join their unit…which you won’t until tomorrow. This is your last day at home. Why are you wandering around the house? There’s no more training today. Take off your uniform. Enjoy the rest of your time, go see your friends.”
Laki didn’t answer. She imagined herself hanging in a sling suspended over a huge womb. Panic welled up in her chest; she found it hard to breathe. The mother hugged Laki.
“Go,” she said.
Laki turned away from the mother and ran down the hall, choking on the urge to scream. When she reached her room, she waved her hand over the sealed entrance. The wall thinned and parted down the middle. She stepped over the threshold, and a softly modulated voice rang out:
“One day to maturation.”
Laki winced. Grabbing the edges of her robe, she yanked the white fabric from her shoulders. Her elbow flung out wildly, triggering the voice to repeat itself:
“One day to maturation.”
“Shut up!” Laki snapped. She stumbled toward her wardrobe portal while pulling off the robe and dropping it on the ground. As she fumbled to release the waist of her dress, she caught sight of her reflection. Startled, she fell still. Swathed in mother-unit whites, she could be any girl on the brink of maturation. A young mother, perhaps, anyone but herself.
Just beyond her reflection, Laki saw a message globe float into the room. She looked at it over her shoulder, then turned back to the reflective wall. She squinted her eyes and tried to imagine what she would look like draped in her mother-unit veil. She envisioned a group of faceless women gathered around her. A disgusted hiss spilled out through her lips. She waved her hand over her reflection, and the reflective wall went dark.
When Laki walked to the wardrobe portal, the message globe followed her. She passed her hand over a flat, round disc embedded in the wall. A rod slid out from where the disc had been and presented her with a row of cloths dancing around on hangers. Even her wardrobe had ceased to be an accurate reflection of her. Mixed in with her customary black cloths, were the mother-unit whites, permanently shaped into formless robes and dresses that, after tomorrow, would become her daily uniform.
At the thought of tomorrow, Laki felt a tightening in her chest. The terror that she had been carefully containing flooded her body. She rifled through the cloths, seizing anything white and flinging it to the ground. When there was nothing left but black cloths and empty hangers, Laki collapsed to the floor. Every wild scheme she had concocted to avoid her fate trampled through her memory. Breathing heavily, she looked around the room manically as if through feverish effort she could find the secret and escape her future. The message globe chirped, and her panic deflated. She let out a resigned sigh. She was powerless to change the thrust of her future, and nothing she did could alleviate that fact.
The globe drifted down to hang next to her shoulder. She blew on it, triggering the release of its message.
“Greetings elder sister,” a high-pitched voice chanted.
Laki shifted so that she was sitting cross-legged on the floor and opened her hand to accept the message. The globe floated down to rest in her palm. An image of her sister—cinnamon-colored skin, freckles, a dark mouth—sprouted in her mind. She heard Se-se whispering, “I think it’s going to work. We’re going to get you out of the mother-unit. You have to meet me later. I’ll send another message.”
Laki rolled her eyes. Even up to the final hour, Se-se was full of optimism. Laki pinched the message globe and it deflated. She flattened it against the wall with the palm of her hand and watched as it melded into the wall. She took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. She peeled off her white dress and threw it on top of the heap of discarded white cloths. She plucked a short length of black fabric from her clothes rod and wrapped it around her body. With the heat from her hand, she fused the cloth’s edges to create one seamless dress. She pinched along the waist, the dip of her back, and under her bust to give it shape. She picked out a shorter length of cloth to wrap over her shoulders and melded it to the dress, creating sleeves. There was a lump around her middle revealing the silhouette of a marriage belt resting on her hips. Nothing to be done about that.
She pulled a blank message globe from the wall and closed her eyes. She projected images of a wild party into the globe, purred “the rendezvous-less zone,” then sent the thought, “Maturation tomorrow.” She opened her eyes.
“Twelve messages,” she said. The message globe split into twelve tiny spheres—each carrying an identical invitation. She touched each sphere while saying a name, and they zipped away to deliver her invitation.
Laki walked to the pod landing room with a grim look on her face. She didn’t look like a woman going to a party, she looked like a prisoner headed to her execution. In the pod landing room, she stood briefly in reverent silence.
When she had left her domed city behind, she reached for the sound module. With quick fingers, she programmed it to record the sound of friction, a static-like screeching bristling between her pod and the thick weightlessness of space. She amplified the sound, adding an echo, then slowed its frequency to match the beat of her pulse. She flipped through her archives and sampled sound snippets before selecting a loop of her siblings laughing through the hallways at home. She mixed in a distorted recording of her own voice, and the jumble of sound built into an aural assault. At Laki’s signal, the sound module found a unifying tempo and tamed the layers of noise into a repeating melody. Laki blended it with one of her preferred beats and blasted the mash-up into her pod—a newly created soundtrack for the moment.
For a painfully short stretch of time, the music obliterated Laki’s worries. She turned the music up until she could feel it vibrating the soft translucent walls of her pod. She started by swaying her head back and forth. By the time her pod was approaching the twinkling lights of the Velvet Stretch, her limbs were flailing, her hips were swaying, her knees were gyrating. She had given herself so completely to the music that there was no space for anxiety, heartache, and other demons.
At the entrance to the Velvet Stretch, Laki turned off the music. She pressed her palm to the thin wall of her pod to register herself with the concierge. As she waited for him to complete his procedures, images of lovers she had rendezvoused with started to flash through her mind. She remembered the sweetness of her sessions with Pemfi, the hilarity of hanging out with Benko, and one heart-stopping moment she’d had with Asla. She could hear Se-se’s nagging scorn ringing in her ears—“Do they even have marriage belts to offer, Laki?”
She responded to the concierge’s questions absentmindedly, grinning at the memory of her usual entrance into the Velvet Stretch. Were it a normal visit with a rendezvous awaiting her, she wouldn’t be standing there, half listening to the concierge; she’d be flat-out ignoring him, crawling around her pod in search of props to enliven her rendezvous.
“No rendezvous,” she told the concierge while in her mind she was remembering placing peacock feathers, a pouch of honey, and a latex strap on the floor of her pod.
He slid his fingers over his data machine. “You only have clearance for the rendezvous-less zone. You must return to the concierge’s desk if you wish to enter another level.”
Laki indicated her consent with the tap of her finger, then turned away. Everything else the concierge said was useless to her. He cleared her entrance, and she plunged into the Velvet Stretch.
Savoring the freedom of flight, she went flitting through the rendezvous-less zone. Even though the Velvet Stretch was all about connection, she steered clear of other pods. She didn’t need a date or even a momentary flirt, she needed a private, remote area for her party.
It had been quite some time since she had searched the Velvet Stretch for anything. Amongst her friends, she acted as if she harbored the same appetites that had defined her pre-maturation stage, but the truth was she had changed. She could no longer sustain the intense curiosity of her early days when she had roamed the Stretch, electrified by her quest to find a sexy someone whose love was so intense that being together would feel like a desperation, a feverish need.
Her identity was so twisted up in her reputation that she didn’t know how to embrace a new facet of her personality. She had spent so much time orchestrating fantastic episodes full of intrigue and mind-blowing carnal consummation that solitude seemed like a foreign language. Who would she be if not voracious and doggedly
