Suzie stepped out onto the track, amid running race officials and confused horses and men with box cameras and a doctor. She found the hat, and Emily herself, quite ruined.
The country had been ignoring the suffragettes up to that point. After fifty thousand people attended Emily’s funeral and clogged up the London streets, they couldn’t ignore the suffragettes anymore.
“How brave,” Suzie kept saying to herself, watching the funeral go by.
Emily Davison came back as a suffragette in her next life, too, and then as an electric eel, and then a suffragette again.
As long as some people were that determined, Suzie often thought, how bad could things really get?
“How bad could things really get?” she said aloud once, but she felt an awful dread in her belly when she said it.
“Pretty friggin’ bad,” she imagined the universe saying, shaking its fat, pretentious head.
JOVIAN MOON GANYMEDE, A.D. 2150
Milo was born inside a machine.
He lived there with his family and ten thousand other people.
The machine’s job was to crawl all over Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon, and make it like planet Earth used to be. It pumped things into the atmosphere and did things to the soil, and the people inside drove its engines and cooked its chemicals and lived sweaty, grunting lives.
Officially, Milo’s name was JN010100101101110. As far as the resource cartels were concerned, this was all the identity he needed. Only his family called him “Milo.”
His boyhood friends called him “Mildew,” because that’s how boyhood friends are.
—
His friends were Frog and Bubbles. Their ball fields were the corridors between turbines in the engine rooms. Their hiding places were tangles of hoses and storage pods. The haunted places they dared one another to go were too many to count: Where someone had been drowned in the algae pumps or died fixing the mighty lobster claws. Places where people had been crushed, steamed, frozen, or recycled.
There were occasional wonders, like the crawler’s scattered windows—portholes where you could look out over Ganymede’s craters and see Jupiter filling the sky like a magical whale. Sometimes they glimpsed cartel drones hopping across the sky…watching, listening.
They were on the residential deck one day, poking at some kind of engine jizz oozing down the wall, when screams exploded from a nearby family pod.
“God, no! You can’t do this! We’ll pay you! It was an accident!”
“We will find a qualified family, off-planet,” answered a hard, amplified voice. “Now let go!”
Two Monitors emerged, bulging with police gear. One of them cradled a baby.
“Our neighbors had an extra last year,” whispered Frog, his voice low. “They tried to hide it, but how do you hide a baby?”
“If they’re taking it off-planet,” Milo wondered aloud, “how come they’re headed for the kitchens?”
—
Years passed. Milo began working with his dad in the crawler’s great central ventilator.
The day everything changed, Dad found him standing way on top of the lung, riding it up as it breathed.
“Goddammit, Milo!” bellowed Dad, “you’re going to get us fired.”
Milo didn’t argue, because getting fired was always a possibility. And if you didn’t have a job, you couldn’t live in cartel housing. And because the crawler couldn’t support homeless people, you’d be sent downplanet. No one ever came back from downplanet.
“How’s Mom?” Milo asked, sliding down. Mom had been ill lately.
Dad ducked down a steam tube, grabbing a wrench from his belt.
“Keep working,” he said. “They’re watching.”
Milo followed.
“That’s why I came looking for you,” said Dad. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. Your buddy Frog.”
Frog brewed and sold affordable black-market meds these days.
“You oughta think twice about that,” Milo warned. “Speaking of getting fired. Or shot.”
Dad stopped. He whistled, and his fish dove into his hand, displaying schematics. Dad read the schematics and surveyed the gas lines overhead.
“Our cartel insurance can’t cover any more of the cartel medicine,” he said.
“So she’s worse.”
“Well, you’d know that if you came home nights, instead of blowing your pay at that…place.”
Shit! Milo thought. Dad knows about that?
“That” was Dreamscapes, a discount brothel on the rec level. Women could earn additional income as licensed prostitutes while they got a refreshing, narc-induced night’s sleep.
“I’m going to go fix something,” said Milo, heading back the way they’d come.
“You do that,” said Dad.
—
Home was a circular pod, with sleeping cells in the walls. Mom stayed in her sleeping cell during the dinner hour that night. Milo heard her coughing.
Dad wasn’t feeling too social, so Milo talked to the twins.
The twins, Milo’s four-year-old brother and sister, had come along on his twelfth birthday. Good thing their family had a top-drawer skill assignment and was permitted three kids. Carlo and Serene were their own universe of two, sometimes communicating in a language of their own invention. Laughing at things no one else heard or understood.
“Zee too,” said Serene.
“Mak lo,” answered Carlo, with his mouth full.
“Muk luk,” said Milo, and they just looked at him.
After dinner, Milo took Dad down to Frog’s.
By the time they got there, a couple of other people were waiting in the hall. One by one they buzzed in and buzzed out and scurried away. By the time Milo buzzed in, seven people had shown up all at once, fidgety and coughing.
“Something’s going around,” Milo said to Frog.
“I’m shutting down for the night,” answered Frog, sweating over his pill cutter. “They’re going to get me pinched. ’Zup?”
“My mom. This same cough everyone’s getting.”
Frog handed over a zip bag with five lozenges.
Out in the corridor, it was getting noisy. More people. More coughing.
“That’s a schedule-one antibiotic,” said Frog. “Gimme sixteen. That’s friend prices. Then out you go.”
Dad handed over the chits.
When Milo opened the door, the latch sprang in his hand, and he fell back under the sudden weight of three big coughing pipe fitters.
“I got nothing!” he heard Frog shouting, panicking. “I’m just a dishwasher, swear to God!”
In the corridor, heavy boots. Monitors!
Dad grasped Milo’s elbow. Together, they got to their feet and hunkered down, pushing for the door.
They broke free and stumbled into the corridor.
But the corridor was worse. Full of coughing people, too many to count, and Monitors among them, smashing skulls. Milo heard the howl of an anaconda around the corner.
Everywhere, fists and elbows.
The zip bag got loose.
“Retards!” Milo gasped, clawing after the bag.
“No time,” grunted Dad, pulling at him.
A Monitor grabbed him by the collar, pulling the other way.
“Your SPLAT has been scanned!” roared the amplified voice. “Now, up against the wall!”
The anaconda appeared—a massive vacuum hose, wrangled by Monitors in exo-frames, sucking up screaming rioters. They flew away down its cavelike throat (to where?).
The thing turned toward Milo. The slipstream pulled at him.