Cessini rattled the strength of the hallway’s metal studs, checked their cut holes where lines of conduit would be sewn. Then he slipped sideways through the framing into the room. Daniel circled the seven-foot cabinet and trailed his hand over the crinkly wrap. Yellow stickers pasted on each side had a mini-ball meter that recorded the last, greatest angle of tilt. Too much lean and the mini-balls would pour into a red zone. But with proper delivery, all the mini-balls would stay unmoved in their upright well. Daniel checked around. All four sides’ upright wells were full. He let out a breath. Cessini smiled. It was all going to be okay.
Cessini and Meg had paced the whole of the room in a matter of steps. It would all have to be filled with more equipment. There would be no place for a new working table. Playing was over. This was Daniel’s new life.
“You can both come here after school if you want,” Daniel said. “I might like the company and extra hands while I work. A new life starts here. Smaller, yes. But better.”
Cessini pulled at a separation between the layers of shrink wrap for a peek and a poke.
“Imagine the potential in this box,” Daniel said, “and in us who traveled across this world.” An anteroom was roughly framed in behind the end of the lab. “And that room there, that will be my office, my studio.”
“And up there would be a good place for a camera,” Cessini said. He liked what he saw. He measured around the room, counting off heel to toe for each of the two rows of eight cabinets. “I think we can make this work.”
“We’ll get it all back,” Daniel said. “It’s going to be perfect. We’ll get Packet back. Your body, my code. All of it, right here. Packet born right here on a pallet.”
“Excellent. When can we start?” Cessini asked.
“I’ll get it all hooked up and installed. You two come right here after school. And, hey, since we’re in an actual school this time, no one can complain that you’re here.”
“This is going to work out great. And you know what else?” Cessini asked.
“What?” Meg asked.
“If a whole module of the data center back home fits into this room today,” Cessini said, “then tomorrow we’ll be able to fit everything from here into a tablet.”
“How about a blood cell?” Daniel asked as he tore free the tape at the end of the shrink wrap. “We won’t use chips side-by-side.” He circled faster to unwind. “We’ll stack them in 3D. No, forget stacking them. We’ll pour chips in droplets of nano-particle-infused liquid.”
“We won’t even need wires,” Cessini said. He yanked down on the folds of the wrap and followed Daniel around. He stomped through the swelling pile of wrap on the floor. The top of the cabinet became bare, unprotected.
“Air-cooled, no liquid, we’ll design the room just for you,” Daniel said as he waited for a chuckle to burst, but Cessini couldn’t get there, not yet. Meg elbowed him.
Cessini looked around on the floor. Splinters of the pallet’s wood were buried under the wrap. More were kicked into the crease between the wall’s stud plate and the floor. Dust filled the recesses of the studs.
“It doesn’t pay what we’re used to,” Daniel said, “but it’ll do.”
“What are we used to?” Cessini asked.
“Lap of luxury. I thought you knew?” A wad of tape from the shrink wrap caught Daniel’s pant leg as he came forward. He bent down to un-tack it.
“Well, a new life definitely starts here,” Meg said with a grin.
Daniel stopped in mid-pull. He looked around closer at the floor, then back up at the bare cabinet. “You know, you were right.”
“About what?” Cessini asked.
“The mainframe will mind. A lot. We’ve got to wrap it all back up. Get it out of here.”
“Wait, why?” Meg asked.
“These kids shouldn’t have brought it up here to begin with during all this construction,” Daniel said. “The banging and dust alone could kill it. I guess there’s a bit of incompetence in us all.”
“Everyone’s human. But you’re right. I saw the dust, too,” Cessini said.
Daniel untwisted the shrink wrap that bubbled and knotted at his feet. “Come on, help me wrap it back up.”
“I knew coming here so early in the morning was a bad idea,” Meg said. “I’m going to go wait outside.”
“I’ll be right there,” Cessini said as she stepped out through the frame of the wall.
By the time he was ready to leave, the student artist in the foyer was also gone from her ladder. Her pallet of tools waited at the foot of her canvas and all of her developing spirals. The morning’s sun had risen farther and become stronger over the eastern bay.
