatello’s hand and leads him away, he goes. Meg watches, amazed, as they speak. Soon
enough, he shakes his head and storms into the coulee.
Estrellita says, “He’s sorry. But he’s like, not really good at talking it out. He likes to
kick.”
“And bite,” Daizy says and hoists her sleeve to reveal her forearm, a big scar across the
tender skin above the wrist, still pink, raw, the new skin puffing around a leftover scab.
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That is when Eavan appears, late, sleepy, smelling like last night’s wine. She is wearing
one of Parker’s shirts tied up over her torso and a pair of Daizy’s short shorts. She looks
insanely young. When she walks up to the circle of groms, Meg can see Daizy hurry the bite
mark under her jean jacket.
“What the fuck,” Eavan says, “I saw that fight across the field. Everybody ok?”
Daizy is standing now, but her white shorts are marked with the dust of her fall.
“Donatello just shoved me for saying their yurt was disgusting but it is disgusting and nobody
does anything about it. And my little brother wants to move in there but he’ll smell like shit and
piss and he’s all, you’re not the boss of me. But I need him to stay with me, we have to stay
together. So what am I supposed to do?”
They all look at Hollings. This is exactly the kind of question Meg wants him to field—
who is the boss of whom? But Hollings, rather than jump into the question, smiles knowingly at
the groms and then lets his gaze drift to Meg. He waits, calmly, watching her so long everyone
else looks at her too.
“Who’s your brother?” Meg begins.
“Do you ever shut up?” Daizy shouts.
“It’s Theo,” Eavan says. “Theo’s her brother.”
Meg says, an ocean of patience inside her: “Daizy, I know what it’s like to have to look
after everybody. You’re smart. You’re so strong and smart.” Her voice wavers at first but picks
up volume as Daizy inflates the tiniest bit at the compliment. “But we all make our own choices.
If he chooses to live with the boys, we can guide him, support him, maybe keep inviting him
back to your clean yurt so he can remember how good it feels. Soon enough, that goodness will
spread and his yurt could be clean.”
“Doubt it,” Eavan says loudly. Meg can see she’s sweating, but her hair hangs long and
stringy beside her thin face, all dark sunglasses and red lipstick over her mouth, lending her an
air of creative defiance. “I mean, not to disagree or whatever but slackers are slackers. A dirty
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yurt is going to stay dirty if a bunch of teenage boys are around. Like, no one to clean it, it will
be sick.”
“Exactly,” Daizy says.
“This life is experimental,” Meg says quickly. “They get to live whatever life they choose
for themselves, without parents or teachers telling them how to live.”
“But do you get a choice?” Eavan asks Daizy, who shrugs.
“Eavan, your mom had all kinds of crazy rules for you, unnecessary rules,” Meg says.
She’s trying not to get upset, defensive. “Think about how much better it would be—“
“I just see Daizy doing a lot of work and she’s lost a lot. And I see why she’s choked. I
see why she wants to keep Theo close to her.” To Meg, Eavan and Daizy look more like friends
than she does. Right now, Meg feels very old, very square.
“Eavan, I really appreciate your concern. I think these young people will tell you all
kinds of positive and negative sides to this lifestyle,” Hollings intones, his voice as even and
calm as the warm air. He raises his hands and opens his arms in a kind of unrequited embrace,
as if to gather all of the children at once. “Most of you exhibit a long list of personality traits
normally not seen until adulthood. This maturity, your self-control and accelerated learning
skills, it’s all very advanced, really unparalleled. You youngest ones have faster physical
learning curves, have hand-eye coordination and tool control way beyond the traditionally
educated in your age bracket. And for those crucial teenage years, we have inspiring mentors
like Meg and Parker and Eavan, to guide us through the tribulations, to speak honestly about
how to live in the presence of others. I think you’ll find,” Hollings took a deep meaningful
breath here, “That at Rapture, we have some of the most special young people in the country.
Autonomous, intelligent and free.”
At this, the groms have calmed, their eyes resting on him, their bodies stilled by his
voice. Even the oldest beam with a kind of pride, Meg can see it on their faces: faint smiles,
shining eyes.
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“But aren’t there ‘essential skills’ that are being skipped, you know, without adults
teaching them by example?” Eavan asks. “Like slapping someone younger than you. That
doesn’t seem like a good example of self-control.”
“Adults display all kinds of violent tendencies, Eavan,” Hollings says softly. “All kinds
of self-harming too, like ingesting illegal drugs, like controlling your life through food, some of
the issues you were dealing with. So we should be careful, shouldn’t we, when we assume
adults have more to teach children, when we believe that goes both ways.”
Meg watches Eavan swallow. Now he has said it, Meg hopes Eavan takes this with love.
“It’s OK that Donatello crushed the computer,” Parker says, interrupting. “I’m actually
kind of glad it’s gone.” Meg can see him keep his elbows glued to his sides to conceal the moons
of sweat under each arm.
“We know how hard it is to let things go.” Meg is saying this to Eavan, waiting for her
bitter face to turn soft. She is saying this to Parker. She is saying this to Daizy: “Letting go is the
hardest thing. We just left everything we know to come to you and I’m still trying to deal. You
groms watch people come and go all the time. So, you know better that everyone in the world
that everything changes. Everything will pass. It gets easier, letting it all go. It’s the hardest
thing, but it gets easier,” Meg says.
It takes a long time before Eavan nods, silently forgiving her. But it starts something.
Daizy nods and sniffs and then Hollings and Parker and even Luna and Miles and Vasquez and
Estrellita. Everyone starts breathing. Hollings very gently presses his knee against hers. For
once, Meg is saying the right thing.

Then last night: Nine o’clock, the littles yurt and Meg is finishing bedtime, a new routine she
likes so much, the milk teeth, her old-timey songs, the wet hair combed flat, the fluffing of
pillows. Donatello knocks before he leans in, wants to give the littles something. Looks
suspiciously at Meg but Luna says, “She’s sleeping over, again,” in such a happy sing-song
way, Donatello ignores her. She can see him deciding to do it. Out of a little purple woven bag,
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he hands them each a handmade toy with a moving part. They are crudely constructed
figurines: bolts and wire bodies with stones for heads, all the same size, with glue or some
plastic holding scraps of clothing to their tiny cyborg bodies. “For your dollhouse,” he
whispers, the only thing he says. Meg notices his eye isn’t swollen any more, but blood has
crusted red around its edge.
At Evergreen, she was never allowed into their rooms, couldn’t enter their tiny worlds
to console them or help with homework or put them to bed. She coached extra-curriculars,
directed plays. But she was denied these small pleasures: grom on grom interaction. Sleepiness.
Ritual.
“You worked so hard on this," Meg says very quietly to Donatello. “You made a perfect
little Grom City.” Her voice seems to startle him; he winces from the sound of it. All of the littles
look reverently at him, their faces lit.
“Miniature,” he says and Meg knows he is saying I’m sorry and I love you and look
after me and help me.

Or that dusk that doesn’t quite fit into yesterday or in her first days, but is only known as the
day she felt comfortable. The day she felt at home. A crack of thunder, gray all that afternoon
and something mounting, humidity, a few new blooms on the barrel cactus, calling for it. Rain.
Late afternoon, the smell is thick piss from all the desert plants wanting it so badly. Once the fat
drops fall against the dust, against the exteriors of the yurts— waxed thick as a cactus—it pours.
Rivers in the dirt. The coulee roars, a red river from nowhere.
They are inside a yurt, high ground. And they are telling her about jail. They are
obsessed with jail, someone’s aunt there, someone else’s brother, uncle, incarcerated, life
sentences, public defenders—a world they know everything about. Meg keeps asking them
questions, like what happens to groms when moms and dads go to jail:
“There’s jail school,” Daizy says. “But mostly foster care.”
“It’s all junkies,” Miles says, then looks at Daizy and says, “Sorry.”
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“It’s different than camps. At the camps they got a big canteen and you live outside
kinda. But the jail is almost all inside,” Luna says.
“And you can’t visit the camps,” Manuelito says. “Video only.”
Estrellita raises her little hand, a gesture she’s picked up from books about school. “I
was named after a jail,” she says. “Estrella Women’s Prison. No groms allowed.”
“Jesus,” Daizy says. “You born there or something?”
But Estrellita won’t say more. She just shrugs. The rain, a torrential thing, pounds
against the waxed walls, the outside world a wet and windy place. Inside the yurt, under
blankets, Meg pulls Estrellita to her lap. No one has to say anything else about the dangers
outside. “Here, you’re safe,” she says into the girl’s hair, into the blankets and to the faces of the
other knowing groms, and she wills it to be true.

Around the Heart, the people of Rapture bend closer to Hollings, nestling into the crooks of
each other’s arms, leaning into each other’s bodies and stroking skin. Their eyes reach out: Look
after me, they say. I love you. People keep passing the jug around, swigging straight from the
bottle. When Hollings finishes a sentence, a ripple of approving groans runs through them. “We
love whomever we want to love,” he says, allowing his gaze to settle on them like the soft touch
of his fingers. Meg finds herself smiling so broadly it aches.
Unbidden, the first time in years, tears tumble from her eyes down her cheeks. Meg
sniffs them back, recognizes the taste at the back of her throat, that sour drip. Her heart skips,
she can see in Rasta Bill, his big chest heaving with breath, tears wetting his face. She can feel, in
that bubbling up in her gut, a certain chemical sting, rawness through her veins.
They’ve been drugged.
She draws her hand back carefully to her lap and looks at it, the slight tremor in the
nerve base, the tingling fingertips. Probably just a low-level serotonin flush. The flashbacks, the
synthesized affection and lust she feels, are all chemical reactions.
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Meg calculates: if it is in the wine, the jug they’ve all swigged from, then they dosed
fifteen minutes ago. It will start climaxing for them in ten, a tsunami of endorphins. She’s been
chem-free since high school; she wants to feel angry. The main problem is this feeling is not
unpleasant. It is a relief, in a way, to be rid of that simmering irritation in her gut. Meg wants to
turn around and share this information with Eavan and Parker, but she can only see them edge
away into the shadows. From his throne, Hollings is dismissing them, gently urging them in the
direction of the domes or to the canyons, the watchtower, the hundreds of places they could
tangle themselves up. Rasta Bill looks to Meg invitingly, but Gloria tugs on his hand.
“Meg, what did you think?” Sonia asks. She has crossed the campfire, straight toward
her. Sonia’s pupils are wide black pools. On Sonia’s face, skin twitches around her nose. She’s
just as high as Meg.
“We’ve been drugged,” Meg says bluntly.
Sonia’s face opens into pleasure, eyes wide, mouth revealing a clear white smile.
“Lovely, isn’t it,” Sonia says, laughing childishly.
Meg looks over Sonia’s shoulder to see how many people Hollings needs to greet before
reaching her. “A bit strong, considering you didn’t tell us,” Meg says.
“Every last Saturday of the month we have a happening. You’re welcome to opt out of
course, but it’s pure. We are always careful with the doses, very minimal, just enough to
enhance feeling. It’s a pure flush, very sensual,” she says.
Meg’s teeth and hands tingle. Hollings sees her, sees some look on Meg’s face, and
crosses to greet them immediately.
“Sonia, Meg,” he says, reverently reaching his hands for both of them.
“Hollings,” Sonia says, touching him back. “Meg has discovered our little flush.”
“Lovely, isn’t it?” he repeats.
“Sonia was just telling me that,” Meg says. “Just enough to enhance feeling.” She is
trying to say this with an edge of bitterness but Hollings lowers his eyes and tucks his hair
behind one ear and only seems to hear the joy in it.
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“Sonia here is a wonderful mentor for you Meg, a scholar, like you, ready to rewrite the
entire discipline, rescued by her own creativity and will.”
Sonia beams. Meg is surprised by how girlish she seems, pushing her hair from her face.
Meg’s desire to have Hollings look at her is pure and urgent. When he does, it is like an itch,
scratched.
“Tonight’s speech was so moving, one of your best,” Sonia says to him.
“Meg, Sonia, I was speaking straight to you,” he says. One of Sonia’s rough, broad
hands is suddenly holding Meg’s sweating one. It feels like a man’s hand, leaving a trace of
tingles where she pulls it away. They wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. Then
Hollings leans his whiskery cheek toward her and insanely, incredibly, brushes his lips across
her jaw. His mouth next to her ear he whispers, “We want you to love it here so badly you
never leave.”
She closes her eyes and when she opens them, their faces both open too, desperately
pleased. “I don’t know where you’re heading now,” Hollings says, “You and your wonderful
mind.” His fingers trace her neck, where his face has been; the skin underneath vibrates with
their heat. Meg looks around and no one is left, everyone has ghosted away but for Hollings,
but for Sonia.
“Meg,” she says, “We couldn’t possibly leave you alone tonight.”
Meg has trouble believing the thing she wants could materialize so easily. She slowly
turns to him, savoring the touch of his fingers, his proximity. Sonia wavers behind her, leans
her small face down to Meg’s neck and starts kissing, the very softest kisses. What a relief to
relinquish herself to them.
Outside the circle of firelight, there is the snapping of branches, bodies moving through
the shadows into the open desert. The moon, just risen, pulses pure white over the horizon.
Around them there is movement, but for a whole minute, they just stare like that, the three of
them, breathing from their mouths. Then Hollings reaches for first Meg’s hand, then Sonia’s. It
is a cool, rough thing, used to work, to the earth.
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More relief, she thinks. It isn’t difficult to wander down this path, holding these hands.
She is happy to let him guide her into the dark.

232
Eavan

Around the Heart, in each rough-hewn bench, the workers are bandana’d, tanned and lean,
leaning into each other. She is seated beside the two Iggies and beside Fresno, who tried to
sneak a hand on to her thigh when they’d first arrived. She’d smiled thinly, removed the hand
and since Fresno has been doing the same rub-up-the-pant-leg move to the older male Iggy. No
one is acting as if this is strange, so Eavan plasters a smile on her face, looks a bit desperately
around.
Meg is talking to Sonia. Parker is beside his crush Kye. In the firelight, everyone appears
so good-looking and friendly, passing jugs of wine and laughing loudly. Eavan’s here, at the
happening, but she’s exhausted. Maybe it’s burnout from the pot. Maybe it’s the heat. The diet.
Eavan has started gaining weight around her armpits and hips, her shorts feel tight, her usually
flat breasts sore. Maybe it’s a tech withdrawal. She’s noticed her fingers flicking repeatedly to
her temple, she can’t stop thinking in status updates. It’s like a mental tick: every few minutes
something types out in her mind:
©freerangegroms rule the world!
Life ©unplugged is the best life
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Maybe it was last night, playing post office in the art shack after dinner. Eavan was post-
master, a big rubber stamp in one hand and a canvas mailbag beside her. Even the older groms
wrote letters into the void, painting and gluing and printing and folding envelopes and then
pretending to ship them off.
It was light until it was deadly serious. Each grom had someone on the outside they
wanted to contact. “This is for my dad,” Vasquez said, no trace of lisp in his voice. “This is for
my ‘buela,” Luna said. “This is for Priss, she used to be here,” Owl said. “This is for Tina, the
teacher,” said Miles. Eavan stamped them all, pretended it was fun. She collected all of the
letters in the canvas bag and later, back in their dome, she held the mail in her hands, each
sealed envelope filled with sores and aches and scribbly misspelled language. She couldn’t open
them. She would not. Until she did. The pain inside was just grom-sized. It was an order for
‘buela’s carnitas, for hot dogs. For Tina to come back, for Priss. It was a plea for Lady Pink to
stop snorting junk and return to her little sister and brother and not to die. Please don’t die
Lady Pink, the letter pleaded. Eavan couldn’t help it, she thought of her own petty losses,
sobbed herself to sleep.
Today, she’s shattered. Can’t find any weed. All afternoon, the wind swept dirt off the
desert floor straight into her face. Daizy was hiding from her, wasn’t in her yurt, not in Boxcar.
In passing, Donatello tried to brush his arm against her breasts and she had to sit him down to
discuss privacy, when to touch and be touched. He rattled away barely listening, his body a
coiled, restless thing.
Since, everything has troubled her: the not-quite-hot shower, the rich kids pretending to
be workers, even the pretty dinner table set with flowers cut into jugs, mismatched teacups
winking at her in front of every plate. She finds herself drawing webs of family trees, trying to
root out the groms’ parents. Luna’s mom, young with neck tattoos, junkie teeth. Miles’ dad, late
forties, very handsome with a far-off uneasy look. Daizy and Theo’s mother is a beaten forty,
skittish, lazer-tattooed nearly everywhere with Hindu gods and Sanskrit phrases, her long
dreads wrapped in swami colors. Eavan learns she mothered three kids in Goa with her guru—
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many wives, she says bitterly—and had to run back to the US when the authorities shut down
his ashram. Daizy and Theo: They’ve got the magic. Daizy’s nose tattoo—she’s an incarnation of
Ganesh, pure good. “Daizy will look after you,” this mother says to Eavan, pointing to the
elephant tattooed across her low breasts.
Eavan wishes she were in Grom City, not here at the Heart with the adults, the parents.
She leans toward the jug of wine, wills it to come toward her. And it does. It’s half gone and
warm, the mouth sweet from someone’s cherry balm. But when Eavan tries to swig it, it tastes
rotten. Her mouth salivates, as if tasting a fizzer.
“You ok?” Iggy’s redhead girlfriend asks.
“I’m, yah, super great,” Eavan says, not trying to sound sarcastic but realizing it’s
coming out that way. Iggy is a perfect Rapture flower child—strawberry blonde and pudgy and
pregnant, freckled, an Art History student from an impressive Ivy out east. She’d been
summering in rural Connecticut where her parents had a country house—boring, all of it—
when she met the male Iggy at a jam band festival. She didn’t even think, she just hopped in his
van to drive west.
Eavan smiles dimly at her, notices her bronzed forearms and calves, the gold studs in
her ears, her copper highlights still growing out. Iggy seems unfazed by Fresno reaching up and
down her boyfriend’s leg, she’s staring at Eavan, her hands rubbing her belly. Eavan tries to
look away, takes another swig of wine from the jug but her mouth fills with drool. She actually
gags. Iggy notices.
“You late?” she asks leaning in close. “I mean, when I first found out I was expecting,
that was my first sign. I just couldn’t stomach the booze any more. Just a thought, maybe, if
you’re late…”
Eavan’s whole body clenches with disgust. Oh, she thinks: pregnant. The thought is
repulsive— she will never be as plump and round and thigh-heavy as this girl. “Don’t think so,
or, I don’t know. Doubt it.” Beside them, the male Iggy and Fresno walk away from the fire-
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light, lending the two ladies a knowing smile. Iggy-girl doesn’t even blink, she is trained on
Eavan, her hands rubbing up along the sides of her massive belly.
“I have a bunch of digi-readers, left over from when we were trying. Like two, in my
dome, if you want to see.” Iggy’s eyes are big and wet and blue. She is freckled, not just on her
face but over her whole corpulent body, with a constant stripe of sweat between her breasts and
wiry hair around her ankles.
Here is a test—how badly does Eavan want someone’s company, that she would
accompany this girl to her dome and do a stupid thing she has no desire to do. Her last fuck
was Samuel, obviously—the memory burned in her mind of him pulling out, coming on her
stomach—and that was over a month ago and she’s shown no symptoms. Her periods are
always fucked. She justifies: the girl is fine. The area around the Heart is nearly empty now,
Meg getting hit on by Sonia and Hollings, Parker gone to Kye. She doesn’t want to be stuck here
alone.
“Sure,” Eavan says. “I mean, I’m almost positive I’m not.”
The walk is slow through the dark; the girl waddles, won’t stop stroking her hands up
and down her belly. She only talks baby: the impending due date, the flips and kicks in her ribs,
the first trimester nausea and fatigue, hypnobirth, water birth, placenta encapsulation.
“Will you put the grom into Grom City, when it’s five?” Eavan asks and Iggy nods and
smiles placidly.
“Well, they do that two-year gradual entry thing,” Iggy says. “Probably more for the
parents than the groms.” Eavan nods. Four days ago, she had visited to the Gradual Entry yurt,
painted with rainbows and unicorns, placed on the cusp of Grom City. Inside, Sonia spent most
of her days training the new littles for independence, guiding the groms through exercises like
making beds and resolving conflict with songs and stories and snacks. There were only three
preemies there—Rasta Bill and Gloria’s three-year-old Pablo, clever little Taly who just turned
four and Owen, the bewildered.
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Both born at Rapture, Pablo and Taly seemed swept up in Sonia’s daily undertakings,
obedient and unperturbed by the long days and sometimes nights without parents. But Owen
threw tantrums. Pounded the ground with little fists. Ripped his clothing off and once while she
watched, a clump of his hair. His body was big for a four-year-old, clumsy, especially with his
eyes and nose filled with tears, his face red and his arms flailing. Eavan watched as he chased
his grandmother back down the path, over and over and over, screaming for her. “A new
arrival,” Sonia had said. “This will be proof that even the most resistant groms can learn to fill
their own hearts. You’ll see the change in him,” Sonia promised, as the little boy writhed in the
dirt, as his grandma Sue, an exhausted long-haired Texan with delicate wrists and many silver
bracelets, delivered this kicking boy back to the Gradual Entry yurt over and over, her gray eyes
full of belief.
“Luckiest groms in the world,” Iggy sings. “Here we are.” She nudges the door to her
yurt open with a hip.
From the outside, the Iggies’ dome is just like the others, but the interior is grimy, smells
of body odor, wet clothing. The only furniture is a square of mattress on the floor, the sheets
stained yellow, tugged away from the edges and clumped damply in a pile. And along every
wall, on homemade shelves fashioned from blackened wood: a hundred small plants, vines and
succulents and flowering violets ringed in dead leaves. Water stains drip from the plastic pots,
leaving fingers of brown down the white walls.
“Amazing, right? That we can grow so much out here in the desert?”
Eavan smiles grimly, can’t imagine where they’ll house an infant.
“Here it is,” Iggy calls from her bathroom and she hands Eavan the digital stick, already
removed from its plastic, primed. “You’ve got three minutes to test, quick, use the can,” Iggy
shouts and eyes the stick hungrily.
Eavan, not rude but wishing she could retreat to the cleanliness of her own dome, draws
the sheer curtain across the bathroom’s doorway and shoves down her shorts, allows a tinkle to
dribble over the stick. Where the tiled wall meets the floor is a gutter of shorn hair, one dead
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cockroach marooned in the corner, its legs crisply curled over its shell. Eavan gulps back a gag
then shakes the stick.
They wait the requisite three minutes outside, on the wooden bench aimed at the moon,
the hacienda. She lets Iggy talk aimlessly about her baby, the way it will raise itself in this
climate, so much better than the blighted Midwest, the poverty, the guns. Eavan tries not to
think of the stick.
“Would you put your grom in there?” Iggy asks and Eavan sees she is asking her for
real.
Eavan shrugs. Thinks of Owen, pulling his hair out, resisting the Gradual Entry, trying
to keep his grandma close. How maybe the most fucked up groms are the ones who don’t cry
for their moms and dads when they cross over to Grom City. The detached. The angry. The
neglected. The happy to be far away.
“The groms here are different. They’re tougher. I’m learning a lot. But, I used to teach at
a prep school,” Eavan says.
“Yah, I went to those,” Iggy nods. And Eavan easily sees this girl as a grom, running
around a manicured field in a pleated kilt, chasing a ball with a stick.
“But there was an accident,” Eavan says, wanting to tell her.
“There’s always accidents at those schools,” Iggy says. “That’s all I remember. Car
accidents, eating disorders. Drinking. My friend fell off the roof after we drank a handle of gin
in our dorm. I was on the roof too, passed out. She was fifteen, totally… mental. I begged my
parents to go home, but…”
That’s when Eavan sees it: Iggy’s small ball of hurt, deep under the baby and the older
man and the gold studs and pedigreed diploma and new name.
“She broke her back,” she says. “But she didn’t die.”
“The girl on the roof?”
Iggie nods. “Did your girl die?”
Eavan shrugs. “She overdosed, for sure, and she was in a coma when I left.”
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Iggie nods. Eavan’s mouth washes with spit, she could puke right there.
“June,” she says.
“Ava,” Iggie replies.
It is an unwelcome surprise when the timer beeps from inside the bathroom. It is a
foreign digital sound among the nocturnal bird song and scrabbling of lizards and this actual
conversation.
Iggy hoists herself up and shuffles to the bathroom. Then Eavan hears Iggy roar with
delight, clap greedily. “I knew it,” she exclaims, pushing back outside. “I just knew, I knew.”
Eavan looks: The hearts on the digital stick pulse, like a baby’s heart would.
The stick declares: © Positive. Five Weeks. ©
Eavan swallows. She thinks she goes deaf until her ears are filled up with this pregnant
woman clapping and shrieking and giggling at her own premonitions. The night shrinks to a
tunnel before her, to a pinprick of light. She forgets to say good-bye, or thank you, she just starts
walking straight, darkness all around.
Shocking to Eavan: how little she knew, how little she does know, about anything at all.
This is the idea that sticks like a desert burr, implanting itself deeper and deeper into the flesh.

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Parker

Moonless, the night is full of indecipherable messages: the bugs hiss, unseen branches rub and
click against the wind. The sky above yawns, starry. The campfire pushes smoke into its sheer
dark. Maybe it’s the joint they shared, the warmth of the fire, Kye still beside him. It brings
Parker his first calm in days.
When the group first assembled at the Heart, Parker had felt disappointed. He’d
imagined a tall dome or orb, something with reflective panels and wind chimes or a giant drill
probing in the earth or sky. But this is just dirt, rough planks, a few scrubby trees. Still, the fire
is usually big and the wine helps, four or five swigs from the handle warm from all those hands.
The low singing. Hollings had opened his speech by asking them to hold hands; Kye had
reached for Parker without any squeamishness. Kye’s fingers were dry, cool. It was like a
switch. Delight: off. Delight: on.
Next, Hollings asked each person to turn to their neighbor and say something
redeeming, something that they’ve seen grow in them. A few murmurs started around the circle
and Kye turned to him and in a solemn voice, not a trace of sarcasm buried beneath, said,
“Parker, I love how you’re opening up to the new possibilities out here.”
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Parker could have choked, the well of emotion was so sudden, so rushed, through his
face and up around his ears. There was no time to dwell on it though, he had to think of
something to say to Kye, off the top of his head:
“Kye, you’re, you’re—“ His eyes were open, glistening in the firelight. Parker stalled. He
couldn’t help it: a practiced cynicism boiled up into his mind, a string of Samuel-like insults
mocking the exercise, some snide comment about how they should suck each other’s dicks—
Parker had to consciously clamp it all down. “You’re the most generous person I’ve met. Telling
me things, including me, trusting me. It’s like…” He couldn’t finish, his throat constricted, not
enough air was getting to his lungs. Kye squeezed his palm gently.
“I want you to divulge something about yourselves,” Hollings said. “Your new name,
written on your heart, written deep inside you, your true self.”
Parker nodded, but the only thing he could think of to share was to describe that one
December—his deep depression, when he wore that “device” lodged to his face, attached
behind the ears by two magnetic bolts that ached in cold weather. It was a fön, but more
permanent, more integrated, more synced. After just a few months attached, Parker had
removed it—the bolts, the whole operation—three years ago, but in dreams he still wears it. In
dreams, everything is still seen through the device’s small grey window.
At the clinic, when he had the device removed, they had warned him that he may have a
hard time adjusting to vision without peripheral icons, without looking to the left corner for a
menu to scroll through. The fön would feel like a lack, like an easily lost object, inferior it its
application, its non-appendage-like ease. The rep warned him, former clients often repeatedly
tapped their right temples with index fingers, involuntarily mimicking the motion used to
switch on the device. Imagine, the rep had said, how frustrating that will feel, always switched
to off. He was trying to dissuade Parker, his device blinking sweetly in the dim light, probably
scrolling through Parker’s use patterns, anticipating how his life without the device would be
filled with a tangible, aching need. Parker exhibited withdrawal symptoms. Battled the desire to
reach for his temple with his pointer, despite urges compelling him to do so.
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Parker tries to explain this. Stares up instead— into the void of constellations and
branches on the periphery of the Heart. Since he removed the device, the night always feels this
way, disorganized, difficult to see without built-in infrared. The rep had showed disdain when
Parker returned to the clinic, asked about the usual recovery period. He’d just asked him to fill
out a questionnaire. To the purveyors of the device, Parker was just another luddite, no button
at his temple, no small gray window to peer through.
At the Heart, there is singing, two guitars and a fiddle. The song, the flickering, the
weepy instruments, it is nothing like his former digital life. But isn’t this better? As if answering
him, Kye turns to Parker and smiles and reaches and brushes something off of Parker’s face,
maybe a bug or a fleck of ash. The gesture is so intimate, Parker is instantly so overwhelmed,
his vision turns microscopic. He can’t help but see by the smallest detail, the tar stains on Kye’s
workpants, the curls over one ear, the peeking tattoo under his T-shirt sleeve, the translucent
blond hairs running from his elbow up to his wrist and probably running up around his chest
and down his navel—
Parker stands. He feels his body spring with sweat. He can see a stricken look on Kye’s
face as he backs away but he can’t sit there beside the fire any more, he needs oxygen, cool air.
His body, usually an immobile thing, needs to run. He wants duck into the scrubby brush,
deeper and deeper into the desert, the thorns and small sticks reaching for him, but he also
wants Kye to follow, right behind him, not letting him go.
Parker’s feet are not swift, not light, not accustomed to the rough soil. He only moves
four hundred meters past the fire’s light, just far enough to be obscured by dark, before he trips
and falls. Wind sucks from his chest.
Kye, not seeing his dropped body, stumbles over him into a bramble and is flattened.
“Fuck,” Kye says, his hand on the edge of a jumping cactus, its spikes inches from his palm.
Parker turns onto his back. He can’t suck air. “Sorry,” Parker wheezes, meaning for
tripping him, for tripping out.
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They lie there for a second, breathing. In Parker’s vision, there is no digital constellation
finder to link the shapes, no names popping up under the brightest stars and planets. He can’t
tell, is there something sad about the way the canvas remains blank? Not sure he can conjure up
the shapes on his own any more.
Maybe it is this memory of the device that focuses his sight. Maybe he sees it because he
is trying not to stare at Kye. Suspended ten meters above him, in the highest reaches of a tree
whose upper branches are spindles, nearly dead and void of leaves—
It is undeniable. A blink.
It lasts only a millisecond, an unearthly blue.
He waits and waits, hears Kye hoist himself to his feet, brush himself off. Parker strains,
breath finally returning to his lungs once he stops trying so hard to gather it.
“Kye,” he says, still lying there, his body shivering. “Kye.”
In the darkness, Kye moves beside him and crouches.
“Look, lie down and look,” Parker says and miraculously, without questioning, Kye
turns and plops onto the dirt and lies there, body beside body, his head next to his head. “In the
tree,” Parker says and breathes. Kye, saint that he is, just lies there, lets air pass between them.
Stares.
And nearly three long minutes later, lasting a fraction of a second and then gone again,
they both see it: another blink. It is blue. Mechanical. Almost invisible.
“That?” Kye says.
“That,” Parker says. He would recognize it anywhere. A peep.

