Subterraneans

To Tara the Jell-O shooters didn't taste like they had any booze in them. And because she'd put faith in her host—and therefore hadn't brought any wine coolers along—she had no other way to get fucked up. This was a problem. She needed to get through this party.

Sasha'd gotten the shivers, for one thing, which was happening to a lot of girls these days. She'd shrunk into the corner in the kitchen, howling loud enough to crack the walls. This kind of shit happened when something went wrong with your Riff and it was cranked; her temple'd bruised up, showing her ware had picked up a glitch. Tara'd talked her down in the corner of the kitchen, as her burning chip put a smell of hot rubber in the air.

And they wondered why Tara didn't trust all these new gadgets.

Sasha was the girl Tara had come to the party to talk to, since she was the last person Desiree'd been placed with before she vanished. But it seemed like a good idea to let Sasha figure out what was going on with her own greyware before Tara tried to pick her brain the old-fashioned way. So she'd let Sasha take her smoking chip out to the docking station in her car and had gone to the back porch in the meantime to think things over.

As Tara waited she looked out past the deck into the suburban night and sighed. If only there were boys. She wasn't sure what the point of a party was if there weren't any boys.

All she could do was flit like a firefly around the older men who were left. That's why, in addition to getting Sasha's story, she'd seen this slumber party as a chance to talk to Mr. Morris, otherwise known as John, her favorite teacher. He was far over her age, obvious!, but he was more interesting conversation than the gaggle of dizzy twentyish chicky-doodles at a typical party, at least. Too bad he'd been busy hosting earlier, when they'd first arrived, and had gone upstairs way before bedtime.

There was a bang against the railing. Tara started, turned, and saw Debbie and Else coming up onto the porch from the back yard, team-lifting a huge picnic cooler.

"Hey, everyone," Else crowd-whispered; she and Debbie'd already gotten everyone's attention anyway. "Try and keep it under your skirt but we decided to go on a beer run." They took the cooler to the near corner of the porch and popped it open to bare a wide array of bottled beers: cheap domestics, fancy imports, microbrews. There were even juice mixers to go with the clusters of one-shot sample whisky bottles. Else's dad had made a mint working in RFIDs, so she could afford to be generous. Her credit had virtually no bottom.

Ah, thought Tara. Now maybe we can get going a bit. She kicked off the porch railing, stepping up into the instantly gathering line. She got a little something to settle her thinking cap and five minutes later, Sasha came back out, having put her head together just in time to start taking it apart again.

A few hours on they'd all loosened up. The party'd thinned out—it was past midnight—and Tara and Sasha'd managed to poach seats at the porch umbrella-table. Tara'd noticed that Sasha was flush from a parade of one-hit whisky samples, chased with premium beer, and had undone too many buttons on her cotton pajama blouse, letting in the warm summer night. Her bursting lapel was drawn back from the inboard of her bosom, exposing the uppermost of her cleavage down to the summit of her breasts. Sasha didn't seem to care much, and anyway, since Tara hadn't yet been re-drugged, once she saw it, her chip kicked in and blurred it out of her vision.

Sexual censorship. That was a feature in the chip that you couldn't opt out of.

This reminded her. "Hey, Sash, what went on with your Riff before?"

Sasha blearily studied her forehead.

"Um, the RFID? When I burned out in the kitchen? There was a 'plank in the densing mechanism,' or something. I've got my docking station back at the car so I did a diagnostic, but I can never grok the report it prints out." She started to fuss through her purse. "I've got it right here."

"No, that's fine." Tara waved her hand. "I can't ever get anything out of those either."

"Ok." Remissioning without looking up, Sasha instead took a pack of Marlboros from her purse. She tapped out a cigarette and lit it. People these days didn't seem too worried about making it to old age. "You never have any problems with your chip?"

"Not really, not nearly as much. They make you get it but they still let you turn the power on it down, thank God, so I do, as much as I can."

"Yeah, I've got mine at seven. Which is pretty high. Thing is, you get some nice stuff, lots of access, but it snags up all the time, because it's cooking so hot."

Sasha sipped delicately from the Seagrams snorter she'd gotten from the cooler, the latest of her growing litter. She gave the tiny bottle a wiggle. "Chip's probably frying my brain but not as bad as this. Least, that's what they tell me." She took another sip. "You know, these are better warm."

They looked out at the night. Tara thought she'd let Sasha unspool a bit.

"So," Sasha unspooled, falling over the word as it left her, "you're almost twenty-two, right?"

"Yep."

"And you haven't gotten coded."

"Nope."

Sasha motorboated her lips, settling in her seat. "Why wouldn't someone get skincoded? That's kinda weird."

"'Cause I don't wanna blackjack."

"Well, you gotta blackjack. Doesn't everybody blackjack?"

