Losing Normal by Francis Moss

Author:Francis Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encelia Press
Published: 2019-04-01T17:33:13+00:00

ALEX

Emma’s family owned the farmhouse, which was built in 1907. It had solar panels for electricity and propane in a big tank in the back for heat and cooking. Oak, cedar, and two mulberry trees around the house kept it cool in the summertime.

Greg checked my implant to see if it was transmitting. I could turn it on for a few seconds, then turn it off. My headaches were gone, maybe because we were far away from the city. But I had a lot to process. It was not logical or possible that I had an invisible android friend, so Gort was a lie I was telling myself, but I didn’t know why. Possibly I wanted it to be true, so I would not have to take responsibility for what a psychiatrist called my “acting out.” I think everybody acts out, but most people are better at it.

Greg hooked up his laptop to the telephone landline, connecting with something called POTS. “Someone in Seattle figured out that Calliope was monitoring internet traffic and had shut down our blogs,” Greg said. He typed some more, and a screen with the word StoryNet appeared, “But we have StoryNet. It runs on a special undetectable internet, called a MESH network. We are connected to other people all over the country who are fighting this.” Greg talked about shortest path bridging, Zigbee radios, and other things I didn’t understand. He hunched over his laptop and started scrolling through screens. It was slow, but he could access StoryNet and stay in touch with other groups.

There was lots of stuff on Calliope news about their Mental Health Camps: footage of happy kids playing in a field with pine trees and a lake in the background, men and women in white coats taking a girl’s pulse, talking to a couple with a child, a monitor hooked up to a smiling teenage boy, kids and adults in a dining hall, eating. It was all just pixels on the screen.

StoryNet told different stories: A dad went to visit his son at a camp and got turned away. A whole class of kids had just vanished from a special school in Omaha. There were a hundred posts from parents, asking for information about their kids. I didn’t think my mom had posted anything.

Ian, the man who had set up StoryNet, contacted Greg. Somehow he had extracted the code from Calliope’s broadcasts and, little by little, he was sending it out over StoryNet to Greg and other people.

I stopped waking up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t feel Sophie, and I still had no headaches. Greg and Sara made me practice survival skills. I learned to drive the farm’s forty-two-year-old Jimmy pickup, a stick shift, without stalling every time.

Saturday was farmer’s market day in Barham, the little town near us. Sara wanted to go. Greg thought it was too dangerous, but Emma said it was probably safe. She told us there were no security cameras in town, just one giant Calliope screen above the closed movie theater.

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