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Meg

Meg has done the research. She has poured over memoirs, oral histories, education journals. She
knows of life in the co-op and kibbutz, knows of toilet doors removed, boot camps for kids.
Rotas for cooking and farm work and printing anarchist tracts. Collective education. Collective
identities.
She knows of the Wilds, experimental groms of London raised by co-parents, thirty of
them coming and leaving rambly mansions with farm tables and manifestos and all of them
turning out fine, if a little square, stock brokers and pilots, their last names still Wild despite
their professions. They speak kindly of their many mums, the books and vats of legumes and
their sister-brother groms, those many bodies in bed.
She knows of child abuse, can’t read about communes without reading about rape.
Those ashrams teaching tantra, healers with plural wives and mandatory nudity and touching
under the influence of mind-altering substances. Sex with followers and sex with children. Sex
as teaching, sex as power. Or just one unruly leader, teenagers trailing him in flowy dresses,
helter skelter, crosses over the eyes.
She knows of the New Zealand homeschool settlements, rooted in the earth, lesbian love
farms, Herlands etched out of patriarchy and pain.
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She knows about Auroville, Arcosanti. About male ego, the bravado of governance.
Waco. Heaven’s Gate. When bravado slips sideways into psychosis, into peril.
She knows of the Territory, pounded into the North by a comet and revered with truck
grease and bonfires and camouflage. Arcadia. Drop City. Fictional accounts as important as the
real ones. Moore’s Utopia, complete with a set of maps.
She knows the Source Family, the Morehouses, Osho and Zegg—why so many real-life
utopias are spearheaded by delinquent, ambitious rock-star pervs. But she also sees love there.
Outdated models of monogamy broken open. She appreciates open marriages, the vagaries of
free love.
She also knows about boundaries. How to pull her own pleasure close so she doesn’t
relinquish control, even when she is subject to lust, to flattery, even as pure serotonin flushes
through her capillaries, her heart batting lightly.
She knows all of this and still she watches herself with a kind of awe: how easily she is
overtaken by clouds of wanting, waves of it whooshing in her ears. As Hollings and Sonia lead
her past the painted doors of the hacienda, purple, blue, behind which she can hear the soft
groaning and giggling of those who paired up so easily at the Heart. When they open the door
to the master suite, locked to everyone else. When they take Meg between the indigo curtains
billowing over their king bed. In the beginning when Sonia disappears, likely to make it easier,
which it does. When it is just his hand under her hips, her throat releasing a childish whine as
his mouth moves over her. When Sonia reappears from behind, a softer mouth, more and more
mouths to enter and tongue.
Even afterward, her body nestled between Hollings and Sonia. She can lie there.
Between her legs, sticky. Falling into an impossible chem-tinged sleep. Even when the quiet is
pierced by coyote screams, her head echoing with a terror-dream—Luna naked in the dirt
surrounded by coyotes, their lips pulled back, their haunches shivering—and outside the night
is full of yipping and snarling, ricocheting off of every surface.
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She can somehow know it all. The history. The dangers. The many failed precedents.
And she can delight in ignoring this knowledge, in leaving it all unheeded. She can revel in the
way Hollings soothes her, reminding her they are part of a pack now, like the coyotes, living
and depending on each other for food and love. She can read these omens as affirmative. And
she can bask in this illogical hope that Rapture is something else completely.

It’s still dark when Hollings takes her to the work truck, opens the passenger door and winks.
They had been sleeping until they weren’t. He’d kissed her shoulder to wake her, then plucked
her clothing off the floor and dressed her himself in the hallway, shushing her with kisses and
pushing her arms through the holes like a grom. Outside, under a setting moon, she thinks for a
second he wants to fuck her again, this time across the dusty bench. Her skin instantly pricks
with sweat.
“We have an important mission for you to partake in,” he is whispering. “One of our
groms has drifted away, she has been recruited into some nasty business. We need to rescue
her. We need you to bring her home.”
“Why not Sonia?” Meg shivers.
“I’ll drive you, I’ll come along, but you’ll use your magic, you’ll see. You can reach her.”
Meg, doubter that she is, marvels at the way she doesn’t doubt. In that moment, she
feels a sense of privilege, to be chosen for a mission, to leave the compound with Hollings.
As they start the groggy engine, Sonia materializes and opens the Rapture gate with the
key strung around her neck. Then she leans hard into the blue Beetle filled with flowers and
rolls it from their path. Meg waves at her out the window, a surge of fear and joy rising into her
face.

The drive, the first time she’s traced the line out of Rapture, reminds Meg of how isolated they
are. First, splintery fence posts mark the property, one long line of thorny scrub. Then the long
gravel road—thirty kilometers of bends between low rock outcroppings and scrubby hills—not
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maintained, turning to washboard in places. The road is cut by Texas gates every few
kilometers. Around one corner, a cluster of rusted water tanks. Around another, a burnt RV.
On the highway, Meg can see the civilization trickle back. An old farm house. What used
to be a gas station. Other gravel roads shoot impossibly into flatlands filled with saguaro and
sage all the way to the Western horizon, but with no apparent settlement or farm or town at the
end. Perfectly camouflaged, the RVs hiding out there are only visible at night. All along the
freeway, the peeps click by.
Meg wants to ask about this girl, who is it, who is her mother? She wants to stroke
Hollings’ face, his hair. She wants to be reached for. She wants to comment on the desert night,
how the interstate lights are like pearly teeth in the dark mouth of the desert. But how to point
out this beauty without wrecking it, the endless blackness, the Milky Way sprawling over her.
She tries not to be disappointed when Hollings pulls a fön out of his breast pocket and
lodges it on his face. “I don’t get out much,” he says. “Important to keep up.”
She nods. Watches him flick through pages while he drives. Minutes pass. Finally, he
removes the fön and hands it to her. “You know; you can’t cut yourself off completely. Ready to
call home?”
Meg feels a stab of guilt—she had no desire to call home, none at all—but now she must.
Hollings listens as she reluctantly dials.
Her mother answers on the second ring.
“It’s you,” her mother trills and Meg feels the taste of melancholy in her throat, old spit,
snot.
Meg says, “I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”
“Fine, fine,” her mother says, but her voice is edged with fear, or annoyance, it’s difficult
to decipher through her measured calm. “It’s the blackouts. Have you been reading about
them?”
“The blackouts,” Meg repeats.
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“They’re nearly every day now,” her mother says. “Somehow these people keep hacking
into our lives.”
“What people?” Meg says.
“The terrorists,” her mother says sharply. “And you know we’ve got our whole place
peeped for security and the office, so we’re particularly vulnerable.”
“Are you ok?”
“I’m telling you, I’m not,” she says, uncharacteristically ruffled. “No, I am, I’m fine. I just
can’t imagine them stealing footage of—of our home, or the office, all those patients, expecting
privacy and it could all go public.”
“Right,” Meg says, less worried so much as annoyed. “Well, just stop peeping. Turn it
off.”
“Oh Meg,” she says. “You know we can’t do that.”
Maybe it is the lingering drugs. Meg suddenly feels ten years old, flipping around her
father’s fön for specs on some coveted toy, when she happened upon their website, Nature’s
Path Naturopathic Medicine for Children. Innocuous at first, a swirl of plants and soothing
chimes, she only had to open the first tab to discover images of herself, her siblings—along with
full profiles of their gut cultures, their growth charts, past maladies, treatments. Meg had
clicked through detailed photographs of her own virus-blemished skin, her swollen face during
fever or tooth infection, even her excrement after a bout of food poisoning. She was their test
subject—every ailment photographed, dispatched, published, public. Even at ten, she burned
with the exposure. She immediately rushed to their home office, but anti-climactically had to
wait in the waiting room next to an aging mother of colicky twin boys, a chunky teen with
swollen joints who stared at her, as if he’d seen the website too. When the patients finally
cleared out, Meg stormed around their office, sobbing, shouting, throwing bottles of tincture
against the tiled floors. But her mother remained placid, unmoved. Her father said plainly that
it was educational. This was helping scores of other children, not lucky enough to have two
naturopathic doctors at home. This was Meg’s contribution to the family— for the coming years
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she would be checked and rechecked, her puberty marked and measured, her illnesses treated
and documented and published. She could stop it when she turned sixteen and no longer fell
under her parents’ jurisdiction.
Even now, Meg can’t erase those charts, those photos, those old connections with
mother, father, brothers, her pre-pubescent self.
“I’m just a wreck,” her mother says now, the edge gone now, all that’s left is fear.
Still, Meg can’t quite give in to pity, with her six bedrooms and never-empty fridge, her
desire to peep everything for safety and for prosperity. Meg feels suddenly very important,
traversing this bleak desert to seek out a wayward girl.
“I’m still trying out a peep-free life mother. You should too, you should really consider
some time outside of the public’s gaze.”
“Sure,” she says.
“OK, well. Love you,” Meg says, trying to sound reassuring, before clicking the fön to
off.

As soon as they exit the freeway, the moon appears, a rising ball of white in front of them on the
road, lighting the mountains with metallic strands. It’s late, but not dawn. Back at Rapture,
everyone is asleep. Her body throbs. The drugs in her nerve base have a dulling effect—her
affection for Hollings is a muted pink. She wants to reach for his ear, the hair tucked behind it,
or his neck or his hand. His mouth had been sweet inside, the taste subtle like apple. In the cab,
she has to draw an imaginary boundary around him, an invisible border of air she will not
puncture.
“This is the place,” Hollings whispers, and his mouth moving sends a weird shiver
through her. She focuses out the windshield: a cluster of lights blinking through clouds of dust.
There is a tent, a large white canopy covered in strings of glass bulbs, with something like a
hundred cars parked in disorderly rows around it. Hollings hops out and slams his door. It’s all
clearly important, he’s walking a foot in front of her, quickly, so she nearly runs to catch up.
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“What place?” she says.
“You’ll see,” he answers, not looking at her.
“It’s a grom we’re looking for?”
He stops abruptly and faces her, holds her shoulders. “Thank you for coming Meg, it
means a lot to me to have you here,” he says. Then he keeps walking.
At the main tent, lit by lasers and blasting AC, people, dressed up, elegant people,
assemble themselves around her. Meg suddenly feels the world tilt: she smells herself, feels her
bunchy peasant shirt and skirt and unwashed underwear. A uniformed man with a tablet
bounces the entrance, swiping föns. Hollings stands at the back of a short line up. The crowd is
a strange combination city kids in frocks, art freaks with bobbled-jewels and capes and boots,
and tech-heads, devices drilled firmly onto their faces. The ticket price is expensive, hundreds,
but Hollings pays for both of them with the fön now on his face. The bouncer nods them inside.
In the dark of the tent, the smell of fried corn fritters, dust, animal shit. Crowds of bodies
push around the perimeter of the tent, talk in raised voices. Vendors mill around selling tubes
of liquor and energy drinks and greasy paper bags of fritters. Other kiosks seem congested too:
they are selling small strips of paper for cash.
When the lights flicker once, then twice, the audience members start clambering over
cold, metal bleachers to get as close as possible to the dark center stage. Meg follows Hollings to
the back of the bleachers as a crack of imitation lightening ruptures the dark of the tent. Then
thunder. Something rises in Meg’s chest. Conversation stills; the tent is draped in darkness.
Then, projected across the tent walls are medieval fireplaces, each containing crackling wood-
fires, guarded on each side by fanged gargoyles. In the dim, a curtain raises on a massive
octagon wrapped from floor to ceiling in fierce, industrial looking chain-link. It is a cage really,
around which the audience starts to holler and clap. Smoke starts seeping through the holes in
the fencing; the stage is lit as if from below with a brutal red glow. She can see peeps lining the
top of the cage, spread perfectly so as to create the 360, VR effect.
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“Keep looking for a girl, Priscilla. You’ll see she’s a Rapture grom just from the way she
carries herself,” Hollings yells over the crowd.
“On stage?” Meg says, just as the audience begins a methodical, chanting applause.
“Just keep thinking, as you watch this—this is what can happen to our groms if they are
set free in the demented outside world.”
“Wait, they recruit groms?” Meg says, but is interrupted by boisterous cheering. In the
center of the stage, a figure appears, his silhouette made taller with low angle lights, his build
masculine, bulky.
“Bienvenue,” the ringmaster bellows into the microphone strapped to his face and the
audience immediately hushes. “You have come for spectacle, but what you will get is worth so
very much more.” The crowd, in appreciation, hoots and applauds. “The first episode,” he calls
out and the crowd hushes again, “Le Combat des Coqs.”
There is a grumble of sound. The lights fall to black and Meg can see several peeps set
up on swinging booms swoop over the stage. A woman somewhere below Meg wails in
anticipation. As a green light eases through the chain-link cage, smoke seeps over the crowd.
Two very young men—stripped to nothing, their bodies gleaming with oil and chiseled
to pure muscle, skin and bone—stand opposite each other in the mist. The stage itself burns
green, pulsing as if with breath. Their genitalia, especially when lit from below, is grotesque,
colossal, engorged with blood and tugged with strings to keep upright, taught. When, with a
blast of sound akin to machinery grinding to a start, one boy throws a foot impossibly high
toward the other’s face, just missing. The crowd yelps with pleasure. The other boy swings a fist
toward a jaw and misses too. The lady seated in front of Meg shouts something in French and
waves her little ticket stub at them. Then the blonder boy, the leaner but slightly taller of the
two, lands a foot across the other boy’s forehead and a spurt of blood is ejected from his eye.
The crowd turns hysterical. Meg feels her stomach turn. All traces of the drugs are gone now,
she has nothing but headache, raw stomach, fear.
“What the fuck?” she says.
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“Disgusting, isn’t it?”
The larger boy takes seven, eight more kicks at the smaller boy’s face, who is reduced
with every blow, who finally ends on the floor on all fours. The green throbs at him from below,
lighting the jetty of blood emitting from his nose and eye, the spit drooling from his mouth. It is
only then that the older boy rubs his hand across the other’s bloody face, swiping swaths of red
across his two palms and rubs it all over his erect and taut body. When he crouches, leans in
and takes the boy from behind, what looks like a sexual act undertaken by force, the young boy
wails, a harrowing, ecstatic cry. The crowd goes ballistic. Hundreds of tickets are tossed into the
air and flutter down delicately to the floor.
“This isn’t legal. This is—“ Meg shouts, but her voice feels small, dropped into a too-
large pool.
“This is exactly the kind of peeping we are trying to combat at Rapture,” Hollings says.
“But still, the young and the vulnerable are drawn to this world.” He taps her knee. Meg wants
to cry. She thinks of Samuel, his perverted peeping. She thinks of Eavan, debasing herself on
camera. How these boys who are paid to fight and fuck will have this film of them doing this,
forever in someone’s possession, over them.
“They’re betting,” Hollings says, and nudges his jaw toward the crowd in rows in front
of them. Meg reaches for one of the small stubs that has wafted toward her feet. Printed in small
archaic script, two French names, with a star punched beside the presumed winner. This is a
game for the knowing, she thinks. To recognize their names without introductions, without a
printed program, indicates a kind of regular attendance. They witness this all the time.
There is no mopping up, there is no scene change. The ringmaster steps into the pool of
blood and gets it all over the bottom of his boots. “La prochaine: La Bataille des Éléphants,” he
says with a flourish. Lights come up on two hefty men swinging colossal arms at each other’s
chests and necks and fleshy cheeks. It goes on for a long while. The crowd marvels. The crowd
gasps. When one man finally makes contact and the larger man is sent hurtling across the cage
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to his back, the cheers are deafening. The vanquished must open his mouth while the larger
forces his cock into his mouth, only to spew ejaculate into the orange-lit air like a fountain.
The matches become easier and easier to watch, even “Le Duel des Paons,” two very
thin women scratching each other’s bodies with giant metallic talons, their lithe bodies rolling
around on the purple lit stage, their breasts and legs lined with scratches oozing blood. In that
finale, the panting woman with the gash down her neck is pinned to the ground while the other
plunges her sharp beak between the other’s legs. The light fades as first one and then the other,
shriek high and tight in her throat.
There are more tickets thrown into the air like confetti, more winners, more clapping
each other on the back for a perfect bet. Meg can detect some of the machinery behind the
spectacle. She spots several more peeps in the rafters, another swooping camera on a boom
catching the audience reactions. The soundtrack is clanging, something akin to crashing metal
and rousing saws, industrial in its rhythm but pure horror in its pitch. Still, it is a surprise when
the ringmaster announces the final match and they still haven’t seen Hollings’ prize appear.
Meg can sense the rising excitement, voices louder, lights brighter, fog thicker.
“Here is the final delicacy for our banquet. It is the most coveted feast of all,” the
ringmaster intones, his voice echoing against the tent’s canvas, the floor an eerie blue now,
almost lending the space a frosty air. “La Dévoration de la Vierge,” the ringmaster whispers
and the crowd unhinges, voices cackle, thighs are slapped hungrily.
The girl who Meg assumes is Priscilla appears first, naked, completely shaved like a
child, her waifish body floating in the blue light. There is a thin gauzy veil over her face, but
under it Meg can see her long black hair and brown body. The veil is sequined and colorful and
the light pours over her like she is the Virgen de Guadalupe. The men that emerge from the
shadows, that circle her, are white, erect, oiled and skin-headed and muscular and circling her
like prey. A soft wind blows and lifts the veil just barely and from behind her, one of the men
snatches the veil between his teeth, dragging it to the edge of the cage and pawing it. The
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woman seated in front of Meg inhales dramatically. The circling man holds the veil above his
head and tries whipping it at her, but it doesn’t touch her delicate skin.
Meg bends to look at the spectator’s ticket: there are five names on this bet, one for each
of the men circling Priscilla. Meg bristles, almost stands, almost just stops the whole thing
now—why not, if they are here for a rescue why not just go up there and grab the girl? Beside
her, Hollings reaches for her hand. “We’ll get her, I promise,” he says and waves his hand at the
peeps on every rafter, to the bouncers by every exit, to the cage lined in razor wire. “This is no
place for a grom.”
In the octagon, one of the predators snaps his teeth at Priscilla and then another, his
penis so large it swings awkwardly in front of him. The first man leaps toward the man who
stole the veil and punches him, closed fisted, across the jaw. A spigot of blood opens up on his
face and a splatter of red reaches Priscilla’s bare back, marking her. The blood turns all of the
men to frenzy. One lunges for Priscilla and he is blocked by another, his muscles tight and
pulling as he leaps on to his back and appears to bite the man’s thick neck. Another tries to
pounce at her feet but he is stopped by a high kick to the temple. He swings wildly and falls
heavily to the stage, slamming his cheek against the floor. There is more sparring. There are
more wide punches, more high kicks, until finally, one of the two remaining men grips Priscilla
by the shoulder with his meaty, bloodstained paw, and spins her to face him. His face is pulpy,
one eye nearly closed from punches, but he forces his mouth over her mouth. The sound that is
emitted from the speakers is so loud, so grinding, it has to be choreographed, but still Meg
nearly cries out. She can see the other man come from behind with the veil and strangle the
kissing man, pulling so tight that the body under it writhes, then bucks, then falls to the floor.
The strangler then bends his whole body over Priscilla’s and in one fluid motion, lifts her from
under her ass, splitting her legs around his waist.
The sound, what had been grinding through the speakers, abruptly halts and there is
nothing but silence. The tent falls quiet enough to hear Priscilla’s tiny voice yowl like a kitten.
Meg can tell, this is no fakery; he is inside her, holding her whole body up and around him, her
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back splattered with blood. The other bodies wriggle on the red-smeared stage. As the lights
dim, as the final storm of betting tickets float through the air, as the crowd bubbles with
disappointment or glee, Meg can hear nothing but Priscilla’s soft animal yowls.
“We need to save her,” Hollings says. “We need to save them all.”
Gone are thoughts of Eavan, of Parker, home, her other life. There is only a flashing
desire to protect groms, defend groms. She stands, wants to shout or jump down or run or
leave, but Hollings is waiting, waiting. She begs herself to sit, to wait. In her head, a parade of
demonstrative action: child pornography charges, calls to the media, peeps from inside, more
rescue missions, and more, another yurt for recovered performers, a world for them to hide in,
hide from. Around the tent, in the rafters, the peeps swoop around on massive booms—
scanning in the faces of the audience as they applaud in the dark. On stage, there is nothing left
but a wet, red mess.

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Eavan

She has been walking for an hour, seeking Meg, Parker, but finding no one.
She keeps her body tall, erect, like holding perfect posture could work against this
bodily invasion. She cannot possibly be exhibiting symptoms yet but still she roils with nausea.
She wants to double over, to spit into the dirt. She walks on, simultaneously hates Samuel and
wants him. Rages at her body having to bear the record of their stupid affair, while his remains
unscarred, unscathed. She touches her gut. Imagines the baby as a baby, not as a cluster of cells
in her uterine lining, implanted now, colonizing. Little spoons of gruel into its slobbery mouth.
Its milk stink. She wonders if she could love the thing if Samuel doesn’t love her. If it could
make her love herself.
In the blackness that is open desert, there is one abrupt opening. On the terrace by the
hacienda, two lights, one after another, blink on. It makes a small stage of the oak tree, the table
under it, lit between curtains of night. And in the shadows on the glow’s perimeter, a figure.
The body slips onto the stage and stops, waits. There is something calming about this lone
actress, reminding Eavan that even in this lit scene across a long pasture of dead grass, there is
another living body.
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Never has she wanted a fizzer more than this. So it is desperation she feels when she
trudges up the path.
“Hi,” she says and steps into the light. It is Sonia, she sees now, who turns to face her.
Eavan tries not to look, but how could she avoid at her nipples, poking gently out at from under
a gauzy shirt. Her long hair is bunched on top of her head and tied with a shoelace, a kind of
bohemian beehive.
“You must be looking for Meg,” Sonia says. “But she’s gone. She’s left with Hollings.”
“Gone,” Eavan says.
“They’re doing a very important grom rescue. Someone’s life is in danger.”
Eavan nods. Swallows.
“Do you need her?” Sonia asks, tilting her head. “She could be gone for some time.”
“I—I have a problem; I need to call home. I was wondering if I could have the keys to
Meg’s van. I need to get into town, just for the signal.” All of this emerges before Eavan has
formulated the plan, but now that it’s out, it makes perfect logical sense.
“Fizzers,” Sonia says. “You’re going to get fizzers.”
“No,” Eavan lies.
“Eavan,” she sighs, “I know it’s difficult when you see everyone pairing off at the Heart,
but soon I’m sure you’ll find a—“
“I’m just pregnant, is all. It’s not a big thing, but, I’m just an idiot, I guess.”
“I see,” Sonia says, clearly disappointed.
“Please don’t tell anyone. I’d just like to— “
“You three certainly arrived with baggage, didn’t you?”
Eavan’s face scalds, that old need to be validated by authority burning at her. “Not
really, I just need to go— “
“I certainly can’t stop you,” Sonia says, no trace of sympathy in her voice. “The starter is
there, in the glove compartment. I suppose I’ll be the one to tell the groms you’re leaving. Of
course now, it’s harder, after they’ve grown so attached.”
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“I’m not leaving,” Eavan protests. “I’m just going for a couple of hours, I’ll be back.”
“Hmm,” Sonia says, pursing her lips, before she pushes into the hacienda, leaving Eavan
alone in the coming dawn.

There is something soothing about the outside world, where the van is just a van, where she is
just a girl who wants a fizzer, where she can lodge a fön on her face and check in with news and
VRs and lists and celebs. She knows it’s early, it’s pointless, it’s impossible, but still she pings
Samuel, her mouth barely moving for voice command, the responses projected on the
windshield, each one a gulp in her throat:
EAV: 6:03am
U up?
Just texting him brings back a kind of hunger, that empty feeling she carried around for three
years of working with Samuel at Evergreen. Perpetually waiting for him to look, to touch, to say
something only to her. His response is fast. Like he’d been waiting.
SAM: 6:05am
Yup, up. Never slept lol. Nothin changes. Howz the cult?
EAV: 6:06am
We © it here, actually. Not a cult. Total surprise. Fancy…
SAM: 6:08am
Y did U break free? Groms too cray?

Eavan stares out to where the RVs thin out and are replaced by real ranches, charging stations.
Their migration tracker bleeps diligently on the dash. On this stretch of asphalt, a train of
billboards illustrate all the things the Rapture groms don’t know they are missing: soft serve,
meat-stick pizza, tempura plums.
EAV: 6:09am
The groms here R rad, no tech, smart, super badass. Like fam to each other ©
SAM: 6:10am
Like U
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EAV: 6:11am
??
SAM: 6:12am
U & P & M- Always jealous of your fam vibes
Eavan feels a wave of affection for her friends, for Samuel. Of course, that is the minute the sun
peeks over the ridgeline on the horizon. She lets the dawn light pour through the windshield;
she won’t tap shades over her lenses. In that moment, she wants nothing but unfiltered morning
blaring in her eyes.
EAV: 6:13am
Awe. So, got some news
SAM: 6:16am
R U coming home? Sober?
EAV: 6:17am
Y still sober

SAM: 6:18am
Good girl. U were 2 fucked up

EAV: 6:19am
FU. Srsly. Was NOT that bad.

SAM: 6:20am
Sorry. Y. That. Bad.
Eavan pulls her fön off her face and chucks in on the charger on the dash. Tries to picture
Samuel, dead on the desert floor. She remembers what Fresno had told her: a body remains in
the sun here for months without decomposing, the preservatives in the victim’s food keeping
him fresh long after his demise. She writes Samuel thirty, forty versions of what she wants to
say, doesn’t send a single one.
EAV: 6:25am
Pregnant.

EAV: 6:25am
FU. Srsly. You knocked me up you motherfucker

EAV: 6:25am
I love you. I loved you. For a long while.
259

Delete, delete. It doesn’t matter. She’s furious he doesn’t already know, isn’t prescient enough,
never will be. Samuel doesn’t ping again, not for the next twenty minutes along the freeway,
not outside the town. A simple apology would be nice. Then Eavan passes the municipality’s
migrant camp, the lights and watch towers and razor wire marking its perimeter. Forget it. She
wipes tears, aims the van, drives.
Nearby, and she knows this because Daizy described the place at length, is the
Ponderosa Women’s Prison. It’s not the biggest in the country, not maximum security, not a
dangerous community of inmates. It is particular because there is a school. The groms who live
there are among the only minors allowed on penitentiary grounds. They bunk with their
mothers; it’s considered a progressive place. “Except it’s jail,” Daizy reminded her. People shit
in the sinks, there’s no toilet paper, no free shampoo, only tiny squares of soap, free for your
first two weeks only. Then for sale at the commissary. They only serve meals twice a day—
white bread mostly, mashed patties of ground beef. And the guards berate the groms like they
are prisoners too. Daizy and Theo and Lady Pink had not lived there, but they’d visited a
cousin, Patricia. Patty-cake, who had trouble speaking, who was a shining blonde, white white
hair, a toy for the inmate-groms who worshipped her, knitted and baked and drew pictures and
sent cards to her cell block. They greased and braided her hair so she would never get lice. The
mom was a junkie, in an out every few months. “Imagine teaching there,” they made Eavan
imagine it. “Or growing up under that kind of peeps.”
A second later: town. A looming smokestack hovers at a distance, a power-station. At
the toll machine, Eavan swipes her fön across it for payment, then frowns. Almost empty.
She drives the half-vacant Main Street like she knows where she’s going, past a string of
stripper rooms and noodle trucks, empty lots packed with trailers. The box store glows at her,
early morning now, the only open place in town. The lot is flanked on all sides by electric
fencing, colonies of RV. Night workers buzz around the loading docks.
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Eavan, determined, jogs across the still-cool concrete. A wall of cold blasts her from
above and as the sliding doors glide open. She calms with the feeling. Starts toggling the fön on
her face, sorting through the special sale items projected on her lenses, her prior purchases and
where they are located on the interactive map.
D – O – C she toggles and her map illuminates with dots: Doctors/Upper Floors: Urgent
Care, Orthopedics, Dermatology. She tries again, W- O- Womens Health. This time, the
pharmacy aisle lights up: Prophylactics, Pharmaceuticals, Implants, Pregnancy Tests. An ad
starts blaring into her lenses, a young beaming couple informing her that new birth control
implants last up to fifteen years, are 99% effective. There are no over-the-counter pills for what
she needs.
In the waiting room of the Urgent Care clinic, two crones and two old men are fingering
tablets, slowly compiling forms. Their faces are webs of freckles and moles with dark spots
around mouths, eyes, foreheads and cheeks. The receptionist is rotund, with wide purple-
painted eyes and nurse’s scrubs.
“Hi,” Eavan tries her hardest to smile. “I need um, a pregnancy test.”
The receptionist raises her tattooed eyebrows at her from behind her bejeweled glasses
and says, “Here everything goes through the store’s insurance. You buy a pre-paid card
downstairs at the cashier, three-months-six-months-or-a-year. You get a punch card with ten
treatments.”
Eavan, sweating now. “I need a pregnancy, uh—dealt with,” she says quieter, but saying
it.
“Not here, you don’t,” the nurse says. She points her pen at the peep over the door and
shakes her head. Somebody in the waiting room titters. “We deal in melanomas mostly, asthma,
chronic fatigue.”
“I just need a referral. You don’t have anyone who can…”
“We can give you a test, but it sounds like you already got one of those.”
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“I just need a doctor, like a clinic, or whatever,” Eavan says, her voice getting wobbly.
The receptionist turns softer now, presses her glasses high up on her nose. She types
something into her monitor and then leans her head in, covers her mouth with a piece of paper.
“You’re going to the medical mall for that. Three exits down the freeway. Some of these clinics
do cash.” The receptionist scans through her monitor, swiping and touching and reading and
then swiping some more. “Alright. Medical Mall Three. They’ve got a walk-in. 21B”
“Thank you,” Eavan says.
“Careful,” the receptionist mutters after her.
Eavan tugs her shorts as low as she can over her legs as she passes the galley of old
people. But before the giant metal door clicks shut, she tries to look at them, really just corpses
carrying their last bit of life around, and she tries smile for real.