"I dunno, maybe they'll make me. But for now they're not, and I'm not gonna do it if I don't have to."

"Wow. That's really interesting." Sasha sat up and gestured at her drink as though it were a scholarly study. "From what I've heard, twenty-oneing's a letdown unless you get a custom invite. Doing it standard is like getting your license. You take a boring class, and then you sit in a room and they read your legal stuff. I dunno, though, I really wanna do it, but only if I get a custom invite."

"Well, I know you've turned twenty-one, too," Tara told Sasha. "But you haven't twenty-oned."

"I've been big on getting an invite. I wanna know what all the talk's about. And that's the thing. It's like finding a rave. All you can do is just keep bringing it up and maybe you'll happen on the right person to get on the inside."

She studied Tara. She plainly had something she was trying to decide whether or not she should tell her.

She decided.

"Okay. There was these two twin-looking chicks you talked to there, at the Papayas, model-skinny, got long black hair. I forget their names. Those were the ones I talked to." She shook her head, blowing smoke, continuing to unspool. "Just talked to them, asked if the rumors were true. They weren't real definite but they didn't outright say no, so. It seemed funny this Papayas, this regular old store in the mall, would be the place to get a custom invite. I mean, you wouldn't think. But that one Papp's got bought by somebody, I got told, and they're trying to go more upscale."

"And when you talked to them, these girls in the Papayas? What happened? Did they have invites?"

"They didn't tell me anything."

"Interesting," said Tara. "My sister Desiree's been pretty big on blackjacking too."

"Desiree? Oh yeah, I talked to her about it. Part of the reason I thought it would be a good idea if Desiree went is, honestly, she's prettier than me, and pretty girls get more invites."

"Well," Tara shoegazed, "that's what I wanted to ask you about." She didn't want to make eye contact with Sasha when she asked the big question. She wanted Sasha to feel comfortable, and to think. "You set Desiree up to go to this place?"

"Not exactly. After they dodged me, I told her about it, but it was her idea to go."

She turned to Tara in a way that made Tara look. Sasha's drunkenness kept her from hiding the desire in her narrow glass eyes.

"I shoulda sent you. I know you don't care about getting coded, but you could've got Desiree and me in. You're prettier than the two of us put together."

Tara'd gotten what she needed to know. She disengaged. "Aw, thanks," said she, a little too sweetly.

Sasha shrugged. The corners of her mouth lost altitude. "Yeah, Tara could be up for Prom Queen. Perfect specimen. But you know, almost a year on and you haven't been coded." Sasha got an undertow. "You don't really play along with all that stuff right? And that's cool."

Tara got defensive, shifting into smalltalk. "I just hear these special invites can be bad news. You go off for a long weekend to God knows where. No one even knows where you are."

"It's all certified, Tara. I'm trying to do it, Desiree's trying to do it, everyone is trying to do it. The ones who go are lucky. I can't believe you're not even going to try, I've never heard of that."

Tara shot her a wan smile. "Different strokes, I guess. Thing is, Desiree's been gone for a couple days and—"

She was interrupted by the noisy slide of the glass door dividing the kitchen from the porch. It was John. A giggle snuck out of Tara: His eyes were red with sleep, a pillow pattern pressed into his face, and frumpy pajamas hung off him complete with fuzzy slippers. He looked about, saw the cooler in the corner and the dead soldiers crowded on the porch table and lining the porch railing, and clapped his hands to call the girls to attention.

"Oh, fer—I was wondering why it was so loud out here this time of night. Now I see." His brow crinkled with worry, and when Tara registered that, she reflexively glanced up to the RedEye on the townhouse wall. Blinking. Shit. She hadn't even noticed.

Sasha looked at Tara and covered a laugh. "It's not funny," Tara scolded, though she'd just giggled herself.

"Dammit, girls, you've tripped the RedEye. Now we all need to scan."

Else, who'd been lingering next to the cooler since it had arrived and had developed a mild hunch over time, tried to gather herself upright with a clumsy slip of the elbow.

"Oh, Dad," she had a wet slur in her voice, "can't we just send it in tomorrow? You know everyone here's of age."

"Hah," said John. "This is your doing, isn't it? No, we can't just sort it out tomorrow. If anyone even suspects there's underage drinking going on here, it'll be my butt. Come on girls," another clap, "scan up."

With a collective groan, everyone on the porch—a quick look by Tara tallied up eight lingerers, counting herself and her friend—stood and turned away from the RedEye, flipping up the hems of their blouses, those who needed to, to expose the barcode tattoos on the smalls of their backs. Meanwhile John, aware of one possible problem ahead of time, wove his way to the porch table and leaned into Tara's ear.

"I guess you have to come with me," he whispered. "I know . . ."

Another giggle. "Everyone knows I'm not coded, Mr. Morris. It's no secret."