Daniel tapped the front button on a vending machine for a coffee. Meg sat in a hard, scooped chair at a white, mushroom-stem table to wait. She leaned over to rest her head on her outstretched arm. Another chair was still turned upside down on the table’s top, left over from the night.
Cessini pulled the overturned chair toward the edge. It was heavier than it looked. As he turned it over, he dropped it before clearing the table’s edge. One leg struck hard as Meg snapped away from under its fall.
“Hey!” she said as it crashed.
“Sorry,” he said, jumping back. She returned to her leaned-over rest and noticed something on the table’s new surface. It was a thin scratch. Cessini looked. The leg of the chair had a foot without a disk and its burr was as sharp as a nail.
“Tsk,” she said, “now look at what you did. You scratched it.” The fingernail of her thumb fit into its first tiny rub. “I bet this is going to be here a really long time.”
“Oops, my fault,” Cessini said as he righted the chair at her table.
Daniel pulled up a third. “So, Robin said she wants to take you two out for some shopping. Get you some new clothes for school. An arcade, ‘Cat and the Fiddle,’ or something like that. Start you off right.”
“Finally,” Meg said. She perked up.
“Do I have to?” Cessini asked.
“Come on, new clothes once a year whether you need ’em or not,” Meg said as she sprang up from her seat. She pulled back her hair but it was too short to stay. It fell back to bangs. “So, come on, what are we waiting for? Slackers! Let’s go.”
Cessini rested his forehead down onto the table. He balked. “Nothing’s even open yet. It can’t be. Besides, there’s no way I’m going to a place where cows jump over a moon.”
“Ugh,” she said. “Can’t you at least try to fit in somehow? Maybe make one friend, if that’s even possible.”
“And we’ve got to get something nice for Robin,” Daniel said. “We’ve got to do at least one thing normal for a change.”
Cessini set his chin on the table. He checked the depth of the scratch with his fingernail.
“Come on, get up,” she said. “If you want to build a spaceship, you first have to jump over the moon.”
“What does that even mean?” he asked.
“I have no idea. Are you coming or what?”
“One friend?”
“One,” she said.
“Okay, fine. Let’s go.” He squinted at the sun that had moved still higher in the eastern foyer window to light the room. Normal sounded good for a change. And for what it was worth, it was the earth that still moved around the sun, and fixing that would take more than a simple change of clothes.
THIRTEEN
LOOKOUTS AND LEECHES
T
HERE WAS NOTHING normal about being the new kid on a Monday, the thirteenth of October, when three school terms out of four had already passed. Cessini entered the hallway on the first day back from everyone else’s break wearing a new set of spring clothes that were shopped for and bought normally at Hobart’s downtown Cat and Fiddle Arcade.
For their foreshortened stay on the island, he could have chosen a public school in the backyard of Daniel’s university campus, but that single-sex solution would have left Meg miles away. So instead, they came to this school together, and he said goodbye to her at the end of the hallway under its blue, red, and white-crested emblem. He bumbled away through the crowd. There wasn’t a single familiar face among the 752 enrolled students, but one thought was certain—his was the least familiar face of them all.
He arrived at yet another new door at the light of midday. The teacher’s table at the head of the science classroom was black, and had a sink at its center. Three columns and two rows of student tables ran perpendicular to the teacher’s. The first column was against the west wall of ribbon windows. Four students could sit at each table, two on either long side, and have a fair view to the front of the room. It wasn’t data center precise to the tile square, but in all, twenty-four students could fit comfortably in the room. There were twenty-two so far.
He ignored the stares, stepped through the frame of the door, and headed over for a rear seat by the windows. If not for the high stool that was empty behind him, he would have been in the southwestern-most corner of the room.
The windows were definitely a plus. He could see down from the hilltop of Rose Bay to the eastern shore of the River Derwent. Tree-lined auto lanes converged upon the Tasman Bridge, crossed to the Royal Botanical Gardens, and re-spread into the city. The sun to the far right of the school was due north in the sky, and the shadows he saw without a view of the sun begged for a further look south along the bay. The roads over on the other side of the river became lost in the city of Hobart. They broke again somewhere through the palm of the city and found their way up to Mount Wellington beyond.