Medical Mall Three: what used to be a string of sunny, glassed-in retail outlets is now chipped
away, faded, squatting dejected on a square of desert so parched it is nothing but gravel,
clumps of earth all pushed around by machinery, baring the ubiquitous flashing desert sign:
Don’t Crack the Crust.
The parking lot charges fön credit only. What used to be an electric fence no longer
buzzes around the lot. Still, the doors slide open to a worn but bleachy shopping emporium,
brashly air-conditioned. The lighting is soft; the music is tinkling. Instead of the original
sporting goods outlets and shoe stores, each retail space is occupied by a different medical
practitioner—dentists mostly, mole removal, facial realignment, gene therapy, sperm/egg
storage, anti-oxidant flushes. Some have glass fronts open to reclining chairs, some have dark
shades screening the work within.
The clientele of the medical mall is elderly, slow moving. The benches along the
corridors are strewn with few desert rats, their wrinkles deep and their clothing distressed. Men
doze in the faux-leather armchairs, some with gauze packed into swollen cheeks, holding
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leaking bandages over eyes or forearms. Eavan scans for peeps in the ceiling, notices the
standard issue eye-in-sky.
DON’T LET THEM PUNK YOU, she posts in her head.
She gathers speed. She passes another three clinics for skin malformations, a pretty pink
storefront for breast reduction and reconstruction, cartoon letters spelling out “Lumps and
Bumps: Chemical-Free Cancer Removal.” She burns with a need to call Meg, or Parker. But
can’t, of course, because of the permanent blackout that is Rapture, AZ. She misses the place
terribly, thinks she likes living in the past. Around her in the mall is a poor, broken looking
Arizona, townies, gun people, cranked out teenagers flicking elastic bands into garbage cans,
loitering near vitamin stores. She thinks of Daizy, or Luna, or Vasquez, how abundant their life
is, how healthy. All she can see here are air-pollution asthmatics, syphoning the mall for its free
AC.
The abortion clinic is third from the end, in white and green earth-friendly calligraphy:
Natura Women’s Health. The glass whooshes open. The place is clean, classy enough. Inside,
Eavan is greeted by a young nurse in a suit, her lips pulled over her crooked, badly bleached
teeth. Eavan runs her tongue over her lips, realizes she hasn’t even taken a shower since last
night. This whole thing so impulsive, she almost turns around to leave but the nurse stops her,
swings her ponytail and starts the entrance interview, a device bolted firmly to her face.
“Here for a particular procedure?” she asks and Eavan nods. She reaches into her back
pocket and pulls out the digi-reader with the positive results. “Removal?” the nurse asks
sweetly.
“Removal,” she says, a relief. She likes this frankness, as easy as a lump or bump.
“Of course, how difficult for you. We’re happy to help.” The nurse smiles with her
mouth closed. She taps her tablet, then guides Eavan away from the front desk, to a cubicle in
the back. The walls are white with gentle green vines drawn along the trim. Hypercolor
graphics of waterfalls flow down every wall. Birds tweet, waves crash on some unseen beach.
The light flickers slightly.
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“Fill out the following tabs, billing and medical background,” the nurse recites. “Then
change into this gown.”
Eavan, crinkly paper under her bare legs, is quick and efficient. The tablet immediately
syncs with her fön, does most of the work for her. “Can you swipe a fingerprint for payment?”
the nurse asks. “The pricelist is quoted above.” Eavan scans the long list of private providers,
many of which are banks she’s seen dotting the freeways they’ve been driving, box stores, E-tail
establishments. At the very bottom of the list, there is a simple, No Plan, not cheap, which she
taps with her thumb, processing through her dwindling credit at home.
“Marvelous,” the nurse says when the tablet flashes APPROVED in flowery green
lettering. “You have someone here to escort you home?”
“He’s outside,” Eavan says. She wants to tell this nurse she’s actually alone and she’s
happy Samuel’s not here. Doesn’t have to think about him if she doesn’t want to. And she
doesn’t want to, so she won’t.
“Wipe yourself down with this and the doctor will be here in a moment.” The nurse
hands Eavan a few small alcohol swipes, tiny squares of paper to sterilize even the dirtiest
hands. When the metallic curtain is drawn, she removes her shorts and wipes the little wet
squares between her legs, feels stinging, that chemical clean. In moments, there is a male voice
behind the curtain. “Ready?” it asks.
“Yes,” Eavan says, tugging the plastic gown over her lap.
The doctor is very old; his white hair is wiry. He is also smiling with crooked teeth but
wears that familiar white coat and plastic apron, a comfort. He closes the curtain behind him.
The birds trapped in the speakers twitter and flutter around and the doctor, without speaking,
opens a cupboard and places several instruments on a metal tray, none of which look
particularly sophisticated: two metal prongs, a speculum. He pulls two long tubes from a wall
unit, something like an in-home vacuum-cleaner. “Chemical flush and suction,” he says.
Eavan stares at him, until the nurse enters with that reassuring efficiency. “Lie back
please and squeeze if things get too painful.”
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“This?” Eavan asks, taking a small rubber ball in her right hand.
“You squeeze the ball and a small dose of painkiller goes into your bloodstream,
through this.” The nurse points to a small spike in the ball, a needle that protrudes with
pressure. “No limit,” the nurse says smiling. “You can squeeze all you like.”
The doctor tilts her knees up and signals for Eavan to move her bottom closer to his face
at the end of the examining table. She is tempted to squeeze the rubber ball right then, but she
refrains, feels his metal instruments first touch her leg.
Then there is the pressure of his fingers, his prodding around. It’s just so gross this old
man poking her— she squeezes the ball lightly. A needle pops out and pierces her palm, a
sudden stab. “Ouch,” she says and the nurse looks from the doctor’s work to her face, scowling
for the first time.
“Should be simple enough,” he says, his fingers way up inside her.
“Good,” she says, but squeezes again, to be sure.
She knew it would hurt, that it would tug deep inside her, that the sound of chemical
flush and suction would cause some blaring panic. But she didn’t expect the desire to defecate
there on the examination table would be that strong, a wave in her lower gut. She gives the ball
another squeeze—this time feeling a short rush of cold running up her arm and into her middle,
a numbing like at the dentist. There is a tug and another tug and Eavan groans, inaudible under
the roaring machine. This time, she squeezes the ball hard and a wave of cold travels to the tip
of her toes, her nose, her forehead, a swift rush. The doctor raises a bloody hand, just a few
drips on the edges of his fingers, but Eavan reacts violently, her stomach heaves. She has no
time to ask for a bucket or a bag. She turns her head away from the nurse and vomits, a thin
stream of bile on the white tiled floor. The doctor stops, the machine stops. The nurse breathes
out, loudly. “Squeeze the ball please,” she says and Eavan does it for such a long time, her
whole body feels a kind of frozen deadness pass through it.
A few minutes later, it’s over, the suction has turned off. The nurse, using the same
alcohol swabs as before, daintily dabs at Eavan between the legs, but the skin is anesthetized.
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She can’t feel the sting. Refusing to look at the small pile of sick she has ejected onto the tile
floor, she shoves her sleepy legs back in her shorts. Five minutes later she is sipping at a juice
box and whooshing back through the glass door, shaky but determined.
When she sees a granny slumped asleep, a thin bandage over her sliced melanoma, a
line of drool dropping from her lower lip, Eavan feels woozy. She slows down, tries to make her
feet keep going. But they won’t. She turns and throws up a thin stream of sugary blue juice into
a potted plant, her whole body needing immediately to be empty.
The granny doesn’t wake. Eavan tries to keep going, to walk steadily out the exit into
the glare of the parking lot. But someone has moved the ground below her. It slips sideways,
trips her to her knees, then turns off the sun. As her head knocks against the asphalt, she is
almost grateful for the hot darkness that blankets her, thick and itchy and black.
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Parker

The day starts cold, but he can’t feel it, he feels nothing except Kye’s breath fluttering over his
neck. He’s that close, lying beside him in the flatbed of Kye’s big blue truck, a shirt bunched
under his head and his lithe body just inches away, warming him. Parker inventories
everything he knows about this boy and it equals almost nothing—twenty-two, tree-planter,
university drop-out, pretty and polite.
Maybe it is Kye’s rage at Hollings and Sonia for filming them that defines him. Last
night, it was Kye who had insisted on climbing the tree; it only took five or six swift athletic
grabs at the branches before he reached it. When Kye tore the peep from the trunk, its wires
dangling like severed veins, the violence of it felt raw, visceral. “Fucking bullshit,” Kye said.
His face turned red, wet, ugly almost in how young it looked, a petulant grom.
“We can figure this out,” Parker said, a teacher for a second.
“I fucking knew it,” he whispered. The two of them bent over the small camera.
Impressive in its small size and discretion, it appeared as if a piece of tape meant to cover the
peep’s blue blinking light had come undone, loosened by the tree’s pollen. Without fön access,
Parker couldn’t hack into the peep’s larger network, couldn’t detect how many other peeps
populated the small area. They could, he suggested, do a manual sweep. Kye agreed, storming
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from tree to tree spouting theories of what they were doing with the peeps: spying on their sex
lives, filming their interactions to use against them, or worse, to be made public somehow.
Filming the groms—for what? Pervs?
As the sky turned a darker black and then purple and then finally a shade of orange
over the Eastern horizon, Parker felt changed, ready for combat. They scanned the trees around
the perimeter around the Heart, Kye climbing the tallest ones, probing his hands around the
branches for any mechanical devices concealed there. But they couldn’t get far, the branches
broke too easily and Parker really couldn’t climb. Above the black canoe, Kye discovered a
palm-sized solar panel, nearly invisible in the needles but not attached to any peep. It felt like
something.
The two of them squatted on the benches around the Heart and stared at the one solar
panel and one peep, in pieces between them. By now the look on Kye’s face was pure worry,
sullen and small. But something in Parker felt vindicated. Frauds, he thought, accusing the
empty benches at the Heart, the fire smoldering ash. Around them, the property was silent, the
groms’ yurts closed, the school curtains drawn, the story wall, with its dozens of openings,
seemed like dark, hollow eyes.

Back in Teacherlandia, the cots were empty, his friends somewhere else. Despite all the
adrenaline that had been surging through him, he felt sleepy. The pleasant give of his mattress,
the dark mustiness of his pillow tugged at him. Not Kye.
Kye marched straight to the hacienda, a new adrenaline running through him. He
waved the peep around in the air as he ran through the things he would say to Hollings, about
hypocrisy, about peep-crimes. Parker agreed emphatically, as loudly as he could without
sounding fake. But he was drained. Here was his old cynicism: of course they’re peeping,
peeping is control and no one is willing to relinquish control. Was it crazy to be slightly
relieved, the very smallest amount, because if they were peeping Grom City, then maybe it was
safer, maybe they had a way of stopping bad things from happening?
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A quiet fell over Kye when they got to the hacienda, when he saw out back, at the giant
table on the terrace, nursing a steaming cup of tea between her callused hands, Sonia.
She was waiting, because she’s peeping us, Parker reminded himself. She sees
everything. Around her, the hacienda was tranquil, muggy and dark. All down the hallways,
many socks hung on many doorknobs, privacy requested. Sonia pulled out chairs for both of
them, as if she was conducting a meeting, as if she were the one to interrogate. Of course, Kye
stared at the peep in his hand, but wouldn’t speak. And so it was up to Parker to begin, to voice
their complaint. He reached for the peep and laid it on the table between Sonia’s outstretched
hands.
“This was up in a tree, above the Heart. And it was still working, recording. I guess—I
guess we want to know why you’re filming.”
Sonia nodded and her eyes crinkled with a small, benevolent smile. “Boys, I’m so glad
you found this,” she said and nodded sincerely. “We’ve been trying to track down the last of
these and we’ve been having trouble.”
“The last of them,” Kye whispered, his eyes lifted from his lap.
“The prior owners, they were real surveillance freaks and they had the whole place
bugged and peeped. We found the first dozen or so, but these last ones have been really tricky.”
“So you knew about this,” Parker asked. “You knew this was running and you let it?”
“The solar panels keep them on whether we want them or not. Listen, we’re trying to
eliminate this shit from our lives.” Sonia looked at them sweetly. A crust of sleep still lodged in
the corner of one eye. It lent her an innocent glow, a kindness you’d afford to a drowsy mother.
“You’re lying,” Kye said.
“Kye,” she cooed. “You’re new here, so is Parker. So you haven’t had time to
acclimatize. This is not the way we operate here at Rapture.”
“You’re lying,” he nearly yelled this time. “You’ve been peeping those groms. As soon
as we get out of here, we can check.”
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Sonia placed her hands on the table and shrugged, as if dismissing an employee.
“Anger, resentment, fatigue, it all tarnishes the energy we’re trying to manifest here,” Sonia
said. Her face clouded over, her brow knit between her eyes. “We’re just trying to be safe, but
this rage, this isn’t safe.”
Parker’s breath snagged in his throat. A list of near accidents and adult rescues clicked
into a pattern in his mind. Hadn’t Hollings arrived when Theo had gashed his face—just
enough for stitches, or when Luna’s fever spiked in the night and she’d tossed her covers off
and vomited silently into the basket of stuffies? The groms described both of these events,
punctuated by adult visits, as the epitome as crazy—it was so crazy, an adult had to come.
“This is how you can promise your groms won’t get molested. Or hurt. You peep them,
you watch to make sure,” Parker said.
Sonia shook her head—seeing him see her. “I won’t insist, but I will ask you to both look
deep inside and think about what you’re bringing to this place. And if you can’t answer
honestly, you’re right, you should probably leave.”
“This was supposed to be a sanctuary,” Kye said, his voice shaky.
“It’s time for you to go, both of you. Not because you’re right, but because you can’t
come back from this anger.”
“I need to tell my friends I’m leaving. I can’t just go without telling them,” Parker said.
“They certainly left without telling you,” Sonia said, a new bite in her voice. Parker’s
heart squeezed. “Meg has left the property with Hollings and she may be away for some time,
maybe days. They’ve gone to rescue a grom in need. And Eavan, she has fled. I’m sorry she
didn’t tell you, but she couldn’t handle this place. Last night, she was having a real anxiety
episode and she ran off to get drugs. You know she’s been having a hard time with
dependency. I didn’t want to be the one to let you know, but she’s taken Meg’s van. It’s not
likely she’ll be back.”
“They left,” Parker said, his voice even, attempting to smooth the hurt running through
him.
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“Kye’s truck is here. It’s the easiest way. Just go,” Sonia said, “Without any noise,
without any fanfare, just peacefully, gently.”
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Teachers leave Grom City all the time. Workers leave Rapture. Please leave as lightly as
you can, to respect those here who are giving honestly of themselves.”

All day long, for many years, Parker taught code: long strings of instruction, which he built into
a larger design, an architecture. He tested that architecture over and over, looked for confusion,
stalls, places where the code could freeze. If something didn’t quite fit the larger pattern—his
queerness say, or his weight, or the coder-turned-teacher label, or the boarding school life—he
could rewrite the code. He could reprogram the circumstances around him one at a time to
adjust for that one variable—turn the zeros to ones. But this—Rapture, peeps, his missing
friends, Kye—he had not done a good job of controlling the variables. Parker cannot fold all of
this together to make a larger design.
Even the geography is boggling. Beyond Kye’s flatbed truck: scrubby fields, high
altitude now and on the verge of forest. There are pockets of snow locked in tufts of grass, bits
of winter that would have melted or evaporated in the desert below. But they have left the low
desert, left Rapture, that little digital ball on his fön tugging them north. When Parker had
placed the fön on his face, he hadn’t felt a wave of joy or comfort, just exhaustion. He tried to
contact Eavan, Meg, but neither was online. He couldn’t wait for their signals to turn green. The
lenses made his eyes squint, then after a few minutes, they ached. Still he scrolled and scrolled
through pages and pages, trying to make up for all he had missed.
They had fled Rapture by secondary highway, then highway. In only a few hours, they
found themselves on city freeways—a stream of blinking signs and swooping ramps that made
up Arizona’s megalopolis. After Rapture, it felt louder, scarier, to be back in this snarl of traffic:
the fast lanes designated for driverless cars, with digital toll counters and peeps scanning
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passengers, next to clogged lanes full of rickety desert-rat trucks. Kye stayed far right, closest to
the shanties precariously pieced together in the shoulder.
“You grew up… here?” Parker said. He wanted him to articulate something about his
upbringing in this sprawling desert city, but Kye couldn’t focus, he was still manic, spinning
out on Rapture’s peeping even after long silences.
“It’s brutal—it’s fucking panopticon shit.”
“It’s possible she’s right, the hardware is old. That she’s not trying to peep.”
“No, it makes sense, I mean, they seems to know when there’s an emergency. You were
the one who said it,” Kye said.
“But maybe that’s not so bad?”
“See, that’s how conditioned you are to surveillance,” Kye said, his face an instant red.
“It’s pure bullshit, the parents think they’re off the grid. They hate that shit, they do anything to
live offline…But you—“ Kye looked at him with a hint of disdain, his eyes creasing like he had
something sour in his mouth. “I mean, you love tech. You can barely live without it.”
Parker’s chest tightened. He sat on his hands. His fön burned on his face. He took it off.
“Where are you going?” Parker asked quietly.
“The house that greed built,” Kye snapped.
When they swung the truck into a gated compound high in the hills above Scottsdale,
Parker saw Kye through his neighborhood, his block. Stucco mansions loomed over them, all
several stories tall, each with columns and Spanish flourishes, small turquoise fountains in
every front yard—each with enough water for a migrant camp, or a community like Rapture.
Kye had to thumbprint code in three times, three different electronic gates swinging open,
before he reached a rancho sprawler on the end of a cul-de-sac, the sultry swath of golf course
stretching out behind it. Motion lights sensed the truck pulling into the long circular drive. He
smirked, “One of three houses, capitalist cunts.” The front door clicked open with Kye’s retinal
scan; the foyer’s chandelier glinted softly off the pink marble as soon as they entered. Not a
minute inside, a trilling phone penetrated the cavernous front hall.
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“Mother,” Kye called into a ceiling and a female voice, quiet, controlled, echoed across a
dining room set for twelve, a fireplace large enough to stand inside.
“You’re home,” it said. “The blinker called me right away.”
Kye offered a quick explanation: he’d be in the house for an hour before heading back
north. No, they wouldn’t spend the night. No he didn’t need anything, just wanted a few more
clothes for the bad weather. Parker couldn’t help but hear Kye’s mother’s voice choke slightly
when Kye refused to stay another day, long enough for her to fly down to see him.
“I won’t even tell your father,” it insisted, but he declined. They’d be leaving tomorrow
morning. Yes, they would help themselves to dinner in the pantry. No, he said again, he didn’t
want her to take the trouble to come all that way.
After hanging up, after rolling his eyes and leading Parker to the kitchen’s back room, he
first pointed to a peep in the far corner of the room and then a panel of blinking lights. He
pulled his shirt over his mouth and then pressed close to Parker’s ear. The heat from his mouth
felt cottony. “We can’t say anything; they’re watching every centimeter.”
Parker nodded and took stock. The peep panel was straightforward, new but
unsophisticated. He pulled his shirt over his mouth and smelled a muskiness that was rawer
than his previous city smell. He wanted, now, to impress him. He wanted to hear a compliment.
He wanted someone, after losing his friends and his job and his city, to see him.
“I can hack it,” Parker whispered. “I can put a blackout on the house, it will just look like
normal, like the house is empty. Go take a bunch of food and pretend to go outside. Go.” He
gently placed some items in Kye’s arms and nudged Kye out the back door, locked it and then
projected his fön’s interior on the blank wall under the peep, where it wouldn’t be detected. It
wasn’t that easy, maybe ten minutes of penetrating their system, of using a mask for each peep,
of looping it for twenty-four hours. And they were free.
When Kye came in, he was changed, relaxed. He leaned so close, he pulled Parker’s fön
from his face and put it on his own. It was the first time Parker had seen him with a device. He
stood very close to him. Then he grinned.
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“You’re gonna be perfect,” he said.
Then he lay his hand on Parker’s elbow and guided him toward three large humming
freezers, which opened with a welcome blast of chill air. Kye waved his hand in front of the
trove of food that lay within and told Parker, “First, we eat.” He was completely cavalier about
the food, but Parker was so moved by the bounty he nearly cried. They started with flash-fried
tempura and lemongrass tofu, then ramen burgers, two smoothie pods each, half a chocolate
pie. They ate like boys, ravenous, standing at the cool marble counter, sleeves for napkins, all of
it on his mother’s fashionable china, left on the counters with food swiped across them, never
cleared.
They wouldn’t talk, not until Kye started the NRG machine and pulled out the bottle of
Japanese whiskey. The bottle was gilded in some kind of armor. Kye poured two shots and held
one aloft for a minute before he downed it, his eyes watering.
“You ready?” Kye asked.
“Yes,” Parker said, terrified to ask. He sipped at his whiskey and it burned at his throat.
“Listen, I want to take you to a group of people, more aggressive than Rapture, more
intense, but with a similar message. Anti-peeping, that kind of thing. With your coding, they’ll
love you.”
Parker only heard love and then his ears started ringing. “Another commune?”
“Not exactly, not the hippie nature kind. It’s more your tribe— coders, anarchists, free
thinkers.”
“How do you know them?” Parker said.
“I lived there all last winter.”
“You went to school I thought.”
“This is what I did when I dropped out of school. When I turned my back on this
bullshit and found a real life,” Kye said. His hands waved around, dismissing the house and the
food and the peeps and all that marble, cold to the touch.
“Coders?” Parker said, sneering slightly.
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“More punk rock,” Kye says, his smile illuminating the room. “They’re brilliant and
they’re fighting the good fight. I’ve been thinking you’d be perfect since I met you. Will you
come?”
Parker twitched. He tried not to think of Eavan, of Meg or Samuel. Instead, he looked at
this boy, this Scandinavian-looking rich kid who could be his mother’s grom if she’d married a
Finn like herself. His parents love him so deeply and he shuns their love on moral grounds,
because— greed. Parker didn’t know him at all, but seeing this house, he saw it all.
“Of course,” Parker said, like it was inevitable. Where else would he go?
As if rewarding Parker for the right answer, Kye smiled.
Then the impossible. He signaled for Parker to follow as Kye climbed the spiral
staircase. He watched Kye slip into the master bedroom and start some kind of bath. But like
every other time this happened, Parker wanted to be sure. His heart hammered away as he
loitered in the hallway, scrutinizing photographs of Kye as a child: that sparkling smile, that
baseball player’s lean body. His father was like an older version of Kye: the coach, a sturdy
hand on his shoulder, their uniforms branded with a surveillance company’s logo—the insignia
on every cap, every sock, every ball and bat. Parker couldn’t stop glancing at the door and back
to the child-version of Kye, those soft eyes, that new height. Finally, after a painful moment and
then another, Kye stepped back out into the hallway in only a towel. His body was skinny but
perfect, his belly lean, his back a question mark, leaning his face toward Parker’s face, his neck.
Yes, he would follow Kye. He would navigate any road. He would program any code.
They both watched as Kye’s fingers encircled Parker’s wrist and pulled him inside.

A few hundred kilometers—nothing really—but they spread it over two days. Their truck filled
with provisions, prepared foods, soap, towels and blankets for twenty or more, Parker himself
felt ill-prepared. He wanted to ask for more stops, more time.
After Scottsdale, they climbed impossibly, he thought, and then climbed some more,
Kye’s truck chugging bio-diesel, meandering along the slow lane. Once, they’d stopped at a
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fast-food vending pods looking for grease to convert, but without people manning the pods,
they couldn’t beg or borrow or barter the oil as they’d planned. It was very late. The road
empty, the air actually cold. After masking the peeps, after jamming the security alarms, they’d
resorted to breaking the lock on a storage bunker and stealing the sloshing jugs of uncooked
oil—fuel for a few days at least. Not his first crime, but his most exciting, by far.
That morning, the thrill shifted perceptibly into fear. Driving through the tin shambles
under every overpass left Parker with the same nausea he felt entering the U.S. When he passed
the migrant camps on the high sierra, the largest in the region, he let Kye ramble on about the
sickness of his culture, how his parents actually voted for increased surveillance, spot checks for
the undocumented, mass deportations. Parker tried to peer through the chain link, tried to find
faces, bodies trapped within. He always tried to find the camp’s school.
“Where we are going, they’re trying to fight this shit. This is our fight,” Kye kept saying.
Parker swallowed, grateful for Kye, for some buffer against the derelict territory outside.
Still, he worried. Meg’s fön was characteristically offline, but Eavan’s was more troubling, his
texts repeatedly bounced, like her fön was dead, not just turned off. Had she driven back to
Canada? Was she avoiding his signal, was he blocked?
Only once, while they drove Parker feigned sleep, just to lean his head on Kye’s
shoulder, to approximate some touch. But Kye wouldn’t show affection by day. By day, he was
grumpy, distracted. When Parker innocently asked about his family—the coaching days, his
father’s likeness, his mother’s kind voice—he scoffed.
“Don’t talk about him,” Kye said, his voiced edged with irritation. “That asshole can’t
see the damage he does. We haven’t spoken in two years.”
“Dads suck. Mine too,” Parker said. The truck lumbered forward.
“I mean, look at that house, that fountain and golf course and that fucking bathtub
waterfall bullshit. In the middle of the desert, in the middle of a thirty-year drought. No sense
of impact. No sense of consequences at all,” Kye said, his voice strained.
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Parker didn’t want to mention how much he’d enjoyed the waterfall. Nodded gravely
instead.
“Most of the Rapture people have no family, no connections. you noticed that?” Parker
said.
“Target the lonely, the isolated,” Kye said. “Worked for you guys too, right?”
But by night, after a heats-itself jar of chili and some spongy bread, after a scrappy fire in
the ditch between two burned and boarded-up RVs, Kye came for him. Parker was leaning into
the front seat of the truck, reaching for one of the thick piled sweaters they had swiped from his
father’s closet, when Parker felt those arms encircle his waist from behind.
“I’m scared of going back to this camp,” Kye whispered hotly in his ear. “It’s super
hardcore. I want to fight but I just, I’m just—“
Parker whispered, “I know, I know,” even though he didn’t, not really, and then he let
Kye peel his clothes off, right there, the brisk wind biting at his bare chest, his fists clenching the
sweater. Afterward, Kye had mopped himself with their itchy blanket, then headed back to the
fire without speaking.
And now, dawn, the two of them pretending to sleep in the back of Kye truck, according
to directions, only minutes away from Kye’s “cause.” Kye, beside him, starts to shiver lightly
and Parker inches closer, spoons his body against his and slowly, carefully, shifts his arms
around Kye’s stomach, breathes into his hair.
“What if you hate it?” Kye says into the cold air.
“I won’t,” Parker said.
“I told you, they’re coders, like you. They’ve got a really intense agenda, very anti-
peeping, it’s coding, grueling work,” Kye said.
“I like coding, I told you.”
“It’s aggressive, I mean, they’re real fighters and it isn’t comfortable to live there. Little
rooms with gas heaters. And there’s all kinds of shit they’re going to want from you.”
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“I’m ready for that,” Parker says, not knowing if he is. Parker doesn’t say that he’s
afraid, that he worries about Eavan traversing the desert, that he misses Meg, her optimism, or
Samuel with his quips and apathy. Only a few weeks have passed, but Evergreen feels so far
away. How many groms between here and Vancouver. How many strewn across the desert.
How many detained. How many living in burnt out RVs and shanties and camps. What will
become of Donatello. Of Luna. Of Daizy, on the precipice of leaving Rapture, about to be
released into this.
“At least we’re doing something. At least we’re trying to make a change,” Kye says.
“Right,” Parker says, determined to mean it.

After a final climb, the trees turn thick around them, shrouded with fog. A few patches of snow
cling to the higher peaks. At the top of the last pass, the truck really chugging now, a creek
filled with mountain water rushing beside them in the rock, that’s when Kye says, “Here.”
At the highway’s highest point, at a splintering sign for a former ski resort reading “The
Snow Bowl, Home of the Powder Kids” they make a hard left and follow a winding road, dark
with drizzle. It is real spring up here, the air thick with cloud. A few abandoned looking cabins
line the road, some with tin foil across windows, some with roofs left to moldy decay. It is
insane to Parker that this is a mere three hundred kilometers from Rapture—that altitude can
pull weather like this, when the basin below remains dry.
“No snow for a decade,” Kye says softly. “Crazy they actually skied here.”
Parker nods, the wet air penetrating his layers. Out in the mist, he sees the cables from
an old chairlift, the rusting seats swinging in the wind, disappearing and reappearing in the fog.
They pull up to a wide gravel parking lot sunken with puddles. A handful of other trucks are
parked around a traditional A-frame, its windows veiled by thick curtains, the letters once
spelling SKI LODGE, now just shadows against the dark grain of the wood. Beyond the lodge, a
silvered cedar deck. Past that, a cluster of buildings, what looks like it used to be a Swiss chalet,
with little cabins dotting the edge of the gentle green slopes. Rain spittles onto the windshield.
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“Are they just squatting?” Parker asks.
Kye shakes his head. “It’s Berkeley’s grandpa’s old place. The grandpa tried to sell it for
twenty years and then her dad tried to operate for the last bit, but it’s useless. Can’t even make
snow if it just rains on it. So, she told them it’s an eco-retreat. We covers costs, they stay away.”
Parker, swiping his moist hands across his lap, wants to say something significant to
Kye, something like—I’m glad I did this for you, or No matter what, I’m sticking by your side.
He doesn’t have time anyway. Someone has thrust open the front door to the ski lodge and is
running toward the truck, a rain jacket over head and giant rubber boots on their feet. They
both watch as the figure jogs toward them and in one fluid motion, throws open the truck’s
driver-side door. The face that greets them is flushed, freckled, fair, young, female, brunette and
is within seconds, kissing Kye all over his face.
“I knew you’d come back,” the voice says, breathlessly, her hands on his hair, his
cheeks. And Parker watches with a kind of stab in his throat as Kye puts his arms around the
girl’s shoulders and kisses back.
“I had to,” he says into the girl’s hair. “You won’t believe who I’ve got here.”

