It is the darkest hour of the night, and I am sorting my clothes into a compressible suitcase, in preparation for the official training at the UNCF headquarters. There is a science to packing. First, the coloreds have to be on the same scale. The shirts take a section at the right corner of the box, the gowns lay adjacent to it, and everything else stays down. I taught myself this. When anything goes awry, it literally feels like there is a scrawny rodent nibbling at my brain. It could drive me crazy. Xavier says this could be a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but Xavier says a lot of internet recycled facts, both true and untrue. I keep reprogramming her to sift the truth from the lies, but sometimes she is as stubborn as a mule.
In a few minutes, I have carefully packed everything up, except Xavier. She looks up at me with steel like eyes. Then, the black orbs begin to get infused with red hearts. That was her way of saying, 'I love you.'
"We don't have time for that." I snap at her, as I zip the suitcase up and hover above her, arms.
Xavier is about a foot tall. She is an AI that has been with me for as long as I can remember. When my foster parents had refused me from going to a public school, she was bought as my teacher. I remember the dismal way dad had dropped her on the table. That day, he was wearing brown trousers and a shirt whose first three buttons were left deliberately open. His mass of dark, curly chest hair peeked from the shirt. His breath reeked of a strong drink and he had an electronic pipe in his mouth.
"You need a teacher, eh, kid? We know you're smart and all, but we got you a really cool tutor." He laughed. His forehead was full of sweat to which some of his dirty brown hair was plastered.
"This stuff cost a lot of money. So you better be careful around it, kid."
Dad never failed to use an opportunity to remind me how expensive it was to keep me around. I was five years old then. I had never stepped outside the house, and I had no toys. All I requested for was books.
Father came closer to me and rubbed my back. "Be a good kid, eh?" I nodded. I thought him as disgusting with his yellowing teeth and dubious penchant for making money. Yet, when the social worker came to check on me which was every three weeks, I always had a smile for her, and I let her know I was fine. I am not quite sure why I did that. But I knew I was not living as other normal kids do. And this weirdness, which I actually loved, allowed me the liberty of being myself. I was naturally a recluse. And I knew that if I was transferred and given to normal parents, life would be extra difficult for me. At the age of five, I knew that.
Mother was a different case. She sometimes forced me to help out with chores. She was okay, but she always had a distanced look in her eyes. Regardless, she was a lovely woman. Despite, despite.
On Christmas mornings, we made food from scratch. Other days of the year, we usually ordered food from a robot. All you had to do was insert the materials through a slot. The robot had different components with different timers. There was a mixer, a section that shredded vegetables and cooked them for the minutes spent, another section for steaming, boiling, frying, etc. It never took time.
But on Christmas mornings, mother and I would put our hands to work. She would wash two florets of cauliflower. I would place spices on the turkey, let the scent of rosemary waft into my nose, and leave it to marinate. We would work together, in contemplative silence.
We never spoke much around the house. Father was the garrulous one. For mother and I, we were often shrouded in thick silence. I think she was always out of touch with reality, because at the study, she would click on the projected books on the wall, endlessly, for hours, without selecting any. She had a knack for drifting off in the middle of a conversation, and staring blankly at the speaker, lost in the bubble of her own thoughts. She was a desperately internal being.
When I was little, I would often go to her and tug at one of her long, halter neck cotton dresses she always wore around the house. I would cock my head and stare at her with a thoughtful expression. She would not even look at me.
"Why are you so sad, mother?" I would ask.
That would jerk her out of her reverie, and she would bestow a faltering smile on me. Afterwards, she would stuff a cookie or a book into my hands. She would never answer the question.
The few times she spoke, I would hold on to and gobble up each and every word. I would pick them in my palms and turn them over, studying them closely, bringing up new interpretations and contextual definitions. If she said, " You look so beautiful in that dress, Emma." I would think about it for days. I would dissect each word in the statement toll it ceased to make any sense. I would ask myself, do I not look beautiful wearing other dresses? Did she imply that I looked beautiful myself, or was it a compliment specifically preserved for the things I put on my body? It didn't make any sense to do that, but I was a child with a lot of free time who read too much, never socialized, and consequently thought too much.
