Chapter 1

Christina Olmos held her red-tinted hands toward her father. "It's hard to believe, hard to imagine a world before things like this." She rubbed her hands together as if trying to remove the red stain, knowing all too well that the pigment was bound at a cellular level, impossible to remove as long as the skin remained on her hands.

"It was quite a world," said Xavier Olmos, as he slowly nodded. "In the time before the Rings."

Christina managed a smile.

In the time before the Rings.

That was a mythical world, a magical place, a realm of infinite possibilities and freedoms, the place from her father's childhood brought to life by his stories. It was a time when the Earth had been able to support nearly 2 billion more people than it currently did. In the time before the Rings, before the shattering of fault lines, the destruction of climates, and the unleashing of the world's arsenals against an unknown, unseen enemy, the result of which was to only further extend the devastation that the Rings had brought, a girl's hands would not turn red for her 16th birthday.

Christina felt her father take her hands and gently press them against his chest. She opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them, that she had drifted away to the distant world of Papito's childhood. "You can do this," he said.

She reached for the console, a nearly featureless panel of off-white plastic, with just a few strands of spider-silk thin crystalline fiber poking out of the surface. It was a physical access point to the Void. She pinched one of the fibers between her thumb and index finger, pulling it outward, then poked it into her right eye, feeling nothing as the fiber squirmed through her eye and entwined her optic nerve. "I'll do it, Papito," she said, nodding her head, then turned inward, the world slowing, then stilling, as she sped, her synapses burning, firing far faster than at the typical human rate, her thoughts avalanching. The Void did not drive her but merely accommodated the speed of her own brain, allowing her to take full advantage of her enhanced synapses. And then the outside world seemed to stop, the reality in her head moving so much faster than the reality of the dirt and blood.

She knew that Papito also had this ability, and when hardwired to the Void, by physical contact to it with crystal fiber and not relying on the feeble bandwidth provided by the wireless Ocs, he could push the aggregate bandwidth flooding his optical cortex by nearly a factor of ten. On rare occasions, such as this, when Papito let her connect to the Void, she was very careful not to exceed his upper limit, not wanting to frighten him.

She did not know her upper limit.

She slipped into a Void-generated reality.

Now, rows of corn rolled out before her, frozen in time, the golden tassels of each ear glinting in the noonday sun. Their little cornfield was still healthy, not infected by the corn worms that had infested Senor Wright's massive fields to the west. She knew it was only a matter of days before the worms made their way to Papito's fields and their entire ten acres would be lost.

These corn worms had been modified.

And unless she could synthesize an effective pesticide, or at least determine who had modified the worms so they could demand compensation, Papito would lose everything. She needed to find the solution quickly, while she still had the time to work the problem.

She slipped out of the Void for a moment and looked down at her hands, not by shifting her head, or eyes, but simply by focusing on another portion of the visual input cascading through the back of her eyeballs. Her hands rested in Papito's. Small hands, delicate fingers, the bright red of her skin standing out in sharp contrast to Papito's dark brown skin.

The smart pigment had fired several days ago, clocked to the central Void, activated on her 16th birthday. The activation of the pigment through transfer of the red polymer to outer cell walls was hardly necessary; a holdover from the old days, when it was still possible to run or hide, to escape the Volunteer tour in the Co-Op's cornfields. After the arrival of the Rings, with so much of the world shattered and so many survivors without adequate food, the rebuilding of an agricultural infrastructure had been one of the world's highest priorities. All those who found themselves in the vicinity of agricultural lands were required to volunteer in the fields. But some tried to escape the duty, so a method was developed to ensure that you would report and perform your tour. Those red hands let everyone know that your time was short. And if hands turned green before you reported, your Volunteer status would be automatically changed to Resident status, and, when caught, you'd be condemned to work the fields until you dropped. Now it was impossible to run: Simply too many eyes tracked those on final countdown to their Volunteer term.

She had 6 days before she needed to report.

And when she did, as part of the standard evaluation and placement procedure, the processors would peer into her head and find things that should not be there. The augmented synapses were bad enough, certain to get her transferred to a medical research facility, but it was what was held in that tangle of wiring that would get her designated as a Resident. Papito and her uncle Che would quickly follow, the Powers eager to find out not only which genes had caused the synaptic modifications, but even more importantly, to discover where the information packed into those neurons came from. She knew things that should not be known.

Christina slipped back, the almost imperceptible sway of the corn suddenly transformed into a gentle back-and-forth dance in the afternoon breeze, insect song rising in pitch, and the squeeze of Papito's hand loosening.

"Senor Wright is the key," said Xavier Olmos as he patted Christina's hand. "If we can figure out what allows this new corn worm to evade the corn's combative pesticide matrix, and who is responsible for the modifications, then Senor Wright will be more willing to help us, to call in favors from those with the power to make exceptions. Senor Wright has real power."

Christina tried to smile but could not manage it.

Her father simply did not understand how the world worked. There would be no exceptions made for them. There was only one way to keep the Ag Co-Op screeners from peering into her head and finding those things that shouldn't be there.

Copyright © 2005 by Robert A Metzger