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Meg

Meg wakes in her dome, her mouth next to the only open window—a sliver of fresh air through
the fetid warmth. When she rolls over, she hopes to see Eavan and Parker occupying their beds,
but instead, the girl they’ve rescued, Priscilla, lies asleep on Eavan’s mattress. She is panting
slightly. No longer a grom, she’s not even as young as she appeared in the octagon. Her face is
not magazine perfect—her face is pocked by fresh acne, caked with streaky make-up not quite
the color of her skin. On the pillow, her hair fans out, black and long and greasy near her scalp.
Meg wants to brush it out, wants to wipe her face with a hot cloth, rub the white crust from the
corners of her mouth. Even with the sheet pulled across her chest, Priscilla seems gravely thin;
Meg can clearly see sharp clavicles and ribs, veins visible, pushing out around the neck. She
places a hand on the girl’s forehead as gently as she can, but still Priscilla jerks awake. Her eyes
flutter open, glassy and bloodshot.
“What the fuck,” she rasps.
Around the bed, a sour smell. Above her, that square of skylight throbs with the late
afternoon’s sun. Meg flicks the air-cooling switch, but Priscilla whispers, “Don’t, I’m cold,” and
shivers as if to prove it. She lifts herself slightly from the bed and the sheet pulls back to reveal
one perfectly formed naked breast.
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“You’re ok,” Meg says. “Lie down. You’re safe.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Priscilla rolls her eyes, then sinks back to the pillow, stares at
the skylight.
“Meg. A teacher. Put this on,” Meg says, tossing Eavan’s dress at her, which Priscilla
ignores.
This is the first she’s heard Priscilla speak. When they peeled the truck away from that
desert tent, a cloud of dust rising dramatically behind them, Meg was wired, chatty. Hollings
listened. But Priscilla was dead quiet, her head against her shoulder, lolling around as if
drugged or drunk. It had taken both Meg and Hollings to carry the girl’s wilted body to the
dome, to carefully lie her down on the mattress. It had taken a very long time for Meg to fall
asleep.
In a wave of panic and guilt, Meg realizes she does not know where Eavan is. Where
Parker is. She’d left the door open but neither had come. Where did they sleep? She can’t tell
what time it is but she’s afraid the heat of the day has peaked and burned off. The dome is hot,
stifled.
“You know you could go to jail for kidnapping a minor,” Priscilla says. She is still lying
uncovered, one live breast in the room, lighting the place up.
“Kidnapping,” Meg says. The Evergreen groms had been obsessed with kidnappers,
even though their vitabands are trackable and most of them were chipped too. Like the whole
city was infested with the psycho-types who would kidnap a grom. And do what with it? Meg
would ask them. But they had lots of answers for that.
“I don’t have a parent here, you’re not my fucking guardians,” Priscilla says.
“OK, that’s fair,” Meg says. “Can you tell me where I can find your parents?”
“They got deported bitch.”
“I’m sorry.” Meg says. “That’s awful.”
“So what’s a camp? Is this a camp? Where am I a prisoner? Huh?” Priscilla’s eyes rove
around, keep flicking on and off the door.
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“Hey,” Meg softens her tone. “You can leave if you want, you really can. I have a van
and I can drop you off where ever you feel safe. You can probably just have a good lunch and a
shower and go back if you really want to. But I saw you last night and that looks like hard
work. It might be nice to relax here for a while.”
“Relax. Ha! They’re gonna kick me out when I’m sixteen anyways, I’m just jumping the
lineup.” Priscilla’s face is wrenched up now. Meg feels hungover, awash with nausea.
“No one is kicking you out. The groms love you here. I’ve heard about you. I’ve seen
your name in Boxcar.”
Priscilla sniffs.
“We could always use you in Grom City, if you want to help.”
“Use me? Use me?” Priscilla says snidely. Then finally, Hollings appears in the open
doorway of their dome. He reaches for the small of Meg’s back and moves to Priscilla. When he
crouches on the floor and gently places his hand on Priscilla’s forehead, Meg feels real calm.
“Sweet child,” he says.
“Fuck you,” Priscilla says back, the tears gone and a smile glints across her face.
“This is crazy,” he says. “You’re a perfect child of nature and look what you’re doing.”
“It’s just a job.”
“It’s prostitution,” he shouts though he’s trying not to.
“It’s spectacle. I told you last time, it’s just stupid white man, brown virgin thing, it’s all
a play on patriarchal sex models. It’s teasing your worst sexual fantasies.” She says this like an
accusation. She is ten years older than she was five minutes ago. Her jaw is set, her eyes
narrowed.
“It is my worst nightmare,” he says.
“Because it turned you on.”
“It scared me.”
“It makes you question the violence in all your sexual relationships. I’m a minority
getting preyed on by white men. It follows a fucking pattern.”
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“Put some clothes on,” Hollings says definitively but she doesn’t. Instead, Priscilla
shakily stands square on the mattress, her nudity sucking all of the oxygen from the room.
“All men,” Priscilla replies. “Like you and your girlfriend, there’s a power dynamic at
play. There’s an imbalance, there’s—“
“Sonia has nothing to do with this.”
“She is the exact same as me. In the dance. Or this girl—what’s your name?”
“Meg?”
“Like Meg here, innocent Meg. She’s just a virgin you need to protect and save with
your commune and your power structure. Typical male bullshit.”
Meg feels a need to correct her, define her position here, her understanding of
intersectionality. Hollings starts pacing the room. He flicks on the air-cooling and she flicks it
off. Meg can see the bones of this girl’s spine in this glaring light. Her slender fingers pick at
something in her hair. Meg can see dried blood in a swipe across her back.
“Why don’t you just hop in the shower back behind the dome, it’s solar, super warm. I
can get you something to eat.” Meg says.
“Huh, she’s motherly,” Priscilla says, like an insult. “What exactly are you offering?”
Priscilla spins around to Hollings, eyes him shrewdly.
“The life here, unpeeped.”
“Fuck you, I grew up here. This place is no fucking different than anywhere else.”
There is a loud and urgent knock on the door. “Yo! YO!”
Meg and Hollings and Priscilla look at each other, but only Meg crosses the room, opens
it. “Hi,” she says.
Fresno is there, panting, face red, “They peeped her. They’re coming.”
“Who?” Meg says.
“Quartzite,” Fresno responds, shaking his head and turning back to the gate. “Fascist
motherfuckers.”
“Who? What?” Meg says.
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“You fucking idiot,” Priscilla mutters. She is instantly dressed, is grabbing random
articles of Eavan’s clothing off the floor and stuffing it into a cloth bag she’d found hanging
from a doorknob.
“Stop that,” Meg says weakly. “That’s not yours.”
“Go,” Hollings says to Meg. Meg stares at him, at them both.
“Where?” Meg says.
“The gate! Go to the gate!” Hollings says as he reaches for Priscilla’s hand and pulls her
out the door toward Grom City.
Outside, Fresno is sprinting to Rapture’s entrance. Someone has pushed the Beetle in
front of the gate. Even at a distance she can see a group of Rapture’s men congregated behind it.
It’s the hottest time of day, the sky clear and high and hot and windy. She can hear the revving
of engines, a few shouts.
More: Meg’s van is gone. She does not see Eavan. She does not see Parker. Her legs feel
swollen and slow as she jogs toward the crowds.
Meg notices then: Opposite the entrance, a dozen RVs and three pick-up trucks spitting
gravel with their studded tires, nosing toward the gate. The RVs are old, their siding loose and
hanging off like bandages. Signs are nailed to their vehicles too: slogans like Family, Faith,
Firearms and White is Right. Meg’s eyes water with the wafting exhaust.
On the Rapture side, twenty or so adults stand shoulder to shoulder. Someone has
sounded the gong and Meg can see a few more arriving, lining up, eyes squinty in the dust. She
squeezes in between Fresno and Iggy, a long gun hoisted over one shoulder. There are more
guns: in the hands of Rasta Bill, old Bernice.
Between the two sides, Sonia has stepped in front of the revving trucks, the tires coming
almost to her shoulder. A desert rat in a checked shirt hops from the driver’s side, tailed by
another larger man with a shaved head in a torn hoodie and sweats. The smaller man’s mouth
is a dark little cave of broken teeth, which ages him, sinks his cheeks in.
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“We tracked that migrant girl, she’s here,” the desert rat says, not to Sonia but over her
head, as if calling to the hacienda: come out, come out wherever you are. “We got her facial
recognition.”
“It’s against the law? To have her here?” Meg whispers to Iggy.
“Their law,” Iggy says and sniffs. “They do what they want out here with the
undocumented. ICE thinks this vigilante law is scarier than a real law so they let it slide.”
Fresno says loud enough for both sides to hear: “Fascist psychos.”
“Are Parker and Eavan with the groms?”
“No, I think they left,” Iggy says.
“Left?” Meg says, suddenly wobbly.
“Yah, Eavan didn’t say good-bye to me either,” Fresno says, his crooked eye looking at
her.
“Wait, where?”
Fresno shrugs.
“This is a place of refuge for many,” Sonia hollers above the engine noise, waving her
hand at the property splayed behind her. Once again, Meg feels the gap between Rapture and
the rest of the Arizona plateau. Clean food, clean air, healthy groms. She thinks of her friends
navigating peeped highways without her, the whole state a grimy sex circus on the desert.
“We peeped that illegal bitch. We got eyes on this road,” the RV rat hisses.
“Many of us have roots abroad and— “
“Don’t you fuck around on us, you hippie shit,” the desert rat shouts and the other RVs
rev their engines in agreement. Meg can feel the heat and smoke waft toward her. “When we
got a migrant on our peeps we can either call ICE to come raid your property. Or we can get
something in return.”
“You can’t threaten us!” Iggy shouts, spit flecking his mouth. Meg can see five more RVs
and two trucks are hulking toward them down the road, their horde growing in size.
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The RV people push closer to the Beetle, their rage flaring up. They slam their fists
against the Beetle’s flanks. “Migrant bitch!” they cry. “You turn that girl over or you offer
something to trade!” someone shouts, the accent southern, drawly.
That’s when Sonia skirts the Beetle and lets her hand drift over the mouth of the RV rat’s
gun. This backs everyone up a few steps. These Arizona people look irate, but they aren’t
willing, quite yet, to shoot someone’s hand off.
“We can trade,” Sonia says.
“Turn over that illegal cockroach whore!” the RV rat says. His face is speckled with
moles and sporadic whiskers, his eyes burn red from too much sun and dust.
Sonia holds her hands up. “As you know, we’ve got a well. We’ve got lots of clean water
and a good, long hose. We can fill your tanks, those of you here now. Is that fair? Is that
enough?”
From the somewhere inside the gates, a water hose materializes and a small burst of
water splashes into the dust at the RV rat’s boots.
“But you’ll turn off your alert. Only those of you here now can make the trade,” Sonia
says. If the silence is an agreement, it is one Meg can’t quite gauge. The screaming stops. The
honking stops. The revving engines still. There are coughs. Maybe some embarrassment at
being bought off so quickly, to be so irate and so placated in such quick order.
Meg thinks: Eavan would be shocked. Parker would marvel at this reversal. First one
desert rat, then the next, tucks their weapons into the waists of their sweats and opens up the
side panels to their water reserves. The truck drivers dismount, leap into their flatbeds and
proffer several plastic tanks—like they’ve made this arrangement before, like they know what is
to be gained from peeping this particular corner of their state. Meg is stunned by the ease of it:
that’s all it takes, a few tanks of water to quell the fire, to assuage the encroaching rage of the
outside world.
She feels a deep longing for her friends.
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At the very end of the RV train, she spots an RV that is vaguely familiar, a Home Sweet
Home sign swinging from the rearview, a little picket fence painted around the perimeter.
Maybe it is Phyllis, the teacher from the warehouses, lining up for a free tank of water in
exchange for a prescribed amount of wrath. Maybe it is the old nanny with the rotten tooth.
Maybe the geezer who told her “Smoke follows beauty.” Maybe they are all just thirsty, Meg
reasons, without money for bottled.
“Where are they?” she says out loud into the heat of the day, but no one hears.
Somehow, she has been left here all alone.

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3:

This is what we know about need. Our childhoods were captured on film. We can summon any
moment from the cloud: first steps, first words, first cupcake, first head-first down the slide,
those thousands of pics posted online before we were capable of posting ourselves. We
learned, as we discovered how to run and jump and spin, how to remain in the frame, say
cheese, perform it again for the fön. We learned very early how to pose.

As soon as our chubby fingers allowed it, we too swiped and clicked and dragged. Our thumbs
would fly, until we could sport the fön on our faces, around our necks, on our wrists. Then we
could play all day, we could browse any number of games or VRs, our thousands and
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thousands of tags. As tweens, every post was a kind of thrill. It was a second world to the one
we occupied and it could consume hours of every day. In this world, we filtered, we geo-tagged,
we appeared super-cute or super-happy or super-relaxed or ©blessed. Once we tagged our
friends, they existed. Some of us even entered the world of million-likes and click-bait and retail.
To be so young and so known! Yes, our actual worlds shrank to the back seat of an SUV, to a
dark bedroom, to an after-school academy waiting room. We had difficulty enjoying a new place
without posting. We had difficulty eating without rating. We had difficulty conversing without
checking to ensure we didn’t miss some like or click. We thought in status updates. We couldn’t
cut ourselves off, we’d be ignored, invisible. We kept very little to ourselves.

Yes, we were exposed very early to the tittie pics, the ass snaps, the accidental pussy at a very
young age. Even as groms, we didn’t search up double-ass-fucking-booty bitches—but the VRs
popped up all the same. Who wouldn’t watch all that skin gyrate. Who wouldn’t click through the
bouncing bodies and their flashes of pink. OK, we’ll say it, we had trouble brushing arms with
the boys in school hallways of high-fiving the girls after a win. It made the glossed lips at school
all the more terrifying. Those new whiskers were harbingers of a great needy violence, growing
inside all of us. The feeling in our throats was one of dryness. When would we be asked to
perform such acts? We knew, it would come any day. We would be cum-shotted. We would be
scream-mounted. We would be the double ass fucked booty bitches featured in those college
dorms, those locker rooms and if we were lucky, those pool-side condos. We knew, we too
would soon shave pussy, wax chests. We would need to start our crunches and pilates and
pushups now. We were already getting asked for nudie pics.

Yes, our parents tried to protect us, mostly by peeping our devices. We were tracked, weighed,
calorie counted. Voice-commands were collected. We thought we wanted privacy—and it only
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required a few ghost accounts to throw them off, feeds filled up with sanitized versions of junior
high, while our secret profiles were followed by any rando who proliferated clicks and likes. But
that could go wrong too, someone could find us, show up when we geo-tagged a location.
That’s a cautionary tale: Girls can go missing. Boys can get jumped. That, and it was too easy
to hack drives, webcams, to make public that private file, that disappearing thing that never
disappears. Some wanted money. Some wanted to destroy us. To expose us. To belittle us.
Some just shared for pleasure, to feel just a bit better about themselves.

How did we feel when too much went public? There are so many ways of peeping, so many
trivial crimes one could peep— shoplifting, bad babysitting, break-and-enter, drugs, the wrong
hook-up with the wrong person at the wrong weak moment. Once news spread, the virus was
endemic—the footage could be imprinted, peeped, stolen and disseminated millions of times
over. A parent or boyfriend or teacher could see, a college recruiter, a potential employer.

So we inevitably designed hacks of our own. That was our first wave. We started paying
attention in coding class and slowly, by group-sourcing together on a giant forum, we coded up
a viral-app that could shut down anyone’s online ID. It was like a bomb on our profiles— it
filtered through all the networks and posts and tags and facial-voice-ID recognition and it
deleted us, for good. Some of us were still groms, but many of us had graduated to adulthood,
scarred and disturbed and pursued by what had been recorded in our youth. The thing that
united us, groms and grown-ups: we longed for erasure. We wanted to obliterate the past. We
only wanted the present. We became the Futurists, claiming the future for our own.

When our imprint returned to zero, when the evidence of our childhoods shrunk to foggy
memories, when those teenage surveillance crimes evaporated–-we felt so relieved, we didn’t
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know how ensnared we had become. The pics disappeared and the posts and the echo of pics
and vids and comments and likes— when the second world disappeared, we were still there, in
the flesh. Crazy as it sounds, part of us worried that wouldn’t be the case.

That’s why most of us joined the Futurists. To protect ourselves, and then eventually, protect
others. As the hacks got easier, we could execute even the most complicated deletion from the
safety of our bedrooms, our SUVs, our after-school academies. We could obliterate old test
scores. We could expunge common apps, college rejections. We could finally eradicate all that
underage pussy. One prank wiped all juvenile criminal records, gave our fellow groms a fresh
start. We sought to ease others from the burden of the historical, allow everyone to live for now.
Erasure for one, erasure for all.

This is what we know about need. We didn’t look into the doting eyes of our parents, we looked
into their cameras and we smiled without feeling. We got no direction from teachers, we got
assessment, results. From doctors, we got retinal scans, vitabands, data available to anyone
with the ability to hack. From friends, we got clicks and likes. But no longer. Now we nurture
each other. Connect. Unite. Now, we can infiltrate every fön, every monitor, every hot mic, every
peep, because we need to start over. We need to make sure our fellow youth are not hacked.
Exposed. Branded. Bullied. So we can erase the ugly past, live for the future.

This is what we know about need. We need the nourishment of one another, person to person.
Grom to grom. The rest, we can tear the fuck down.
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Eavan

Eavan wakes up with a feeling totally new to her: that she has been thrust unwittingly into the
future, that she has skipped over something— there is only a wide blank space where the
present should be.
Her eyes twitch open and the room is blurry at first, then pale blue-gray, a shade drawn
over a window and white daytime sun leaking in around its perimeter. She cannot say where
she is. She hears beeps. Against her skin: sheets, scratchy, chafing her hips, rubbing the stubble
on her legs. The room is freezing, an icy air-conditioned chill. Around her neck, a gown. A
hospital, then. She pats the gown’s worn material with her fingertips, feels how it gapes around
her arms. Despite goose bumps up and down her torso, her armpits sting, hot and prickly. Her
head feels clogged with cotton.
Beside her, the beeping narrows, sharpens. It is a firm, insistent thing. Another
realization, the increasingly loud alarm is from an IV machine, its tendril plugged into the
translucent skin of her wrist, taped there too tightly with clear adhesive. In the room’s murky
gray, a single word, ‘Empty,’ flashes red beside her face. She hopes someone has gone to find a
replacement IV bag, or at least a way of turning off that infernal beep beep beep.
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Then her dream comes to her—something about a baby—one that felt so real curled up
on her chest, she pats around the sheets to make sure she hasn’t misplaced it, allowed it to roll
off the bed, slip away. The baby in her dream didn’t have a smell but she had a feel, the silk of
hair and scalp under Eavan’s chin, and a sound, something like the bleating of a goat. She
realizes, foggily, that the sound of bleating is still soft and clear in the room, under the machines
and the forced air from the ceiling vents. She blinks around; there is a tray of
compartmentalized lunch beside her lap—broth, melted fruit-ice, plastic forks—and a dark
monitor screen mounted on the wall. Beside the bed, the bathroom door is closed, but a slit of
light seeps out from under it. The bleating, she realizes, is coming from in there. Did she put the
baby in the bathroom by mistake? She tries to hoist herself up from bed but cannot make her
legs move. She is frozen. Perhaps paralyzed. She rips away the synthetic blanket covering her
body and sees, to her horror, a pair of medical mesh panties with a thin plastic tube running
between her two pale thighs. In the tube, her own weak urine drips to an unknown receptacle
under the bed.
She hoists herself up with her arms and then prods around her legs, discovers that this is
not paralysis she is experiencing so much as numbness—she can feel the weight of her hand on
her thigh, her knee, her shin. There is no pain. Only pressure. Still she cannot voluntarily shift
her legs, they feel cemented to the bed. A bandage is adhered to the numb skin above her pubic
hair, which, when she lifts the mesh panties, she discovers has been shaved to spikes only a few
millimeters long. She wants to cry out but not from pain— for the moment, she feels nothing, no
tingling from her toes, no throbbing from what she is guessing is some kind of incision.
Again, the sheep bleats from the bathroom and the toilet flushes, a sink runs water then
turns off. Eavan half expects the baby to walk itself out of the bathroom. When a figure does
emerge, it makes a silhouette against the dark of the room. The shape is unfamiliar. She is tall, a
long ponytail bunched high on a head, but instead of breasts, she has a baby-shaped lump on
the front of her body, stuck to her somehow.
“Oh!” the voice says, high, familiar.
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“Whose baby is that?” Eavan asks, her voice raspy but loud, clear. “Who’s there?”
“Eavan, hi. How are you feeling?” the voice hesitates, stops. A light flicks on beside the
bed and Eavan can make out the freckled, benevolent face of the female Iggy—Sophie? Sarah?—
and what must be her newborn baby strapped to her chest in a sling. It looks small under there,
but Eavan cannot remember how old it would be. Has she seen this baby alive? Wasn’t this Iggy
girl pregnant just a day ago?
“It’s a girl!” the Iggy announces quietly. “Born yesterday morning at 6:33. I guess it went
so smoothly I’m getting discharged already!” When Eavan doesn’t respond, she asks her baby
in a high sing-song voice, “Why isn’t anyone here yet?”
Eavan groans just barely, stops herself. She remembers the medical mall, the clinic, but
nothing after that. How did she get to the hospital? Where is she? Where are Meg and Parker?
Who is paying for this? Who could possibly pay?
She cannot ask this teenager about what she missed. To Eavan, this flower child looks
stupid, young, her straw-colored hair draping both sides of her face, encased with a cheerful
chubbiness around the arms and neck. Despite her cooing into the sling, the baby does nothing,
doesn’t squirm, just remains a still lump on her front, bleating. “I’m really sorry,” she finally
says to Eavan. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“Can you get someone else? A nurse?” Eavan says. It is as if this girl has a bubble
around her, a quiet pleasure Eavan wants to pierce. “Someone who knows what’s going on.”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” she dramatically whispers. She rubs her baby’s tiny back
under the cotton. “Sonia told me you would be confused.”
Eavan stares at her. “Just—where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital in Mesa. You’ve been here for two days, or more, like three? You
passed out and then there was an ambulance and then they had to put you under. I had the
baby during the night, and you… Sorry, time is all confusing. Supposedly you were totally out
of it on the drive too....”
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“Out of it?” Eavan raises her eyebrows, interrupts. “Can you see a call button anywhere
on this bed?” The girl stops speaking but lets her mouth hang open. “A way to buzz a nurse or
something?”
“Right!” the girl whispers loudly, as if startling herself. “Of course, sorry,” she says, but
she is not sorry enough to do anything. She sits on a bedside chair and starts unbuttoning her
blouse. At this, the baby at her chest emits another bleat.
Eavan’s vision blurs, she cannot see straight through the beeping IV. She pulls the sheets
away from the bed’s perimeter and finally locates a HELP button on a remote control crudely
glued to the bed. The HELP is written in a faded red, the plastic peeling slightly as if it has been
pressed many times. She pushes it and waits a long minute before she hears a nasally voice call
into some unseen speaker. “Nurse’s station.”
“This IV is beeping, it says empty,” Eavan says loudly, not knowing where to direct her
voice. The Iggy girl raises her eyes to Eavan and then back to her baby, shushing it. “And I’d
like to speak to someone about, my, um, status…”
Eavan trails off. Waits. There is no response on the other end.
“Hello?” she tries again.
“We’ll have someone come down as soon as we can.”
Eavan tries peering around the gloomy room for clues. What kind of surgery came at the
end of her emergency? Should she call her mother? Did she buy that insurance to pay for this?
Who is paying? Who will pay?
“Look,” Eavan says finally and the girl raises her drooping eyes, her breastfeeding
obviously a tiring act. “Can you finish up and maybe find Meg or Parker for me please. I need
to figure this out.”
“Sure,” Iggy says, “They’re coming to get me soon so maybe—“
Eavan waits. The beep starts peeling through her pain medication, her headache a
tangible thing now, vibrating between the temples, under the eyes. By shoving a hand under
each knee, she picks up first one leg and then the other and hoists herself a few inches higher on
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the bed. Blood flows into her ass and with the tingling in her unused muscles, she feels a wave
of nausea. Her heart is really running now, sweat pricking her hairline, her armpits stinging.
And worse, she has started to itch, under her eyes, her neck, beneath her breasts. Maybe it is the
pain medication wearing off, some withdrawal from the opiates or muscle relaxants searing her
veins. She hoists herself up again and this time she feels a sharp pain above her pelvis. Like
something ripping. The pain sends her temperature up, moves her blood through her even
faster, hotter, she suddenly needs something she thinks. And then she says it.
“Fizzers.” It comes out a whisper, raspy, panicked.
At first, the girl looks confused, then once the baby gurgles, as if translating for Eavan,
she clues in. “Oh! Yes. They left some for you on that bedside table. The nurse said you can
have your fill.”

How much time passes once the tablet slides under Eavan’s tongue, where it folds perfectly into
the indent made by so many fizzers that came before. Time is now written in a language she
doesn’t speak, like baby bleats, penetrating the dark room in smooth waves. A nurse enters and
exits but there are no questions asked. Gone are the questions. Gone is the apprehension about
her condition, disappeared painlessly, just like that infernal beep from the empty IV, stabbing
between her eyes until mercifully, inexplicably, it is gone.
She must rest. She is in good hands. This is a hospital. This is where you get better. This
is where they give you the fizzer that fits under your tongue that melts the soreness and the
anxiety and the panic away. It’s like a nursery rhyme, Eavan thinks placidly, perfect for the
baby. Gone is the pain, gone is the pain, she wants to whisper into the tiny ear of the baby she
cannot see.
Still the smell of baby lingers around her bed. She does smell it, doesn’t she, that sour
diaper and milk and sweet breath. The feel of baby skin under her fingers is only the inside of
her own wrist. But the bleating, that is still thankfully there in the corner of the room next to the
window. “Please,” Eavan whispers, “Let me hold the baby.” But Iggy ignores her, continues
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breast-feeding in the corner, then bounces the lump around on her chest to expel the air caught
in its tiny little tummy.
The room expands. The walls undulate in soft blue waves. Eavan slowly realizes that
Iggy has opened the blinds. Outside: clear sky, another building, gray, unhelpful. This fizzer
feels stronger than the ones she used to pop for school, or is it just the weeks since she used one.
Or is it the combination with the pain medication, the medications mixing perfectly in her blood
to produce that tinny buzz along the surface of her skin.

Things flicker. Her machines all at once, beep, go dark. But there is no other sound.
Then she hears Iggy say, “Blackout. From the cloud. Weird, isn’t it, when we’re so used
to going tech free?”
The sky out the window is still gray. Eavan’s body hurts. Under her gown, she realizes
she is wet, her hair is damp and her back has soaked through to the sheets.
Some kind of humming starts and a back-up server kicks in. The monitor is black, the
bed doesn’t rise and lower, but the IV still seems to blink its light. Eavan’s eyes float toward the
window, sees what was a flashing billboard is now blank. Another blackout. But where better to
be than here in this hospital room? Are those her thoughts? No. Those are the words of the
doctor, who has replaced Iggy. Iggy is gone and here is the doctor, benevolent, tall, head-
scarved, wide eyes and sharp features. The white coat. The drawing of the curtain around the
door.
“I’m Dr. Fatih,” she says, reaching a chilled hand for Eavan’s warm knee, then upper
leg. “May I?”
With a gentle tug, the catheter is gone, she has pulled the tube from way up inside her. It
sobers Eavan. There is a thin, efficient nurse’s aid with her, bottle blonde, who picks Eavan up
under the armpits and walks her across the room to a chair. When the pads of her feet touch the
cold floor, it shoots real feeling up her legs. Of course she can walk. She feels silly for worrying
about that at all.
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The doctor lets Eavan sit for a moment, waits until she comfortable. She holds the IV
pole as if it is propping her up. “You’ve had surgery. Part of your uterus was lacerated by that
D&C, those clinics use antiquated technology and they really aren’t sanitary at all. It was a
terrible gash that got infected, so we’ve stitched you up, all by laparoscopy. Would you mind if
I have a look,” she says and Eavan pushes her gown to the side to reveal her abdomen. Two
very small pieces of mesh cover two tiny holes, one in her belly button, one on her side. A small
pouch hangs from above her shaved pubis, draining fluid that is thick and yellow.
Beside her, the nurse is stripping her sheets away from her bed. She can see the imprint
of her body, the sweat that trickled from her to form a shape on the bleached white.
“That will be there for a few days,” Dr. Fatih says softly, pointing to the pouch, “and so
will this IV. The infection is a tough one, but we’re hoping it’s not antibiotic resistant.”
“I’m so stupid. Why did I do that—“ Eavan doesn’t know she is crying until her throat
closes around her words.
The doctor does not hesitate. She shifts her eyes to the peep above the door and then
draws a curtain around the chair, shielding them. “You cannot be made to feel guilty for
seeking a D&C, that’s not at issue here. We can send a counselor and they will tell you the same
thing. Your job now is to heal, to recover. If you’re careful, this won’t affect future pregnancies.”
“What’s happening outside?” Eavan slurs, wiping her face, sniffing. She is trying very
hard to think and speak and act clearly.
“There was another internet blackout, so we’re on our alternative server, but it’s slow,
essential services only. Never know how linked in everything is until—“ she pauses here.
“Needless to say, we’ve still got AC. Water seems to be on for now. Nothing too dangerous.
Here, you’re safe.”
“Do they know where I’ve gone?”
“Sorry?” the doctor asks.
“Um, my friends, I’m not sure they know where I am.”
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“This is the only hospital in the region, certainly the only one equipped for this kind of
procedure, so they should know where you are. And we’ve got a special server. Your fön will
work here. Probably one of the only places in the region.”
And so Eavan nods at the doctor and the nurse and she looks wistfully out the window
and when they leave the room she stands up on wobbly legs and shuffles to the cupboard
containing two plastic packages, her air-compressed belongings. One contains her shoes, the
other, her clothing: jean shorts, underwear stained brown with blood. Her shirt is musty, smells
of puke. The van’s starter is still lodged in her shorts pocket. And at the bottom of the bag, her
fön. There is almost no charge. But maybe there is enough. She tucks it comfortably over her
ears, toggles. Assumes Meg and Parker are still under the Rapture cloud. She starts a note to her
mother, erases it. The only one left to text is Samuel.
EAV: 2:13pm
So, weird news. In the hospital, long story
EAV: 2:15pm
Pretty fucked up. Not sure how to get outa here.
There is a long radio silence, so she deletes the texts. Reads a headline, then clicks
around her own profiles, until insanely, she searches for the VR on her last day at Evergreen—
of her holding the small convulsing body of June. She doesn’t really want to see it, maybe just
the comments, to scroll through the vitriol and the admonishments, just to see what has been
added or subtracted in her absence.
But strangely, mercifully, inexplicably, the VR is gone. It has vanished from her profiles,
from the larger vid-site. In fact, all of little June’s profiles are gone.
Eavan takes this to mean the worst. She gulps air. Scrolls around for death
announcements, tributes—finds nothing, no pics on other groms’ sites, no tags, no mention of
June anywhere. There is no record of her having existed at all.
EAV: 2:18pm
Hey any news re June?
EAV: 2:19pm
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Her profiles r scrubbed. I’m freaking out rn
EAV: 2:20pm
Did she ever wake up?
He’s probably under blackout, she tells herself. He’s busy. He’s working. He’s just a
dick, just another motherfucker who never cared about the groms or the job or Eavan at all. It
only takes a minute to post a status update with a geo-tag of her location at the hospital, an
SOS. The words skim across her screen and then disappear, a mute cry into the dark:
IF SOMEONE WANTED TO RESCUE ME, NOW WOULD BE THE TIME

