Chapter Three

Chapter Three

            “You’re up early for a Saturday,” said Anne. She and Ken were seated across from each other at the kitchen table with a slew of papers taking up all the available surface between them. The first rays of sunlight were slanting in through the windows casting bright bars around the room.

            “I guess,” answered Makoto. He went straight to the fridge and stuck his head inside, more out of a desire for privacy than hunger. His eyes felt grainy and a nasty tasted coated the inside of his mouth, retribution for skipping the previous night’s ablutions.

            “I found more eggs in the chicken coop this morning; I could fry a few of them for you.”

            “I’m fine.”

            “Or how about scrambled? Your father likes them on toast with cheese in a sandwich, you could try that.”

            “I’m not really hungry.” Makoto grabbed the pitcher of drinking water out of the fridge and brought it to the stove to heat for coco. Anne’s disapproval when she saw him grab the container of brown powder was like a heated spotlight focused on his back.

            “That’s not nutrition. That stuff has no nutritional value at all.”

            He made it anyway and brought the mug to the table, sitting down so his back was to the sunshine. The papers spread between his parents were all maps. He recognized the surveyor’s map that showed their property line. There were also topographical maps that he couldn’t interpret and an aerial photograph marked with red lines. His father sat brooding over them and drinking his morning coffee with an unaccustomed grimace.

            “You should eat the eggs, get them before your sisters wake up,” said Ken. Makoto knew that wasn’t likely to happen any time before noon and said nothing.

            “See, our line runs right along the ridge here. We don’t own the entire side of mountain,” Ken said to Anne.

            “I could have sworn we did,” said Anne leaning over one of the maps. “I distinctly remember that from when we bought the property.”

            Ken shook his head. “No, I walked up there when we set the bounds.”

            “That’s a shame.” Anne rose to her feet and gathered up the eggs from the counter by the sink. She began cracking them into a bowl and Makoto knew he be eating breakfast whether he wanted to or not.

            “Why do you have all these maps out?” asked Makoto because the question was staring him in the face and not because he felt he wanted the answer any more than he did the eggs.

            “Oh, there are plans to build some kind of industrial lab up on top of the mountain and they want to run the power and fuel lines up our side because there’s less of a slope,” answered Ken.

            “Don’t let them,” said Makoto feeling an unpleasant kick as his heart started to beat faster. A tired, rueful smile that Makoto knew well crossed Ken’s face.

            “According to their lawyers they don’t need my permission since the project is to the public’s benefit.”

            “Is it?”

            Ken snorted. “Of course not.”

            “It’s a privately owned company. Somebody’s wallet is benefitting somewhere but it won’t be anyone who lives around here,” said Anne. She managed to keep her voice neutral but she was beating the egg yolks with excessive force. “They want to clear the top of the mountain. Those trees won’t grow back, not at that altitude. They’re going to have mudslides. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

            “I’m more concerned about the blasting. That could disrupt our water supply,” said Ken.

            “Is there anything you can do?” asked Makoto. “Don’t they have to hold a public hearing or something?”

            “Oh we’ll be there,” said Ken. “We’ll get it voted down too. Then they’ll find some reason why the vote was invalid and there’ll be another and another until they get the result they want. That’s how the budget passes too.”

            “Or the council will just outright ignore the vote like they did last time.”

            “Depends on who’s been talking to whom.”

            The conversation lapsed as Anne hunted through the cupboards for a frying that would suit her. Makoto hoped it was over but knew them better than that. Once his parents were on to a subject they never let it go and both of them loved to talk. In a way, they embodied the worst aspects of Chen and Marielle combined. Sure enough, Anne picked right back up as soon as she was standing over the stove.

            “Doesn’t it just figure that you can’t get approval for a couple of solar panels-”

            “On my own house,” Ken broke in.

            “Exactly, but they can put a line of towers across someone else’s property. Do you want toast honey?”

            “Sure,” muttered Makoto.

            “That’s the wonder of government for you, our tax dollars at work,” said Ken.

            “Those labs are tax exempt too.”

            “And they won’t tell you what they’re doing up there that’s supposed to benefit the public good.”

            “Or what they’ll be releasing into the environment this time, right on top of our watershed. Remember what happened in-”

            Makoto got up and went to make toast for himself and his parents, focusing on the task so he wouldn’t have to listen to any of Anne’s tales of doom and gloom. It seemed to him that she remembered every disaster, radiation leak, contamination breach, escaped genetically modified species and ill planned government policy that had come about in her lifetime. And just the act of driving into town for a night out could remind her of one of these events and then she would recount it for all of them while they were attempting to eat their meals or trying to keep ice cream from spilling onto the back seat of the car. He was glad they were going to do something about the construction but he couldn’t see why they had to keep dwelling on it.

