Jinxed Read online

  Another slogan appears where my elbows are touching the countertop. BAK-UP YOUR LIFE . . . MONCHA’S NEWEST CLOUD SOFTWARE INCLUDED WITH EVERY NEW BAKU. This time, a picture of Monica flashes up, with her signature asymmetrical fringe cut into a diamond pattern, almost like a reverse crown. Mom has a story of when I tried to cut my hair into the same style . . . and that’s why I had a pixie cut for half of second grade.

  Seeing Monica’s face makes me smile. The story behind bakus is ingrained in our cultural history and Monica Chan is its main protagonist. There’s even a Hollywood-produced mini-series about her journey, called (WO)MAN’S BEST FRIEND. I stream it whenever I’m feeling low, or uninspired – and I dread to think how many times it’s been logged that I watch it.

  The story goes that Monica grew up glued to her smartphone – so much so that it began to be detrimental to both her mental and physical health. During her doctor-mandated phone-break, she walked the streets of Toronto and found herself watching people walking their dogs in High Park. She realized what she’d been missing all along: a companion. If her smartphone was going to be by her side all the time, why not have it be cute and interactive? Something she could love and feel comforted by? But that could also be useful – helping her keep track of her life and her calendar, stay in touch with her friends and family, and access her social media, the internet and everything else she needed.

  She started work in the storage locker of her apartment building, because her parents didn’t have a house with a garage (I bet her mom couldn’t stand the smell of solder either). They squeezed their entire family into a two-bedroom condo, just like my family’s. She designed a robotic pet with all the features of a smartphone and called it a baku because of a story she’d heard from her Chinese grandmother, about creatures made up of the leftover parts of other animals. Her first model, affectionately known as Yi (the Chinese word for ‘one’), was built from the screen of her portable gaming device, her old smartphone’s motherboard, and metal parts she could scrape together from old toys and electronics. She went door-to-door in her apartment building, asking her neighbours to give her any old bits of tech destined for the scrapyard.

  She took her design to a board of reality television investors, who threw money at her and turned her – and her baku – into a viral sensation overnight. Before long, MONCHA was up and running in a small co-working space in Toronto’s Discovery District, alongside crowd-sourced taxi services and the latest health tracking software. It opened its first factory in North Toronto and just kept expanding, taking over buildings and multiplying like mould in a petri dish as bakus became the must-have device around the world. Monica bought her old condominium building to help provide housing for her employees, then started her own school for her employees’ kids, acquired a local hospital to provide healthcare . . . and quickly Monchaville was born.

  A loud crash from beside me snaps me from my thoughts. Zora gasps and when I look up, my jaw drops too. On the counter two down from ours is a stunning high level baku – an eagle – its wings spread so wide they’ve knocked over a display case of customizable butterfly wings. The companioneering work on display is on a level beyond anything I’ve seen. The feathers are made up of individual filaments of steel-sprayed-gold, giving it a rich, sparkling texture. It tosses its head – so lifelike – and lets out a screech that almost pierces my eardrums. It’s magnificent. It’s absolutely top-of-the-line. Must be at least level 4, if not level 5.

  Who could afford something like that?

  I get my answer. The eagle folds its wings down and, staring wide-eyed at his new baku, is a guy in a Profectus-branded jersey.

  ‘Lace?’ Zora whispers in my ear. ‘I think you’re drooling.’

  ‘What?’ I drop my head and wipe my mouth, just in case she wasn’t joking. ‘That baku is amazing.’

  ‘That’s not the only thing that’s amazing. Damn, he is fine,’ Zora says in a low voice, wiggling her eyebrows at the guy, making me snort.

  She’s not wrong. I dare one more glance. The guy is older than us and tall – six feet at least – with a smooth high brow and close-shaved black hair that’s just starting to lift into small curls. His teeth are bright white against his dark skin as his lips split into a giant grin.

  I’d be grinning like that too, if that beautiful bird was destined to be my baku.