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Parker

Parker, deeply chilled, his toes aching through his blow-up sneakers and his breath hanging fog
around his mouth, closes his eyes. Just for a second. Twelve hours ago, he had watched through
the picture window as the gray sky blurred to black and now he’s still in the same spot,
watching the sky lighten through a scrim of raindrops on glass. He watches the dim clouds turn
less dim but there’s nothing special about the dawn—just black, gray, gray, white.
There are a dozen places where he could be, but none as unexpected as this: He is not in
Samuel’s loft, swallowing backwashed vodka. He is not in the back seat of the van, the highway
ticking by out a smudged window. He is not in a hut on Rapture’s desert, staring at the slice of
skylight. He is not in Kye’s arms, or under his scratchy blanket, or palming soap over his body
under a waterfall shower as a razor-wire protected golf course twinkles dew at him under a
glinty moon.
He is in a ski lodge, what used to be. Everything around him is relic attempting a second
life: shelves are stuffed with plant clippings in old jam jars, bits of pottery are glued into rough
mosaics. Stacks of books double as tables for chipped teacups. Old magazines have been glued
together into braids to make rugs, muddy now and fraying at the edges. Against one wall, what
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used to be a bank of microwaves now houses a dozen puppets in dubious sexual positions. And
at three long tables, ten coders just like him hunch over tablets, monitors lighting their faces.
Unmoving, typing silently, they form silhouettes against the windows looking out to the
treeless slopes. Outside, the rusting wires of a chairlift drip a lacework of drops onto some
grazing sheep. The chairs, inert, now hang at weird, morbid angles.
One pleasant feeling: that thrum of the dozens of glowing monitors around him— all
shared, open sourced, with interactive maps and scrolling digi-data and media sites. The other
hackers, like him, don’t need to talk or sleep standard hours or expound on family
backgrounds. They write code. Their fingers tick-tick the touch-screen, their nails occasionally
grazing the plastic. Every time Parker takes a break, he glances at Kye across the room, his back
bent over a giant monitor, coordinating the unknown number of other Futurists camps around
the hemisphere.
It was Berkeley who showed him around, who led Kye by one hand, who kept leaning
into his neck and kissing his hair. Kye wouldn’t look at Parker, instead he regaled the talent in
the room, the myriad reasons for being here.
“All of these hackers have suffered from some kind of surveillance crime. So they are
completely committed to erasing peeps. All over the world.” As Kye tapped the shoulders of
individual hackers, they peered at him from above their screens, faintly smiling at Parker,
nodding.
Berkeley grinned at him and continued, “Jamal here was getting peeped by his TA at
college, who stole all his research and published it himself. Or Kenji, he got expelled for sharing
his mother’s fizzers around his high school and they rescinded his college apps. So he ran here
to us and now he’s put a full freeze on the entire school district, all peeps have been under
blackout, the groms are safe. And his records are wiped too, am I right?” Kenji shrugged, his
body a wiry thing in a squeaky office chair, one knee continually twitching.
“Or Lourdes!” A petite brunette lifted her doe eyes to Kye shyly. “She’s been super
vigilant, scouring for underage migrants getting exploited, peeped, arrested, deported. She
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often erases files, or throws creeps off their trails. Or sometimes she exposes the creeps, like
revenge peeping. She’s really amazing.” Lourdes blushed. Parker knew—all hackers are
young—but there was something almost childish about Lourdes, her short legs crossed under
her in her rolling chair, her bangs in her face. She looked 16, at the most? Kenji too, his face
sprouted no whiskers. Jamal’s shoulders seemed slight, not yet filled in.
“OK, so Parker, I’m really glad Kye brought you.” Berkeley said. She too looked dewy
and young, maybe in her early twenties. “Fill us in on this Rapture thing, who are they
watching and how.”
Berkeley of the clear eyes, the freckled skin, the gently wavy hair down her back a
mousy brown but lit with honey threads so it isn’t dull at all, nothing is dull about her. Parker
had tried to squeak out his impression of what was happening—Rapture is an intentional
community, groms separated from parents and he suspects the founders are peeping. They
have a data block, could be impenetrable.
“Or they could be disseminating the footage to the public,” Kye interrupted.
“I’ll see how sophisticated their network is under the block,” Parker said, hoping in
some way Sonia was right, that those peeps were nothing, old relics of a past voyeur.
“We’re going to expose these motherfuckers,” Kye had said, determined. “We’re going
to take them down.”
And just like that, after almost three weeks away from his devices, Parker plopped
down in front of a monitor and started to hack. It was comforting. Tiring. He felt clunky at first,
his fingers not as swift. The first hour, he was cognizant of every twitching body, every discreet
conversation, Kye moving in and out of his periphery. After Kye disappeared around midnight
without any instruction, any sense of where Parker should sleep, how he should feed himself,
Parker clenched his teeth and just kept at it. His eyes tired quickly, but he wouldn’t leave, even
as a few others slipped away to the bunks upstairs, the old ski lodge rooms still musty from old
long underwear, socks. Berkeley didn’t sleep either, she kept returning with cups of tea, with
toast smothered with strange vegetable spreads, with deep fried sticks of fish or chicken that all
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tasted the same. “Kye keeps telling us, you’re gifted, you’re brilliant, you can rock this. You are
our rock.”
But now, after seven hours attempting to find Rapture in the deep web, Parker doesn’t
feel particularly talented: he can’t seem to find anything. On his monitor, he sees a list of coding
projects from other Futurist strongholds— scrambled IPs all over the country—coordinating,
infiltrating, erasing effortlessly. Parker’s fingers feel dry. His lips taste of tin. Across the room is
a space heater but its tendrils of warmth don’t reach him at his post at the old cafeteria table. At
his elbow, a teabag floats in a dingy cup.
His fingers move, almost without him. Instead, he thinks bitter thoughts. Can he hate
the cold, but hate the heat more? Can he hate Berkeley only because it turns Kye distant? Does
he hate Hollings more? Rapture? Meg and Samuel and Eavan, can he hate them forever? Could
he just once, point all his hate toward something like a cause, or does he have to summon other
people’s hate just to get something done?
At 8:30 am, after the night owls have retreated to bed, while the day-time coders still
haven’t surfaced for breakfast, he stops searching for Rapture, slips into an untraced IP address
and drifts around the cloud.
First, Kye: a rich databank of pics and VRs, his mother’s albums easy to crack, most of it
posted publicly. Kye and his two younger brothers are almost feminine with cropped hair and
Christian features. Professional shoots in front of the Christmas tree, matching uniforms in
every sport. Then a few brooding years as Kye grows his hair long, his skin changes, his father
disappears from the pics for a year. He is tagged for a few weeks at UCLA by new college
friends, then goes radio-silent at age 19—two years ago.
Next Berkeley: a basic university-girl profile set—lots of peaks climbed and carbs
burned and typical purchases posted in retail. Of course he unearths nothing on the other
Futurists; they are deep web, their tech is complex and thorough and the whole point.
Then Parker peeps his friends. Samuel’s sites still list him as an employee of Evergreen,
though Parker can’t bring himself to contact him, not yet. Meg has always been off the grid, but
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Eavan refreshed her sites constantly until they went black, right at the gates of Rapture. The
geography gives Parker an idea: he quickly hacks the peeps over the highway, then secondary
highway then gravel road to Rapture. Then he charts the arrivals and departures over the past
weeks.
The surprises: Meg’s retreat with Hollings. Then, Eavan’s trip away in Meg’s van. Meg’s
return with a young girl slumped beside her on the bench seat. Finally, an RV crowd that
assembles shortly after Hollings’ return, bearing angry slogans on the exteriors of their vehicles,
hailing religious peepers and creeps alike. This hacking is easy: there are two chains of links
that are shared often on religious right forums, Parker follows effortlessly.
The first is a set of linked peeping with facial recognition—identifying the passenger in
Hollings truck as a fifteen-year-old migrant girl, Priscilla Mendez Octavio, former Rapture
grom, living on the desert in a kind of tent village associated with an entertainment company.
She is undocumented and thus, valuable to the desert rats. There is much discussion about
whether they can keep pressing Rapture about the girl—even after they’ve traded for water.
The second peeping trail follows Eavan. It starts innocently enough, just watching her
drive through the dawn, across the desert to a box store. But then the footage gets creepy.
Parker swallows hard, watches as they stalk the van to a medical mall. The story changes, is
filed under a terrifying title: TRACKING FETAL MURDERERS! CLICK TO IDENTIFY!
The footage these RV people are disseminating on their rudimentary site is grainy,
obviously stolen and crudely cut. But it is Eavan: walking into a medical mall, then a women’s
health clinic, exiting looking dizzy thirty minutes later. Just as she steps outside, as her face
drops its color and she leans over to throw up into a potted plant, the screen splits and we see
the image of an unborn fetus getting slashed by unweilded machetes. The graphics are violent,
cartoonishly gory. Then text begins scrolling over the frozen image of Eavan’s sallow face:
HAVE INFORMATION ON THIS OR OTHER FETAL MURDERERS?
CURRENT LOCATION?
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TXT BELOW TO PROVIDE NAMES, EMPLOYERS, FAMILY DETAILS.
YOU CAN EXPOSE THEM.
YOU MAY PREVENT ANOTHER NEEDLESS DEATH.
Parker’s breath quickens. What would they do with her information, her status, her
family details? The vid loops again to Eavan entering a medical mall; her walk is steady,
confident. She looks young, younger than she did at Evergreen, where she was clad beneath the
authority of a teaching suit. Here she is all spindly legs, thick sunglasses. Like all of them, she
had lost weight at Rapture, but she doesn’t look healthier, she looks thirsty, scared.
He re-clicks on Eavan's sites and seconds after the windows flash open, he sees that just
minutes ago she stupidly geo-pinned her location with a childish cry for help:
IF SOMEONE WANTS TO RESCUE ME, NOW WOULD BE THE TIME
“Ahhhh,” Parker admonishes her quietly. The ski lodge hums around him. At the three
long cafeteria tables, two more bent backs arrive to their monitors, people who have awoken
and immediately returned to continue their hacks. LEDs throb up into their faces. He makes
eye-contact with Berkeley. “Any luck?” she asks.
“Maybe,” he says.
Then, it all turns very weird, when suddenly a new window pops up to the creepers’
site: it is a hospital room.
It is Eavan’s body in a gown in the corner of the room.
This is clearly real-time. Some savvy hacker on the creepers’ side has done the facial
recognition and paired the abortion vid with her profile and establish her geo-location and
hacked this hospital peep. All in minutes. Their speed is terrifying. The footage is fish-eyed,
black-and-white, but clearly her. Parker can see a doctor sitting against a window talking first,
then lifting the sheet and performing a short tug, pulling out what Parker, disgusted, realizes is
her catheter. She pokes Eavan’s puffing abdomen, but blocks the peep when she’s leaning in to
check something at her stomach. The creeper is writing comments, sharing the link with his
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fellow creeps—directions, locations, how Eavan deserves the infection she picked up at the
clinic, how this was divine intervention.
There is a certain disconnect one feels peeping like this, in real time, watching a friend or
colleague who passes from vid to life and back to vid again. Those bubbles of privacy,
punctured. It happens when the doctor leaves the room, when Parker is actually watching as
Eavan puts on her fön.
On the table, by his elbow, he scrambles to place his device on his face. He summons her
digits and on the other side of his monitor, in a hospital room hundreds of miles away, Eavan’s
headset starts to vibrate. Her gown is open at the back, she is facing away, but she is clearly
astonished by the vibrating fön on her face. Her body tenses.
Parker steps out the front door of the ski lodge’s A-frame into the muddy parking lot.
The rain has stopped but the wet hangs around him, comes out his mouth in clouds. The line
crackles; it is old timey.
“Parker?” she says.
“Eavan, hi.” He can’t help it, his pulse is fast. “Did you just geo-post your location?” he
says.
Her voice is happy, urgent. “Parker, did you find me already? Did you see my post?”
“You gotta take it down,” he says.
“But how else will—“
“People are going to come for you.”
“What people, Rapture people? Iggy was just here, they know where I—“
“Anti-abortion people, I think. Creeps.”
There is a long silence, a frightened pause. Until, “How do you know, I, uh…”
“I saw online. Are you OK? I saw you got a procedure. And these anti-abortion people,
they have a site—“
“Aren’t you at Rapture?”
“I’m with Kye,” Parker says.
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“You left with that new guy?” Eavan says. “OK. Can you come get me?”
“Eavan,” Parker says. A raindrop plops on his nose. It surprises him, splashes into the
lens of his fön. “You’ve been filmed. You’re being filmed right now, by those abortion creeps. I
was actually watching it just now on their religious right-wing site. I don’t know what they’re
going to do—blackmail you? Chase you down?”
“You can see me?”
“You’re um, in the chair. In that gown. With the blinds half-pulled behind you.”
Eavan is quiet. Finally, she whispers, “I’m not in a chair.”
“OK, you were, hang on.” Parker moves back inside, the music filling his mic. It is real
morning now; the room is nearly full. When he enters, fön on his face, the hackers stop eating
their bowls of grains, put down their mugs of steaming NRG and stare. Berkeley notices too,
whistles shrilly at him and signals to take the thing off.
“I’m not broadcasting my video,” he says loudly. Berkeley starts moving toward him. In
the picture of the hospital room, Eavan is up on her feet, hobbling across the room dragging a
chair.
“I’m watching a peep of my friend in the hospital and she needs help.”
There is a slight inhale, then Parker can see her hoisting her small body up on the chair,
then jamming a nail file behind where the peep is fixed to the wall. Her hand is freakishly huge
in the fish-eye lens. Then it goes dark.
Parker panics, thinks he’s lost her. Her voice in his ear surprises him.
“Fuck, I just found one,” Eavan says. “You were right.”
“Parker,” Berkeley says. “No contact, no traceables.”
“I’m so sorry,” Parker says, to everyone.
Eavan says: “How far away are you? Can you get me? Can you come?”
Berkeley could rip the thing from Parker’s face, but she doesn’t. She waits for something
to be translated. “My friend is leaving a hospital because they are peeping her right now, trying
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to expose her. These anti-abortion people. This is totally a surveillance crime, it’s exactly what
you guys do. Look here’s the site.”
“Your friend?”
“Eavan.”
“Put her on speaker,” Berkeley says.
Parker complies. Eavan’s voice is zapped to the hidden surround-sound in the room.
The coders all stop, listen.
“Eavan,” Parker says and winces with his voice over all of the room, amplified, on
everyone, loud. “You’re on speaker,” he says softly. “A bunch of people are here and they’re
listening.”
“Eavan, this is a safe line,” Berkeley takes over. “Can you explain your situation?”
There is some quiet. The coders look up at the corners of the room, at the speakers,
where her tinny voice, full of static, will come.
“OK,” she begins. “I was at Rapture with Parker. But I had to leave, to have operation,”
she says. “An abortion. But there was a perforation in my uterus and I caught some infection.
One more thing, I don’t have insurance, I didn’t even think about it. But I’m guessing I owe a lot
of money,” Eavan says.
“I can erase the geo-tag but it looks like they’ve tracked you there. You can’t stay.”
Parker says.
That rings around the room for a while. The door behinds him pushes open and it is
Kye.
Parker speaks loudly: “Kye, you know Eavan, from Rapture. Can she come here?” Kye
looks at Parker and Parker wants to feel connected to Kye again in an important way so he says,
“Maybe you and I can get her?”
Kye doesn’t answer at first. Instead he scans the anti-abortion site and sees the vids of
the many girls cached there. “It’s Eavan?”
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Berkeley says resolutely. “Parker, you stay here and scrub this site. I mean, we usually
deal with minors, but this anti-abortion site is definitely a peep crime.”
“So we can send someone?” Kye asks again.
“A moto-chick,” she says.
“Why not me?” Parker says.
“We need you here,” Berkeley looks down her nose at Parker. “We’ve got help. We’re
prepared for this,” she says. “Eavan, we’re going to talk you through this, Parker will see you
soon.”
Parker watches as Kye and Berkeley take him off the call, retreating upstairs. He is left
with nothing but the staring faces around the room. Eavan’s voice has been replaced by old
timey jazz, the horn and drums kind, rattling from the speakers in the ceiling. The lodge still
smells like pine planks but now, it’s a heady mix of wet wool, stinky feet, garlic and oregano
leaves— bushes of the stuff are growing out of old ketchup buckets at the entrance. Above the
door, in purple, someone has stitched their name: THE FUTURISTS. For the first time, he
notices under it, done in needlepoint in the softest pastel peaches and pinks, the group has
framed their motto in letters large enough to read from anywhere in the room: Speed.
Technology. Youth. Violence.

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Meg

Once the last RV has hobbled away down the road, its water tanks full and its brake lights
seeping red through afternoon dust, Rapture erupts into a party: wine glugs into jars, grills are
laid with vegetables and bubbly cheese, music rings from guitars, voices lifting from under the
thirsty oak. From the direction of Grom City, Hollings moves toward them, throwing open his
arms and emitting a cawing sound. The second he steps on to the terrace, firecrackers explode
into the still-hot afternoon, almost invisible against the sun but still loud, raining bits of ash on
their platters of food. The entire table erupts into caws too, nothing but teeth and raw red
throats. The men jolt to their feet. The girls grip their chairs, tilt their heads back, Meg caws
quietly too, glancing around to see when to stop. Priscilla is absent. So is Kye, Parker, Eavan.
Meg has moved from person to person asking everyone where these people have gone, but no
one knows. She gets shrugs. Smiles.
It feels like forever until she actually reaches Sonia, arms flung over Rasta Bill and
Gloria. From across the terrace, she looks flushed, elated, but up close her eyes are red-rimmed.
“Sonia,” she says, “I’m looking for—“
“I’m sorry Meg,” she says loudly. “I’m sorry for you that your friends did not have your
spirit.” Gloria and Rasta Bill try to pull Meg into a grinding dance, but Meg pulls away.
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“Where are they?”
“They left,” Sonia shouts over the raucous music and noise. Something about her
laughing, her levity, makes her suddenly ugly to Meg—the gap between her teeth, the wiry
white hairs straying from her braid, her bones, not delicately pronounced but jutting out—
clavicle, elbow, cheeks, like her skeleton is revealed underneath her papery skin. “I’m sorry, it
happened when you were on your rescue. Eavan was not taking to the chem-free situation here
and she went looking for drugs. She has your van, which is probably long gone now. Parker left
too, with Kye. He was infatuated with him and the two of them were just too caught up in that.
You will have to be the one to tell the groms. It’s always hard when they lose a teacher and this
will be doubly difficult, I’m sure.”
“Tell them?”
“I was very reluctant about taking the three of you when only you expressed interest in
teaching here. And I’m not surprised that only you remain.”
“They liked it, I thought they—“
“You saw what can happen to groms who stray. They need you here. Now, please be
gentle with the groms and tell them that only you will be remaining. That is, if you are
staying?”
Meg won’t cry. She won’t panic and leave; even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t know
how. She imagines Parker in some cracked out motel with Kye. Eavan somewhere lost in the
landscape, stoned, driving her van. Over and over she sees that sex circus, with Priscilla’s body
splayed out under those penetrating lights. These groms need her, she repeats. This past two
weeks, she has grown closer to these students than four years at Evergreen—attached. Or
maybe that isn’t the word she wants any more. Looking back, her childhood felt sticky,
strapped to her mother’s chest or back, smothered against her siblings’ bodies in the family bed,
self-weaned, homeschooled and filmed—perpetually peeped, always, in some way attached—
these groms are a miracle of self-discovery and independence. For ten years, these groms have
lived autonomously, only minor accidents reported and many success stories—Rasta Bill’s
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oldest son, a known folk singer. Vanessa, a flight attendant. Jonesy, the photographer welcomed
into indigenous communities when no others may pass. She’s seen their tags at Boxcar, wants a
piece of that independence for Luna, Miles, little Estrellita. Can give it to them.
Her body feels lighter as she traverses the Rapture property, as she crosses the upturned
canoe that marks the threshold to Grom City. The groms will fill the void. The groms will be
enough. She feels something inside her release when she hears that familiar whistle, the signal
that means: Warning—Adult.
Grom City, though, is filled with unreadable messages. She doesn’t see anyone but
notices the honeycomb wall, usually filled with toys and detritus from the plastic past, is mostly
bare. Haphazard piles are clumped under the caves, things once treasured have been tossed in
heaps. After some calling out, opening and closing doors, she discovers all sixteen groms
huddled in the oldest girls’ hut, the curtains drawn, the air-cooling on full blast. In the center of
the group, with two littles tucked gently on her lap, is Priscilla. She is bathed, dressed in an old
basketball jersey and long skirt, her wet hair pulled into two braids, which Estrellita
methodically takes apart and weaves again. The other groms sit neatly in a circle, hiding their
hands. A few of the littles get up and run to Meg when she pokes her head inside, but the olders
eye her with suspicion. The faces, usually so animated, are stony. Nobody speaks, not even the
littles emit a giggle.
“Guys,” she says. “Wow, super serious over here.”
“Where’s Parker?” Miles says loudly, like a part in a play.
Meg smooths her hair, squats. “That’s why I came, to tell you. I don’t know where he’s
gone, he left with Kye.” The groms all nod in unison.
“Where’s Eavan?”
“I don’t know that either,” Meg replies honestly, her voice getting pinched. “I’m really
worried about both of them.”
“She didn’t come back,” one of the littles says, Manuelito, a six-year-old with a stripe
shaved through his matted hair.
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“She hated it here. I could tell. She hated all of us,” Daizy says. There is a current of hurt
in her voice, under the rage.
“This had nothing to do with you, she loved you guys. I bet she’s really sorry to have
left. I’m going to check on her as soon as I can.”
“That’s not the problem,” Miles says. When he speaks, Luna, a feather woven into her
long dreadlock, elbows him harshly in the rib, but he scrambles to his feet.
“Shut up!”
“I’m allowed to tell her, to tell someone! How else are we gonna figure it out?” Miles
shouts this at the group, tears already sprung to his eyes. Daizy looks equally somber.
“But she’s going to…”
“She’ll blurt it!” Donatello shouts.
“Hey,” Meg offers, but they’ve started in on a kind of shouting match over her replies.
Before she can get her voice above those of the children, something is thrust in her hand. It is
plastic, it has wires emerging from the back of it like insect legs and a small lens in the front,
cracked with a chipped center, as if with a rock.
“She’s too dumb,” someone whispers.
“She probably watches us anyway,” Donatello says dramatically. “They all do.”
“Wait,” Meg says. “This is a peep. Is this one of the old things they used to watch—”
“We found it in our story wall. Miles said he saw Parker put it there.” At this Miles
nods, seriously. Daizy continues, her voice bending upwards, near tears. “I know, I used to live
in Las Vegas with my dad and I’ve seen so many of these, you know, operational. I don’t get it,
was Parker peeping us?”
“Was there a light flashing?” Meg asks.
“I heard Parker say it had a lens inside, moving,” Miles says, his voice strained. “And a
light.”
“And then he left,” Vasquez, one of the littles volunteers. “He left, like all teachers
leave.“
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A long, raw silence falls over the groms.
“You guys,” Meg whispers. “I didn’t know anything about this.”
“Yah right! You fucking liar!” Donatello says, throwing his hands up. “You go to the
hacienda all the time, you probably watched us too!”
“We found another one, a long time ago,” Daizy adds. “Me and Pink. It was on the roof
of the littles hut, pointing down to where I change my clothes and shower sometimes.”
“Bullshit,” Donatello shouts and kicks the wall.
“But they hate peeps,” Miles says. Meg looks at the boy who is holding the thing, who
found the thing and who so badly wants to believe it is not a thing. “They tell us all the time
that’s the thing they hate.”
Daizy moves beside him. She doesn’t touch him but her proximity seems to calm him
down. “It works,” Daizy says. “Think about it. Last year when Santiago got sick, he was rolling
around on the ground because he ate half of that dead frog and we didn’t tell but still Sonia
came and took him away.”
“I bet they all know. I bet it’s not just Hollings peeping us, I bet they all do,” Donatello
says. He’s stopped kicking things, stopped throwing punches, but now he’s still and quiet he’s
almost scarier. “Like living under a giant baby monitor,” Donatello says.
Meg looks to Priscilla, dressed like a grom now, her skin showing its pimples. She’s
looking like the fifteen-year-old she is. Tenth year, Meg thinks. At Evergreen she’d still be in the
showcase, singing and slam-dancing to pop songs on autotune—an audience of peeps
broadcasting her likeness to parents across the world. “Told you,” she says. “Typical bullshit.”
Meg looks at Priscilla. “Did Parker really find this peep? Is that why he disappeared?”
Priscilla shrugs.
“Yes,” says Daizy.
“Your parents wouldn’t like this, if it’s true” Meg volunteers and they stare at her. ”I
mean, I don’t like this.”
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“What if it is true?” Daizy says, accusing. “Think about that, really think about it. These
assholes peeping us all the time.”
“Shut up. We can’t leave here, don’t say shit like that,” Miles says. He’s he’s got his
hands up, like he’s trying to stop a wave washing toward him.
Donatello points his face at the ceiling and yells: “You— you treat us like a bunch of
fucking babies!”
“No, no,” Meg says. “I’m sure this is just a mistake, an old thing.”
“Why did we even tell her?” Donatello shouts.
“Maybe you can help,” Miles says, deciding it then. “You can prove that it’s nothing.”
This time, instead of kicking the wall or the floor, Donatello punches Miles in the back,
hard. Meg stops herself from grabbing his wrist and flinging him away. Instead, Miles whirls
around and smacks Donatello hard in the mouth. His eyes spring tears and immediately his lips
puffing up. For the first time in a month, Meg looks up, scans for peeps in the ceiling, that deep-
rooted suspicion creeping in: Did someone see that?
“I can do whatever I want, I’m a fucking science experiment,” Donatello says, a tiny bit
of blood in his teeth.
“I can help,” Meg says to the groms of Rapture. She sees the littles’ eyes open a little
wider.
“Yah, right,” Priscilla says. “What can you do?”
“We have to take this to the grown-ups. We… we can ask what it’s about. We can
demand answers.”
The groms stare at her, some cocking their heads, unsure.
“Come on,” she says and she holds her hands out.
“Where?”
“To the hacienda! To demand to know if they are filming you.”
“They’ll never tell you the truth.”
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“Priscilla,” Meg reasons. “You’re not afraid to confront the adults. You’re brave, you’re
the bravest grom I know. Can we do this?” Priscilla won’t speak, but she nods, her eyes filling
with the compliment. “OK, listen to Priss, she’s seen the outside and she knows what’s at stake.
We can address this! Will you come?”
Priscilla stands, hoisting one of the littles onto a hip expertly.
“You deserve answers. Let’s all go together,” Meg says.
Some groms reluctantly climb to their feet, some leap to her side and cling to her hands.
As she moves to the door, one of them releases a very small Hollings-like caw and as if on cue,
they all echo it, quietly, reluctantly—like a slow-motion murder skimming across the
schoolyard and up the path and across the desert, shadows flitting against the hot earth.

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Eavan

The nurse is French African, quiet, steady-handed. She calls Eavan by her name and pronounces
it perfectly—AY-van, AY-van, she repeats. The effect is calming. She wears a sky-blue uniform
and a matching hairband over her forehead, something she has coordinated perfectly, a
personal flourish.
When Eavan insists on getting dressed, Akilah finds her a clean set of clothing from the
lost and found when hers are unwearable, spattered with vomit. Akilah helps stretch a tunic
over her head and tugs leggings way up her leg, almost reaching to her mesh panties and the
tube emerging from her gut. Eavan knows she’ll take off the leggings as soon as she’s in the
heat outside, but having them on makes her feel more certain.
Then she asks for to meds. She shows Akilah her fön, the wired prescription for
fizzers—unlimited, three-pills-a-day.
But Akilah says, “No.”
“Why not.”
“Eavan, I’m not a pharmacist.”
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Eavan hobbles around the room, picking up her few belongings, stuffing them into the
small backpack. Her whole body is seeping sweat. The place on the wall where the peep had
been looks innocent but her stomach still bites with nerves.
“Please,” she says to Akilah. “Can I show you on the site, where they’re tracking me?”
Akilah says nothing, then nods and places Eavan’s fön over her eyes. She watches
images flicker in the reflection. The hospital moves around them but this room is still, a dead
space.
“They’re calling me a fetal murderer. They’re going to find this room,” Eavan says.
Finally, Akilah removes the phone. She closes her eyes for a minute, then looks at Eavan
disapprovingly and says: “Sit. Wait here,” and then she goes.
Eavan can’t sit. Instead pulls out her shoes, freeze-dried and air-compressed. When she
tears the polymer with her teeth, she gets a nose full of dust. It hurts to bend, to crouch, to tie
them.
When she stands up, she almost blacks out. So she sits again, this time on the side of the
bed, beside the IV. Then she very gently pulls the tape from her skin and with a ball of cotton
over the tip of the needle, pulls the IV from the crook of her arm. It is luck, maybe, that keeps
the IV machine quietly flashing, there is not enough Internet to bring back the beep, beep, beep
of a sudden disconnection. She doesn’t have a cotton ball to cover the hole, so when the new
blood comes, it is alarm-bell red.
She’s got a clean sock wrapped around her elbow, her shoes strapped on and a swipe of
lipstick on her face when Akilah returns. With her is Dr. Fatih, a new layer of makeup smeared
over the deep circles under her eyes.
“She doesn’t trust you are healthy enough to go,” Akilah says, shaking her head at the
sock and efficiently replacing it with a swipe of alcohol, gauze and a bandage.
Eavan gets nervous again, says, “Did you tell her about the site? Did you want to see
too?” She holds out the fön to the doctor shakes her head.
“That was a serious procedure.”
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“This is serious,” Eavan says. “I have to, I’m not safe here, you must understand that.”
Then she regrets it, wishes she didn’t act like she could appeal to a Turkish doctor or a West
African nurse in a shit-public hospital in Mesa, Arizona—about safety, of all things. Outside her
window are stilled cranes, quiet AC units, empty billboards. She had forgotten that the outside
world was in blackout when the hospital has föns, vids. She won’t even be able to make a call
outside. “The longer I wait, the harder it will be to move with the blackout,” she tells them. “I
need to leave and go back across the border.”
“You’re fighting a very serious infection here,” Dr. Fatih says. “You could be at risk.”
Eavan doesn’t want to get dramatic, but she can’t help the tingling tears that are wetting
her face.
“Is it for medical bills?” the doctor asks.
Eavan thinks. Says, honestly, “Partly. I have no idea how to pay for this.”
“The business office has your biometrics, you know that, you can’t escape the bills,
they’ll come after you across the border, they’ll penetrate your sites. Leaving won’t help your
financial situation.”
“I just don’t feel safe here. They’re peeping me. I just want to go home. I’ll find a doctor
at home, but here—“
“That’s what I wanted,” Dr. Fatih interrupts.
“Sorry?” she says, swiping at her cheeks.
“I want your promise that you will find care on the other side, once you’re clear of the
state. When you’re in your own country.”
“Yes, of course, I’m heading straight to the hospital,” Eavan promises. And it that
moment, she means it.
Like that, a package of medication is tossed on her lap, a perfect lob. It is a foil of serums,
their individually wrapped needles glinting at her. “Those aren’t fizzers. You’re not getting
those, you should seriously consider dropping narcotics from your lifestyle,” the doctor says as
she clip-clips toward the door. “Take the antibiotic shots in the finger every six hours.”
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Eavan wants to say thank-you but Dr. Fatih raises her hand as if to block out Eavan’s
face.
“Please leave by the back staircase. I’m not signing a form that says you’re discharged.
No way. This has occurred without our knowing.”
“Right,” Eavan says, relief lifting her.
As the doctor leaves, Akilah moves toward the bed and gestures for Eavan to lean back.
There is only her drip tube left, the last tiny drops of puss draining from her gut. Akilah tugs it
very quickly, tapes the small incision with three quick swipes. The last of the tranquilizers worn
off, pain sears through Eavan’s pelvis. The cramps are staggering. Eavan breathes. Tries some
mindfulness. Akilah pats her shoulder and then moves to the door, then points at the missing
peep above the door. Then Akilah laughs out loud. “Lucky girl,” she says and Eavan hopes this
to be true.

Outside the hospital, there is one giant flag trying to flap in the hot wind. It is too large to catch
a breeze, wraps itself incorrectly around the pole, fails. Eavan is trying to walk quickly but her
stomach seems to pull with too large a step. Her feet won’t move very fast; they feel bloated in
her shoes. Her incision stings.
The parking lot emanates a serious metallic heat and the hospital’s generators roar from
the roof and kick exhaust below. Eavan stops again. Leans against a parked moto-taxi then pulls
back, it is so hot to touch. She feels already spent, the heat presses.
She is weirdly alone and not alone. Most of the parked cars have people in them, engines
idling, blowing cool air inside, hot air out. Still, no one sees her. Everyone is toggling the föns
on their faces—the hospital is one of the only places in the city with coverage. Worth driving to
this lot and parking and sitting, just to dial in.
It’s when she’s standing, panting, scouring the faces that are blank and unseeing, that it
starts softly: her name.
“Eavan,” it calls out. Like from across a canyon— only echo.
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She tries to duck between rows of motos but it hurts to bend at the waist. She tries to
stop breathing but she just breathes.
“Eavan, Eavan,” it comes from very far away. She stands. It’s possible the voice is
imagined. The sound of her body, or her footsteps, or her breath making the sound of it and
tricking her into going back.
“Eavan,” it says, small enough to be coming the hospital with its many windows looking
down on her.
“No,” she whispers, keeps moving, the vehicles’ heat dragging across her as she passes.
Then her backpack vibrates slightly. Her fön. It’s coming from her fön. She puts the thing on her
face. And there, in front of her eyes, looking right into her face, is Parker.
“They’re almost there,” his fön image says. But he is nowhere, he is flickering on the
lens, which does her nothing. Their connection is getting blurred; it fills with static as she moves
away from the hospital.
She stops. Starts walking again. Then says, “Where?”
“Kye has sent somebody who is trying to find you. Where are you? Turn on your
tracker—“
Of all the unmoving hulks of inert metal in the parking lot, she thinks she sees one shift
slightly, inch forward. She stops.
“Where?” she whimpers.
“OK look out,” he says and then there is the sound of a motor—growling, pure smoke.
She hears it far away and then around the corner, louder, louder, here.
It is a motorbike—a diesel with massive off-road tires and a full-helmet driver. Face
guard. Boots. “That’s it,” Parker says.
The bike idles around her for a second, corners her. Then the driver takes off a helmet
and it is a woman— massive jaw and chem-tattoos across her cheeks. She’s blotchy and hot, her
hair is pasted to her skull. “Eavan?” she asks.
Eavan raises a hand weakly.
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Eavan nods.
“I’m Ilya,” the woman shouts. “Don’t be scared.”
“You’re with Parker?” she asks louder.
“Kye told me to come. Better hop on, you got a tail.”
Eavan’s heart roars with crescendo of motor. She takes the helmet Ilya digs out of the
seat compartment and shoves her head into its hot dark. Across the visor-screen, maps, audio
crackling in her ear. “We’re going north, through rain” Ilya says. “With no jacket,” she says,
“You’re going to get drenched.”
Eavan swings her lost-now-found backpack over her shoulders, thinks of Dr. Fatih’s
small bag of meds meant to burn the infection away, tucked in its pocket. Ilya gestures, come,
come on. But she can’t get on. It is everything to hoist her body on to the back of the bike.
“Seriously. Get up. Get on. Let’s go,” Ilya is telling her. But the sound is blurring with
the pain. She has to hold her suture with one hand and press hard as she heaves and swings her
leg. It is fire, flesh pulling against stitch. When she gently drops onto the seat, Eavan feels a rush
of wet, blood or something else, between her legs. She makes herself tuck her arms around this
stranger’s waist before they lurch forward, forward, away.

323
Parker

It is deeply buried, disguised, tagged under ©childpsychology, ©milestones, ©freerange and
©techfree. The outer site is an invitation to witness a “revolution in child development.” There
is a supposed vetting system to subscribe to the live feeds, a background check, credit analysis,
and it is unhackable: Parker has to provide fake details, an assumed identity with a deep tech
imprint and untraceable credit digits. He’s embarrassed it took him so long, bizarrely elated
when seconds later, he can see it all.
Every square inch of Grom City is there: peeped and on display—inside each yurt, the
school, the watchtower, the kitchen, even their wash-shack. They are mostly live streams,
crudely cut, but there are also profiles for every grom, growth and skills monitored in charts
and infographics. The worst part: the comments from viewers piling up by the thousand.
His stomach sinks. The first thing Parker thinks: pervs. Of course they’re watching—
they’re not commenting, no, but they’re jacking off to this, aren’t they? The commenting
audience can’t decipher quite what Rapture is, social experiment or educational study or
commune. Most of the chatter is analysis of the groms—is it cruel to separate at age five? What
milestones come earlier when taught by other children? What is delayed? How do these groms
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rate in terms of physical strength, elevated IQ, life skills, a sense of larger role in society? What
threshold of separation is safe before children display symptoms of depression or anxiety?
What does a child-led lifestyle really look like?
What Parker sees—Luna is wearing boy clothes now, has cropped her own hair almost
to the skull, is soon turning ten. Donatello has grown an inch in the past month (is that
possible?) and can eat three thousand calories per day. Daizy weighs fifty-two kilos, shows
aptitude in problem solving, leadership, lacks in self-control, literacy. Vasquez has a bilingual
reading level of a grom three years older. There is a new, older grom, with two long braids
down her back, Priscilla, who was missing from their records for nine weeks but whose
biometrics pick up right where they left off. Height: 152 cms. Menstruation: eleven years old,
three months. Current age: 15.5, nearly ready to graduate out.
Parker clicks around, looks for flashbacks when he was caught by the peeps and
archived, but he can’t find himself—it is as if he’s been erased. In fact, most of the flashbacks are
of Meg and Sonia—healthy looking, teacherly, sweet, guiding, offering lessons and receiving
big grins from the groms. On the live-stream that moment, Grom City is empty, but still, a peep
inside the little boy’s yurt shows piles of woven blankets and toys. The interior glows in the
infrared, waiting for bedtime.
Parker discovers a tab: ConnectNow, where dozens of Hollings’ fireside speeches at the
Heart are cached. Comments are restricted. Downloads are available for an additional fee.
Parker scrolls through files, finds the night when Kye finally saw him, when they found the
peep and left Rapture in the dark. The footage focuses on Hollings and Sonia, on beautiful
women nodding and agreeing, on the crackling fire. Once again, Parker is erased.
From inside its architecture, Parker quickly hacks into their maintenance of the site,
learns they’re also filming the adult side of the property—inside the domes, the hacienda, on
the terrace, the gate. They appear to be making several thousand dollars a month from the
streaming, enough to pay bills and they’re also downloading and editing a kind of
documentary of the footage, something for larger consumption. Parker can just picture a circuit
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of educational seminars and workshops, selling their ‘research’ without the knowledge of the
groms or their parents— all of the adults tucked away on the Rapture property, without access
to the larger world.
Parker feels weird, stops. Just watching the Rapture people, the way they interact—
looking into so deeply into eyes and faces, speaking so genuinely—he realizes how secluded he
feels now. The ski lodge is scattered with people sitting beside each other, quiet, coding,
engrossed in their monitors or tablets or whatever. They’re getting instruction and processing
and getting shit done. But they aren’t looking at him, introducing themselves, talking. They just
click click their monitors under the blanket of blasting jazz.
He returns to his monitor, watches insatiably, three windows at a time, daytime parties
and meals and lectures under the acacia tree. It’s like he’s building a case, he creates a map of
the property where the peeps must be operational—and soon, very soon, as soon as he can get
him alone again, he will show Kye the very worst of it. But for now, he also just wants to watch.
Though everyone says Rapture is ten years old—the site has cached four years of footage, banks
and banks of groms in Grom City: Donatello as a stringy eight year old, his tenth birthday
celebrated with cupcakes, his eleventh unnoticed. The poor little grom jacking off and jumping
off rooves and punching himself in the head.
Parker’s old peeping tendencies rush in: he flips between cameras, zooms in, watches
the simplest exchanges with a raw, greedy interest. He can’t help it; he feels enormous comfort
just seeing glimpses of these people he knows archived around that grainy black and white.

