Home Again, Home Again by Cory Doctorow (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud .txt) 📖

/> "What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was as
unreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was a
collection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.

"You know, like, the whole fricken thing. Like if I leave here when I'm
eighteen, will my folks be okay without me, and like that."

"Your pa-rents are able to take care of them-selves, Chet. You must con-cern
your-self with you, Chet. You should do something con-struct-tive with your
wo-rry, such as de-ciding on a ca-reer that will ful-fill you when you leave the
Cen-ter." The Center was the short form for the long, nice name that no one ever
used to describe the bat-house.

"I thought, like, maybe I could be, you know, a spaceship pilot or something."

"Then you must stu-dy math-e-mat-ics and phy-sics. If you like, Chet, I can
re-quest ad-vanced in-struct-tion-al mat-e-rials for you."

"Sure, that'd be great. Thanks, Robotron."

"You are wel-come, Chet. I am glad to help. My own par-ent was in a Cen-ter on
my world, you know. I un-der-stand how you feel. There is still time re-main-ing
in your ses-sion. What else would you like to dis-cuss?"

"My mother doesn't talk anymore. Nothing. Why is that?"

"Your mo-ther is. . . ." The Amazing Robotron fumbled for a word, buried
somewhere deep in the hypnotic English lexicon baked into its brain. "Your
mo-ther has a prob-lem, and she needs your aff-ec-tion now more than e-ver.
What-ev-er rea-son she has for her si-lence, it is not you. Your mo-ther and
fa-ther love you, and dream of the day when you leave here and make your own way
through the gal-ax-y."

Of course his parents loved him, he supposed, in an abstract kind of way. His
mother, who hadn't worn anything but a bathrobe in months, whose face he
couldn't picture behind his eyes but whose bathrobe he could visualize in its
every rip and stain and fray. His father, who seemed to have forgotten how to
groom himself, who spent his loud days in one of the bat-house's workshops,
drinking beer with his buddies while they played with the arc welders. His
parents loved him, he knew that.

"OK, right, thanks. I've gotta blow, 'K?"

"All-right. I will see you on Thurs-day, then?"

But Chet was already out the door, digging Debbie Carr's purse from under the
planter, then running, doubled over the bulge it made in his shirt, hunting for
a private space in the anthill.

#

The entire north face of the bat-house was eyeless, a blind, windowless expanse
of foam that seemed to curve as it approached infinity.

Some said it was an architectural error, others said it was part of the
bat-house's heating scheme. Up in nosebleed country, on the 120th level, it was
almost empty: sparsely populated by the very battiest bats, though as more and
more humans were found batty, they pushed inexorably upwards.

Chet rode the lift to the 125th floor and walked casually to the end of the
hallway. At this height, the hallways were bare foam, without the long-wear
carpet and fake plants that adorned the low-altitude territories. He walked as
calmly as he could to the very end of the northern hall, then hunkered down in
the corner and spilled the purse.

Shit, but Debbie Carr was going girlie. The pile was all tampons and makeup and,
ugh, a spare bra. A spare bra! I chuckled, and kept sorting. There were three
pennies, enough to buy six chocolate bars in the black-market tuck-shop on the
75th floor. A clever little pair of folding scissors, their blades razor-sharp.
I was using them to slit the lining of the purse when the door to 12525 opened,
and the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla emerged.

My palms slicked with guilty sweat, and the pile of Debbie's crap, set against
the featureless foam corridor, seemed to scream its presence. I spun around,
working my body into the corner, and held the little scissors like a dagger in
my fist.

The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla was clearly batty. He was wearing
boxer-shorts and a tailcoat and had a halo of wild, greasy hair and a long,
tangled beard, but even if he'd been wearing a suit and tie and had a trip to
the barber's, I'd have known he was batty the minute I laid eyes on him. He
didn't walk, he shambled, like he'd spent a long, long time on meds. His eyes,
set in deep black pits of sleeplessness, were ferociously crazy.

He turned to stare at me.

"Hello, sonny. Do you like to swim?"

I stood in my corner, mute, trapped.

"I have an ocean in my apt. Maybe you'd like to try it? I used to love to swim
in the ocean when I was a boy."

My feet moved without my willing them. An ocean in his apt? My feet wanted to
know about this.

I entered his apt, and even my feet were too surprised to go on.

He had the biggest apt I'd ever seen. It spanned three quarters of the length of
the bat-house, and was five storeys high. The spots where he'd dissolved the
foam walls away with solvent were rough and uneven, and rings of foam encircled
each of the missing storeys above. I couldn't imagine getting that much solvent:
it was more tightly controlled than plutonium, the subject of countless
action-adventure vids.

At one end of the apt stood a collection of tall, spiny apparatus, humming with
electricity and sparking. They were remarkable, but their impact was lost in
what lay at the other end.