So when father came with words barreling out of his mouth, I was sure to look up at the walking muteness that was my mother. Her eyes would tell me everything I needed to hear. It always did. I would miss them.
I try to stop reminiscing and I pick up Xavier.
"Shrink." I say to her.
"Shrinking." She replies in her automated, robotic voice.
She reduces in size till she becomes a thing that can fit into the palm of my hands. I sneak her into my pocket and put my headphones on.
I stand in front of the mirror to look at myself. My skin is pale because I never leave the house. My hair is brittle and scarce. The more I stare, the uglier I look so I pull my hair down from the pony tail it was in, and brush it to the side. It doesn't look particularly pretty, but I guess it is manageable. What I do love is my eyes, the intense blue of it. I manage a smile and pick up my suitcase. I am not the kind of girl that leaves impressions on people. If I were an animal, I think I would be a gecko, with a huge intellectual capacity for good measure. I choose the gecko because I am familiar with the way it slithers across walls and fits itself into nooks and crannies. I know the familiar comfort of disappearing in plain sight, of having nondescript features, of being seen without really being seen. However, I am not quite the gecko because of my eyes. Why? They literally shine and sear down everything in their path. It is like the rest of me is made of a boring cardboard paper, and my eyes are little jewels placed stark in the middle of it.
Our house is made of glass. That is, the doors and windows in particular are made of sleek solar panels. They are noiseless. An entire section of the walls of the living room is made of a huge glass window. It faces east, the side where the house faces the woods. Home is peculiar, the way it is built. Just like us, our living room appears as though it has turned its back on the town and the entirety of civilization.
My room is situated to the side of the living room. This section of the house faces the normal place. My room is sparse, minimalist even. The only piece of decoration, or what I consider to be decoration, is a disassembled pink bot that is carefully arranged on my dresser. The walls are painted a stark white, and there is no fragrance. Mother said the adoption agency had given her a long list of many things I was allergic to, but somehow, she and dad had lost it.
To mitigate any disaster, she started cutting everything down to the barest minimum. I avoided certain fabrics except cotton, and she slowly introduced them to me, watching keenly if I would react. She aggressively read food labels, kept harsh fragrances away from me, and avoided using many products on my skin. The finicky lifestyle, which is actually quite comforting, grew on me. I have not yet had an anaphylaxis or broken out in hives because of the taste of any foreign food. I wonder if the adoption agency was wrong sometimes. Perhaps, they mixed up the file with that of another poor kid who is going through the vigorous, painful process of finding out what they are allergic to.
I creep out of my room, silently rowing my lightweight luggage along, behind me. I have disconnected the AI that lights up the room and sticks her nosy business in everything. She works just like the old Alexa. But this new version handles virtually everything, including movement recognition. If she spots me creeping across the carpet by this time, she would ask why I was not asleep and revert to mom and dad about my late night habit. Dawn is already breaking, quickly.
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When I make it out of the house, the first thing I look at is the purple streaks across the sky. The ball of orange sun rushed steadily from the east, illuminating the sky with it's fiery redness, in a slow, almost indiscernible way.
Finally, I head out to the train station. It is squeaky clean as usual and weirdly crowded today. I see a woman leading a number of kids who look like they are on an excursion. They are dressed in stiff, clean uniforms peculiar to public schools. I wonder what they are going to see since we were going in the same direction. The woman says hello and beams at me, but I am too slow. Too slow to catch up. This is my first lesson in the fact that when greeted, there is only a small fraction of time, a little window for you to respond before it gets extra awkward. I was not used to social unspoken rules of thumb yet. I felt a sweltering heat pass through my body. The 'hello' I wanted to say in return lodges itself in my throat, tightly, like a clenched fist. It almost makes my eyes water and I consider running away, down to the safety of my room and the science lab in the basement back at home. That idea, I quickly discarded. Going back is not an option now.
