Alice’s Order

3. Trust Engineers

Three

Trust Engineers

Alice was six when she first went to Sanisco with her teenage siblings. When Cyrus, Dawn and Alice arrived at the airport, they strolled with guards behind them down a concrete walkway. Cyrus plugged his visor into an external battery. Dawn hummed a tune. Inside, they walked onto a shiny, smooth floor that reflected the lights above them that were nestled between industrial metal support beams. People traversed by sitting atop their self-rolling luggage. The three siblings walked to the check-in, weaving between the luggage-riders. Cyrus typed the flight information into the kiosk, annoyed by the lag between tapping the screen and the computer’s reaction. They had all forgotten what a spinning colored progress wheel meant.

“Come on, this is 2085.” Cyrus’s taps were more frequent, though the result was the same.

The kiosk opened beneath the screen and they slid their baggage into the chute. The door took a while to close and Cyrus fake kicked the machine.

“Today, I’m going to the west coast, down to Sanisco to go to SECOND SIGHT’s headquarters,” Cyrus said to his followers, and circled around in one spot to give them a panorama of the airport.

Out of nowhere, people appeared in seconds to take pictures of him.

“Cyrus!” a girl cried hysterically.

“Whoa…” Cyrus smiled and gave everyone high fives.

Even through the scanners, the officer laughed when Cyrus placed his visor into the conveyor. “I love your channel.” The TSA officer smiled at Cyrus. “Hello, girls.”

The trio went to their gate and proceeded into the entryway. Alice looked at the little windows in the entryway and saw the shaft of the rocket towering above them on the runway. On the rocket, all passengers were dressed in space suits.

“Did you know this flight would have taken almost seven hours with old technology?” Dawn adjusted Alice’s helmet.

“What would you do for seven hours?” Alice inquired.

“God knows.” Dawn laughed. “It sounds horrible.”

Alice had never gone to space, but the flight was unremarkable: it only took about five minutes to get settled, launch, and land. The stars they briefly saw blurred like a long exposure photo ruined by movement in a camera.

When they landed back on earth in Sanisco, Cyrus helped Alice out of her space suit.

“Was that fun?” Cyrus asked.

She shook her head and yawned.

“Savage, Alice.” Cyrus frowned, crossing his arms.

“Come on. Our luggage is on belt seven.” Dawn waved at them.

The SECOND SIGHT headquarters was made up of a grid of white streets between a series of buildings. People zipped down them on pedal bikes. It resembled a university campus. The buildings were neon pink, sea blue, and green, with a yellow stripe.

“Check it out, you guys!” Cyrus looked up to the sky with his visor.

Alice moved out of the way as a woman pedaled past her. The woman had VR goggles on, which quietly said, “Seven-point-five miles, three hundred fifty calories. Your trip is ending. Your trip has ended! Good job! Would you like to post to SECOND SIGHT? The app would like to receive your profile, contacts, date of birth.”

The central building was wrapped in glass windows with rectangular panels in blue, red, and yellow glass that varied chaotically in their placement and size. As soon as Alice and her siblings entered the building, employees started clapping. The applause continued as they walked down a bridge that was independent from the bottom and top floor, where the employees stood to greet them.

Along the walkway, live-streamed interactions were projected onto the glass railing:

Nate Gosling: Today’s been great. I feel like a new me. It’s a beautiful day to commit cockroach g******e.

Sarah Ross: I should just get spayed and become a damn nun. My love life is next-level ridiculous.

“This. Is. Awesome!” Cyrus touched the streams.

“Hello,” Edward, the CEO of SECOND-SIGHT greeted them. Cyrus moved into a close-up pose with Edward. He was a master of the perfect selfie. They stuck their tongues out and waved; the employees mimicked them. “Say hello to all my trust engineers.” Edward held a hand out to his workers.

Edward turned back to his visitors and led them through a crowd of cheering employees. They walked up a spiral staircase with blue LED ribbons twisting around the railing to the top floor. They walked across a glass bridge to the other side of the building. Edward stopped midway and pointed through a glass wall. Employees were playing VR basketball. They all stood on the court with their visors on, waving at an invisible ball. Alice saw on the screen that they were in a neon disco-themed world in their visors. Alice looked down from the glass bridge and watched people walking like ants beneath her.

“They say, in the Old World, the Empyreans were able to communicate telepathically,” Edward mused to Cyrus. “It’s what inspired SECOND SIGHT. I wanted people to have telepathy in a way that isn’t a mutation. Social media is a channel into each other’s minds—we’re always connected.”

“What’s that?” Dawn pointed to a bunch of men hollering in a neon-lit room.

“Oh, we have an arcade and a speakeasy,” Edward said, half-distracted.

