Brave New Worlds

lost and had to find a nice policeman to take me home. They put this on my arm, so it doesn't happen again. " Drea lifts her wrist, where a barcode has been branded into her skin. "You'd think they'd just write the address. But nobody likes words anymore, do they?"
    Trina sits down on the bed. Her mom doesn't move. Her head is upside-down, which makes her look alien. "I'm in trouble," she says.
    Drea blinks. Her fingernails are dirty. Or maybe ashy.
    The camera's light is green, just like the doctor's, and she thinks about smashing it. She'd like to say : I'm leaving. Come with me, mom! But this is being recorded, so instead she stands. "I'll remember both of you," she says.
    Drea smiles. "How nice. "
    She's walking backward out the door, like this is a movie in rewind. They haven't really lived in this hole for three years. Her mother isn't really a junkie. She didn't really rat her father out to the CEM, and get him killed. She isn't really leaving all that she's ever known.
    "Bye, mom," she croaks as she crosses the threshold. Then she's running down the steps.

    The streets are red, and the sky is ashes. Inside her, a girl is chewing the scenery. She's ripping down all the old pictures, and making everything blank. A girl is yelling and shouting and crying. And breathing. And running. And thinking. And remembering. This girl is her.
    Feet pounding, she doesn't stop until she's out of breath. When she looks up, a crowd of people has amassed under the Triborough Bridge in Astoria Park. Have they come to arrest her so soon? No, she remembers. It's Patriot Day.
    All along the street and sidewalk are floodlights, gurneys, and the sound of drills. The streets look wet, and at first she thinks it's water, but no, it's blood. People stand in lines one-hundred bodies deep, waiting for the messy operation. Scalp wounds bleed. Her sneakers are red.
    When the sky explodes, she thinks at first that it's another bomb. But then there are colors: red, white, and blue. Heads bobble in unison, thousands, and peer into the light. She notices now the men with guns. They're here to make sure that everybody, even the people who try to back out, get their ports.
    She pushes through the crowd and gets onto the bridge. The road is so thick with people that she can hardly move. Still, she pushes. There are others, she notices, who do not look at the bright lights in the sky. They navigate the crowd, and try to make their faces blank, but they can't. They're terrified, just like her. One in a hundred. Maybe one in a thousand, but still she spots them. Still, they exist.
    Have there always been others, only she's never noticed them before? Or is it that she's never been one of them before? She knows the secret now and it has nothing to do with the doctor. The way to remember is to stop forcing yourself to forget.
    The people like her make their way across the bridge while the other stand still, and block the way. Some are alone, others in small groups of three or four. Heads bent, chests pounding, they steer through the immobile throng. She thinks they're all headed for the same place. Canada or free Vermont. A few are wearing neck kerchiefs, and she realizes it's because they have no ports.
    Remember , her father told her. And she will do more than that.
    She doesn't know it's happening until her breath comes ragged. She's running along the bridge in blood stained shoes. She's not sure, but it seems like she's the first. Others follow. Soon, half the bridge is shaking, pounding. There aren't many of them, but they're determined. They are running. It feels so good, the air slapping her face. She was born for this, to run. She will keep running, until she is far away. Until she can watch the fireworks of Patriot Day from some place free.

The Lunatics
    by Kim Stanley Robinson

    Kim Stanley Robinson is the bestselling author of fifteen novels, including three series: the Mars trilogy, the three Californias trilogy, and the Science in the Capitol trilogy. He is also the author of about seventy short stories, much of which has been collected in the retrospective volume The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson . He is the winner of two Hugos, two Nebulas, six Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His latest novel, Galileo's Dream , came out in 2009.

    At the end of the nineteenth century, coal mining had become one of the biggest, meanest industries in the United States.