            Anne thanked him for making the toast and put the plates on the table. Having food actually in front of him woke Makoto’s stomach from its early morning doze making him feel suddenly ravenous. He cleaned his plate before either parent was half through theirs and then occupied himself drinking coco and eating his mother’s second piece of toast.

            “We have to go into town today, want to ride along?” asked Ken. He tried to make it sound like he was offering a trip to an amusement park instead of a morning at the hardware store possibly followed by lunch. Ken threw Makoto a hopeful little glance and accompanying smile that almost made him say yes but he was struck by an idea that made a morning alone seem very appealing.

            “No thanks,” he answered.

            “You could always stack wood if you get bored,” said Anne. “There’s plenty of it.”

            “Uh huh, maybe I will.”

            “I’m sure.”

            Makoto helped clean up the kitchen then watched the tail lights of his parents’ truck disappear down the drive. As soon as they were out of sight, he made his way to Chen’s room. She was still asleep, dressed in the clothes she’d worn the night before with her head shoved beneath the pillow. He didn’t know for sure when she’d gone to bed but he guessed it hadn’t been until the early hours of the morning. She didn’t even stir when he began digging around under the desk.

            The process of moving the disc driver from Chen’s room to the living room ended up taking him much longer than expected. The downstairs screen was newer than Lyn’s old one and he’d hardly ever used it. He kept pounding up the stairs for new cords and when, finally, he’d hooked everything up to what he hoped were the proper plugs the screen refused to acknowledge the existence of the disc driver. All it would do was flash an error message too quick for him to read. Beginning to be angry, he stomped off to try yet another cord on the off change that the connection itself was the problem. He began pulling everything out the desk drawers.

            “Makoto, what are you doing?” asked Chen. He jumped and flashed her a guilty look, wondering how long she’d been awake.

            “I’m trying to play that game from last night downstairs.”

            “Can’t get it hooked up?”

            “No, I’ve got everything plugged in but I can’t get it to work. The screen says it can’t read the application or something.”

            “Hang on.” Chen stretched and rolled out of bed, wincing when her feet touched the ground and bending over like an old woman.

            “You don’t have to.”

            She waved him off. “Meet you downstairs in a minute, I got to pee.”

            He took the hint and vacated her bedroom. Mixed feelings of guilt and relief flooded through him making him aware of how frustrated and worried he’d been. Chen turned up wearing shorts and a loose T-shirt and looking even less prepared to face the day than she had sleeping in her dirty clothes. Makoto sat in the armchair and watched as she fiddled with cords and menus. Normally he’d have peppered her with questions but he felt anxious about the outcome like someone waiting a hospital for an update on the health of a patient.

            “Isn’t this Marielle’s game?” was the only question Chen asked.

            “Yeah, well…”

            “Ha. It’s only fair; she uses your stuff all the time.”

            “Your stuff too.”

            He watched as Chen logged onto the network under his user profile. For the first time, he felt bothered by the way none of them had individual passwords. Any of his siblings, or his parents, could access his account with the click of a button. He’d never worried about his parents going through his files simply because he’d never had anything he wanted to hide before.

            “Everyone uses my stuff,” said Chen. She wasn’t reproachful, just stating a fact they both knew to be true. Makoto wondered if she worried about hiding things. She knew the most about computers and did all the net stuff for their parents. He guessed she had ways of keeping anything she wanted to private.

            “Well this is annoying,” said Chen in response to an error message that popped onto the screen when she tried to play Oneiros.

            “Is the disc still not working?”

            “It’s got a security code that only lets you play on the computer you registered it from.”

            “But we moved everything down here.”

            “You moved the driver down here, the screen has its own internal computer and the game won’t work on it. That’s cheap. They want you to pay for it again if anything breaks. This is why I quit buying games; it’s all a rip off.”

            “So if the screen upstairs breaks…”

            “You’ll be out of luck. Where’d Jaida get this game?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “She ought to boycott.” Chen tossed the controller onto the chair. “Now we’ve got to lug everything back upstairs.”

            She dropped to her knees and began pulling cords and gathering them up. After a few moments, Makoto roused himself enough to turn off the screen and help her carry things. He followed her upstairs. The way he was all ready scheming about how to finagle the use of Chen’s screen made him feel guilty, she’d been so quick to help him, but he couldn’t stop.

            “You know, I’ve got that stupid essay to finish. I was going to type it up on the laptop in the kitchen, you can play up here then if you still want to,” said Chen. She’d belly crawled under the desk to begin reattaching the disc driver and so missed the look of stunned relief on Makoto’s face though perhaps she heard it in his voice.

            “Really?”

            “Sure.”

            She rolled onto her back and gave him one of her slightly frowning contemplative looks. Makoto tried to blank his face though he could feel the blood in his cheeks and thought he was probably flushed.

            “I’m going to do some stuff first but I’ll start work by lunch.”

