Freelancer Read online

  Sarah and her clique had been particularly nasty regarding Kari’s fashion choices—or lack thereof—a few years ago. They had actually seemed more interested in actively hating Kari than they were in themselves, which was a feat in itself. Luckily, that hadn’t lasted, as their narcissistic love affair became more of a committed relationship, and they became far too self-obsessed to make more than a passing effort at trying to ruin Kari’s life. Or they had simply become bored with her. Kari hadn’t changed her style since her sophomore year. Most people switched up their style every few weeks—a side effect of the evolution of at-home clothing printers. Anyone could recycle and reprint their clothes every day if they felt so inclined. Recycle, reuse, but never rewear.

  The only thing worse than the popular clothing style was the makeup. Sarah’s face matched her clothes perfectly; the neon eye shadow matched her shirt, and her red-and-purple lipstick coordinated with her pants. Kari didn’t wear much makeup. It wasn’t that she disapproved of it; it just took too much time and effort and had no possible return on investment. As a freelancer, she always thought about what she got in return for her time—her most valuable asset. This was the primary reason behind her intolerance for school. It did her no good to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on about . . . well, whatever they talk about in school.

  The auto-auto slowed down gradually before coming to a standstill, and the green lights lit the interior as a loud beep signaled their arrival at school. Kari had already spent an hour pouring over the news this morning. The Middle States were expected to present their Declaration of Independence to the US Congress at some point today. The news had been a long time coming, but it still scared Kari. The world was changing, and she wasn’t sure how it was going to affect her. Right now, however, she had more pressing problems, such as making it through another school day.

  Kari stepped out of the auto-auto as soon as the door slid open—she didn’t want to make eye contact with Sarah if she didn’t have to. There will be plenty of time to be looked down on later.

  The rain was still coming down just slowly enough to cause most students to jog awkwardly into the school building with their heads down. It also gave a few students the chance to draw attention to themselves as they shrieked and complained about the rain ruining their hair. Several of the more opportunistic boys rushed to cover the girls’ ill-fated hair or to help them into the building. Kari half walked, half jogged, unassisted, resenting the fact that she hadn’t just walked the entire way. But school was bad enough as it was. There was no need to make it worse by wearing damp clothing the entire day.

  Kari settled into her typical chair toward the back of the room, as far away from the learning leader as possible. She hated that title, an opinion she attributed fully to her parents. Although they prided themselves on being forward thinking, her parents embraced only the traditional term of “teacher.” I guess the title wouldn’t make a difference; I wouldn’t like them no matter what they called themselves.

  Kari closed her eyes and went online, as she had no desire to join her classmates in any form of friendly conversation or forced pleasantries. Instantly, the small window, which had been lingering in the upper corner of her eye, grew and filled her vision with news and updates. Reality now appeared in a small window that lingered in the bottom corner of her overridden vision. She scanned through the screens and images, flicking through them mentally as she quickly lost interest in the stale news. Nothing had happened yet; it was as if the entire country were holding its breath, waiting for the Middle States to get their revolution started.

  The networks were boring. Everyone she knew in real life was complaining about school, and her friends in the hacker community didn’t wake up this early. One last glance at the news told her that it was as stale as it had been seconds ago, so she loaded up her simulation from last night while she waited for class to start.

  The sun somehow seemed even brighter than she remembered. It had been late when the movie had ended last night, and her mom had fallen asleep long before it was over. Kari hadn’t wanted to wake her mom up, so she hadn’t moved from her spot on the couch. She had worked on the simulation until she eventually fell asleep a few hours past midnight, which was earlier than when she usually called it a night.

  The potential separation of the Union was causing all sorts of problems at the Social Security office where Kari’s mom worked. Her mother had been working overtime for weeks, and it was finally catching up to her. Stupid Middle States, ruining everyone’s lives because they can’t deal.

  After Kari successfully landed at the base of the cliff in the simulation, she spent a while trying to figure out how to evade the pesky gunship. Eventually, she solved the problem by using a stealth device she had invented for a client a few months back. The stealth device hid her heat signature so the gunship couldn’t locate her.

  Once the gunship gave up its search, Kari started looking for the treasure. Sometimes, the treasure was a famous painting; other times, it was a sentimental item from her life. But no matter what the treasure was, its capture was the endgame of the simulation. After walking through the digital red desert long enough that her real feet began to ache, she eventually stumbled upon a desert fortress.

  Kari huddled behind a small sand dune outside the heavily guarded encampment where she was confident the treasure was being hidden. She cautiously peered over the edge toward the camp in front of her. Cheetahs—catlike robots that were extremely fast, agile, and heavily armed—were circling the perimeter at high speeds. Behind them stood several mechs that were constantly scanning in every direction for potential threats. In the air above the camp floated several gunships. This was a wall-less desert fortress.