The men in the neon room glanced over at Dawn and gave her a double take. She took Alice’s hand. Alice saw a hologram of a nude woman and heard her mechanical voice say, “What is your command?”

Dawn whisked her away. “Let’s go. I’m done.”

“There’s a sexy man version too,” one of the assistants tried to assure her, but Dawn kept walking toward the exit. Alice turned back and waved goodbye to Cyrus.

Back at the hotel, a bored Alice watched her sister unpack.

“I wanna go back,” Alice whined.

“I don’t.” Dawn threw on a pair of denim shorts and an embroidered tank top. She stuck on her white cat-eye shades and tied her hair back with a red elastic. “Let’s enjoy the real world, shall we?”

“Where do you two want to go?” one of their guards inquired as Dawn walked toward the door.

“The pier.” Dawn smiled.

When they got to the pier, for the first time, Alice noticed people’s heads turning to watch them pass.

“What ice cream flavor do I want, Alice?” Dawn whispered. “Can you read my mind? I’m thinking about it now.”

“Strawberry! Strawberry!” Alice repeated.

Dawn bought them both ice cream. She gave Alice a double-scoop chocolate cone drizzled in sprinkles. Dawn got mint chip.

“Wrong answer.” Dawn poked her.

“Hey there,” a boy said to Dawn. “Cute little sister.”

Dawn smiled but said nothing. She ate her soft ice cream and walked down the boardwalk. Two boys whistled.

“Come on, girls.” The guards moved them along.

The sun burned down on Alice’s head. She hid in the shade whenever she could. Dawn bought her a little sun hat with a green ribbon on it. “Here you go, little fly.”

The two girls saw a crowd of people at a stall. Dawn walked over, curious. Eighteen dollars for a giant bucket of crabs, oysters, mussels, and crab cakes with French fries. Dawn tapped her phone on the square panel by the cashier.

“The pier is my favorite spot.” Dawn tried to entertain Alice while they waited. “Grandpa used to take us here before he passed away. I wish you got to meet him.”

“What was he like?”

“He was quiet, very handsome. He wasn’t always there though. He had seen a lot, living through the intense wars prior to the Grande War. Dad and mom fought in the Grande War too.”

After fifteen minutes, while hidden under the slender awning of the food truck, their food came in a bucket dampened by condensation. As the sisters walked to the boardwalk to find seating, they spotted Cyrus waving at them. Together, they eventually found a bench.

“Are you a trust engineer now?” Alice asked with crab cake in her mouth.

Cyrus took a crab cake and smiled. “It’s going to be my future job. Do you guys want to go to the River District?”

“What’s there to blog?” Dawn retorted.

Cyrus smiled. “We can go to Everglow. They said they’d give me free chocolate if I mention ’em.”

“Cool,” Alice piped in. “Let’s go, Dawn.”

As soon as they arrived at the candy shop, Dawn’s lack of enthusiasm was combated by glass cases full of truffles, macarons, cakes, every flavor of ice cream, chocolate fondue, tea-infused chocolates, chocolate-covered rice cereal treats, and even more chocolate-covered everything else—bananas, bacon, caramels. Cyrus took a bag of chocolate pretzels from the counter and handed them to Alice. He tapped his watch on the panel and the panel read zero in price.

“Hooray.” Alice beamed. Cyrus took a picture of her and tagged Everglow on his post.

“Can I have those strawberries?” Dawn pressed her hands against the glass.

Alice smiled up at Dawn’s wonder. Her brother gave Dawn a side embrace as she ate one. He took a photo with her and she stuck her tongue out.

That image illuminated Alice and Cyrus’s faces in the dark in some future so unlike this wonderful past.

“I can’t look at this right now,” Cyrus’s voice vibrated with anger, he pushed her wrist away that projected the image from her watch. Not with force, but his hands stung her with their cold. He rose from the bed. She watched him go into the light of the hallway before closing the door behind him.

As his presence faded, she understood that her doubt was no match against the darkness and silence in her room. Her hope transformed into an echo inside of a mountain. In the face of death, God did not answer her. And no one else could. Life and the image of its never-ending possibilities cracked, and she fell through the pieces, knew she would for the rest of her life.

From February 2nd, Alice tried to count the days, but she wondered who she could share her tears with. She wanted someone to tell why and how Dawn mattered to her so much. Dawn’s fierce loyalty, her honest friendships, her deep love of music and painting. She only hoped in time, the space her sister occupied inside of her would be a wellspring instead of a place of hurt. That she would weave those threads of her sister into the fabric of her future. When it stopped hurting, she’d tell all those who will listen who Dawn was and how she graced people’s lives. Alice knew in her heart Dawn became what she was always meant to be. Free and whole. Eternity had her sister. In the face of this unutterable knowledge, Alice had no courage to say goodbye.