  ‘Tobias, my man!’ comes a shout from behind me. Another guy – also in a Profectus jersey, but this one so new I see the price tag sticking out at the back – barges past me, knocking me into Zora, and then both of us into the counter.

  ‘Watch it!’ I snap. ‘There’s a line, you know.’

  The guy doesn’t turn around but his baku does. An ugly pig snuffles at our feet, pawing at the ground. It has two huge tusks and it sways its head menacingly – not a pig, then, but a boar. I leap back, letting out an involuntary yelp.

  ‘Rein it in, Carter,’ says Zora, who recovers faster than me.

  My neck snaps around so fast, I almost get whiplash. Carter?

  I don’t know why I’m so surprised. Despite the fact that I beat him in almost every class – much to his annoyance – his acceptance into Profectus was a signed, sealed and delivered thing.

  He saunters over, smirking at me.

  ‘Zora? Is that you – and Lacey?’

  I cringe as he says my name. I wish with all my heart now that I had taken the subway out to some distant Moncha Store where I wouldn’t run into people I know. Especially not this particular person.

  ‘Admiring my new baku, are you? When I got my Profectus acceptance last night, I got an upgrade straight away.’

  ‘You mean your dad bought you an upgrade,’ Zora snaps. That’s why the boar baku is so surprising. I’m sure the last time I saw him at school, he had a dog baku.

  Carter just shrugs. ‘Meet Hunter – he’s a level 4, don’t you know.’

  I grimace, despite myself. Trust him to get a level 4 baku without having to earn it. I wonder if he even knows how to operate it properly. His dad probably got one of the companioneers at Moncha to customize it just for him. My body aches with jealousy.

  ‘Choosing your baku, are you?’ He leans his elbow on the counter, tilting his head to one side. ‘What are you going for?’

  ‘Oh, uh . . .’ I try to calculate the time it would take for me to bolt to the door. Internet or no internet, anything is better than the humiliation I’m about to face if . . .

  ‘Here’s your beetle, miss.’

  The vet’s timing couldn’t be worse. He sets the tiny box down on the counter, the beetle baku trapped in a white plastic mould, clearly visible through the transparent opening in the front. Carter’s eyes bulge out of his head. I don’t know whether he’s going to explode from confusion or glee – or both, as the realization dawns. Then he begins to laugh. He laughs and laughs, as my face burns with embarrassment.

  I turn away from Carter but not before I notice that everyone in the store is looking at me, including the hot guy Tobias with the eagle baku.

  ‘You didn’t get in, did you? Oh, Lace – all those years of being a total nerd, wasted!’ Carter says, before laughing even more.

  ‘Come on, Zora,’ I mumble, snatching the beetle from off the counter, and this time she doesn’t try to stop me.

  ‘Hey, don’t you want me to show you how to leash it?’ the vet calls after us.

  But Zora and I are already out of the door.

  ‘HE’S A JERK. FORGET ABOUT HIM,’ SAYS Zora, once she catches up to me. She slips her arm around mine, forcing me back into a more normal pace. But I don’t want to slow down. Everywhere I look in the mall, I see people with their higher level bakus – mechanical dogs and cats either trotting at their heels or leashed up on their shoulders – and it’s a constant reminder of what I can’t have. I make a beeline for the exit, craving sunlight and fresh air.

  I’m still shaking, Carter’s laugh a soundtrack to my steps that I can’t turn off. I’m simultaneously humiliated and annoyed th
at I’ve let him get to me. My new beetle baku is still trapped in the box in my hand; I can’t bear to look at it yet. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ I say to Zora, once we’re through the revolving doors and outside. ‘Somewhere . . . to escape from here.’

  ‘I know just the place. I’ll get directions.’ She holds her palm out as her dormouse sneaks down her arm, projecting directions on her fingers.

  I shove the beetle into my backpack, pushing it right to the very bottom. Zora shoots me a look, but doesn’t say anything. I avert my eyes, focusing on the zipper of my bag. I can tell by the gentle rattle of the beads at the bottom of her braids that she is shaking her head at me.