  Kari painstakingly circled the base several times and found no virtual weakness in it. She knew she could drop in her own army to fight the guards, but that seemed like cheating. There was always a way to solve the situations creatively. After all, she had programmed the simulations to always have a back door—a secret way to win that wasn’t immediately obvious. She just had to find the key to unlocking this puzzle.

  Kari had no idea how to beat this particular state of affairs. She loaded in the stealth device that she had used to evade the gunship and activated it. It was composed of headgear and a bracelet-like band for each appendage and made an audible humming as it blocked her heat signature from showing up on any of the guards’ sensors. It’s not going to work, but the only way to learn the right way to solve this is to start by trying something—anything—even if trying something means I’m going to get reset over and over in violent ways.

  Kari froze as everything suddenly went quiet. She twisted around in the simulation, searching for what had caused the sudden change. She slowly realized it was the classroom that had gone silent, not her simulated desert. She returned her vision and attention to the real world and looked around. David stood in the doorway, his blond hair was short, and everything about his appearance was well kept and sharp looking, especially when compared with the current male fashion, which was, in a word, loose.

  David frowned as he looked around the unwelcoming room. People shook their heads and showcased their disapproval at him as they met his greenish eyes. His eyes passed over Kari, and she simply turned back around, unsure of what to else to do.

  “And to think that I thought the Middle Staters were too good for our schools,” Rob jeered, causing the class to laugh. David brushed Kari’s desk slightly as he walked steadily toward his traditional seat at the front of the room.

  “What? Are we so far beneath you that you can’t even respond to us?” Rob taunted again, apparently unsatisfied with David’s indifference.

  “It’s not that he thinks he’s better than us, Rob, it’s just that he wishes we were all dead,” Sarah said. Kari would recognize that hateful voice anywhere. The students laughed as a few of the boys mimed shooting each other at the front of the room. David sat down at his desk without responding. A sopping-wet jacket
flew across the room and hit him in the side of the face.

  “Oops, my bad!” Jack shouted as David turned around angrily to see who had thrown it. “I thought the seat was open because I didn’t see a US citizen there.”

  Just leave him alone . . .

  David’s face turned red with anger, but he didn’t react. Kari was impressed at David’s discipline, because she was about to turn at yell at her peers, and they weren’t even picking on her this time.

  “Please, take your seats!” Thomas shouted. The learning leader had finally arrived to start class. This might be the only time I’ve ever been relieved to hear Thomas’s voice. Common sentiments upon hearing his nasally voice included, but were not limited to, annoyance; indifference; minor aggravation; and, depending on the current state of the list of other things Kari could be doing with her time, anger.

  The students dutifully took their seats without complaint. OK, Kari, you can do this. There was nothing Kari looked forward to more than being finished with school. Moving out to her own place after graduation so she could buy more printers was a distant second place. Right now, she had only a few printers readily accessible to her at home, and those printers were primarily used for clothes, food, and school assignments—nothing interesting. Kari was tired of having to sneak across town to use printers that were capable of printing more interesting projects.

  Kari had been programming for years anonymously as a freelancer, and that required printing numerous projects her parents wouldn’t approve of. Clients would contact her for a project, and she would build it for them if it were something that interested and challenged her. That work generally required being able to print items that only commercial-grade printers could produce. Thus, she had spent the past few years buying up old storage lockers and knocking down the walls between them to build a place where she could print larger, more complicated items. She had started calling it her factory, as she hadn’t been able to think of a more affectionate name.

  “Good morning, and thank you for coming today,” Learning Leader Thomas said. Kari sat up straight and placed her bag on the floor next to her desk. Learning leaders were mostly incompetent, except for their ability to tell when a student was not paying attention—a skill they unfortunately excelled at.

  “I found this past week to be very interesting. Would someone like to start our discussion today by sharing what they found to be interesting?” Thomas asked.

  A couple of students sitting toward the front of the room raised their hands. As usual, Thomas called on one of the overeager students and thanked him benevolently for being willing to share.

  “I think the Middle States deciding to separate from the Union was very interesting.” The comment had come from a red-haired boy named Connor. He sounded like he knew exactly how Thomas would respond. This exercise wasn’t too impressive, as everyone knew exactly what was going to happen next.

  “We’ll not be discussing anything of speculative nature today, Connor,” Thomas said.

  Speculative? Everyone knows the Middle States are declaring independence today. Not even you are that clueless, Thomas. This is just going to be one of the most important events in history, but let’s not talk about it. Kari didn’t want to hear Thomas’s or her peers’ opinions about the matter anyway, but it was ridiculous that they were simply going to act like nothing was happening. Kari spent hours every day reading news and thinking about how life was going to change if a war started. It was extremely troubling, especially for someone with her talents and work experience.

  Thomas forced a change in the conversation with a wide smile. “Did anyone find anything of interest in our lesson material for this week?”

  “I found it interesting that we were asked to study the programming of drones,” Sarah said.

  “And why is that, Sarah?”

  “Well, there doesn’t really seem to be much of a need for this type of work anymore.”

  “You mean programming drones?”