He doesn’t get the chance to present his hack of Rapture in any ceremonial way.
After only a few minutes, Kye is behind him, over his shoulder. “So you did it,” Kye
says softly. “So you figured it out.” With a flick of his fön, Kye screen-shares Parker’s monitor
and Rapture is no longer his own.
“Wow, nice,” someone mutters.
“Gnarly,” someone adds.
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On the screen, the Futurists are tapping around the four years of grom footage like it is
nothing. Parker can see screen after screen open. Those little grom bodies proliferate around the
room. Behind him, Kye is incensed. He paces, throws his arms skyward, his cheeks enflamed.
“See, this is exactly the kind of thing the blackouts can’t target,” he nearly whispers.
Parker stupidly says, “Blackouts?”
Berkeley and Kye connect their blue eyes, as if sharing a miserable joke. Someone
giggles. “This is a wonderful teaching moment,” Berkeley says and Parker has never hated her
more. “Who can explain to Parker what we are doing here?”
“Doing blackouts on the peeps,” someone says.
“But why?” Berkeley says.
“To stop bullshit like this!” Kye says cheerfully.
“So we can stop living on camera, like, stuck in the past, and we can just live,” Lourdes
adds.
As if proving it, someone in his feed types in a line of the original Futurist manifesto:
Time and space died yesterday. We want to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible!
Parker says nothing, clicks around the non-Rapture screen-shares from around the
room. On their monitors is a whole division of work he’d managed to ignore. If he had paid
attention to the code, he would have seen the Futurists are doing something with emergency
shut-offs, meticulously sabotaging the cloud over large swaths of the country. In one string,
someone is attempting to pause the internet all over Arizona to erase student loans. Another
has cut off most of Oregon and is targeting juvenile criminal records. In another, in British
Columbia, Parker’s home, the people-stackers and traffic signals and refrigerators and air-
conditioners and security systems and automatic doors and MRI machines and yoga-streams
and radio transmitters and smoothie-pods and sidewalk music across seven thousand square
kilometers— all are quiet. Who knows what they are doing with all that cloud shut off. Just as
Parker marvels at the complexity of the hack, he watches the cloud go black across sixteen
counties in California, most of LA, Las Vegas.
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It should be obvious, how the Futurists can execute such large-scale work, but it isn’t;
rather Parker just recognizes this hack is a beautiful impermanent thing. Data grids, whole
sections of them, appear dead because of this code. They aren’t dead, nothing has died, but
everything has been paused.
“Hey, look, it’s already going viral, I’ve got a hundred hits on this one link and I just
posted, like three minutes ago.”
“Wait, what link?” Parker asks. He is still wrapping his head around Las Vegas, Los
Angeles County. He can’t make sense of something more viral that that.
“The Rapture peeps. Our other hideouts are eating this up,” a new voice calls out.
“Hideouts?”
“We’ve got hideouts all over,” Lourdes says proudly. “Hundreds. We’ve got hundreds.”
This is a smaller emergency, but a burning one. Parker watches as the Futurists peep
that small contained world: Grom City, the yurts, the school, the views into the groms’ little
lives. The live-feed jumps to the threshold of Grom City, the groms passing under a peep
perfectly placed high above the black canoe. Parker can make out Manuelito, wailing and
clinging to Daizy, who is carrying a little. Donatello and Miles, usually hurling stones at each
other’s heads, are leading the pack, marching almost. Estrellita is trailing behind and the whole
cluster slows to wait for her. It isn’t until that moment Parker sees Meg at their center, guiding
these groms out of Grom City.
From the Futurists, dozens of comments unfurl in so many uncontrollable directions.
Rafi213: Hly Fck, nbdy cracked dis b4?
SisterSarah: I can see 14 peeps on the perimeter. Anyone see how they’re charging?
Sexsmith: Jesus Fucking Christ have you seen 14:22 on 12/09??? DARKNESS
MANIFESTO: We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness
Now, they are all tuned to the split screen. On one side: the groms step tentatively into
the adult half of Rapture, not knowing how many new eyes are glaring down on them. They
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hold hands under a punishing afternoon sun. The feed is mute, but Parker recognizes their
heads tossed back, knows the sound of their caws. On the other side: the adults of Rapture lift
hands in the air and dance and someone sprays a fan of water over their heads. They too throw
their heads back and laugh like it is nothing, like they have nothing in the world to lose.

329

Meg

After only two weeks, Meg has grown used to the heat. The prickle on top of your head, the
scorch on the skin. She’s used to sweating. She’s slower, she nearly crawls by the time she gets
to the thick afternoon, pausing in each oasis of shimmering shade. She touches anything cool to
her forehead, sipping air in each time she finds herself in shadow.
But this afternoon, on the long walk to the hacienda with sixteen groms in tow and a
cracked bit of plastic in her sweating palm, the heat feels unbearable. Maybe it is little
Manuelito gripping her forearm, her hair tearing out under his clinging. Maybe it’s the time of
day, three-thirty, what should be siesta, when she’s normally lying on the mattress in an air-
cooled hut under white domed roof. Maybe it’s the urgency of being left alone. Eavan and
Parker are gone, maybe with her van, maybe not coming back. The sun blares louder than the
music trickling across the property.
As she walks, Meg tries to visualize exactly how the scene will play out. “These groms
demand answers,” she’ll say. No, even better, use Donatello’s line: “They feel like babies under
a monitor.” She can picture Hollings, his face alarmed, then Sonia, impressed. She wants to be
proven wrong. She wants very badly to show the groms what a grave mistake they’ve made.
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Even from a distance, Meg can see the adults of Rapture are clearly intoxicated, they’re
lurching around the terrace, clinging to each other, pouring wine into each other’s mouths.
“Wait,” one of the groms says.
The groms have stopped a hundred feet away. They pull her back, to the shade of a
blossoming tree. At first Meg thinks they are catching breath, but it is something else. The
groms are fighting their instincts, that desire to run to their parents.
The adults still haven’t even glanced in their direction. Daizy fingers Meg’s shirt and
watches, her chest rising and lowering. Luna, recently shorn of her long glossy hair, shuffles her
feet, staring at her mother who is gesturing manically at the others around the table. Priscilla
carries Theo on her back, who is much too big, who’s legs dangle but who won’t let go. Meg
sees them as the adults would, those small grubby bodies huddled here, cowering in the shade.
None of them run to open arms. They grip each other instead, their sticky fingers intertwined,
their little faces open to the adults, willing someone to look their way. Miles has started
humming nervously. Otherwise, the groms are quiet.
Meg thinks ungenerous thoughts: That Manuelito, hanging from her arms, is too heavy.
Daizy pinching the skin at her elbow is getting on her nerves.
Finally, after a few minutes, a tall, heavy woman notices the groms and without saying
anything moves toward Estrellita, a scrawny seven in shorts and no shirt. The mother scoops
the tiny frame into her bosom. A little boy Meg didn’t know is Estrellita’s brother is swept up
under her other pudgy arm and the woman bounces there, ignoring Meg, but stroking her
children. Estrellita, usually shy and restrained, starts bawling into this woman’s shoulder and
the woman, rather than ask the groms to explain anything, coos gently at her, at all of them.
Meg feels she needs this reassurance most of all.
Sonia, finally noticing Meg and the groms, only has to stand and push through the
crowd and raise both her hands. The music abruptly stops. Heads turn, one at a time.
“Inside,” Sonia says and to Meg’s surprise the other mothers and fathers, usually wild
and devious, turn obedient. They retreat. Some kind of meeting will be indoors, Meg thinks
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thickly, and she needs to be there. She tries to lower Manuelito but his feet buckle under him, so
she has to rest his bum on the dirt.
When she pushes toward the hacienda, the groms follow, some so close they clip her
heels. When she gets to the door, Sonia turns and holds a hand out to stop her. “No groms,” she
says to Meg, her eyes drifting over their small heads. “You know that, no groms in the
hacienda.”
“But they have to talk to you—“
“They have their moment to talk, twice a week, during our mediations. As for this
interruption, I can deal with them. Everyone else, inside.”
Estrellita’s mother doesn’t argue, doesn’t redden or object, she squeezes Estrellita and
her brother, delicately lowers them to the ground and steps over Manuelito to enter the
hacienda door. In seconds, she vanishes into the dark. Meg feels a longing for sleep, just to lay
her dusty body in a wide clean bed, her face buried in a pillow, to loosen these clammy fingers
pawing at her wrists.
“Wait,” says Meg, to Sonia, to the disappeared mom. “They live here too.”
“In or out,” Sonia says, her mouth a thin line of appraisal, her eyes scanning Meg’s face.
The broken plastic moves again into her hand, Miles has slipped the discovered peep
into her palm.
“Let us in,” Vasquez whimpers. Meg looks down on the boy, hair shorn up the back and
floppy over one eye and she notices, for the first time, a scar running down his cheek onto his
neck. It is still pink, flaking at the edges, in need of honey or vitamin E oil or someone’s soft
touch to massage the scar tissue into the skin. She reaches for his shoulder, but he flinches.
Meg swallows.
“We have to talk about this,” Priscilla says, stepping in front of Meg. “Parker found a
peep and it was turned on. And then he disappeared. We want to know what this is.”
Sonia looks scornfully from the peep to Meg to Priscilla and grumbles, “Oh really. Now?
Of all times, Priscilla, after what we just did for you? You have to learn to choose your battles.”
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“Listen to her,” Meg whispers. She hovers a hand over Priscilla’s shoulder, but doesn’t
let it fall. “Why aren’t you listening to them?”
“I don’t have time for this now,” Sonia says, impatient but still crouching, leaning in to
the groms’ faces. “We’ve been through this. It’s old, a relic from another time. Something to put
into your story wall—“
“But it was running. It was operational,” Meg says.
“Meg, we know what this is about. Now your friends are gone, you’re feeling isolated,
distrustful. And to be honest, this is not what we expect from our teachers.“
Meg feels warm, prickly. The children around her visibly tense. “You’re spying on us,”
Donatello says quietly, then loud enough for the adults inside to hear. The other children open
their mouths too. Daizy starts speaking and then shouting at Sonia and the parents inside. Then
Priscilla, louder, in the direction of the adults, “You’re spying on us!” And they repeat it, like a
refrain. In seconds, they are all screaming harsh, difficult things into the darkness of the
hacienda, the injury in their voices a tangible thing. Meg just listens to their small voices,
reaching toward their parents, flecked with pain:
You’re in there. I know it.
Can you hear me?
Why don’t you care about us?
Why have you left us all alone?

333
Eavan

The highway is hot, no surprise. It is packed, people fleeing, thinking the internet blackout is
something they can flee. Their homes, after a few hours without the cloud, have no water in the
pipes or AC in the units, no peeps watching their windows and doors. Everything that is
usually wired—the water-treatment plants and the electricity grid and the millions of driverless
cars—everything linked is now lifeless. The traffic is crawling, then pushing forward, then
reduced to another lurching stop. Without charging stations linked up, the drivers are losing
the juice they needed to keep going, so they too stall out, one at a time. The ones with a charge
panic, skid against other vehicles, leaving large scrapes in the paint then driving off, no one
willing to disembark and fight for their bodywork for fear of losing their spots in the endless
line. Loitering around the freeway entrances, there are crowds of thin and grimy men camped
around every toll meter, hoping someone will slow down long enough for a flicked coin.
When Ilya slides her motorcycle up the center lane, muscling her way through the rows of irate
drivers, Eavan feels a rush of power and fear.
“There is no essential difference between a human body and a machine,” Ilya is telling
her. Since Parker sent Ilya to pick her up from the hospital lot, they’ve covered a hundred
kilometers or more, Ilya chattering the whole time through her helmet’s crackly speakers. It’s
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supposedly only one more hour to go, but Eavan’s feeling feeble, faint. Ilya won’t relent. “So I
really recommend some bio-technics. You could use some amplification, I can tell.”
They pull up to an out-of-place roadside vegan grocery, an arranged place to refuel—
where the Futurists often trade fuel for coding. Inside the shop, the lights are dark but the
cooling runs ice-cold, thriving off solar, off the grid. Ilya clicks her nails against their ancient
monitor while Eavan sits shivering in the corner of the storeroom, slumped on some sacks of
ancient grain, scooping cold lentil stew into her mouth, not tasting it at all. Two wired blankets
hang over her head and shoulders, Ilya’s steaming thermos of tea seeps warmth up under her
chin. The vending machines have bags of freeze-dried food and bottles of water locked behind
plexiglass, the small need for internet inside them rendering them useless. Eavan watches the
sweep-up robots burn out the last of their batteries in dull circles.
“So by letting your profiles just turn old and outdated like this, like letting it slip into the
past—you’re essentially letting yourself get old, you know.” She looks at Eavan, flirtatiously.
Eavan smiles thinly. Her thighs still buzz from the motor between them. Like something
out of Samuel’s fantasies, Ilya is leather-clad, her eyes are quick, her nails are long and
metallically modified, she’s got scars where a chip has been removed from her hand. Otherwise,
Ilya is pure adult—not the waif Samuel is usually drawn to. She’s got burly shoulders, inflatable
breasts, a sculpted ass rounding up and out of fitted chaps. Her body is hard, each muscle
amplified by stimulation pads, the kind Dr. Mike had used to pump his pectorals to
supernatural size.
Eavan has questions, things she’s just about to ask: about where they’re going, how Ilya
knows Parker, how Parker found this place, if she will be able to cross back across the border
and leave this country safely, quickly, before she’s tracked down for the abortion, or the tens of
thousands in medical bills she surely owes that hospital in Mesa. Is there a way Ilya can erase
those charges? Or is that linked to her profile, her fön, her biometrics? Eavan’s perspiring under
the blanket, but she can’t tell if it’s the fever or the stress or that hour exposed to pure moving
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wind. She pricks her finger against one of Dr. Fatih’s antibiotic shots and tries to feel the
medicine course through her, but she does not.
“Done,” Ilya says and Eavan jumps. Was she dozing off? The blanket over her feels hot,
too hot, or she’s too cold, she’s shaking, sweating.
“Did you eat?” Ilya says. “Drink?”
“Sure,” Eavan says. Beside her is an empty bowl; there had be that stew and now it’s
gone.
“Are you going to be warm enough?”
Eavan needs to prove that she’s OK, because she cannot stop moving. She can’t stay in
this decrepit town in the middle of desert America. She had seen the peeps along the highway,
she knows she can be tracked this way. She has now also seen the vid online: her own body
stumbling out of the medimall clinic, puking into the potted plant while a fetus is slaughtered
in a split screen beside her ashen face. For the past hour, through intermittent connectivity, she
has watched and re-watched the vid, read the scrolling comments, the attempts at tagging her,
linking her profiles, her family, her address, her life.
“Are you watching that shit again?” Ilya asks and swats the fön off of Eavan’s face. “I
told you, the Futurists will erase it, they’ll do all your profiles if you want. We’re almost there.”
“How do you know?”
“They did it for me, OK? They scratched my whole porno past and we are talking hours
and hours of footage. And now I can be a social worker, nobody knows.”
“This is social work?” Eavan asks.
“I’m doing this on my day off. Like a—like a public service, to repay my debt to the
Futurists.” Ilya winks at her again, this time sweetly, nothing gratuitous about it. “There’s a
whole group of us, biker broads. The Futurists saved us all. No past at all, no trace. Now we can
live normal, healthy lives.”
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So Eavan pushes the electric blanket away from her shoulders and stands. Her head
rushes with light and then a curtain of darkness threatens to drop over her eyes, but she waits
and waits and it recedes. The room comes back. She hopes she didn’t sway.
“It’s going to get colder. We’re going to gain altitude,” Ilya says. “Harder to breathe and
stay warm.” She pulls off her genuine leather jacket, all clinking buckles and animal stink, and
hands it to Eavan revealing the brawny bicep, rendered perfectly on her arm. “Don’t tell the
vegans,” she laughs and pushes out the back door.
Eavan pulls it over her shoulders and is comforted by its weight. Before she leaves the
room, she grabs some dusty old-style newsprint from a stack in the corner and stuffs it into the
sleeves and around her chest. She zips up, buckles the buckles. She pulls her hands inside the
sleeves. On her way outside, she can feel the paper crinkle against her skin. She almost laughs
holding the bottom of the coat so none of it escapes.
Ilya’s bike is propped on a kickstand, another old timey relic made modern with a sleek
new engine, new exhaust system, new chrome and a biodiesel converter. Around them, the
beginnings of mountains, spindly pines poking from clumps of rock. The floor is needles; the
smell is old ash, thirst. Large swathes of forest on the west side of the highway have burned, old
black poles where trees had been.
After revving her engine, Ilya lights two old school cigarettes and hands one to Eavan.
She shrugs, pokes her fingers out of the leather sleeves and takes the cigarette. She has pulled
on Samuel’s clandestine smokes before, felt a pleasant dizziness she associated with his smell.
But this—after four puffs Eavan is truly woozy, then faint, then sick. A pile of lentils and broth
is suddenly at her feet, her mouth is drool, her shoes, splattered. She wretches again, her mouth
full of sour soup. She spits. Spits again. Watches the cigarette hiss in the pile of sick.
Ilya, tender now, takes a tissue from under her seat and daintily wipes Eavan’s mouth,
her sweating temples, the tears she didn’t know were streaming down her cheeks. Then she
kicks dust onto Eavan’s puke with her boots and mounts and grinds her engine. Over her
shoulder, Ilya hands her a mint sheet for her wretched mouth. Eavan is shivering, but holding
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Ilya from behind lends her a kind of warmth. Eavan can feel Ilya’s arms flex with the engine’s
up and down.
Her helmet on, her screen flickers the interactive map and speed and altitude and
temperature. She feels a rush of sick again, but clenches her teeth, refuses. Instead, she focuses
on Ilya’s distant voice through the padded speakers: Just chill, it’s saying, just lean on me. I got
you. Despite herself, Eavan crafts a status update she knows she’s never post:
People who never fuck up, who never try and fail, who never allow themselves to get
sick or cry or feel shit, who never quit, who never love the wrong one—I AM NOT
AMONG YOU.
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Parker

There is an urgency in the air, it hangs, like the echo of an alarm bell no one can hear but him.
His monitor scrolls lines of the Futurists manifesto, unnerving him:
Take up your pickaxes, your hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.
Parker looks up, finds Kye, and just meeting his gaze sends tangible pain down his
spine. He can feel every hair on the neck of his suddenly-itchy shirt.
Over their heads, Berkeley says: “OK people, strategies. How do we black out Rapture?”
“What’s the point, they’ll just put up new peeps. We need to expose them somehow, so
they won’t try again,” Kye says.
“Blackmail!” someone shouts.
“A virus?”
“Cops?” Kenji says, but Berkeley shakes her head.
“Quartzite,” Kye volunteers. “They’re the closest, they’re the sketchiest. Let’s sick the
RV rats after them.”
“No,” says Berkeley. “Quartzite isn’t invested in exposing peep crimes, they peep too.
And they’re too easily bought off. What’s Hollings and Sonia’s worst case scenario?”
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Parker swallows. Imagines the aftershocks if the commune is geo-tagged, pinned to a
map.
“Peeps,” Parker says quietly. “They would be humiliated if they were caught peeping,
considering their message.”
“But don’t people already know, like the public?”
Parker shakes his head. “My understanding is there are a very limited number of
viewers and they pay much more than I thought before. Hundreds a month. So it may be vile,
like these creeps are watching all the time, commenting and who knows what else… but it’s not
really the larger public. It’s just this one small group of pervs.”
“And now… us,” Lourdes adds.
“If the authorities learn that this commune is filming groms and disseminating the
footage to these creeps, that’s illegal. That’s child porn. Or at least an invasion of privacy,” Kenji
says.
“But if we get the police involved, all the undocumented groms would be compromised.
They’ll round them up,” Lourdes says.
Parker clears his throat and he is surprised when everyone swivels to look. “Maybe all
we need to do is reveal this to the adults. They don’t know Hollings and Sonia are peeping. And
Rapture is making money off it, which is worse. These people are so anti-peeping. If it were
revealed to the Rapture adults, they would freak out,” Parker says.
“We also need to take down the actual hardware,” Kenji says.
“And we need to remove Hollings and Sonia. To expose them,” Kye adds.
“What about our moto-broads?” Berkeley asks.
“Who?” Parker asks.
“We’ve got a squad,” Kye says, “who can really kick some ass.”
“And a film crew, let’s send a real crew to document this. To expose the peeping before
we shut it off.” Berkeley is already typing, clicking, dragging.
“Wait,” Parker says. “A film crew?”
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“Parker. We have to discredit Hollings and Sonia. The only way to tear them down is to
shine a light,” Berkeley says this with a distant smile.
“For the public?”
“If we broadcast their downfall, they will be a cautionary tale. No one will try to peep
groms again, not like this. And Hollings and Sonia won’t just scurry off to create a new
commune. We need to expose them.”
“We can protect the groms, blur faces, and still broadcast when these fuckers go down,”
Lourdes the wonder-hacker says, laughing lightly. “Cheap thrills.”
“They deserve this,” Kye says and leans over Parker’s shoulder. He taps some keys, but
Parker can’t see what he’s doing. Kye’s cheek is just there, downy, so close to his eyelashes, his
mouth. It is the most intimate contact they’ve had in two days. Sweat pricks Parker’s skin. He
wants to believe him, believe entirely in Kye and his Futurists’ vision of justice—of speed,
technology, youth and violence.
“What about the groms?” Parker mouths the words.
“They’ll be free,” Kye says and wanders away. Parker has to physically stop himself
from following.
“Remember people!” Berkeley is calling over their heads, their cheerleader. “A good
hack is the most dramatic tool for social and political change! We are changing the world!”
There are a few nods, no applause. “You’re really kicking ass,” she says to everyone, but her
eyes find Parker.
“Futurists versus Rapture, a showdown!” someone hollers from the corner of the lodge.
Parker knows that exposing Rapture will appear sanitary with the distance of the screen
and monitor between them—but in real life, for the groms and parents and for Meg, it will be
gory, unclean, terrifying. He stares at the shape Kye makes against the picture window: the lean
body under the wool sweater, the curl of blond hair on his neck, one tanned forearm pushed
out from a sleeve. Parker stares until he can’t. Until his eyes jump to the line of code Kye just
left in the corner of his screen, between bits of blackout and chatter.
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We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism and destructive
gestures of freedom, beautiful ideas worth dying for.
It is recognizable. Clear. This bit of code is recognizable because in addition to
commands, it contains Parker’s small signature, a double blink—his initials spelled out in
dashes and blips. He sees his initials once and then again. Unmistakable. There is that little
looped flourish he liked to incorporate into his own code because he thought it was funny. But
now, it is not funny. He coughs again and a wad flies from his mouth, gets lodged on the
screen, a wet smear.
“Wait,” he says out loud.
He knows this line of code because he wrote it and taught it to hundreds of groms over
the past five years. He knows the groms learned it because he wrote the test and watched as
they all answered the question correctly on Test Day. He tested them and they all did
exceedingly well, they all deserved their As.
“What?” Berkeley asks, turning.
He knows now—the commands, the hacks, the coding—
It is coming from groms. His groms.
Some of the Futurists, some of the coders off in their coding caves at Evergreen are
groms he has taught. The groms he cared for.
Erect on the summit of the world, once again we will hurl defiance to the stars!
“Kye,” Parker says.
Kye turns and the sun is suddenly on him.
“Maybe we should take stock and think about what we’re doing. Because I have
evidence that—“ Here, he falters.
“What kind of evidence?” he asks.
Parker breaths, wipes his forehead. His mouth is full of pennies. He has a million
questions—how are his groms involved? When did they join the Futurists? When did they
rebel? Did his coding skills turn his students into terrorists? Is this terror? Are these instructions
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coming from that classroom in the last stand of coastal forest on the other side of the border? Is
his small signature stuck to it like a digital barb?
“The people doing this work… are just groms. Like, specifically, the students I taught at
Evergreen.” Parker stops.
Kye turns to face him but does not cringe. “Do we look like groms to you?” Kye says.
“I’m not saying it’s everyone. Obviously, you’re all…” Parker lets this trail off. The room
is full of adults, young, some still teenagers, but not kids. But he knows, some of the commands
are coming from groms he’s taught, which puts at least some of these commanders no older
than sixteen. “I recognize my code… and they’re… they’re just kids, they’re babies, they
shouldn’t be...”
All faces turn to Kye, who sighs and turns back to Parker looking apologetic, sad almost.
“Parker, we all have to live under peeps, am I right? But sometimes it takes a grom, someone
unlikely to be tarnished by our peep culture, to really resist.”
“But children don’t know what they’re doing.”
“You started hacking when you were a grom,” Kye quips and turns back to his project.
“We are turning off every peep, we are closing every eye.”
“They don’t know about consequences,” Parker counters. “You’re saying groms really
know what violence and blackouts does to poor people, to real people? What if someone gets
injured.”
“We do, we know.”
“You don’t.”
“We do give a fuck because you taught us,” Kye says. He stands directly over Parker,
tall, distractingly beautiful. The other coders in the room stare too, surprised to hear the hurt in
Kye’s voice.
“Hey,” Berkeley says, placing her hand on his arm. But he ignores her, slips behind a
monitor, taps twice and above them, on the high wall of the ski lodge, over the picture window
facing all that green hill of pasture, his screen is projected for the room to see. Kye clicks
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around, filters through innocuous names like Instructions, HOW_TO. There a hundred files,
different faces, different teachers from all over the world. But something drops from Parker’s
stomach when he reaches a file labelled: TEACHER PARKER.
It is not particularly flattering—his frozen face in the thumbnail for dozens of vids:
dated and labelled with class names like vid-code 1/2/3, font design, introVR. In each shot, he
can see his own double chin over a collared button-up, his father’s skin and his mother’s eyes,
his stomach bulging over his pants: captured perfectly by the peeps in the classroom in the
boarding school named Evergreen in the coastal mountains in the Greenest City in the World, a
place that feels a million years from here.
“Wait,” Parker says out loud.
“We all watched your vids,” Kye says to him.
“And dozens of other teachers in schools as tech as yours. We just use your expertise
Parker, as a starting point, for new recruits.” Berkeley adds, looking at him sweetly as if he
should feel flattered by this peeping, this thievery. “You were just so talented at teaching
introductory code and then your peeping lessons—hacking webcams and surveillance—were
really unparalleled.”
“It was me who found you,” Kye says.
“You?”
“I had a cousin in one of your coding classes,” Kye says softly.
“And real teachers are almost impossible to come by. And Evergreen was so
advanced…” Berkeley continues.
Across the top of Kye’s screen is Parker’s face with the text Intro to Coding, a class he
taught every year to fresh freshmen. He recognizes his sweater, the one he wears on the first
day of school, every semester. It was always a prickly day for the new groms—thirteen years
old in a uniform, new bunk, new cafeteria, new country. Evergreen was a soft landing but he
could still see a grain of terror in each of them, like they were unsure if the world could tip over
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and pour them off. They held on to things, the corners of desks, the straps of their backpacks.
But in coding class, he told them they could let themselves fall into a game, a long meaningless
game where they were in charge, where they write the characters, they build the world. Every
semester, year after year, he watched them change after that, turn creative. Parker looks around
at the old ski lodge full of faces. Realizes. That’s why he was so feared and ignored and lauded
by the other Futurists. They’ve all taken this class. He’s taught them all.
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot.
“We all watched,” Kye says “You can’t take that shit back. You teach. You give. It goes.
It’s gone.”
“You came to Rapture, to find me.”
“We had a duty,” says Kye, “To those groms, at Rapture. I was sent there, yes. We’ve
been following you, and once you got there, we knew we needed to crack this. We suspected
their peep crimes, but we couldn’t nail them down, until now.”
Parker’s hands clench, as if grasping for all the things pulled from him so suddenly. His
classes at Evergreen, stolen. His students, recruited. Those truck-bed fucks and that shower and
Kye’s lips on his face, his neck.
“You followed me?”
“Rapture is dangerous,” Berkeley says, her voice steady. “It’s exactly the kind of
peeping we are opposed to, groms, exploitation, you have to see that this is for the greater—“
“You peeped me, to turn off the peeps?” Parker says.
“We oppose all peep crimes,” Kye nearly shouts.
“Isn’t this a crime?” Parker says, his voice catching, his own face still blaring down on
the room of coders. In the CCTV, small sweat stains tinge his sweater’s armpits, his forehead
and nose are shiny. “Stop. You have to stop,” Parker says. “You can’t go peep the end of
Rapture, just like you peeped me.”
“He’s started it. And now he wants to stop it?”
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Parker stares back at him and feels enormous in his body, his big chest and legs all hot
and feeling. On Parker’s screen, the Rapture link blossoms and spreads like a germ. In an hour,
two, there will be a film crew, a squad of moto-chicks primed for violence. He can’t warn Meg,
the groms. Parker taps his monitor, imagines a cleared path on the highway and roads. He is
just two hours away, less if the Futurists unclog the arteries between locales, release the
blackout for just long enough—
Parker says: “Yes, I changed my mind, I want to stop it.”
Berkeley jumps in, points to a random monitor and says: “We’re not going to lose our
momentum.”
Nobody leaps up. Nobody reacts.
“It’s happening,” Kye says, swallowing. “But I understand, if you—if you want to go.”
The coders twitch. Everyone watches Kye. Parker tastes bile. The projected screen is
replaced by one line from the manifesto:
No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.
“I’m going to get Meg,” Parker says low.
It takes all of his willpower, every muscle, to cross the room to Kye.
“I’m going,” he says, just to Kye this time. Kye shakes his head but he lets Parker put his
hands down the front of his pants and reach in to his pocket and grab his truck’s starter. They
are face to face. It is the closest they will ever be again, Parker knows this. All he wants is to lean
into his neck, breathe his skin smells, be comforted. Instead, he takes his truck. They make no
plan to return it. Kye is going to let Parker just drive it away.
“I’m going,” Parker says louder now.
Nobody stops him. It’s like they want him to go, because won’t this add to the spectacle?
Won’t another actor intensify the show?
As he turns, as he pushes toward the door, he can still see the projected version of
himself on every monitor in the room.
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In the present, his heart is a ravaged thing. But, all over the world, all the way into the
future, he will continue to teach those small fingers to type, to hack, to peep, to call out into the
void.

