Swipe

Recently the city had celebrated its growth into territory as far as what had once been called Mexico (before it all just became the A.U.), and Erin was often told that if you could stand the heat, Sierra was a great place to live.
    Outside of these urban areas, though, North America was mostly uninhabited, and while Erin had long known this to be the case, it wasn’t until today that she could visualize what “uninhabited” truly meant. Along the ride, Erin had seen a few vistas still dotted with houses, and a couple even covered with them, but those were rare sights. Mostly, these days, following so many years of environmental disruption, the country was desolate, its old cities and towns long abandoned and forgotten, occupied by only the most occasional and intrepid of settlers still willing to risk its climate of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, heat waves, blizzards . . .
    Consequently, the sky between cities was open and infinite, unobscured by a single skyscraper or overpass (except the occasional ruin), and it seemed to Erin that it might swallow her whole if she didn’t hold on tight to her seat.
    As they rode north through the suburbs, fifty miles out from New Chicago’s city limits, the development returned. But it was hardly the bustling urban life she’d grown up with. This was small-town, and everything about it was unfamiliar. The buildings stretched only ten, maybe twenty stories off the ground. The streets were quiet and humble, scattered with pedestrians, but hardly any rollersticks or electrobuses. There were no treads on the sidewalk for automatic moving. No trams. No crowds. The buildings’ sides were vinyl or glass or brick, and none were covered with the ground-to-sky advertisement and news screens from back home. Intersections didn’t even have stoplights here. No one moved fast enough to need them.
    “You’re looking at it!” Erin’s dad said as the train came to a stop. “This is Spokie.”

    Half an hour into their walk through the quiet streets, Mr. Arbitor wasn’t so jovial. Sweat pooled in the crevices of his shirt as he lurched and dragged an oversized luggage carrier behind him. Droplets beaded and ran down his forehead. He huffed and spoke very little.
    Erin refused to help.
    “It has to be somewhere around here,” Mr. Arbitor said. He wiped his face hopelessly on the collar of his shirt.
    They passed Erin’s new middle school three times before either of them saw it.
    2
    “I hate this,” Erin said, standing at the edge of a large, empty field sandwiched between tall buildings on either side. “I can tell already.”
    The field was carpeted with plasti-grass, lined with bleachers, and big enough for any variety of outdoor sports. At its edge was a track for running, and by the sidewalk was a small sign announcing the school’s presence: The Spokie School of Middle Development.
    “Middle of nowhere,” Erin said, and Mr. Arbitor walked with the luggage to a glass booth at the field’s corner.
    “I guess this is the entrance,” he said, and they opened the booth’s door and descended the long escalator into the school below.
    The halls of Spokie Middle were bright and warm with a natural light, surprising for a place so far underground. There weren’t windows in the traditional sense, but the walls were indeed lined with glass, behind which were simulated, three-dimensional video projections of vistas from all over the world—a reminder to the students of how things once were. Erin was impressed in spite of herself. Her school back in Beacon had hallways named for their subjects of learning: the math wing, the English wing, the science wing . . . but Spokie Middle’s seemed to be known by their views. There was the Amazon Wing, with its “windows” looking out at ground level through the virtual trees of a rain forest from long ago; the Sahara Wing, with a “view” of the sand dunes of northern Africa; the Pacific Wing, re-creating with startling accuracy the sensation of walking below the old ocean’s surface; the Arctic Wing; the Beach Wing . . .
    Erin walked with her father through what must have been the Moon Wing, rendering its view of Earth from Tranquility Base. The school’s main office was just beyond the lunar module.
    Behind the front desk, another “window” looked out into an endless expanse of computer-generated stars and planets. A small woman with short black hair sat facing away from the door, staring into their