The woman guides them through the tracks and when the time comes for us to get into the train, they do that in a single file. Before stepping off the platform, a little girl turns to look at me. Her face is cherub like, and her eyes are the most soulful pair I've ever seen. It shimmers and glistens like she is about to cry. Her hair is held up in a tight ponytail, stringently put together with a pink ribbon that matches the tiny band on her wrists. There is a girl beside her, a blonde shorter one whom she links arms with. I think about how cute this is, and wonder briefly, if I would have turned out differently if I had a childhood best friend, or attended a public school even if it was virtual. My mind wanders to the butterfly effect. Surely, I would have been different. All actions have consequences, and we are consequently the results of tiny actions heaped up like bricks over time. I think about the theory of multiverses that has transcended time. For every action, every path we light has taken, there are different versions of yourself living out what could have been and what could have not been. I blink. I am prone to getting posts in my own musings, just like mother.
I want to transfer the hello back to her, perhaps with a wave of mine, but she turns back to one of her classmates. They whisper something to each other and they both burst out in uncontrollable giggles.
"Girls, quiet." The woman says. They promptly shut up.
I wonder if they were laughing at me? I stare briefly at my plain choice of clothing. I am putting on jeans, a white Shirt, and a white shoe that envelops my feet. I smoothen down my shirt and divert my attention to my fingers. They are neatly filed, ending in an oval shape pattern where they meet my skin. I make a point of pruning my cuticles at least once a week. They are pink in some places, dissolving into red and white in some. I am staring too closely. I press on one and watch as the blood stops flowing. It turns a harried white and after, the red tumbles in with full force. All of these culminate in an effort to not glance at the kids. These things are difficult. What is an older person supposed to do when you catch youngsters making mockery of you? I want to continue watching what is going on around me, observing the children, their pleated uniform, their tiny eyes and pincher, mischievous noses, but I do not have a lot of time.
I am heading to the space exploration program which I was recruited for a few months earlier. I have only passed the first trial because even when we get there for the orientation and all other things to come, there would still be another selection process. I have heard that it will be tough and only the best of the best would move on to the final round. It is not going to be easy, but every inch of my body affirms that I am doing the right thing. I am meant to be here, on this train, away from home, wandering into the unknown.
Regardless, I feel a bout of anxiety rising in my chest, and this is why I have told Xavier to play the facts about the program into my headphones. Everything from the lost ship to the founding of the space program, I already know. But to have her play it over and over again, is to sear the information into my brain. I am not sick of it yet, no matter how many times it plays.
The UNCF was founded in the year 2050. Ever since then, it has made a lot of progress and achievements. However, there have been a few deadly miscalculations. Some projects have failed, life has been lost, and while they have done everything to save the world, with good results, there are still secrets lurking beneath their fa?ade, skeletons hiding the white of their bones in their cupboards...
I sigh and pull out Xavier. She has begun reading from one of these websites swarming with conspiracy theories and speculations.
"Xavier, I need you to read from the materials we compiled in my cloud please. Just that, nothing additional."
"Searching cloud." She replies through my headphones.
She begins to read from the approved material I had written out myself. It contains questions and answers, summarizations of bulky textbooks, compilation of the transcripts of multiple interview sessions with the founding fathers, available on the web. It contains their vision, mission, challenges, solutions, every single thing about them. I am deliberately avoiding the conspiracy websites. Of course, I am smart enough to know that an organization as big as that has secrets, mistakes, and failed projects that involve humans. But I do not want to look at them through that lens, and neither do I want to regard them through a rose colored lens that depicts them as saints. I want to be neutral, and when I am selected and absorbed into the system, I would then whip out my badge of morality, in a secure sphere. There is news everywhere. Most of their failed projects are known to everyone far and wide. The organization has shown what appears to be a great deal of transparency. But if there are still secrets, I can only wait before I find out.
