Kay stands on the porch.
The dream is more vivid than usual. It’s like my brain knows I need the pick-me-up, and I curse when I’m jerked out of it—by what, I’m not sure, until lightning blinds the room. Thunder follows, rattling the house. Shadows, as if shaken loose, unfurl back over the walls.
I sit up in the darkness and wipe the drool off my chin. Can’t sleep anymore—can’t risk sleepwalking out into a storm. It’s pummeling the roof and pouring down outside when I look. The sea seethes, swollen and reaching for us. But we won’t be touched. I send my grateful regards to whoever designed M.M.’s house as thunder booms and my hand trembles, planted on the window. I lift it, palm chilled, and rub at my handprint with a sweater sleeve.
Freeze.
Bringing my nose to the glass, I squint through the smudge, and recoil at the next flash of lightning—not because of it, but because of what I’ve seen. It’s still there, even when the beach plunges back to black.
A body on the sand.
6
SOMETIMES KASEY FELT LIKE A stranger in her own skin. Holoing as much as she did could do that to a person. The full spectrum of bodily discomforts was available to all holographs. Kasey simply opted out. She derived no pleasure from getting pins and needles in her feet, or desiccating her eyes under the glare of conference room lighting, an effect she couldn’t escape even after toggling on the tear production setting in her biomonitor.
At least her mind was free to wander out of its flesh prison. Except today, it’d caged itself within an endless thought loop, consisting of two words:
INTRAFACE LOCATED
The signal had lasted for only a second before it was lost. The hope-induced high was just as fleeting. The geolocation coordinates corresponded with a residential unit. Private domain. Breaking in—virtually or physically—was a felony and one was plenty for Kasey. Besides, what were the chances of Celia sneaking back in under the nose of every eco-city cambot? Minuscule. Possible, yes, but improbable that the signal had come from Celia’s Intraface. More probable （and thereby possible） that a hacker or spambot was trying to prank Kasey. Or her search program had sent back a false positive. That was also possible. Probable?
Not if this was Kasey’s own program, coded by her own two hands.
But it wasn’t. She wasn’t allowed to code—or to touch anything related to science.
These were the P2C restrictions on her, monitored as strictly as her mood levels.
“And that’s a wrap.” An earsplitting clap returned Kasey to her body, half-asleep in its chair. She blinked and looked up at the woman at the head of the oval table.
Ekaterina Trukhin. Specifically, her holograph, semi-transparent to Kasey; it was how her Intraface delineated those in holo when she herself was in the physical mode.
Ekaterina at 50% opacity was no less of a commanding presence, though, and her heels clicked against the floor as she made her rounds, the room configured to react to virtual stimuli. “It’s six p.m.,” she said to the seated mix of solid and transparent people, faces lit by the screens floating before them. “You know what that means.” She stopped beside Kasey and bore her weightless palms against the tabletop. “Scat.”
The holographs evaporated—screens followed by people. The rest of them pushed in chairs and gathered their briefcases. Everyone would be back tomorrow. The Planetary Protection Committee spurned inefficiency, and P2C officers wore too many hats to take weekends off. They ran the government within the eco-cities and served as their delegates outside of them. They were stewards of the planet above all, and in response to the mounting environmental crises （as well as pressure from the Worldwide Union, which oversaw both territory and eco-city polities）， P2C officers had recently taken on one more role: as a judging committee for doomsday solutions. Thousands of submissions had flooded in from around the globe, now awaiting review. It was exactly the kind of grunt work Kasey didn’t mind being assigned to, requiring limited effort and investment. Policy wasn’t her passion. She wasn’t like senior officer Barry Tran, who took personal offense at every unworkable solution that crossed his path.
“Do they even teach reading comprehension in schools anymore?” he ranted, and Kasey remembered a time when Barry would’ve looked to her, a sixteen-year-old who spent her weekends at P2C headquarters, as the expert on all matters adolescent.
Thankfully, Barry knew better now and addressed his grievances to anyone willing to listen, which, more often than not, still made Kasey his audience of one.