Marisa Carneseca blinked, calling up her mail list. The djinni implanted in her head switched modes smoothly, projecting the words on her Ganika-brand corneas so that they seemed to float in the air in front of her, filling the room with dimly glowing letters. The icon for her spam folder was red and pulsing, and she dumped it without even bothering to look at what was inside. Her inbox showed two emails from her mother and five from Overworld—most of those probably ads, but there might be a few from Cherry Dog fans. She’d look through them later. Two emails from Olaya, the house computer; Marisa opened the folder and saw two repeats of the same passive demand for laundry access. She sighed and looked around; it had been a while, she had to admit. She saw a half bottle of Lift on the nightstand, and took a long drink.
She’d met a cute boy at a club a couple of nights ago, but his djinni had been so filled with adware she hadn’t accepted his ID link; instead she’d written it down, like in the old days, and the paper was buried somewhere in this pile of clothes—she couldn’t let the drone in until she’d checked all her pockets.
She blinked the house folder closed and scrolled down, rolling some of the stiffness out of her shoulders as she did. Her neck was pulling on the left again, where her natural muscles connected to her Jeon prosthetic. She lifted the artificial arm, splaying the fingers in front of her—it was her seventeenth birthday present, just a few months old. Obviously mechanical, but slender and elegant. Definitely a step up from the old SuperYu.
At the bottom of the mail list was a message from Bao, reminding her to ping him when she finished practice. She blinked on his number—no ID, because he didn’t have a djinni, just an old-style handheld phone with an old-style number. It made her laugh every time, like he was her abuela. She kept the video turned off while she stood up and looked around for pants.
Bao didn’t answer for almost thirty seconds. “Hey, Mari.”
“Hey. You in school?”
“Took me a minute to get out of class.”
Marisa smiled, sifting through a pile of old clothes. “If you’d get a djinni like a normal person you wouldn’t have to get out of class.”
“I need the break anyway. You’re done with practice already?”
Marisa examined a shirt, but discarded it. Too wrinkly. “Sahara ended it early on account of me being a genius.”
“I saw her post. Apparently you’ve broken the game again.”
“She’s already posted?” Marisa smiled.
“Just a sentence, says there’s a big video coming later. What’d you do, another costume exploit?”
“Powerset exploit,” said Marisa, finding a pair of black jeans and pulling them on as she talked. “Though I’m not even sure it’s an exploit, just a lucky play. For all I know they wanted us to start throwing the sentry drones around.”
“Throwing drones? This I’ve got to see.”
Marisa split her vision, calling up the live feed from Sahara’s vidcast. Sahara was sitting at her immaculate desk, the camera nuli watching from over her shoulder as her fingers flew across the touch screen, editing and sculpting the replay into a highlight video. She was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, her thick hair pulled up in a ponytail—a far cry from her evening gown avatar, but still impossibly adorable. Marisa shook her head. “How does she always look so good? We’ve been plugged in and lying down for three hours, and asleep all night before that, and she looks like she just got her hair done.”
“I’m sure you look great,” said Bao.
Marisa looked down at her own oversized nightshirt, and glanced at the mirror with a pained grimace. “I look like I’m hiding from the government.” Her dark brown hair was a squirrel’s nest of knots and tangles; the tips were dyed red, about four inches deep, which looked pretty cool when it was straight, but now it only added to the wispy chaos. She ran her hand through it, trying to smooth it down, and winced as she hit a snarl. She gave up for the moment and started hunting for a clean shirt. “You know what I think it is?” she told Bao. “I think she does it all before we practice. Nobody gets that cute, just-rolled-out-of-bed look by just . . . rolling out of bed.”
“You coming to school today?” asked Bao.
Marisa shrugged. “Probably not. I can do most of it online, and the rest of it . . . technically also online.”
“You can’t just hack all your grades.”
“Sure I can,” said Marisa with a grin, “unless you’re saying I shouldn’t just hack all my grades, in which case you might have a point.” She found a black blouse, fancier than she needed but the only presentable thing in the room. She really needed to let the laundry nuli in here. “You hungry?”