I just need Xavier right now to reiterate those purely academic facts, mostly because I feel awkward about going to be around new kids. In one of her many diagnoses, Xavier has mentioned that I have social anxiety. I do not listen to her. But now I guess it might be true. The only reason I am playing this over and over again is to prove myself when I get there. To wear my smartness like a differentiating badge of honor from the rest of them. Isn't this a sign of insecurity? I think to myself. I do not mind so much.
Dad has mentioned once that my high IQ is the only thing I have which is of value. When he said that, it had stung me like a bunch of needles being jabbed into my skin. I was 11 then, seeking for his approval anytime I was tired of being so reclusive. Over the years, I grew to love it. Perhaps it came with the realization that most people were inherently stupid anyway. It was cool to be intellectual. And if that was the only thing you had, then it was fine because you get to be the one to build things, to see things and understand, to live beyond ephemeral pleasures. A part of me knew it was mostly just talk to make myself feel better, to appear intellectually superior because I did not engage in 'hedonistic' activities. But could anything possibly be wrong with that? I was not hurting anyone, only driven by my curiosity to explore science beyond the realms of the earth where we were languishing in its limits. Mother has a cousin in Merch, a city on Mars that has made the highest exploratory discoveries. I have never gone there because mom never bothers to visit.
In the train, we are all seated comfortably. It is self driving and the instructions for us to strap in comes from a huge speaker overhead. A robot traverses the isle, noting complaints from the passengers and taking instructions. I sink into the soft foam of the seat, strap in, and wait for the odorless antiseptic gas to be sprayed. After witnessing several pandemics following a mutant respiratory virus that attacked earth long ago, sanitary measures such as this have been put in place.
Sanitization in ,5,4 3,2...
The speaker warns.
I shut my eyes, hold my breath and grab my seat just like everyone else in the bus. It hits my body like the rush of a soft wind, and in one second, it is all over. Bacteria and certain viruses have been killed. We are relatively clean, save to travel somewhere else.
Everyone knows the drills like these. It happens everywhere, even in elevators sometimes. I cannot remember when it has not ever been like this. The first time I had gone to a park with my father, it turned out to also be our last. Father did not have the time for such frivolities, as he called it. We were told to pass through the sanitizing gas dispenser before being allowed into the park. Father disagreed because I had never been through it, and he feared something about it would trigger my allergies. The staff tried to convince dad that no one had ever been allergic to it, and it was well tested, but father was having none of it. Eventually, I passed through it and nothing happened. I would never forget the look of indignation the staff gave father. It was hilarious.
At the extreme end, my eyes rest on a boy who looks about my age. We seem to be the only people of the same age group seated in the bus. He looks handsome but I do not let my gaze linger on him too much. When he tries to look back at me, I turn my face away. I notice his blond curls, the white pearls of his teeth, the way his skin glistens. I can't tell what it is, but something about him interests me.
The woman beside me has begun giving the Kids well packaged boxes of sandwiches. The smell drifts up to my nose and I squirm uncomfortably in my seat. I think of pomegranates, cheese and hot sauce, carrots and cereal tossed slowly into a bowl of milk. I really can't help daydreaming about food when hungry. It is much worse now that I am being assaulted by the smell of this sandwich. My mouth waters. My stomach rumbles a little too loudly at the same time, and I hope the woman does not hear it. Not like it now matters because she is now offering the last of the boxes to me. In a brief moment, I consider declining but a sharp pain assaults my stomach. Back home, I mostly study, work, and I hardly get to eat unless I remember. It would be foolhardy of me to pass on the sandwich, so I take it and thank the woman.
Just then, the UNCF labelled bus made its way towards the compartment. The speaker makes an announcement for us applicants to gather our luggage as we would be the first to be dropped off. I get up, and so does the boy who I noticed earlier. I should have known that he was also heading to the space exploration program. We exchange glances, pick up our luggage and begin heading out. I am not sure, but a part of me feels like I am supposed to hate him.