The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla had an ocean in his apt. It was a clear
aquarium tank, fifteen meters long and nearly seventeen high, and eight meters
deep. It was dominated by a massive, baroque coral reef, like a melting castle
with misshapen brains growing out of it.

Schools of fish -- bright as jellybeans -- darted through the ocean's depths,
swimming in and out of the softly waving plants. A thousand neon tetra, a flock
of living quicksilver sewing needles, turned 90 degrees in perfect unison, then
did it again, and again, and again, describing a neat, angular box in the water.

"Isn't it beautiful? I'm using it in one of my experiments, but I also find it
very _calming_."

#

I hail a pedicab and the kids back on my adopted homeworld, with their accusing,
angry words and stares vanish from my mind. The cabbie is about nineteen and
muscular as hell, legs like treetrunks, clipped into the pedals. A flywheel
spins between him and me, and his brakes store his momentum up in it every time
he slows. On the two-hour ride into downtown Toronto, he never once comes to a
full stop.

I've booked a room at the Royal York. I can afford it -- the stipend I receive
for the counseling work has been slowly accumulating in my bank account.

Downtown is all foam now, and "historical" shops selling authentic Earth
crapola: reproductions of old newspapers, reproductions of old electronics,
reproductions of old clothes and old food and other discarded cultural detritus.
I see tall, clacking insect-creatures with walkman headphones across their
stomachs. I see squat, rocky creatures smearing pizza slices onto their
digestive membranes. I see soft, slithering creatures with Toronto Blue Jays
baseball hats suspended in their jelly.

The humans I see are dressed in unisex coveralls, with discreet comms on their
wrists or collars, and they don't seem to notice that their city is become a
bestiary.

The cabby isn't even out of breath when we pull up at the Royal York, which,
thankfully, is still clothed in its ancient dressed stone. We point our comms at
each other and I squirt some money at him, adding a generous tip. His face,
which had been wildly animated while he dodged the traffic on the long ride is a
stony mask now, as though when at rest he entered a semiconscious sleep mode.

The doorman is dressed in what may or may not be historically accurate costume,
though what period it is meant to represent is anyone's guess. He carries my bag
to the check-in and I squirt more money at him. He wishes that I have a nice
stay in Toronto, and I wish it, too.

At the check-in, I squirt my ID and still more money at the efficient young
woman in a smart blazer, and another babu in period costume -- those shoes look
painful -- carries my bag to the lift and presses the button.

We wait in strained silence and the lift makes its achingly slow progress
towards us. There are no elevators on the planet I live on now -- the wild
gravity and wilder windstorms don't permit buildings of more than one story --
but even if there were, they wouldn't be like this lift, like a human lift, like
one of the fifty that ran the vertical length of the bat-house.

I nearly choke as we enter that lift. It has the smell of a million transient
guests, aftershaves and perfumes and pheromones, and the stale recirc air I
remember so well. I stifle the choke into my fist, fake a cough, and feel a
self-consciousness I didn't know I had.

I'm worried that the babu knows that I grew up in the bat-house.

Now I can't make eye-contact with him. Now I can't seem to stand naturally,
can't figure out where a not-crazy puts his hands and where a not-crazy puts his
eyes. Little Chet and his mates liked to terrorize people in the lifts, play
"who farted" and "I'm gonna puke" and "I have to pee" in loud sing-songs, just
to watch the other bats squirm.

The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla thought that these games were unfunny,
unsophisticated and unappetizing and little Chet stopped playing them.

I squirt extra money at the babu, after he opens my windows and shows me the
shitter and the vid's remote.

I unpack mechanically, my meager bag yielding more-meager clothes. I'd thought
I'd buy more after earthfall, since the spaceports' version of human apparel
wasn't, very. I realize that I'm wearing the same clothes I left Earth in, lo
those years before. They're hardly the worse for wear -- when I'm in my
exoskeleton on my new planet, I don't bother with clothes.

#

The ocean seemed too fragile to be real. All that caged water, held behind a
flimsy-seeming sheet of clear foam, the corners joined with strips of thick
gasket-rubber. Standing there at its base, Chet was terrified that it would
burst and drown him -- he actually felt the push of water, the horrid, dying
wriggles of the fish as they were washed over his body.

"Say there, son. Hello?"

Chet looked up. Nicola Tesla's hair was standing on end, comically. He realized
that his own long, shaggy hair was doing the same. The whole room felt electric.

"Are you all right?" He had a trace of an accent, like the hint of garlic in a
salad dressing, an odd way of stepping on his vowels.

"Yeh, yeh, fine. I'm fine," Chet said.

"I am pleased to hear that. What is your name, son?"

"Chet. Affeltranger."

"I'm pleased to meet you. My name is Gaylord Ballozos, though that's not who I
am. You see, I'm the channel for Nicola Tesla. Would you like to see a magic
trick?"

Chet nodded. He wondered who Nicola Tesla was, and filed away the name