The Actuator (AT the series, #1)

By J. Spinazzola

A young woman is institutionalized for following her heart in a futuristic age dominated by reason, digital technology, and the actuator. Can Marco DiBlasi, a romantic hero, liberate her? Or will Vidalia Palmer, an older woman, continue to stand in their way? As if the Mod, Privates, and environmental hazard were not obstacle enough. Love is timeless, but time is running out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Spinazzola
• Release date: Jul 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466168350

J. Spinazzola

J. Spinazzola is a writer and former attorney. His stories have appeared in Asbury Pulp, Boston Literary Magazine, Charlotte Viewpoint, Full of Crow, Little Write Lies, Metazen, The Molotov Cocktail, The Nakedist, Silver Boomer Books, and Stymie: A Journal of Sport & Literature. His serialized novels, No Crime in Pleasure and A Year Without Magic, are featured on JukePop Serials. He is also executive producer of Bearfoot's music video "Tell Me a Story" as appearing on CMT.Player names change, but story is eternal.

Book preview

Prologue

We got the good news through our subsidized tech devices: trace had been legalized. We’d been rallying for legalization, via text and email, for decades. Armed with statistical research and anecdotal evidence culled from years of personal emails and web posts, we’d made an irrefutable case that legalization would lower the cost of healthcare in an age where the prohibitive expense (and environmental hazard) of personal travel made medical house calls a burdensome necessity.

If only the good news hadn’t been accompanied, as usual, by the bad. Trace had not only been legalized, but also privatized. We’d have our taste of cerebral freedom, but in doses so small and expensive that we would spend our days craving the type of transcendence promised by streaming trace advertisements, sponsored by Privates, which had started popping within minutes of the legislation’s initial announcement.

After legalization of trace, worker productivity spiked in the mornings and afternoons, wages paid each evening based on bonuses, while chat rooms crawled to a whisper come nightfall when shipment of food items and other products, including trace no bigger than a thumbnail, arrived instantaneously through our actuators.

A secondary series of protests, staged by the same activists who had launched the original movement, called for subsidies to make trace affordable in quantities capable of making sustainable happiness available to all people in a way that recognized our human dignity and value. Those of us who bothered reading the protest emails knew it would be decades more, beyond our lifetimes, before any subsequent changes could be passed by a Mod pandering to both sides of the aisle.

Only college students would have had the luxury to worry about such things; and most of them filled their free time, tucked cozily in their parents’ flats, by sending photos to each other. In a nod to a time-honored tradition handed down since the dawn of the digital age, they sent and posted photos via the flat screens and minis provided as part of their personal homeschooling stations, hoping they would attract an invitation to the annual dance (their one chance to meet other students in person). Their parents might have joined the initial flurry of protests if they didn’t sleep so well after each night’s shipment, waking anxiously to begin their day’s flat screen work, monitored and incentivized via productivity bonuses.

Not yet capable of actuating (known as teleporting in earlier models) large or animate items, the actuator device was easily relocated from the family room to the parents’ room after trace was legalized without first losing its stigma. Parents and the Mod agreed that students should not be exposed to trace at a time in their young lives when consumption might stunt their academic growth and interfere with internalization of the rationale. No one suspected that college students, focused on tech devices designed to work only from within their own flats, would take advantage of their parents’ deep sleep in order to explore tech-free nights forgotten by all but the transit population. After three generations made content on tower living, digital technology and the actuator, an exception emerged intent on reviving old traditions just when trace promised a future with less adult outliers.

Chapter 1

What do you mean he’s not online?

He’s not online. You can’t contact him that way.

What other way is there?

There are other ways.

Stop being mysterious. What, did he lose his access or something? His parents spend too much of their allotment on downloads?

No, his parents are online. They’re standard. He’s retro.

Retro? I’d say. He’s classical. Practically prehistoric.

But he’s cute. Star pool eyes, a hundred yard stare, untamed hair like adventure. And a defiant smirk.

How would you know all that? What, did you meet him at the dance?

Sort of.

Well at the dance or not? Don’t tell me he’s a transit. You know what they say about them.

Come on, I’m not dating a transit. I met him during a fitting at the dress shop for the dance.

Your parents can afford to buy in person? The security costs alone must be cream.

They saved up. Cut their nightly ship for months.

They did that for you?

That’s what I said. They were off about it.

So why’d they do it?

Wanted to make it memorable.

The dress?

The fitting and the dance. It only happens once a year, and I happened to turn eighteen that night.

Was it?

Memorable?

That.

Life’s been memorable every night since I met him.

Wish I knew you then. Would have been something.

To see me in a fitted dress?

Not that. To see you dance with a transit.

I told you he wasn’t one of them transits, and he wasn’t at the dance. I met him at his parents’ shop.

So how do you stay in contact?

You mean since?

Since.

We meet out.

Out? On your own, without security?

I don’t need security. I’ve got Marco.

And what about the hazard? You could catch the bug.

It’s passed. Marco says it’s healed.

What’s healed?

The planet.

That’s jib. How could it heal?

From the lack of travel: people staying in since the invention of the actuator. Three generations. We walk.

Just like that?

If we let it, the planet can heal without our help.

Then why would the Mod encourage us to stay in?

Marco says there are other reasons.

Jib. You’re not even supposed to be courting other than to post a pic for the annual dance. Freshman.

Marco’s a junior. Or was.

That doesn’t make for an exception. And what’d you mean ‘was a junior’?

After the annual dance, he turned junior then dropped.