  By the time I stand up again though, she’s over it. That’s what I love best about Zora. She’s the least emotional person I know. It’s one of the things that makes her such a great coder. She sees everything as if it’s an algorithm, including our emotions – ‘this is just the body’s inbuilt response to stressful stimuli’ she told me when we first met, while I was crying in the elevator after getting a B on a test in third grade, and I blinked at her as if I couldn’t believe I’d found another eight-year-old as nerdy as I was. She’d just moved into the same condo building with her parents and three high-maintenance sisters. I’d always been the loner kid in class – the one who took everything (especially my grades) a bit too seriously, who was always hungry to learn more about engineering, to see my name at the top of the honour roll. Zora was the first person who was as passionate about something as I was. At first, she was just glad to escape the madhouse of her family, but we quickly became best friends.

  She knows when to push and when to leave me alone. We lock together like pieces of a very specific jigsaw. No other person has ever understood me like she does. She pushes; I pull. She codes; I build. My creations would be lifeless without her code and her code formless without my builds. And because we live in the same building, she’s always hanging out in my unit – helping me not get too lonely when Mom is at work, and even hanging out with Mom when I’m tinkering in the basement. She’s more like a sister than a friend – she calls me a sister that she chose rather than was born with – and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

  There is no specific border for when we leave ‘Monchaville’, no massive gate or wall, but there’s a definite feeling. A gentle shift in energy from one side of the road to the other. I think it’s because of how clean everything is in the part of town that is run by the company. They took over responsibility from the city for all the maintenance of the ten-block (and expanding) rectangle in exchange for preferential planning permissions and the right to override specific bylaws. I saw an article in a regular city paper once that said the sidewalks and pathways around Moncha are embedded with anti-trademark-infringement alarms that trigger if someone attempts to steal anything, and that there are security bird bakus flying over every square inch of pavement – as invasive as CCTV. I don’t know if any of the rumours are true – I’ve never seen any unusual-looking birds or heard the blare of an alarm, but the Moncha guard – the security team – are ever-present, keeping the streets of Monchaville safe.

  Tales of security bakus and alarms go against everything I’ve read about Monica Chan – she doesn’t seem paranoid about copyright infringement. We’ve had loads of talks in school about how important it is for us to experiment and play – that’s how technology takes its great leaps forward. And no company in the world has yet been able to replicate the bakus to any reasonable standard. There was a disastrous version that came out in Germany – the animals were all based on mythological creatures (that part was totally cool) – but they bugged out and started twitching, scrambling text messages and rerouting web searches to illegal dark net stuff. One even attacked their owner. They had to shut down production within a week. Once again, there were rumours that it could have easily been Moncha’s ace code-creators that infected the German hosts, but viral code wouldn’t explain the weird mechanical tics.

  In the decade that bakus have been around, there haven’t been any major glitches. The neuroleash technology is no more invasive than an ear-piercing (although the law still makes people wait until they’re entering their final year of high school before they can get one). The best part is that even older bakus can be upgraded, incorporating any developments in the technology, under lifetime Moncha warranty. Their spread around the world has been so rapid and prolific, there isn’t any need for competition. And if you want to work for a cutting-edge technology company, there is only one choice: Moncha.

  There has only ever been one choice for me, that’s for sure. Except now, the spark of hope is accompanied by a wave of crashing disappointment. I wonder if that feeling will ever go away, or if I’ll be left with this regret for the rest of my life.

  When Linus indicates that we should turn left, I realize where Zora is taking us. I grin with delight. The Don River valley trails. The Don River valley splices through the city centre like a river of green, an oasis of calm in the busy metropolis. It’s one of my favourite parts of the city. You can look down into it and pretend you are in the middle of the wilderness. I have a blurred memory of being on my dad’s shoulders as we hiked down through towards the tracks and—

  I immediately curse my brain and scrub it of all mention of my dad. I do not need to go there. Not today. Today has been filled with enough disappointment.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Zora asks, and Linus tilts his head in strange synchronicity. He’s only been hers for a day, and yet already he’s adopting her mannerisms, and becoming as much a part of her as the line of earrings dotted up her earlobe.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She stares down at my hand. ‘You’re rubbing your ring.’