            “Stuff” turned out to be checking on a net multiplayer game called Alteira. It seemed to consist of about five minutes of actual play and then hours of sorting through menus and typing in commands. Makoto noted that Chen handled the keyboard situation by sitting cross legged on her bed with the keyboard propped beside her on some books. No wonder she was going to write her paper on a laptop. He hung around watching the painstaking construction of an aqueduct to service her flying city and then left when she started chatting with some other plays. He went and stacked wood.

            Chen came out and called him around 2 in the afternoon. They were all ready losing the sun behind the mountains. Marielle was still in bed. Makoto dropped the piece of wood he was holding and hurried inside. His body had gone numb even with the exertion and the heat inside caused painful prickles up and down his arms as he pulled off his coat and kicked his boots into the corner.

            “I’m making sandwiches,” said Chen.

            “Not hungry,” replied Makoto, meaning it. He actually felt a little sick. He all but ran upstairs before she could try to force anything on him.

            Chen had left everything running. Makoto switched to his user profile, sparing a moment to be grateful that Marielle had been using his account when she’d installed Oneiros so he didn’t have to sign on as his sister every time he wanted to play his own game. While it was loading, he went up to their room to grab the book, taking comically huge giant steps on tip-toe to avoid disturbing Marielle. Things were quiet on her side of the curtain, he had no idea whether she was wake or not. Just in case, he crept down the stairs and dodged back into the other room. Chen’s keyboard was half buried under the blankets on her bed. He retrieved it and positioned himself on the couch with the book to one side, the keyboard to the other, and the controller clutched in his hands.

            The game screen came up showing the Sim sitting in the hall where they had left him. They hadn’t made it to a designated shelter yet. Marielle had panicked and ditched him right outside the equipment room. How many days had they been at this? Between the power outages and the party Makoto couldn’t even remember. They had to be pushing some kind of limit; the poor thing had mostly been left alone to sit since they’d gotten him.

            Remembering something from the book, Makoto went into the settings and opened the stats page. It was longer and more complicated than any status page in a game had any right to be. The only bits Makoto felt confident he understood were the pulse rate and temperature. With some fiddling, he was able to post the information in a small box into the upper left hand corner of the screen. It wasn’t as good as a health bar but it was at least some indication of how things were going.

            Using the controller this time, he flipped over to the inventory and commanded Tyr to drink. The Sim stood and sucked down half a bottle of water in one long swallow. Was that how much water he drank on command or was he thirsty wondered Makoto, trying not to feel overwhelmed and failing.

            It’s just a game, it’s meant to be played, relax and play it, he ordered himself. He took a deep breath, noting that his fingers hurt from holding onto the controller and were slimy with sweat. He flexed them and then resumed his position. This is a game and games are fun, he continued. There is no reason to be this nervous.

            He wandered around the dark warren of halls passing what he thought were other starting rooms. If this was supposed to be a race to the top of the tower, he thought, then Tyr had to be dead last by now.

            He was lost before he realized what had happened, completely disoriented by all the right angle turns and the view that changed every few steps. Eventually, he noticed that he was circling the equipment room which was now sealed tight. After first backtracking to what he suspected was their own start chamber, he found the hallway they’d been in the night before. He was back where he’d started after an hour of aimless ambling but he at least felt like he had his bearings now. The place wasn’t actually very big and the maze-like quality was an illusion caused by the camera and the way everything looked the same.

            Finally, he made sure Tyr’s back was to the equipment room and walked him straight down the hallway past the double view change that had turned him around the first time. If he’d been playing a normal game, he would have quit at this point and thrown the disc away in frustration. Instead he found the elevator, a shining cylinder of light at the end of those dark tunnels.

            The elevator was made of some translucent material; Makoto thought it was glass but there was no way to know. The door parted as soon as the Sim approached casting a yellow glow over him. The brightness was a welcome change from the half-lit corridors. He steered Tyr inside. The cylinder slid closed again blocking his view of the Sim. The screen went black and the white loading circle appeared.

            Makoto frowned and leaned against the armrest of the couch, resting his cheek against his fist as he waited. The circle continued its annoying fade-in and fade-out spin for an interminable length of time. He couldn’t imagine what the game had to load in the first place; it wasn’t like it had to generate the next environment or something. He still didn’t understand why someone would go to the trouble of building a giant tower for a bunch of artificial humanoids to run around in but he’d assumed not having to stop and wait for the program to buffer every time a player opened a door was supposed to be one of the advantages.

            The load sign vanished and Makoto spent an uncomfortable second staring at a blank screen, then he was once again looking at Tyr’s back but better lit than he’d ever seen it before. The drab green shirt Marielle had picked was almost vivid in the white light of the elevator. Makoto sat up as the door rotated open again for them. He pressed the analog stick and Tyr stepped out into an entirely different world.