You’re dating a drop? That’s almost as bad as dating a transit.

You can’t compare those two things.

I can’t believe your parents let you out.

They’re back on full ship ever since the dance.

Mellowed out?

I call it mellowing in. They mellow in. I slip easy.

There isn’t an actuator shipment big enough for my parents to get that mellow.

You have no reason to go out.

That’s ‘cause I don’t know any transits.

Chapter 2

To the ceiling!

What are you so happy about, Amelia?

I think I’m falling in love.

What?

Surprised?

Not with that transit I hope?

Vidalia, we’ve gone over this. And who else would it be?

A girl can dream, can’t she?

He is my dream.

Gag. Seriously.

You don’t even know him.

How could I? He’s not online. I didn’t even know there were stags our age who would opt to be offline. Maybe it’s a punishment.

Punishment? He does everything right.

Like what?

Like the way he kissed me.

Like in the wedding photos parents keep?

Like that, but different.

What, the drop didn’t know what he was doing?

No, I think he knew more. He kissed me with his tongue.

What kind of sickness is that? He must be a transit. Hungry or something.

It felt like hunger. Gave me an appetite for more.

More what?

More tongue. I started kissing him back with mine. I pressed his body against mine and asked him not to stop.

Did he think you were crazy?

No, he loved it.

How do you know?

I felt something.

Something what?

Something urgent.

Where he’s getting this spam? Sounds like residual, physical junk from the pre-digital age. Couldn’t he just send you some emoticon flowers so you wouldn’t have to risk getting picked up by the patrol or harassed by a transit?

I told you, he’s offline.

I’d say so: offline and off reason.

Reason isn’t everything.

Now you’re talking like a rebel.

I’m not a rebel. I’m just in love.

I’m going to gag, Amelia. You haven’t even told me his name.

His name is Marco. Marco DiBlasi. And his parents are tailors. They custom make. He’s got roots. No transit. Just cutting his own path.

I’d say. Where’s he come up with sticking his tongue and meeting out? Must have been cold out there without radiant.

Radiant is overrated. You can live without it. Plus it’s still summer.

What kind of jib is that?

You know how when there’s a power outage parents never mind it as much as their child?

Yeah, so what? That’s just poker face.

Marco says parents make their own radiant. Body-to-body keeps them warm undercover where they sleep skin to skin.

You mean like when they’re making their child?

He says they do it other times. After civil union they receive a tutorial on the subject. Parents download things students can’t learn online.

Everything worth knowing is online.

That’s not what Marco says.

Stop it with that Marco says jib. I’m not even convinced he’s real. You get a digital of him?

I had my mini, the camera app works outside, but he didn’t want to risk the flash. Patrols everywhere, and it’s against his code: no technology.

Then how do you plan your meets?

We don’t. We have a place. After nightfall, if he’s there and I’m there, then we meet.

What kind of boy or man or whatever he is sends his court out at the risk of falling prey to transits?

There aren’t as many out there as you think. I think the rumors are designed to keep us scared of going out. Plus, Marco found a location close to my tower.

Then why come back in? Why not become transitory?

Outside scares just the same. And I don’t need your sarcasm. Wild grass everywhere, the flapping of birds. We meet in what Marco calls the parking lot of an old ship center, where people used to buy product, this one waiting to be turned into a new cluster of towers. Out of the pavement, grass grows tall from every crack. Sometimes you can’t see anything else around you. When the patrol passes by, footsteps scramble in every direction.

So there are transits?

Maybe some.

I hope you kept your clothes on.

He says we should wait before taking them off: some courtship ritual from the days of love marriage before testing and parental approval. He read about it in a paper book.

I thought they were all gone?

There used to be a bookstore or something above his parents’ flat. Some guy collected things. That’s where Marco does his reading. Where he learns.

Like how to stick his tongue in your mouth?

You should try it.

How?

Try it on some stag during next year’s dance.

Long way off.

Then try your own tongue on the back of your hand.

Why?

To see how it feels. Should give you an idea. That’s how I practice for Marco.

Then what?

Then you’ll know appetite: what it’s like to hunger for another person.

Why not hunger for tomorrow’s ship?

Because tomorrow’s ship won’t be that different from today’s: fruits and vegetables, powdered milk and juice, prepared proteins, a sweet, and some vitamins. Maybe a new shirt or a pair of pants, sanitary papers.

Isn’t that the point of the actuator: predictability, convenience, efficiency?

Not if you want to try something new.

Why waste an allotment on something you may not like?

Intuition.

Into what?

Try kissing the back of your hand. Might give you the idea. What it’s like to want what you’ve never had. To want the real before you taste it. To imagine another body pressed against yours.

If real time is so much better, why you texting?

Feels more real after I write you. Feels too good, like a dream, before that.

Maybe Marco is a dream. Some advanced simulation planted by a fringe hacker, snuck into your subconscious subliminally during a web search. Then manifested as a dream.

Not the way my heart pounded or the way sweat poured when the patrol almost nabbed us: their lights were everywhere, birds rising up from the weeds. Marco’s eyes went wide. He told me to run. Gave me a warning: if I go back to our meet in a few nights and he’s not there, then the patrol is on to us. Marco will leave me a sign, a trail to follow.

What sign?

You’ll keep it hush?

Why would I spill?

Could get us both in trouble for defying the rationale: you for just talking about going outdoors without a license. They could tag us as conspirators.

"Don’t you think I know that? My parents would pull me offline for weeks. I’d