He tried, and then dared again to ignore the mild kicks from behind that rattled the long leg of his stool. He ground his teeth. Ignoring was best. Surely the teacher would be in soon to begin the delayed class. If he spun, his new bully would win, so he turned and searched for the sight of a road that would lead him back home. The kicking boy, he could only assume, must have entered the classroom door and slipped along the first column of tables. He would have hooked right at the back wall, passed his complicit friends, maybe even high-fived them along the way, and then taken the only seat left directly behind him in the actual southwestern-most corner of the room.
The smart screen at the front was a better distraction to the kicks. An animated graphic on the screen showed a red blood cell enlarged to enormous size for classroom display. The natural structures of the blood cell then morphed into a diagram of honeycombed chambers, rotors, pumps, and cams. The organic blood cell had become a mechanical, spherical pod. The pod was relabeled as a “Respirocyte.”
The red respirocyte pod then shrank back to microscopically small and millions of others just like it rushed in to fill the veins of a body—a human’s. A human, who much to Cessini’s dismay sat lounged and content in a chair at the bottom of a cylindrical water tank, which was tall by the person’s height plus another half. The respirocytes released graphically enlarged oxygen bubbles that swirled around the submerged swimmer’s calm lungs, escaped his soothed bare skin, and rose to the surface. A fantasy, Cessini thought, for his skin could never tolerate such a fiction of medical science.
In the far right rear corner of the room, two boys were locked in a quiet arm wrestle with little surrounding cheer. Then one quick thrust and it was over. The victor’s arms were tight in his long sleeves, but mostly throughout his forearms. The boy who lost wore a blue, red, and white-striped jersey of the school’s athletic team. Its single horizontal band of blue over red was striped across his chest.
Then the most demanding kick bumped Cessini clear from his stool.
“Do you wear seatbelts in America?” the kicking boy asked.
Cessini turned and saw him. It was the oddest looking boy he had ever seen. He immediately averted his eyes for a return to the front. Then the kicks continued.
“Yes, we do,” Cessini said without turning. “And we drive on the right side of the road.”
“Me mum drives on the right side of the road, too,” the boy said.
Cessini swiveled a quarter turn and sneaked another look. He knew well enough not to judge the boy by the skin he was in, but this boy didn’t seem to care enough to notice even if he did. He turned completely around. “You actually drive on the left side,” Cessini said.
The boy had a facial disk like an owl’s that flattened to inset orange eyes. He had a pug nose between the glare of his eyes and perfect dimples over his hanging jowls. He lifted his eyes for an inviting grin and leaned forward with a hand held out to shake. He tilted his head as he spoke, “They call me Spud,” he said.
“I don’t mean right versus wrong side of the road,” Cessini said. “Just left side, right?”
“Yeah. Left side,” Spud said as he tipped up and dragged his stool closer. “Are there flies in America?” he asked, diving right in.
“Why wouldn’t there be?”
“Don’t know,” Spud said. “Only movies I’ve seen of America, flies ain’t in ’em. The only flies I see are here.”
“We have flies, too.”
“Where are you from?”
“Minneapolis, outside of it.”
“Good to know. I’m from Alice Springs. But only when I was little. Town right in the middle. Lots of dead hoppin’ roos. Plenty of flies there, too. You can’t even count ’em. Now I live here in Tas with me dad.”
“Minneapolis is kind of in the middle, too,” Cessini said. The teacher was still nowhere in sight.
“Great. Then we’ll be partners,” Spud said. “Me and some mates are going to the park this weekend. We’re in the bushwalking club. You want to come?”
A loud rap and entry at the door snapped everyone front. A consummate science teacher entered in white lab coat. He carried a small crate and an eager guest speaker followed him in for the start of the fourth school term.
“You coming?” Spud kicked again. Cessini didn’t turn.
The guest speaker was Gerald Aiden. Unmistakable. The crude man’s stiff-legged limp was intact, his weathered skin tanned. The wrinkles under his eyes still folded.
“So, you coming?” Spud asked again with a lean. “We got us the greatest club ever.”
Cessini hushed him with a single turn. “Okay, now stop it.”
Spud’s eyebrows raised and pulled up a grand, proud smile. “All right then, it’s a deal,” Spud said. He shifted back for a taller perch on his stool, and pointed his thumb back into his chest for a prouder parade.