  Heat rises in my cheeks and I snap my hands apart. But she’s right. Whenever I touch my dad’s old engineering ring – the last piece of him I have left – something is up.

  The iron rings are a Canadian engineering tradition. Supposedly forged from the iron of a collapsed bridge, it’s a reminder of the immense responsibility borne by engineers, and to keep the safety of their work in mind. It’s supposed to be worn on the left pinky, but my hands are much smaller than my dad’s. I wear mine on my thumb. Besides, I’m not an engineer yet.

  And maybe now you never will be, not for Moncha Corp anyway, says a small voice in my head.

  I dash the thought away.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I say. ‘This was the perfect place to come. I love it here.’ I throw my arms wide and twirl around under the canopy of leaves, hoping to distract her.

  It works. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. ‘It’s pretty great. And if we head across the bridge it’s a short cut downtown, so we can get some bubble tea.’

  There’s a suspension bridge in the middle of the park that crosses over the high-speed rail tracks. ‘Excellent plan,’ I say. I stare down at the pattern of shadows created by the leaves on her face and arms, her skin shining burnished copper where the sun hits it. I feel a twinge of sadness that she’s off on an advanced coding course this summer. It’s an amazing opportunity for her – Zora’s wanted to be a coder ever since she programmed her first ‘Hello World’ in BASE – and this course will give her a leg-up on the competition before she applies for an actual computer technology degree next year.

  ‘When does your course start?’ I ask, wanting to know exactly how many days I have to hang with Zora before she leaves me for two whole months.

  ‘Hmm?’ She opens her deep brown eyes and levels her gaze at me. ‘Oh . . . end of June. Are you going to miss me?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I stop in my tracks. ‘What am I going to do with my summer without you?’

  She pokes me in the ribs. ‘Maybe you’ll enjoy yourself. It’s the summer. You’ve worked hard all friggin’ year. You’re allowed to take a break and relax.’

  ‘Right . . .’ Except that you get to do the thing you’ve been wanting to do your whole life. The words balance on the tip of my tongue bu
t I don’t let them spill off the edge.

  Laughter reaches us from behind, the low chuckle of inside jokes and bad puns. Zora looks over her shoulder. ‘Oh no,’ she says, her shoulders tensing.

  ‘What is it?’ I turn around too, and immediately see the source of tension: the twitch of a robotic boar nose coming up behind us. Their bakus must have directed them down the same short cut into downtown.

  ‘Oh look, it’s beetle brain and her rodent friend,’ says Carter, his voice laced with smugness as he approaches. He’s accompanied by a few guys I don’t recognize, all with level 3 bakus and also in Profectus shirts, and Tobias. At least he has the decency to look ashamed at his friend’s blatant taunting, staring off into the trees and refusing to make eye contact. As if I’m looking at him anyway. My eyes drift over to the sight of his beautiful eagle baku, my stomach clenching with jealousy.

  ‘Ignore Carter,’ whispers Zora, holding her chin up high. Linus quivers inside the hood of her jacket. We slow our pace, hoping they’ll pass us by.

  ‘Now, seriously though,’ says Carter, holding his hands up in front of him as he steps in front of us, forcing us to stop. Reluctantly, I hold his gaze. ‘I’m kinda disappointed that you’re not going to be at Profectus next year. You were by far my closest competition in our class. I guess now I get to see what the actual smart kids are like. Guess you flunked the entrance exam?’

  Beside me, Zora bristles, all five-foot-nothing of her stocky frame, and she glares at me expectantly, her expression in her deep brown eyes screaming: ‘YOU CAN’T LET HIM GET AWAY WITH SAYING THAT!’

  But my treacherous brain draws a blank at anything witty or creative. Instead I just mumble non-words, drop my chin and my eyes and keep on walking, speeding up this time. My cheeks burn with shame – I wish I could be half as clever in the moment as the teens on my favourite streaming series.