“Don’t worry. I’ll get used to it.” Hwa scanned the main entrance. The specs told her where every little camera and microphone was. They lit up snitch-yellow on the map. She could pick out the angry kids (red halos), the sad ones (blue), the baselines (green), and the ones who were making out with each other (grinding columns of deep purple).
“We should have gotten them for you sooner. But for someone like you, someone who’s lived for so long without…” He sounded uncomfortable. Like he didn’t know how to finish. Hwa stared out at the uniform perfection of her fellow students. They were all mainstream: mainstream height, mainstream weight, mainstream ability, mainstream health. Technically editing skin colour or hair texture qualified as a kind of hate crime, but Hwa had her suspicions. The world was what it was, and she knew there were parents on the rig who wanted more for their children, even if it meant putting some English on the ball.
“Without any augments,” Hwa said for him. “Without any help.”
“Most of these devices are designed to work alongside other services, other technologies. But you’re different.”
If by “different,” he meant “poor,” then he was onto something. It wasn’t that Hwa had some moral or aesthetic commitment to living free of augmentation. But Sunny had never found money for that kind of thing. At least, not when it came to Hwa. Hwa was a bad investment. The lasers that were supposed to fix the stain running down her face had only made things worse. Why throw good money after bad? The only good thing about that was that it finally got Hwa off the hook for dance lessons. After that—after Sunny knew she’d be ugly forever—Hwa got to do tae kwon do with Tae-kyung.
“The good thing is, now I can see what you see.”
Hwa snorted. “You know I’ll be shutting these off when I’m in the girls’ locker room, right?”
“Could you say that a little louder, please? I’m not sure the PTA heard you.”
“Oh, come on,” Hwa said. “You’re not worried about the PTA. You work for Lynch, and Lynch pays the wages. They’d offer you a two-fer on the Lindgren twins, if they could.”
She directed her gaze to a pair of blond girls wearing varsity volleyball jackets over their uniforms. They reclined against the opposite wall, chests out, knees up, all shiny hair and white teeth and laughter. They were everybody’s number-one fantasy. If you didn’t want to fuck them, you wanted to be them. Their parents had so liked the prediction their genetic counselor gave them, they ordered two.
“Not interested.”
“Liar.”
“Can we not discuss this, please? We’re being recorded, you know. For quality assurance purposes.”
Hwa examined the floor. Her tights had a run in them down her good leg. She inspected the damage idly, twisting her leg this way and that, but her specs had nothing to say about it.
“Much better.”
“I still can’t believe I let you con me into coming back to this place.”
“Better late than never. We were lucky to find a candidate for this position who lacked both a diploma and a prison record.”
“Yeah, that’s some luck, all right.”
Across town, Síofra laughed. Hwa felt it as a tickle across her skull that skittered all the way to the base of her spine as sure as if someone had run a finger down there. She twitched against the wall.
“Hwa?”
Hwa opened her eyes to see Joel standing in front of her, blazer laid neatly across one arm, school tie in a tight little knot she couldn’t help but want to mess up. Christ, he was even wearing the Krakens logo tie pin. The tie pin. Like he didn’t already look enough like the skinniest little Tory ever.
Right then and there, Hwa decided she had to get the boy in some trouble before the trouble found him first.
“Hwa? Are you okay?”
The warning bell rang. Hwa shoved herself off the wall and teetered only a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get to physics.”
“Were you talking to Daniel?”
“Yeah.” She raised her voice slightly so her boss would be sure to hear it. “But he should be working, and we should be, uh … learning, I guess.”
*
There was a basic problem on the desk when they got to class. At least, Joel said it was pretty basic: “It’s Moore’s Law,” he said. “About exponential growth in computational ability. Didn’t you cover exponents in grade eight algebra?”
Hwa tried to remember grade eight. She’d turned fourteen that year, and had a general memory of fourteen sucking worse than the other years for some reason. Oh, yeah: because her mother wouldn’t shut up about how her first single had gone platinum, when she was fourteen. And then she’d talk about pink champagne and parties and music producers and how to fend them off, always making certain to end her stories with something like, <<Not that you’ll ever have that problem, Hwa-jeon.>>