347
Meg

Inside the hacienda, it’s gloomy. The cool is palpable. No one moves to flip lights, open
curtains. The adults don’t seem drunk but stoned, bodies slouch in disorganized rows on rustic
wooden furniture. Meg has to step carefully over the legs sprawled over the carpet.
Already, she has failed. Outside, Hollings is guiding the groms back to Grom City,
speaking to Priscilla and the groms about what they found. Meg had promised to fight for
them, sworn she’d convince the parents to hear their side. But the groms turned from animated
to defeated so quickly, succumbing to their pattern of entrenched rules, she’s not sure she can.
She strains to hear their little shouts, scanning the adult faces for reactions. To her right, Gloria
is sprawled out with her knees spread and Meg has to cross her ankles to keep from touching
her thigh. A wave of musty unwashed stink rushes at her when Gloria removes her buckskin
jacket.
At the front of the room, Sonia is rubbing a calming balm over their concerns in the
vaguest of terms: “We’ve had some departures, this week has been difficult. We are a family,
let’s remember that and mourn those we’ve lost. Let’s discuss a new batch of teachers. This
group has clearly not benefitted our—”
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“This is real,” Meg hears herself say, mid-sentence, mid-thought. The peep is in her
hand and she is holding it out like an offering no one will take.
“Meg,” Sonia says, as if disbelieving the interruption, then seeking other disapproving
eyes among those lounging across the floor. “I know this is painful, but we are discussing how
to remove you from the community. And I know you are hesitant, but this is a group decision.
You may be doing more harm than good. To yourself and to us.”
Meg is seated awkwardly and she is even more awkward when she thrusts the peep up,
over her head, so everyone in the room can see its wires and broken plastic. “The groms are
terrified. They think they’re being peeped.”
“Hollings is with them. And these groms know how to self-soothe,” Sonia quips.
“You’ve been here two weeks, you haven’t let your walls of judgement fall. You can’t come in
here with these false claims—“
“It’s not false!” she says shrilly. “Parker wouldn’t have left if he didn’t think the peeps
were operational.”
“Meg, can we be realistic? Parker left for Kye. And Eavan just couldn’t handle the detox
and left to get drugs. We have to admit this isn’t for everybody. In just two weeks your friends
have proven that you don’t fit. We’ve had many, many people come and go. I’m sorry, but
some people are just toxic to our environment.”
The room shrinks around Meg and Sonia. She can feel a quickening, her lips tingling, a
rush of blood to her ears.
“What if this is true?” Meg says. She tries to make eye contact with every woman there,
many of whom look back at her with disgust, annoyance.
“We’re totally against surveillance,” Luna’s grandmother says. “But this doesn’t prove
anything.”
“We’re not peeping, like, that’s the whole point,” Daizy’s mom says, her jaw still jutting
out, that twitching junkie eye flicking around the room.
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“Exactly. It’s supposed to be no-tech,” Meg is looking into the adult faces. “Which is
why I’m so worried. This freaks the shit out of—“
“Shut up!” says. The voice is unsteady, from a dark corner of the hacienda, beside an
overstuffed chair. Meg sees Donatello’s mother, a frizzy damp woman she’s never spoken to,
hoist herself to standing, as if the extra height will somehow validate her claim. “I can’t just
leave, I have a warrant.”
“Meg—you are trying to disrupt something,” Sonia says. “That matters a great deal to
all of us. The outside world is far more threatening for some of us than for you.”
Meg feels a drip of sweat trickle down the tender part of the inside of her arm and with
it, guilt—she is not undocumented, not oppressed, not hunted, not a no-where-to-go, not a
fucked-if-we-leave.
“I’m not telling you to leave Rapture,” Meg says. “I’m telling you—“
“If someone is peeping our kids,” Donatello’s mother says. “I’m just happy it’s keeping
them safe.”
Meg cringes. Evergreen is peeped. Her childhood home. The streets and highways and
stores. Every school in North America is peeped by now. When she was arrested as a teenager
at that protest, she depended on the peeping to validate her virtuous behavior. Her meme was
pure: thrust to the ground by police, BAN OIL across her forehead—she’d posted the VR herself
on sites countering police brutality, hoping to feel included, involved in that struggle. Since,
she’s often thought of peeps as corroborating witnesses, public testimony to righteous acts.
Even now, standing up to Sonia, maybe she would appreciate a peeps’s validation—to see
exactly how she appears to the outside world.
“I want to walk you through a potential scenario here,” Sonia says, standing now,
inches taller than Meg. She recognizes the tone of voice: teacherly. ”Outsiders coming,
penetrating this calm we have worked so hard to foster. We have to consider what we are
willing to fight for and how easily we could lose all of this, what we’ve created together.”
“Fuck that,” a voice cuts through the room. It is Priscilla.
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She has entered that supposedly sacred place. Meg looks behind her, sees that in fact,
the groms didn’t sulk back to Grom City. The groms didn’t stop themselves outside of the
hacienda out of instinct, because they never get to go inside. Their bodies did not hold them
back. Priscilla, giving no fucks, just pushed open the door and with one hand snatched up
Henry, Jamie, Estrellita, Vasquez, Taly, Owl, Daizy, Miles, Donatello, Theo, Santiago, Luna,
Jade and Jon-Jon. Like a chain, they entered the hacienda.
Meg turns as all the adults turn and she watches the doorway fill with groms. It is like a
sudden stab of light enters the gloom. Iggy stands. Two more mothers stand. Then three young
men hoist themselves up. The little eyes ogle: the doors ajar all down the hall, those king-size
mattresses behind doors painted purple and orange and gold, sheets scuffed from dirty feet. Is
this where their parents sleep? How often do these groms yearn—those many fearful nights on
the desert—to crawl onto their parents’ bodies, to nestle onto pillows, to nuzzle their noses into
their clavicles?
“You aren’t listening, you’re only thinking of yourselves.” Priscilla is shaking her head.
Meg watches the parents watch their groms—faces smudged, fingernails broken, adult
clothing hanging off their little grom bodies. The parents look at them with pride. With guilt.
With shame. With love. The groms stare back, little hands on hips, or arms crossed. Jaws
clenched.
“You’re happy if we’re peeped, because it means you don’t have to watch us. It means
someone else is watching. And you can do what you want,” Priscilla says.
“They wouldn’t do that. They want you to live independently,” Luna’s grandmother
replies quietly.
“Under peeps, under spies?”
“What if it helps you out!” Donatello’s mother shouts. “What if it’s keeping you safe?”
“Peeping us? That’s disgusting! What if they’re sharing it? What if they’re selling it?”
Priss says.
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“That’s impossible,” Daizy’s mom says.
“Is it?” Daizy shouts back, like she was waiting for her mother so she could inject her
own dose of rage into the room. “Do you even care?”
“What if we’re getting peeped?” Priscilla says into their stunned faces. “Don’t you want
to know for sure?”
“I want to know for sure,” Gloria says. Her body is large, stinking, spread out over the
carpet, unmoving for anyone, but she is clear. “This seems weird.”
Rasta Bill looks at Sonia, his one lazy eye winking. “This would be some fucked up shit
if you were peeping all this time.”
“Kye left because of this?” Fresno asks Meg and she nods. “With Parker.”
“This is highly unlikely,” Iggy says, his face reddening, all the way to his receding
hairline. “It’s completely antithetical to the whole place.”
“Exactly!” Priscilla says. Meg can feel something in the room shift, perceptibly toward
the groms.
Then the gong sounds, the wrong sound for an emergency, but the emergency
procedure nonetheless. The adults finger the gate keys around their throats. They hear the caw.
They cannot pretend that they did not.
All at once, the adults of Rapture all start speaking quietly. All at once, they stand and
exit the room by various doorways like dutiful students. The mothers and fathers’ faces are set
in a kind of determined grimness Meg recognizes as the faces of those heading for tests, for
headmaster’s offices. The groms are left open-mouthed, staring after them. Once again, their
children must self-soothe.

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Eavan

A montage of sun-scarred landscapes flicks by them like a vid she could scroll through.
Throngs of pedestrians line the highway, cowering under loads. The cars are immobile.
The freeway, clogged. That these travelers are willing to leave their vehicles at this time of
day—but insist on lugging valuables—that’s already desperation. Those who wait are
suffocating under blaring car roofs, or in stores with no AC. Eavan knows, they seek contact
with loved ones and clean water and shelter and security and none of those things are available
to them without the cloud. And so they move, fear permeating their heat-weak bodies.
Watching them line the burning highway, Eavan gets it: she wants nothing more than to leave
the desert. The urge to veer north is a palpable draw, it’s surging in her hot blood.
To calm her nerves, she tries to count small comforts, consolations: First, that this
motorcycle isn’t dependent on roads at all, that it can drive up and in and out of the ditch as
needed, its tires burly, studded when you press a button. That the bike is dependent on bio-
diesel not cloud-based electricity stations, that their tanks are full.
Another consolation: That Ilya has promised her a full erasure. She can’t even imagine
that weight lifted from her shoulders and neck. Gone: her countless childhood pics, her profiles,
her black employment record after Evergreen, the vid Dr. Mike posted of the day of her
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dismissal, shared and clicked and liked and disseminated those hundreds of thousands of
times. That abortion vid. Vanished.
Freedom is ©erasure. Eliminate your own trace now!
She posts an update in her mind and immediately stops. Soon, she will have no profile
left, nowhere to post. She will be newborn.
“What’s going to happen to all these people at night?” she says, looking out to the
stragglers along the highway. Ilya has wedged the bike up onto the dirt track next to the
shoulder. A few sedans attempt the same move behind her; one gets stuck with its nose in the
air, its rear tires spinning gravel. They don’t stop. No one gets out, turns around, helps.
“All these people will get mugged, or dehydrated, or lost.” she says. “Or the cloud will
come back on and they’ll go home and nothing will have changed.”
She watches a woman weeping in a stalled mototaxi. A man lugging a suitcase over the
gravelly shoulder. Two groms hiking to a high point in the desert, really just a clump of rock,
waving a fön over their heads, seeking a signal.
See, she thinks, I’ll be free.
Half an hour goes by and Eavan actually believes she will leave the desert, on the back
of that motorcycle, saved by a butch with pumped buttocks and a conscience. But no.
Just as the bike is about to climb in altitude, the first of a long and cool ride up through
forest and rock— Ilya receives a transmission through the headset in her helmet, searing
through the cloudless sky on a bandwidth only the Futurists can share:
FUTURE: 5:18pm
Action Requested.
Peep Crime in Progress.
Force Needed. All Moto-Broads comin in hot.
See Attached Pin.

“What’s this?” Ilya says. “Isn’t this that creepy commune where you just left?”
“Rapture,” Eavan says.
ILY: 5:20pm
Bringing our new recruit, y?
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FUTURE: 5:20pm
Y
“Sorry doll. Can’t head back to basecamp. You gotta go save those groms from a peep
crime.”
“A what?”
“They’ve been peeping that commune, I hear.”
Eavan winces. Her stomach lurches as Ilya makes a hard U-turn and heads back south.
But it isn’t until they are rolling back through heat and blowing trash and splintering buildings
and ranchland turned to dust, she can actually imagine Grom City under peeps. Eavan’s fever
spikes. It is rage and it is fear.
“Peeps, at Rapture? You sure?” Eavan asks again.
“Don’t worry, we’ll shut them down.” Ilya’s voice comes in tinny, assured.
“Do they have proof?” Eavan asks.
“They don’t send in the moto-broads unless they have proof.” Ilya sighs, a loud whoosh
in their earpieces. “These are the creeps who peep the most. Trust me, I’ve seen some real crazy
hidden cams. Locker rooms. Daycares.”
“Hospital rooms,” Eavan says.
“Right? How many people had footage of me giving them blowjobs? None, not
anymore. That’s exactly the kind of thing we erase.”
Eavan swallows a kernel of anger. She thinks of Samuel, his hidden cameras, the
debasing things she did to service her stupid need. Her mind splits into multiple screens, the
many different ways of looking at Grom City from above. The school, the wash-shack, the art-
shack, the fountain, the little wall of stories, each of them a private narrative for a group of
private groms. She has never felt this protective, has never before wanted to scoop up groms
and save them. “Motherfuckers,” she says.
“Don’t debase the mothers,” Ilya says, scolding lightly. “They’re just creeps. And they’re
going to pay.”
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Inside Eavan’s gut, the anger hardens. She doesn’t feel sick any more, or feverish, or
weak. Now there is only a crystal of rage where the pain had once been.
Still, every time she closes her eyes, she sees the vids; it doesn’t matter that they will
soon be erased from the cloud. Eavan keeps spitting up puke into a medical mall plant. June’s
little body keeps convulsing again and again and again and again and again and again.
She remembers that school bus: how Eavan was so ripped she couldn’t count. Over and
over, Eavan counts the groms in her head. She wills June’s face to show up in the back seat,
hiding, giggling, awake, counted.
She sees June’s seizure.
She watches June convulse in her bed.
June jerks in her arms and releases a stream of wet vomit all over her shirt and Eavan
touches her chest and she is sweating. Panting.
Then she tries to meditate it away. Tries to find moments of respite along the landscape.
A few vehicles are moving again—the wealthy, with solar panels on their hoods, strings of
internet leeching back at them, enough to operate vehicles, maps, tolls. The sun blares. The sky
is clear and wide.
All along the highway, the golden hills glint sunset against glass and metal, the lights
twinkling from the thousands of crack shacks and burnt out RVs all up and down the Arizona
strip.
She doesn’t say anything. In her head, the little girl’s seizure is an endless thing.

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Parker

He is not the first to arrive.
As he approaches the gates of Rapture, Parker can see several motorcycles clustered in a
pack-hunter formation around the harmless blue Beetle. Wedged behind the crowd are also two
silver production vans, a film crew made up of women in quick-dry uniforms, föns drilled to
their faces—recording and streaming and broadcasting everything to a live audience of
Futurists. Parker is weary from the two-hour drive, wary of the cameras, that exposure. Shelter
is here: a safe distance away from the gate inside Kye’s locked truck, his body still suspended
over the thorn and dirt and scrub of below. It is dark out now, the sun is gone. He almost
believes he can hide.
After a few minutes, Parker spots a motorcycle with a passenger, it’s light knifing
through the shadow. He clenches his hands around the steering wheel—hoping for Kye,
dreading someone else—until he sees Eavan, her thin body slumping off the seat. He pops open
the passenger door and she climbs into the truck, but not without obvious pain; she falls against
him, makes a small, wounded sound into his shoulder.
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“What happened to you?” Parker says. She is impossibly skinnier than before, hair lank,
her skin damp looking despite the chill of the truck. They stay like that, holding each other for
such a long time, it is like life is pumped back into her wilted limbs.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she whispers. “Is it true?”
“We gotta get Meg,” he says. It is the mantra he has been telling himself the whole way
back down the highway. For kilometers, he’d been retracing steps: here is where Kye shared his
steaming tea, here is where they’d looked for clean water in an abandoned well, here is where
he was kissed on the neck, lips scorching his delicate skin.
“Who’s peeping?” Eavan asks.
“Hollings, Sonia, pervs,” Parker says, shaking his head. “We gotta do something, those
bikers…”
“The bikers are cool. They’re women, like sex workers. Ex-workers and porn stars and
plain people with peep crimes. They’re on our side.”
“They may tear the place up.” Parker is sweating, he wishes he had a change of shirt,
new socks. His skin smells like someone else’s. “They look fucking scary,” he says. And they
both laugh lightly.
“I’m not ready,” Eavan says and Parker nods.
At the front of the line, a motorcycle revs its giant studded tires in its spot in line, raising
a vengeful cloud. There is a fire too, made of burning tires. The dust and smoke hides them,
Parker hopes.
“Did you see the film crew?” Parker asks.
“Shit, no,” she says. Eavan checks her hair, her face, in the side mirror. “If we’re lucky,
they can delete this after,” she says to Parker, smiling weakly.
Parker swallows and says, “Now?” Then they climb out and he holds her hand and
leads them away from the road, through a sweet, sooty dark. It is harder walking together like
this, but better, so they continue, sweating palm in sweating palm.
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The ground is not warm, not easy to walk along. Someone has shoved brambles and
tumbleweeds into the wires of Rapture’s fence and skirting the perimeter is thorny, the
property impenetrable. Parker nearly takes her down when his ankle hooks on a manzanita
branch and Eavan’s arm is wrenched, but it is she who yanks him up.
“Here’s the temple,” she whispers. “Here’s the orange grove.”
See us, Parker thinks. He wills Meg to appear, to open an opening, to emerge, to escape
with them. He never wanted to return inside those gates, he just wants to leave, to retreat to
their cool, wet, safe familiar city. For a few minutes at a time, he can forget he’s being watched,
until he can’t and he stumbles again. They are on a trail, a narrow clearing of thorn. There are
voices.
Then just ahead, a light flashes in short staccato bursts.
Parker races toward it, letting go of his hand. Eavan trudges after him, still stumbling
every few steps. He sees a break in the fence, the thorn cleared and the wires cut. Through the
empty space, there are groms.
He does not see their little moon faces first, he sees the hands, reaching for them. It looks
like all the olders and several of the middle-youngers with flashlights and bottles of water and
arms thrust around the teachers’ necks. They cling to Eavan especially; they whisper into her
ear. “We had a lookout and he saw you drive up,” Daizy says authoritatively. “See, I told you,
they’d come back for us. You came back.”
“Thanks for leaving us that clue. You were right,” Miles says to Parker. He is muscly, his
jaw already square, already peeking through his boyhood. “They’re peeping us; they’re
probably peeping us right now.”
Parker nods gravely, feels sick.
Then Donatello taps him on the arm. His eyes look wide, painfully young. Two trails of
snot snail down his face. Parker pulls him into an embrace, holds him up, reaches for his head
and cradles it. Feels him shaking, his body warm. Parker says something quiet like, “It’s ok, it’s
ok,” until Donatello sniffs, pulls away. Some groms are replacing the thorns in the fence and
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others are talking all at once and some are just standing there staring at them, mouths agape.
One grom clutches at the bottom of his shorts. Luna, hair shorn, dressed as a boy.
“Where’s Meg?” Parker asks her.
“With the adults,” she says.
“You have to bring her to us,” Parker says.
“Didn’t you hear, they’re peeping us! They’re doing the very worst thing!” Donatello
says.
Parker holds his breath for a second, then lets it go in a slow whoosh. He knows that
walking across the property with all these groms and confronting Meg and Hollings and
Sonia—it all means more and more people will see. The live streaming audience will grow, will
comment, will share, will link. “It’s going to be OK, we’re going to help,” Parker says, willing it
to be true.
The walk is long, it’s hard to decipher each step. Behind the warm dark, there is the
distant sound of revving engines, of voices. There is also the sound of cicadas. Of small feet
kicking dirt. Of sniffling, of high kid voices reaching up into the quiet.
“You gotta take us with you,” Isabellita says.
“We can pack bags right now. You can take us.”
“They can’t do that dumbshit, we’re minors, they can’t just take us away.”
“Fuck you, they’re teachers! We can just do a new school.”
Parker wants to tell them what’s happening out there, about the blackouts, how people
are panicking without water or power, how they get thrown into camps, or live in parking lots
and shanties, how the people on the outside don’t feel safe. He wants to ask if they are in fact
safe, if they’re getting hurt or if they’re hurting themselves. He wants to ask: what will happen
to you, Miles? Who has been creeping on you, Daizy? What perv has been watching little
Estrellita? Will Donatello’s mother finally take him away? Will someone come for you, finally?
But he can’t.
Instead, he reaches for them and clasps their hands.
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The walk across the property is long, but not long enough. The hacienda peaks out from
the dark, the graceful lanterns hung in the oak tree are still elegant, still lit. The groms hold
tighter. Walk slower. Huddle close. They stink, Parker can barely handle the smell of their small
sweaty bodies, of poop unwashed and hormones unchecked.
But they are speaking, with their needy faces and their skinny bodies and their crusty
eyes. All at once, they are saying the same thing: Save us, they are saying to him. Save us,
please.

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Meg

The room is tiny, wooden, like a lighting booth at the back of a hot theater. The smell is organic,
splintery. Priscilla and Meg almost fill the place.
There is an entire wall of monitors. It is the bat cave. It is mall security. It is every corner
of the Rapture property, simultaneously: the yurts, the school, the domes, the hacienda. This is
where Hollings and Sonia can watch the groms fight and feed and flail and screw up and they
can go and rescue them or they can choose to do nothing.
It was Priscilla who found it. After the adults filed out and clustered around the gate, the
gong sounding around them. After the groms retreated to Grom City, hearts wrenched and
little mouths twisted up. It was just Priscilla and Meg left in the dark room. Meg had felt
snubbed, an old hurt low in her throat. But Priss, she just raged. Kicked a side table. Threw a
chair. Then immediately barged into Hollings and Sonia’s master suite at the end of the
hacienda, the door’s lock weak and easy to smash with a Buddha statuette.
Inside their room, it was breezy. Old papery books lined the walls on homemade
shelves, hand-dyed sheets lay snarled in the center of a king-size mattress. Priscilla continued to
stomp around, knocking over lamps, tearing Hollings’ precious succulents from their pots—
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until a tiny lock appeared, a hook and eye behind a row of textbooks. Undoing the lock released
the bookshelf from the wall, which swung open like a door.
There was the splintery staircase. At the top was another locked door, with a peep above
it, not even hidden. Once again the Buddha’s head crashed down upon the lock, breaking it too
easily.
Priscilla had whooped with joy, while Meg despaired. “Fuck,” she said.
Now Meg can do nothing but stare at the screens, her eyes flicking around. So many of
them. So many views. The Heart, the kitchen, the terrace. Grom City is eerily empty, the yurts
and school and wash shack are all vacant, just infrared pulsing into the dark.
Priscilla finds a toggle, points it to the corner of the monitor, a list of cached files, and it
only takes one click to see the many dates compiled there—yesterday, hundreds and hundreds
of yesterdays piled up.
“Oh shit,” Priscilla says.
Meg sees one evening she remembers: Outside of the school, when Vasquez spat in
Luna’s face and Luna punched him in the mouth, releasing a spigot of blood, a small tooth
wiggly now, bound to turn black.
She sees another night: Daizy tidying the littles’ yurt, shaking out blankets and
gathering soiled clothing to be soaked. “Look,” Priss says and points as Daizy goes through a
basket of toys, sniffing each piece and sorting them according to smell. Then she fills a bucket
with water and dish soap and starts to wipe the floor on her knees, her stringy bangs falling in
front of her face. They watch the littles pee around the outside of the yurt and then one-at-a-
time come inside. They watch as Daizy says, “Hands Up,” and tugs their shirts over their heads
and then distributes the contents of a big sack of large adult shirts for each of them—a
basketball team’s rejects, all of these babies in matching cartoon hoops. Priss sighs as Daizy tries
to spit-clean around their mouths before they waddle to their mats in their new nightgowns.
“What are they doing with this footage?” Meg whispers.
“Selling it, I’m sure.”
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“Maybe Sonia is just studying the groms, like protecting— “
“You know that’s not true,” Priss says and Meg nods. She knows.
Then this afternoon. Around a circle, the older groms speak with their shirts pulled up
over their mouths, or bandanas over half their faces, their words invisible to the peeps—a trick
she remembers from working at Evergreen. So quickly groms adapt, she thinks.
Meg presses the button and the groms disappear. She leaps back to the present: she sees
the domes are empty. The hacienda is empty. But the gates, every adult seems to be clustered
around the gates. There is a cloud of dust pushing up from the horizon. At the entrance,
someone has pushed the Beetle with the flowers in the hood in front of a gate.
She realizes, for several minutes, she has been hearing a throbbing heartbeat under the
ground. Up in their booth on the top of the hacienda, they are washed in a low rumble of engine
sound. The noise doesn’t come from anywhere, but it seems to roll off of every surface—roof,
wood, sky.
She toggles and sees a swarm of motorcycles, maybe six now but many more are
arriving, a line of them coming up the road. The headlights make a long trail to follow. The dust
from the road doesn’t dissipate, it builds, the chimney of it points toward the fullish moon, then
stops and stretches out into a long thin line.
At the gates, Iggy has dragged a pile of tires before the line of bikes. The Rapture people
gesticulate. They clump together, they raise their hands dramatically. The motorcycle people
aren’t speaking, not yet. Meg doesn’t really know; she can’t hear them. She could turn on the
mics, but she does not. There is something so theatrical about the way it all occurs on mute. The
motorcycles arriving from afar are soundless, ghosting through dust.
Someone douses gas over the pile of tires. It ignites with a big puff of soundless flame, a
balloon of light that lifts up and away leaving small angry fire. It will be a few minutes before
the smell reaches her, burnt rubber. And maybe then it will feel more real. But for now, she
watches all of this unfold on the screens, as the motorcycles spit dust and the tire-fire pulses
light.
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Then, like a bullet crack, Hollings’ caw pierces the stuffy air of the booth. On the screen,
he rushes away from the gate. The motorcycle people assembled there start to raise arms,
voices. In a peripheral peep, Meg sees Sonia running too. “Cowards,” Priscilla says.
“Look,” Meg says. On a faraway peep, at the threshold to Grom City, there is a squad of
littles and olders and they have two adults by the hand. It is Eavan. It is Parker.
“Whoa, who’s that? Outsiders?”
“They’re mine,” Meg whispers.
Meg knows she should run to meet Eavan and Parker. She should help the groms. She
should seek out Hollings and Sonia or join the adults out at the gate. But she wants nothing
more than to stay at the monitors, watching, scrolling, peeping. It is so hard to look away, when
here it is, all at once, laid out on the ever-flickering, ever-watching screens, magically existing in
all these places at once.
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4:

What does it feel like, to be together? To hold hands and march blindly into the dark. To be
near—humanly near—to another’s heat. To breathe sweat smells? To entwine grimy fingers in
fingers? To smush nose against neck? Watching them move in unison, past scrub, past dirt
clod, past yurt, past the Heart, past orange trees with twisted limbs and sour fruit—we yearn to
hold hands. Or ponytails. Or belts or some small bit of each other’s clothing, a tassel, a thread.
We know that these groms could be ripped from each other at any second and so we think, hold
on. Touch. Touch tightly.

366
It’s not like we don’t know people. We are surrounded daily, hourly. We occupy game-clubs and
classrooms and trains and super-loud arcades filled with others that speak and move and
gesture toward us. We still attend organized, supervised events, but we walk into large groups
and feel urges, very strong urges, to just stare at our screens. We recognize everybody; we’ve
searched them all up. But when it comes time to speak, ugh, what difficulty. What list of failures.
All the ghastly things said or unsaid.

These Rapture groms though—they caress, they hurl insults. When they’re wrathful, they hit or
bite and then holler openly and then share food and then sleep, right out in the air, in front of the
person they just called the very worst thing. While our time is strictly structured, their days
stretch before them like tired dogs. They don’t gossip or blog or post about the groms they love
or hate. They kick. They reconcile. And even though they can’t sleep together, boys-and-girls,
they touch relentlessly, the girls petting and grooming each other and the boys slapping hands
or knocking knuckles and kissing even. They get so germy and still they so rarely get sick.

When you ask adults, what would happen to groms left alone to raise themselves, they all think
the groms will kill or harm each other. But no, these groms care for each other as none other
can. After so many near-accidents: shattered collarbones and asthma attacks and one
perforated esophagus from a swallowing a stick, they are super vigilant. They watch each other
ruthlessly. They are connected for life, family where there is none. Because what is family but a
lack of anyone else?

For so long, we yearned to watch groms like this—and now we have finally found them, we can’t
stop our chain of chatter. We scrutinize. We track them from peep to peep around the property
at Rapture, at their campfires, in their theatre performances, Boxcar smoke sessions, bodies at
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entwined and bodies at play or last night’s bodies in slumber, each breathing child an island in a
wavering static sea. Watching them is a tender act, but it must be done carefully.

We recognize the irony: that we even as we peep continuously, we want to eradicate the peeps.
For us, peeping is a kind of compulsion, an injurious behavior that we must cut off. We must!
But it is so difficult when this is our world—a whole second world that is brighter and livelier than
our own. We try to summon the taste of dust and blood because it is so different than our own
dust, antiseptic and dull. This is the way we get to live—while we study on screens, visit parents
and grandparents on screen, draft essays and chart science and write tests on screens, while
we send VRs and code friendships and play interactives on screens, even lean into our
monitors and send kisses, those other screened eyes looking back… These Rapture groms
have never worn a fön on their faces, never toggled, never scrolled through a profile or VR or
test. Imagine! We barely venture out of doors. We don’t know what it feels like to scuffle our feet
in the dirt, bumping into one another and slipping and dragging and picking one another up.

Our hearts beat super-quick as we peep Meg, who peeps Eavan and Parker coming to save
her. Like something out of a VR or a console game! Eavan looks fragile—we’ve been watching
her feverish swoons, the infection flourishing inside her. But Parker is confident, surefooted—he
doesn’t have that hesitation we saw from the old vids at Evergreen. Something about being
chosen by Kye and then reaching up and out of his infatuation and saying NO to him. This has
given his actions a new potency. Imagine, Meg has friends coming to rescue her—a scenario
from our fantasies! She should throw her arms around them exuberantly! Yet she still
demonstrates a cool reserve.

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Outside, on another peep, the knot of motorcycles and film crews are arriving at Rapture,
Arizona. The road is a vein of headlights up the desert’s dark body.

On another peep, the adults of Rapture have assumed their posts at the front gate. Iggy, Rasta
Bill and Fresno are holding long guns—and they are clenching them tightly, so their biceps are
bulging under their torn sleeves. But not Hollings, he’s not there. Sonia is not there. They have
fled, off-screen. Iggy is taking charge instead—but he lacks Hollings’ composure, his panache.
Iggy is brash and red and sweaty and waving the gun too close to people’s faces. He is having
a hard time staying calm with motorcycles revving, someone trying to explain what is happening
inside with the peeps. Iggy won’t hear anything.

On the other side of a door, another fish eye is aimed at Meg. She and Priss are watching it all
unfold below. They do nothing, even when a shot is fired into the starry sky.

We wish we could be there with them, but we are only a network of peeps gazing down. An
ocean of fish eyes, gawping down through the watery dark—seeing all, knowing nothing.
Because we cannot know what will come of them, but we can hope for them. We can hope very
very hard.

