“We’re alive.”
“Are we?” Celia mused. Kasey pointed out they were breathing, to which Celia retorted, “Reprocessed air.” Kasey would have said clean. “Our veins, shot full of chemicals.” All nutrients were chemicals. “Minds, imprisoned.” Freed from the material world.
“When I look at the sea,” Celia continued, “I can almost hear it saying my name. It’s comforting.” Unsettling was the word that came to Kasey’s mind, and Celia laughed at her expression. “You’ll see what I mean.”
“I don’t think so,” said Kasey slowly. “This will not be a repeated activity.”
Celia only grinned.
The next day, to combat the heat, Celia bought ice pops from the observation deck concession stand. The ice pops made Kasey sticky and sweaty, the sucrose concentrate melting all over her hands and dyeing Celia’s mouth a gratuitous Red 40. That didn’t discourage her sister from eating three, or from coming back the next day and the next, until the inevitable happened:
Celia suggested they go to the sea itself.
The day was overcast, but clouds couldn’t dissuade Celia. Via duct, she led them down to a boat rental set up in the waters beneath the eco-city. The existence of such an establishment amazed Kasey. Who’d bother coming here when around-the-world cruises could be enjoyed from the comfort of a stasis pod? Kasey’s demographic, apparently. Puffy-faced teens high on organics, not one lash batting when Celia cut the line to rent a boat with HUBERT painted on its side.
Hubert came with the antiskins, goggle-masks, and P2C-approved toximeters required for all extracity activities—gear they could have skipped if they’d holo-ed, Kasey thought as she zipped up her antiskin, trying not to think about the number of bodies that’d inhabited it before hers. She secured the goggle-mask over her face. It was huge, rivaling the goggles she’d worn back when she still had chem lab. Celia giggled, her own goggle-mask dangling around her neck.
The boat rental owner looked like she wanted to be here as much as Kasey. “Map’s under the stern,” she said when Celia asked for recommended attractions, before shouting, “Hey! Two to a boat!” to five teens trying to fit into one.
“All aboard,” said Celia, hopping into Hubert while Kasey fished through a jumble of biodegradable floats in the compartment under the stern to retrieve the map. It was laminated in some contraband plasti-material, and unfolded to a whole lot of gridded blue, the only bit of land, labeled 660, a speck about twenty kilometers out northwest. “Where to?”
“Nowhere,” said Kasey, holding open the map.
“Nowhere it is,” said Celia. Kasey sighed. But later, she revised her opinion: sailing wasn’t half bad. It was quiet. Peaceful. Celia cut the motor when they reached a calm patch of sea, and Kasey was just starting to relax when her sister began peeling off her antiskin.
“What are you doing?” Alarmed, Kasey watched as Celia stripped down to her clothes, then to the bathing suit underneath.
“Swimming, silly.”
“We still need to get back.” Leaving was easy; returning to the eco-cities was harder. They’d have to drop their antiskins into the appropriate hazard chutes and be decontaminated themselves, and if, for whatever reason, they didn’t gain clearance …
“We could face eviction,” Kasey finished, the word acrid in her mouth.
Celia’s gaze deepened. “You’re safe with me, Kay.”
“Both of us,” Kasey said. Misspoke. Celia never feared for herself and almost immediately, the seriousness evaporated from her sister’s eyes. She leaned in and pinched Kasey’s nose.
“With our ranks? We’re invincible.”
Kasey was silent. Meridian would’ve called Celia out for her entitlement. But wasn’t that what rank was? A measure of what people were entitled to redeem after banking in good planetary stewardship? They were already being taxed for other people’s mistakes, restricted to living in “ecities,” as Celia called them, because others had made the outside territories unsafe. What was wrong with reaping a perk or two?
Kasey wasn’t sure. Right or wrong—contrary to what people wanted to believe—was often subjective. Self-interested. Only numbers didn’t lie, and numbers were what Kasey turned to as she stuck a P2C-issued toximeter into the seawater.
The contamination readings came in: safe for skin contact within a 1km radius.
“See?” said Celia, then jumped in before Kasey could get a word in edgewise. “The water’s great! Come on.”