  “Drones seem to work perfectly already. And even if we could make them better, no more than a handful of people on the planet are needed for that,” Sarah said. “I wish we could have spent the week learning about something more widely applicable.”

  How long did it take you to think of that comment, you suck-up? As much as Kari hated Sarah, she had to acknowledge Sarah’s skill at manipulating learning leaders.

  “Very interesting, Sarah. Like what?”

  “I don’t know, maybe something that expresses a greater level of humanity and creativity, like art or music composition.”

  “Thank you, Sarah. Very interesting thoughts indeed,” Thomas said with a smile. “Does anyone want to respond to Sarah’s thoughts?”

  Would anyone like to continue to tell us how we should be focusing on art instead? Kari quipped to herself. Sure enough, Thomas called another student seated near the front of the classroom and led a discussion for several minutes about how, in the modern economy, only people who contributed to a higher cultural experience were truly valued.

  It wasn’t that Kari disagreed with the sentiment. Times had changed; creativity was really the only way to make a difference. The jobs of the past, such as accountants, construction workers, and shop owners, didn’t have a place in the modern economy. She knew this as well as anyone did—her father’s parents had been shop owners during her early childhood before being put out of business by the global availability of three-dimensional printers. There were only three jobs now. You could be a creative, a raw-materials worker, or a government worker.

  What bothered her was the fact that school had trained students to think that creativity existed only in so-called higher art forms. What the school failed to understand was that creativity existed even in the most mundane fields. It was Kari’s ability to be creative in nontraditional art forms that had made her into the secret success she was today. Kari believed that optimizing drones to interact with each other required just as much creativity as writing a song. But that didn’t play well into the narrative the school system had rehearsed to her and her fellow students.

  “Kari?” Thomas’s voice jarred her attention back to the present.

  “Yes?” Kari asked innocently, causing a round of faint laughter from her peers. She felt her face flush, and her heart started beating a little faster.

  “I asked you if you had anything to add to this conversation,” Thomas said, seemingly pleased that she was caught off guard.

  “I agree,” Kari said. She had long since learned to always agree. The school system wasn’t kind to those who thought differently, at least not here.

  “Really? You agree with David’s assertion that ignoring the reality of the ‘world we live in’ is foolish and that we should all be learning skills such as this?”

  Kari cursed in her mind. She hadn’t realized that David had spoken last. On the scale of traditionalist to forward thinker, David was as old-fashioned as they came. His family had a manual car they drove around town, and they grew their own food because they “didn’t trust the government.” Worse than his traditionalism was the fact that he and his family were known Middle Staters. That was a bad thing to be, given current events. Kari’s proven formula for middling success at school centered on agreeing with the learning leader and distancing herself as far she could from whatever David said.

  David turned back and looked Kari in the eyes; an understandable glimmer of hope was hidden behind his gaze. Kari had never thought of David as a particularly good-looking boy, but it occurred to her that he wasn’t the worst-looking boy in her grade by any means. He had light-green eyes, and his ears were just a little too big for him in an endearing sort of way. This would be the first time in years that anyone had agreed with David. Kari felt alone and different from everyone else in school, but David might be the only person who could feel more so. Kari met his eyes for a brief moment. He does have nice eyes, she thought before breaking their brief connection. I’m sorry.

  “Of course not. I apologiz
e, I got distracted,” Kari said without daring to look at David.

  “Then you disagree with what David has added to our conversation?” Thomas asked. This is why I hate you, Thomas! I apologized, now just let me be.

  “Yes, I think David has an antiquated view of society. The likelihood that we will contribute anything that would benefit society by pursuing such skills is low,” Kari said calmly, rattling off what she knew Thomas wanted to hear. Her mood grew cold as she instantly felt that she had betrayed both herself and David.

  “What about enforcement? Or defense?” David asked. For some reason, he was still searching for a way to get Kari to even partially agree with him.

  “Yes, what about enforcement and defense, Kari?” Thomas asked with another smile. Thomas apparently knew that Kari was now trapped directly between having an argument with David and having one with the rest of the class. It would be an argument that Thomas would giddily preside over to ensure the desired outcome.

  For a brief second, Kari thought about just agreeing with David to spite Thomas, but she knew that would cause her more trouble than good. She needed to survive in this system for another thirty-seven and a half weeks, and having Thomas attack her in every class wouldn’t make that any easier. Besides, she wasn’t a fan of enforcement or defense.

  “There hasn’t been a need for defense in a hundred years, and enforcement spends 99.9 percent of their time doing regulation and mediating,” Kari said somewhat bitterly. That won’t end it; Thomas will want more. “Besides, David, I thought you didn’t like enforcement regulating you, anyway.”

  “We need the drones to transport goods and to help fight criminals and stuff—”

  “Lawbreakers, like those people who try to break the United States in half?” Kari asked. The class oohed at her not-so-subtle reference.

  “We’re not going to discuss that, Miss Tahe,” Thomas interrupted.