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Eavan

Eavan has never felt more acutely in her body, her sweaty palm in another sweaty palm, her
toes scuffing dust. There is no fizzer for this: how raw one can feel, how feeling. Her heart is
banging and her skin is flushed and she is in love with the world and these groms and her
friends and the night is alive with the possibility of what is to come.
An entire sky of birds twitter and chirp through the desert around them, flitting through
the saguaro, impossibly snapping bugs from the thin air around the blooms. There is a line of
color on the western horizon, the last sun angling high and red. The groms feel its import too.
They fall quiet, stepping soundlessly across the earth. She still marvels at these warm desert
nights, the clear breeze. It’s fun, until it isn’t. A shot is fired into the almost-dark and the groms
don’t slow, they quicken.
Her incision hurts, it does, but she refuses to let it go deeper than it needs to go. She’s
been religious about the antibiotics. Has been drinking water, hasn’t felt feverish for an hour.
Parker is guiding them between the yurts, shapes looming shadowy around them. Daizy is
walking beside her, with Vasquez between them. The poor little grom is crying, sobbing really,
but there is no way to calm him. She can’t lift him from the ground, she can’t say, “We’re here
for you,” because soon she will leave. She rubs his hair back from his face. Lets him cry.
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Before long they have breached the border to Grom City and they are in the adult area,
where the groms tread more carefully. The is a deep rumbling that seems to come from under
them, under the ground. Manuelito, one of the smallest groms, twists around and stares at
them, his eyes wide open.
“It’s motorcycles,” Eavan says. “They’re all girls, they’re moms, some of them. They’re
going to get rid of the peeps.”
The groms slow. Daizy stops. Donatello stops.
They stare at Parker, who still wears his fön, who has some kind of signal boosted only
to him. “Wait,” Miles says. “You’re saying it’s true.”
Parker takes his fön form his face, sniffs. He’s moved, almost crying himself, his lip is
shaking and between his eyes is pinched. Eavan has never seen him so openly upset—he’s
usually holding it in. But now, with these groms, he’s letting something show. “It’s true. Kye
was the one who knew, he and I searched it up and we found it. They’re peeping you. They’re
peeping all over Grom City.”
Eavan expected rage. That particular Grom City way of kicking dust and spitting and
hitting something when they’re shocked or mad. But at this news—they’re silent. The groms
nod solemnly.
“We’re going to see some difficult things,” she says. “So please, stay together, stay
close.”
She watches them take big, brave breaths. Then they step toward the gate with their
mismatched boots, moccasins, sneakers caked in dust. They can’t all hold hands because they
must walk two-by-two down the path, but Eavan notices how some stay hand-in-hand.
Manuelito holds to Parker, calming him down. Daizy holds Estrellita who is the youngest and
has trouble with her one foot turned slightly in. Eavan braces the wall as she takes each step,
holding Vasquez’s hand tightly against her stomach. He’s no longer crying. She is no longer
sweating with fever but her head roars.
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Just before the gate, they stop. Lined up behind the Beetle are the adults of Rapture, in
emergency positioning, but maybe a little flushed, sweaty, jittery. She watches each grom seek
out their parent, grandma, guardian, person from the adult world. That is who they watch from
their spot under the tree. They each watch their person.
Across from them are the moto-broads of the Futurists. There are twenty giant bikes,
with huge burly biker girls atop each one. Eavan knows each has some sordid past. She knows
they have erased their histories filled with pussy peeps and shoplifting peeps and teacher peeps
and now they are free, just as Eavan wants to be free of her vids, just as the adults and groms of
Rapture want to be free. “Maybe this will be OK,” she says out loud. Parker is the only one who
nods.
“You want to go find Hollings and Sonia for us? You think you can?” Parker asks.
Donatello and Miles both reach out and touch Parker’s shoulder, a gesture Eavan has
seen them do only with other groms.
“Take this peep,” Parker says, handing them a tiny spider-like device with an active blue
light. The groms crowd around. Miles reaches out an empty palm and then takes the machine
like Eavan would a snake or insect, revulsion and fascination on his face.
“This thing peeps?” Donatello asks.
“You point this at them when you find them, that’s it. We’ll come and help you. OK?”
“We are the Futurists,” a female voice calls through a crackly speaker not so far away.
The groms cower and Donatello and Miles run into the dark like another shot has been fired.
The littles’ eyes are wide and full of dread; they have never heard an amplified voice before.
“Our mission is to save you from a peep crime, you are victims of this crime and it is our job to
help you.”
“We don’t need outsiders here! We live a peaceful life!” Iggy shouts into their
headlights. “We can trade water, or food.” His voice is cracking, the burning tires pushing
smoke into his sweating face. Around the gate, Eavan can see the little blue flickering lights of
peeps floating around in the dark. Parker steps away from the groms, but they won’t let go of
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his hands, his arms, his pants. And so, as he takes his position behind the crowd at the gate, all
of the groms and Eavan have globbed on to him. A tiny voice speaks to him through her ear.
“Ready?” he asks Eavan.
“Ready?” she asks the groms.
“Ready,” they all say, gripping each other.
Just then, synchronized, spookily, the motorcycle engines cut and there is nothing but
desert sounds.
Eavan watches as Parker aims his fön with its built-in projector to the giant
whitewashed wall of the hacienda, a perfect screen. The other moto-broads point their föns too.
The projections sync. The video pierces through the dust like an old-timey cinema projector,
fingers of light reaching through smoke.
At first, Eavan has trouble processing exactly what is flickering in the screens, shapes,
circles on the desert. At first it reminds her of that famous jet-fighter’s view down onto the
countryside in the Middle East. A village below, about to get bombed. But soon the shapes
morph and organize into domes and yurts, little pathways between orange trees. It is Rapture
from many angles: through the leaves of the acacia tree, down onto the terrace, then inside of
the yurts with their empty beds. The shapes blare at her in infrared. The projection flashes from
one yurt to the next, from Heart to tree to dome to school. They are all shot from above, from
hidden peeps around the property.
Fresno says, “What the fuck is this?”
Iggy says, “Jesus.”
Here is their whole world, lit up on screens. Everyone falls quiet. To the babies, it is a
wondrous thing, to see this digital reflection. Pupils flicker and dilate. Fingers levitate toward
the images as if magnetized. To the older groms, rememberers, it’s alarming. Eavan can tell by
their open mouths, fists clenched at the end of their small arms. Daizy kneels and points things
out to the youngers, “That’s your yurt. Your Heart. Your orange trees. Our school.”
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That’s when the groms turn to their mothers and fathers—their faces full of accusation.
First, it is Luna’s grandmother who walks away from the line of adults, towards the projections.
She can’t see well, has to pull a pair of reading glasses from the top of her head and stare at the
shining wall down the length of her nose. Then Donatello’s mother breaks away, looking with
an open mouth. Gloria starts sucking her teeth. From beside her, a cluster of littles pulls at
Eavan’s arm. She crouches and lets them crowd her.
“You bastards denied it and here the fuck it is,” Priss shouts into the quiet. She shows no
glee in saying this.
“We didn’t know,” someone says, too quietly.
“This is insane,” Gloria says.
“What can you see, you tell me you fuckers, what do you watch every day?” Daizy calls
back.
“I don’t think they knew,” Parker says and without ceremony puts the fön on Daizy’s
face. Daizy squints under the fake light.
“It’s a set-up, this is somebody trying to rip this place apart, don’t you fucking listen,”
Fresno shouts. Gloria keeps swearing inaudibly. Rasta Bill shakes his head. While the adults
murmur and shuffle closer, looking up at the projected screen, Eavan notices, the groms are
quiet.
They watch as Daizy looks through the fön. They watch her eyeballs flicker downwards,
then side-to-side. Daizy intuits that she should press the button on her temple and toggle it
around. As Daizy toggles, images appear. She discovers how to click, drag. She scrolls through
the things the public can see. All of the adults see too. For the first time, it is a grom flicking
around the peeps and data. Daizy clicks randomly to yesterday, two am: the little girls in their
purple yurt, the shape of their bodies pushing out of the dark like topography on an aerial map.
One of them shifts slightly in sleep. The groms recognize Owl by the print on her pajamas, her
worn blanket gathered into clots and nudged under one drooly cheek. The cameras are so good,
Eavan can see their little chests breathing.
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That’s when Meg and a thin teenager appear from inside the hacienda. Eavan can’t stop
moving toward Meg, she drags the groms who are still holding on to her shirt, her wrists. The
hold each other a very long time. Parker comes from beside them and wraps his big arms
around both Eavan and Meg. The groms pile around them too. It is a mess of arms and bodies, a
huddle, so many bodies leaning in. Eavan wants to tell Meg everything that has transpired,
everything she has gone through. Instead, they just sniffle.
Meg says, into the new quiet, “We are all of us absolutely opposed to you being peeped.
I want you to know that. This has to stop.”
No grom disagrees, so she turns around and calls out to the parents: “Maybe you knew
about this. Maybe you don’t care. But the groms care. They don’t want to be peeped.” The
people of Rapture stand and listen like they’ve been taught to do— to attend to the orderly,
inside world while the outside appears swamped in confusion. They are listening to Meg.
Eavan can see, they trust her now.
Then, on the screen, Daizy toggles to a tab called Metrics:
Daizy Singh. Age: 14.3. Female.
Spectrum: Literacy 6.2, Maths 4.2, Motor Control 9.7, Verbal 8.1…
Health: Good bone density. Underweight, possibly iron deficient. Late menstruation…
Behavior: Attention deficit. Assumes authority role. Exhibits defiance toward authority….
”OK fuck you,” Daizy mutters.
“What about me,” Luna asks.
“What about me?” Vasquez echoes. Eavan realizes, the tech block on Rapture must be
gone, with all these föns on full blast. She reaches into her pocket and grabs her fön and places
it on Vasquez’s face. Vasquez searches up his dad, it’s the first thing he asks for, in a meek, lispy
voice that picks up every S as a TH. Then Owl swipes the fön from him and soon she is filming
Fresno, who is screaming directly to the creeps, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS YOU MOTHER
FUCKERS YOU ARE DOING THIS AGAINST OUR WILL.”
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“Don’t diss the mothers,” Eavan whispers.
Then the teenager leans over and gently removes the fön from Daizy’s face. She hasn’t
made it far into the fön’s architecture but it’s obviously overwhelming; she drops her head
against the girl’s shoulder and squeezes water from each eye. “Priscilla,” she whines. The
teenager, Priscilla, Lady Pink’s old best friend, who Eavan has heard so much about—the grom-
adult looks kindly at Eavan. “Hey,” Priss says as her strong hands cradle Daizy’s head, swipe
her cheeks. “It’s OK, you’re safe now,” she coos.
There is a long silence after that. Even the Futurists’ scrolling commentary slows, stops.
As these grom-brains are thinking for the first time in peeps and mics, pinned locations,
recorded messages, vids and VRs, that’s when Eavan hears Meg shout into the crowd: “How do
we stop it?”
The moto-broads take this as a signal. Something happens on the giant projection, the
different squares of peeps somehow morph and change until it makes the shape of a giant head.
It isn’t clear until it is: the eyes, the mouth.
Eavan realizes with a jab: she knows the face.
It is June.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” June’s little voice asks, echoing through the megaphone,
turning menacing, scary to the groms.
“Who’s that?” Daizy asks.
Eavan wants to shout: It’s June! Little June. My poisoned girl! My disappeared student!
June is the girl who cost us our jobs, the girl who refused to board the bus, who ingested fizzers,
who wanted only to sleep. Do you remember June? Who felt so distraught about Test Day, she
poisoned herself?
“June!” Eavan finally shouts, her voice broken. “You’re—“
June’s face is the same, just thinner, the skin under the eyes, sallow. Her bangs are not
fluffed, her hair is lank. Her chin has sprouted two pimples, one is particularly big and red and
blurs her mouth into an almost-frown. She is not at Evergreen, Eavan doesn’t recognize the
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room behind the monitor. June is in another people stacker, in another city, somewhere else
entirely.
June starts out hoarse, quiet.
“Hello?”
“We can hear you! Are you ok? June!” Eavan screams. Her voice is screechy, unhinged
“Hello? Is this getting through?” June asks.
On the screen, the Futurists pepper her feed with a string of hearts and smiles and
pumping thumbs-up. She swallows. Eavan almost can’t breathe until June begins to speak.
“You know, that VR of me, it went viral,” June says. Her voice is wobbly, but seems
practiced, like she’s been working up to this.
“What is she talking about?” Iggy yells.
“I tried to erase it,” Parker says.
“Vids never get erased,” Priscilla says.
“I used to think that. I used to think the whole world would see me having a seizure in
Teacher Eavan’s arms. I thought it would never go away. For the past month, thousands of
people have watched it over and over. My brother and my parents and grandparents. My old
babysitter. My enemies.”
Eavan’s incision suddenly burns. On the massive wall, projected in color, triple-size, is
the vid. Now they are all thrust into that day at Evergreen: Eavan clutching little June to her
soiled blouse, stumbling across campus. The pathways and manicured shrubs blur by as Eavan
rushes toward a medical-delivery drone, to a tube she must thrust down June’s throat. Eavan is
crying, her hands shake, she is not efficient or effective with the emergency procedure. June’s
face is buttery yellow, her eyes roll back in her skull, showing only whites. Foam collects in the
corners of her mouth. Her whole body convulses and convulses and convulses.
Around her, the groms’ faces all lift like solar panels at the sun. Many of them lean their
heads into Eavan’s stomach, her hands.
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“Your peep crime,” they say. The groms nod and try to pat and hug her reassuringly.
The youngers huddle between legs, shielding eyes, looking and not looking.
“The Futurists, though. They saved me. I was shipped to a hospital, nothing but a fön
for company—and the Futurists contacted me, invited me in. They stole the VRs from every
databank and they managed to delete the thousands of shares, plus all the comments, the
memes… Even my profiles. They did a full erasure. They started my whole life again. They’ve
done this for tens of thousands of us, all over. They can do this for you, too,” June says,
breathless now.
Eavan’s heart surges. “I thought you were dead.”
“Just erased,” June says.
Beside her Daizy whispers, “Whoa,” and shakes her dreads dramatically. It’s like she
knows she’s being watched now. She must know her body is considered perfect in the outside
world, tall and tanned and emaciated, dusted with dirt around the nose and chin so there is no
shine—the look fashion models strive for with many manufactured cosmetics. Compared to this
Evergreen grom, all Rapture kids are striking. But something in how Daizy pushes her hair
around, Eavan can tell, she’s feeling herself being watched.
“So they erased your VR?” Parker asks.
“They erased everything,” June says. “My profiles, my past. Gone.”
Priscilla interjects: “We want this erasure too. I want full erasure.”
“Yes,” says Gloria.
“These peeps should be erased,” shouts Luna’s grandma.
“But we have to get a guarantee that Hollings and Sonia will not just reboot the peeping
in some other capacity. We need a promise.”
Just then, the voices of the moto-broads become audible: “This is pornography. This is
criminal. Open up. Open up.”
Eavan gets nervous again. The adults of Rapture move in a confused cluster. The vid
projected on the wall turns shaky. Then Eavan experiences an unexpected turn.
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Donatello and Miles—groms who have a different way of seeing through the scrim of
dust and moonlight, who can read signs Eavan cannot read, past the range of the peeps to the
best hidey places at Rapture— in minutes, these boys have located Hollings and Sonia. The
giant head projected on the hacienda wall moves to a split screen. On the other side, their shaky
camera shines a beam of white into the dark of the desert. There is panting and then a little
throat clear and then Donatello’s tinned voice saying, “Got them.”
Eavan tastes blood, a torn cheek. The camera steadies, then aims at the entrance to
Boxcar. Inside, crowned by the tags of all the groms of Grom City, are Sonia and Hollings. He
sits serenely. Sonia looks out from beside him, her pupils massive in the too-bright light. She is
still her attractive self, but now Eavan finds her hard to look at, her eyes squinting and red
rimmed, her bones sticking out. In the floor between them is a hole, a trapdoor previously
covered in a dusty rug. Now, the rug is pulled back into a folded pile. Through the infrared, the
piled tapestry looks like a landscape, a mountain from above. The peep swings into the hole at
Sonia’s feet and inside is a small collection of important items: two passports, a fön—though a
somewhat archaic model.
“Where’s the starter?” Sonia is saying, her voice hoarse. “There was a truck starter in
here. Where did it go?”
“Didn’t you peep us taking it? Didn’t you see?” Donatello is screaming at her.
“There’s no peep in Boxcar,” Sonia screams back, her voice breaking.
They let that ring.
“Can they hear me?” June asks.
“They can hear you,” Miles shouts and Eavan can see, even in the shaky camera, Sonia
flinch.
“You’ve been discovered,” June’s voice cuts through the hiss of the empty mic. They all
watch the adobe wall—and they all see Hollings and Sonia move their eyes to the peep Miles is
holding in front of their faces. “You have many thousands of people watching you right now.
We know about the peep system you installed. We know about the viewers.”
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Hollings adjusts his posture. Eavan can see him working his mind around what to say
next. Sonia, though, looks wrecked. Like she can’t quite look away from the peep, like she can’t
stop hearing June’s little voice, broadcast from so far away—but she doesn’t want to, she wants
to turn it off.
June keeps going: “You can’t run. We can erase your funds. Your data. We can file
charges for child pornography. We can get you arrested if you don’t stop filming, now.
Forever.”
“And then you will go to jail,” Miles shouts.
On the screen, Hollings and Sonia say nothing. The mothers and fathers say nothing, but
the pause is not peaceful. A certain anger hangs coiled in the air. On the other side of the split
screen, Eavan can see June is panting slightly, a thin mustache of sweat over her lip.
The voices, when they surface, are almost too loud through the loud speaker. First,
Hollings says, “Everyone should know that this was done for safety, to watch out for the groms.
There were so many accidents that we stopped, that we prevented. And the peeps are not
public,” Hollings continues. “We have a very small group of observers. Everything is edited, no
nudity. We needed to make sure you were safe.”
“We can’t let anything bad happen to you. You’re children after all.” Sonia says this very
quietly, like it is very true.
“Sometimes you need technology to live a tech-free life,” Hollings says. Eavan
recognizes the tone, the same one Dr. Mike employed at Evergreen— one of cardboard
intimacy. The gestures are there, the blushing, the shrugged shoulders, but they aren’t felt, they
are performed.
Donatello can’t see it, he’s moved, his voice is cracking, you can hear it through the
peep. Eavan is reminded that he is twelve, reaching his voice up to the screen to say, “You were
watching us, to guard us?”
The responses come from all over Rapture, simultaneously recorded, disseminated,
heard.
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“To protect you,” says Hollings.
“To control you,” Priscilla snaps.
“No no, because we love you, we need to watch over you,” says Sonia.
“Like cops,” says Miles.
“Like teachers,” says June.
“Like parents,” says Eavan.
Around her, many of the groms start to cry; it is a contagious thing, like a virus, tears
and snot transmitted from one to the next. Eavan and Meg crouch and touch their faces, hold
their little shoulders and chests. Then, like something has come alive in them, Eavan watches as
their little heaving bodies turn hard, one at a time. They stiffen arms. The repel her touch.
Without talking, without a plan, Daizy lets out a vicious, violent caw and the groms toss their
heads back and caw back at the adults and teachers, their voices full of hurt. Then they run, all
of them, away from her, away from the hacienda and the projections and the adults, retreating,
sprinting back across the desert, back to Grom City.
On the other side of the gate, patience is lost. One at a time, the moto-broads shut their
föns off and June’s face flickers, then collapses to black. Eavan inhales, another loss. Then the
engines rev up and the motorcycles start shoving their weight toward the gate. But this time,
the people of Rapture do not try to stop them. They just step aside.
It starts with Kye’s truck. Someone is behind the wheel—someone has found the starter.
Eavan squints through the smoke and dust and can see the driver is Ilya. She opens the
window, leans her elbow out like a trucker. First, she spins the studded tires, spraying dust over
the tire fire. Then the Beetle is bashed and bashed and bashed until it is pushed to the side. Then
the gate is in splinters, a wide open mouth. Then the first motorcycles muscle in behind her,
following the geo-tag where the groms have run. Others follow. Others follow. Others follow,
thrusting the machinery further into the compound, past the manicured line of cacti and the
whitewashed domes and the terrace and the bougainvillea and the lanterns waving in the wind
from the motorcycles storming by. They bump up the track. It is a parade—groms first and then
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motorcycles and mothers and fathers and teachers, all running to Grom City, to Boxcar, to
Hollings and Sonia.
Eavan tries, but the searing in her gut holds her back. She clutches her belly. She hobbles
up the path. By the time she arrives at Boxcar, she cannot stop what is to come.
She sees a circle of motorcycles in the clearing and in the center of the circle, she sees the
groms dragging Hollings and Sonia out of Boxcar with their many hands. Eavan shouts, “No,
wait,” but they are yanking at their clothes, their hair. They are grabbing at their shoulders and
pushing at their chests and backs, surrounding them. Eavan weakly says, “No,” just as Daizy
runs at Sonia from behind and knocks her over and Sonia’s body flails against a dirt wall, her
head whacking against it.
Eavan feels real fear. These groms are young, yes, but they are very strong. Together,
they are monstrous. She watches as Miles shoves Hollings from behind. Then Donatello trips
him and then Miles kicks him once, very hard in the side of the head.
No parent stops them. No teacher stands in their way. The motorcycles rev,
encouragingly. The littles howl.
Eavan feels sick, feels real vomit rising to her mouth. Daizy has grabbed Sonia’s hair and
Miles is kicking a boot against her face, swelling up now, split now, spilling blood. That turns
the groms to frenzy. Even the littles pile around Hollings and Sonia, their little fists punch, their
little legs kick, their little teeth bite. It is a brawl, a rumble. All of them are pulling punching
kicking screaming sobbing.
Eavan’s eyes fill with dust and tears and the pain in her gut. She realizes she is trying to
enter the circle of light and dust but Ilya is holding her back by the shoulders. The brawl is
captured in the lights of the motorcycles, which surround the group in pack-hunter formation.
The moto-broads cheer. Soon the groms have sticks and rocks and shards of plastic in their
hands, which they are bashing against cheeks, backs of heads. That’s when Eavan looks away.
That’s when she notices the film crew in the periphery, dressed in black, little blue lights
signaling their endless roll of footage.
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It is not Eavan, not Meg nor Parker, but it is Luna’s grandmother, always first, oldest,
who breaches the circle and puts her body between the violence and the victim. She reaches for
little Luna. Then Donatello’s mother tries for his hand, but he doesn’t stop right away and she
stumbles backward. Daizy’s mom, her eyes red from crying, instead of pulling at Daizy and
Theo, gives a kick to Sonia’s writhing body.
When Priscilla approaches with a large bat she’s procured from the schoolhouse, swings
it awkwardly around—that’s when Meg intervenes. Finally, finally, Meg shoves past the
perimeter of motorcycles, right into the dusty scuffle. She grabs the bat. Then she pushes
through the grom cluster, struggling to stop their thrashing, biting, jerking, clawing. They keep
kicking at them, they keep kicking dirt on to the pile of what they have done. So she switches
from grabbing at groms to reaching for Sonia and Hollings. She crouches, puts her body over
them. The groms stop one by one. They make a space around her.
Under her, Sonia is seated but slumped, breathing but not moving, recoiling in the
headlights. Hollings just lays there on his back panting like he has raced very far. They are
battered, their skin is puffing. They do not hoist themselves up.
Priscilla shouts: “Don’t touch them! Don’t help them!”
But Meg shakes her head, holds up her hands. “Let’s let them leave,” she says.
“We should kill them!” Miles shouts.
“You should go to jail,” Luna says.
“If we let them go, they’ll never come back,” Meg shouts back.
“You pervs. You psychos. You monsters. You creeps,” Donatello is shouting. He keeps
pulling away from his mother’s large arms and his chest.
“They can go. And they can promise: No more peeps,” Meg says.
Twisting from the grips of their mothers, the groms form a wild band, some holding
hands, some throwing dust into the sky, into the mouths and hair and eyes of Hollings and
Sonia. The groms roar: “No more peeps!” They clutch their jagged hunks of plastic gleaned
from the little windows of cave behind their school. They no longer thump these things against
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the bodies of Hollings and Sonia, so they clack them against the walls of the school, or they
swipe at the surrounding adults, their eyes roving, drunk on the violence they’ve just inflicted.
“No more peeps!” they squawk, their song high through the air. Eavan wants to reach for them,
but can’t. She is genuinely terrified of their fists, their bites, their kicks.
Meg says: “We should just let them leave. Let them just go.” Hollings and Sonia’s faces
contort with pain, but they wait, mute, for a long time.
Finally, Gloria pulls up in Rapture’s work truck, hops down. “Found the starter,” she
says. “In the cab.”
In the circle made by the motorcycles lights, Meg hoists Hollings and Sonia to their feet,
though their bodies are slumpy, dripping black-red onto the dust. Sonia is trying to keep her
head up, but one eye keeps rolling away from her face. Hollings’ mouth is slashed, an unnatural
grin in one direction.
Gloria helps Meg load the bodies into the truck. Sonia holds the wheel. She occupies the
driver’s seat, though it’s not clear she can drive. Hollings sits shotgun and slips low, so his face
is barely visible. Eavan expects them to speed off, but they wait. From behind Eavan, with her
muscly arms still latched around her shoulders, Ilya shouts: “We are watching. If you peep
again, you’re finished.” Sonia idles there for a minute before Meg whispers something to her
and Sonia finally nods and drives away.
The groms’ little bodies sprint beside the truck, knocking against the rickety walls,
smacking the sideboards, swinging at the studded tires. They are an amazing thing, with their
brash voices and their pumping fists. They clack their plastic against the truck’s flanks as Sonia
and Hollings roll by. But they don’t follow the truck past the gate. They go quiet when it crosses
the threshold, its brake lights dripping red against the desert.
From their wake, it is Parker who interrupts in his silent way. Against the wall of the
schoolhouse, he shines his fön. The picture reaches through all that dust and turn into a map. It
is a map of peeps, speckled across the property, like landmines to skirt around. The groms stop,
turn attentive.
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“Help us,” Parker says. “It will take all of us to turn them off, to destroy them.”
Iggy clears his throat. A job to do: he takes the west wall. Fresno, the watchtower. Gloria
and Rasta Bill and the mothers and workers, used to emergency procedures, quickly converse,
point, make teams and run off to remove the hardware, one peep by one peep by one peep.
Then Meg, to Eavan’s surprise, does not run away. She whistles, loud. The groms turn,
move toward her. Listen to her when she says, “We have to show you something. A room. The
room they’ve been using to watch.” Priscilla nods and takes Daizy and Estrellita by the hand
and guides all of them steadily back to the hacienda. Ilya and Eavan follow. Eavan wants to lean
against her so she does it. She leans in and lets Ilya help her walk, soothed by the clanking of
her buckles.
“Whoa,” Daizy says as they enter the hacienda. Even Eavan feels a strange exhilaration
entering Hollings and Sonia’s bedroom. They all gasp, touching the linen curtains, the papery
books. They all touch the walls as they push through the door and up the hidden stairs.
“Jesus fuck,” Miles says, as they all crowd into the little wooden room, like a hot lighting
booth at the back of a dark theatre. On the monitors is a whole topography they know, but they
don’t know. This feeling of looking down at their own lands peeped and broadcast and viewed,
up here, from above, the many views of Rapture splayed out all at once—it is all disorienting,
even for Eavan.
“Like babies under a monitor.”
“Look at me, I’m a science experiment,” Donatello says.
The room is warm, too warm for all of them to crowd in. The wall of monitors blares
into the dark. Their little faces are lit up. They don’t point, or speak. They get as close as they
can to the screens.
From behind them, almost pressed against the plywood wall, Eavan reaches for Meg’s
hand. Meg lets her grip her there, but she doesn’t move, so there is this very awkward holding
to each other with groms right in the middle.
Eavan says, “They can figure this out. But you—we’re going.”
385
“I can’t,” Meg says.
“Meg,” Eavan says, the word creaky and hard to say. “I have to go home, I had an
operation and I need to leave, I need to see a doctor, you have to—“
“I’m so sorry,” says Meg. “Are you going to be OK?”
“Please,” Eavan says. “Take me home.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says again. The sound of it makes Eavan feel sick, worse than she’s
felt all day, all night.
“What do you mean sorry?”
“I’m not leaving. You can take the van, you can keep it.”
“We don’t want your van,” Eavan says, almost begging her.
“What are you going back to? Evergreen? Vancouver? I can’t go back to that.”
“There are other schools,” Parker says. “We can erase our records. Start fresh.”
“I can’t leave them,” Meg says. The groms break their gaze with the screens and look at
her. “No one gets a life as special as this.”
It is a small broken spell. They all feel its import: that Eavan and Parker will leave, but
Meg will stay.
That is when Priscilla starts ripping the screens from the walls, hurling the first one
down the rickety stairs, to smash and crack on the floor below. Then little Daizy and Donatello
pull at the other monitors, wrenching them from the wall. There are sparks. A low buzzing that
stops with a pop. The groms are tired from their violence but with their stones and their small
feet, it only takes a minute of stomping and bashing to reduce the monitors to a pile of wrecked
plexi and wires.
After it is done, after the monitors are cracked open, the groms scatter to investigate the
interior of the hacienda, to raid the kitchen of its delicacies, to crawl into the massive beds
usually reserved for mothers and fathers.
Ilya squeezes Eavan’s hand and says, “You need a ride?”
“We’ve got Kye’s truck, I guess,” Parker says.
386
“Your van is at Medical Mall three,” Eavan says to Meg, trying not to infuse hurt into
her goodbye. “You can keep it, in case this doesn’t work out. I’ll be home, you can always come
back.”
“Hey,” Ilya says and Eavan turns to her. “Are you gonna be alright?”
Eavan sniffs. Nods.
“We’ll do your erasure, just say the word,” Ilya says she kisses Eavan on the side of the
head, right where her headache is pulsing. Then Ilya stomps down the stairs, kicking debris to
skitter across the floor.
Then it is just the three of them inside the booth with the detritus of switchboards and
chips and wires around their feet. Teacher Eavan and Teacher Meg and Teacher Parker. Eavan
tries to collect her last glances. Below are the sounds of groms yelping and yipping with the
discovery of new treats. The revving of engines driving away.
“I’m so sorry,” Meg says again. Eavan knows she means: for letting you go, for getting
you into this, for not getting out.
“I’m sorry too,” Eavan says. Meaning: You’re brave. Meaning: I love you.
Eavan swallows snot, holds her friend’s hands tightly to her hot cheeks. For the
millionth time, Eavan wishes there were a drug for this—to love so fully and so wretchedly. The
moment is full, warm. As they step outside, she can hear a real crow caw above the sound of
honking and revving and bellowing and it makes all the mothers and fathers and groms of
Rapture caw too. Then Meg starts, then Eavan, Parker. They laugh but still they are cawing
together, like the wild birds they are.
387
©:

There is not much left for the film crews to film. But there is one long shot, our favorite, of Eavan
walking away from the gates of Rapture—those headlights at her back, making a silhouette of
her thin frame, Meg and Parker flanking her, holding her up by the waist. They walk away like
that, arms around torsos, heads leaning on shoulders, speaking so just the other can hear.

The night outside is gusty, perfect.
Then, like everything, it starts to recede.

388
Around Rapture, the peeps are vanishing. In the schoolhouse, Miles bats a large piece of
monitor against a hanging globe, cracking the casing, shattering the camera inside. Rasta Bill
knocks down a peep over the terrace using the leg of a chair. One newly pregnant girl crushes a
rock into the peep hidden over the hammock, where she had kissed her boyfriend only the night
before. Gloria scours the groms’ wash-shack and jams a screwdriver into the peep above the
composting toilet. They even stop the film crew, in their black synthetic clothing with their
professional peeps with their floating blue lights. It shouldn’t surprise us when Fresno and Iggy
point their guns through the windows of the production van, forcibly taking our expensive
cameras, crushing them under rocks. It shouldn’t be so sad when our stream abruptly stops.

Here is what happens: we no longer see what is occurring in that stairwell. In that wooden room.
Over the Heart. Over the school. One by one, the lights go out. One by one, our eyes close.

For a few moments, we can see the groms lingering by the broken front gate. They all know
what is to come, why all the teachers, even Meg, have assembled there. Eavan reaches for
Daizy and hugs her narrow body and then reaches for Miles, and then Parker reaches for
Estrellita, for Vasquez, Donatello. Their little bodies vibrate from the adrenaline. They are still
sweating, but despite their frenzy, it is a long goodbye. This is not new to them. We have all said
good-bye to teachers before.

We can also see, how—without a last look or a hug or a kiss on the cheek, Eavan holds then
releases Meg’s hand. But Meg doesn’t hug her friends goodbye, she stands there, tearless, her
breath quick, swallowing too often. We are shocked. But we rejoice in our scrolling comments.
Stay! we type again and again. Don’t leave these groms! It is as if our Rapture groms hear us;
they crowd her and lean their faces into her body. And she stays. The groms wave wretched
389
heartbroken waves as Parker and Eavan walk away from them, away from the hacienda and the
Heart and the domes and the yurts and their friend.

The night gets darker, as things do. An unseen hand holding a stone crunches the peep above
the gate to Rapture, Arizona and we can no longer witness even this unhappy goodbye. All
across the property, the peeps flick off one after another after another.

We do our part. Methodically, we begin our erasure, penetrating databanks, burning URLs,
deadening links, sending virus-bots into the drives of anyone with a Rapture account. We
obliterate any trace of these groms at Rapture Arizona, any accounts or geopins or pics or vids
of Eavan or Parker or Meg. But we cannot help it; we are filled with sorrow, a feeling akin to
regret. This is exactly what we’ve wanted, what we fight for, how we all want to live—the past
deleted, allowing for nothing but present, but future. But still, our scrolling continues. After all,
we are still relegated to dorm rooms, test centers, the back seats of SUVs. We have any
number of programmed activities. We have games and vids and VRs and interactives and
stuffies that respond to voice commands. We have moto-taxis and people stackers and
vitabands and the very best föns our credit can buy. We have fizzers and beta-blockers and
caffeine kickstarters and cans of vodka NRG we can shotgun down our throats. We are not
starved—we have dessert and tea and mineral waters and our own smoothie pods which we
can eat and drink until we are bursting. Bowls and bowls. Seconds, thirds if we want.

But what of this emptiness? As they pile into the truck, before they traverse those battered
states and cross that border and return home—Eavan, newly erased, crushes her fön under
their tires. Parker turns his to silent, to untraceable, to invisible-to-the-peeping. Once they are
unpeeped, they are gone to us. One by one, this happens to everyone we have learned to love,
390
to save. On our monitors, they become nothing but split glass, then static. Now, there is nothing
but blankness where our people had been.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

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