SORD DROPPED HIS READING pad onto the tile floor and rolled to his side, peering over the bed to ensure the tile wasn’t cracked. He knew there was nothing to worry about since virtually every item of manufacture in Prosperity was made from some form bioplas and was therefore readily replaceable. The tile looked fine, and he rolled his head back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

“Odd this old dude talked about quantum stuff,” he whispered. “Dad was into that. Scientist. Physicist. If it wasn’t for quantum crap, he’d probably still be here today. With us. Mom and me. Maybe even a brother, which would have been nice.”

He recalled the day he found out his dad was in the deadly accident. It happened at a test site about twenty kilometers east of the city center. “I never was allowed to go there to see the ruins and rubble. All I know is that he left for work one morning and never returned. The site has been cordoned off for years, an area likely accessible to authorized personnel only.”

He heard a surveillance drone pass overhead and quickly out of range. “Hmm. I wonder if the area is still restricted? After a time, I didn’t care to see it. Dad was gone. By visiting the place, I wasn’t going to change that reality. It only would have made me sadder and brought back tough memories. But I wonder if they’ve backed off the original restrictions? They’ve been building the city out that way recently, out along the old one-sixty highway, and it’s not as remote as it was five years ago. Probably not even risky to go out there, if I could sneak past security.”

His mind was spinning. “Go with Robbie? Naw, he wouldn’t want to put his mom through another dangerous adventure with me anytime soon. Certainly nothing beyond the approved boundaries. But I know whom I’d love to invite out there with me. Daisy. That sweet, soft hand and scent of heaven. Besides, I need a reason to stay in contact with her. She’s a catch. My God, she’s a catch. I can’t let some guy at her school nudge his way into something that could get very real here.”

He gazed at the cast on his forearm, scheduled to come off soon. “She came to visit. Held this hand. It couldn’t have only been pity, though I might effectively play that up a bit when the time comes. Pity for my injuries. Pity for the story about my dad, because I don’t think she knows. And just like those hands, she has a soft heart. She’ll understand my story. Near death experience. A need to get closer to my father, to his memory. Geez, this plan has the makings for a great opportunity to get to know her better. Maybe there’s more that could happen. An abandoned location. A little scary. Sad recollections. Strong emotions. Nobody around to observe. Caressing. Kissing. Yes, even more than that. This is perfect!”

***

Sord took two weeks to fully develop his plan, though it relied on deviations from a few of the norms he had been taught since before he could remember. Given the risks, he wanted to avoid any possibility that others might find out. That meant convincing Daisy over vidscreen, which he knew was an inadequate substitute for being present in person.

“Hi, Daisy, how are you?” he exclaimed, positioning the vidscreen to prominently display the sling and cast he sported from the incident.

She was close to the camera, and he could only see her face. Her skin was unblemished but for a single mole beside her left lower lip. Though she was a mixture of races and cultures, common for Prosperity’s citizens, her creamy almond skin from some not-so-distant Latino or African American blood was a perfect match to her auburn hair.

“I’m fine,” she replied, staring at his arm. “Are you healing okay? You can’t imagine how worried I’ve been, and I hadn’t heard from you since the hospital.”

That was a well-placed womanly hint, he understood. He was new at this activity, talking to a love interest, and she had caught him unprepared and inconsiderate. He didn’t realize she might have been waiting for him to make the next move, to contact her. He was too busy hatching his plan, and he assumed she somehow would infer from his obscure activities how much he cared for her and that he was busy incubating a plan to see her again.

“Yeah,” he admitted, lifting his injured arm to his face to unconsciously mask his embarrassment. By now, the bone had healed properly, assisted by genetic modifications infused in all Prosperity’s citizens.

“It still hurts a little,” he feigned, “but I hardly notice it. In fact, I’m supposed to shed this sling in a few days, then I’ll be back to my good old self.”

Daisy was amused at his macho reply. “He’s nervous,” she thought, taking note of his fidgeting. She was nervous as well and didn’t want to give away too much body language by showing more of herself.

“I’m so glad you’re okay. How’s your friend Robbie doing?”

“Ah, he’s okay, too. We’re both back in school.”

She laughed. “Oh, I’ll bet the girls are all over you two cute boys. The Durango Delinquents. That’s what my friends and I call you now. Your antics made quite the news story, especially since this place seems to overprotect us so. I understand how adults push for headlines like that, but you think they’d cut us poor teenagers a little slack, huh?”

Sord needed to execute the first phase of his plan, to convince her to go with him, but this was so new. He had girlfriends in the past but the last was a few years back. Ages thirteen to fourteen were challenging enough for him, growing into his skin, shifting from middle school to high school, breaking away from old friends and establishing new ones with similar interests. Despite lots of bravado and joking with friends, he simply didn’t feel like engaging with the opposite sex until this point.

“Maybe,” he considered, “that little near death experience shook my foundations. Perhaps I may not live forever, even with this gene drive stuff. They were not going to sew together the scraps of skin and hair and a femur or two after the racnines finished with me, then create a new Sord. Time is limited, and nothing can be taken for granted.”

In 2132, reminders were everywhere that life was finite, despite ubiquitous use of anti-aging technologies. Life was never comfortably secure – not in Prosperity or anywhere in the world, for that matter. Despite the improving state of the slowly recovering North American ecosystem, small bands of rogue intruders and adversaries presented continuous threats to the budding nation-state. Stores of previously secured governmental military armaments were utterly unaccounted for, and the once robust global systems that monitored and controlled annihilation technologies, including lethal volatile materials like nuclear and nerve agents, were largely nonfunctional.

There was no immediate reason to attend to them. Countries no longer existed. Outside Prosperity, no known groups of humans remained in a sufficient quantity to threaten, coerce, or kill as a matter of course.

Twenty two million – the extent of humanity believed to exist after the devastation of GDII. These few remaining bands of humans had mostly dispersed broadly across the world’s land masses to attain one objective that required little forethought – the avoidance of another debacle, another truly species-ending event. The final Great Filter that could wipe out all humanity.

As determined from satellite and drone scans, citizens of Prosperity believed their confederation of interconnected city-states was the largest contiguous settlement of humans on the planet. The reason why this was so, they felt, was no mystery: their simple ethic, placed above all other societal objectives, was to ensure the long-term survival of the species.

Prosperity was also the most technically advanced and geographically widespread of any human settlements rising from the ashes of GDII. This very visible success of the nation-state made it an occasional target of not-so-fortunate clusters of humans and hybrids.

Key weapons used most often by these groups to threaten Prosperity included genetically manipulated bacteria, viruses, and other virulent, microscopic particles, whether derived from natural or artificial sources. To counter such threats, the citizens constructed advanced air and water filtration systems, early warning and monitoring systems, and other technologies to immediately evaluate and neutralize new pathogens.

The most potent defense to such biological weapons was the human body itself. Every citizen carried some elements of modified human DNA, in addition to synthetic molecules, to mitigate most new pathogenic threats immediately. This set of tools was little different than antivirus and cyberthreat defenses as applied to computer systems, though it often required updates to be rapidly distributed among Prosperity’s population. Such threats were so common that they were usually fabricated in a household’s own bioprinter then taken orally or via patch or needle.

Sord smiled into the camera, half watching Daisy and half watching himself to ensure he came across okay. “Yeah, it’s bad enough we’re continuously drilled on ethics and norms. Let us live a little, why don’t they? Geez.”

Daisy was silent for a moment, observing that he was new at this. Sord was not her first boyfriend by any means, and she understood well how to play her cards.

“Something’s up, here,” she thought. “He seems a bit secretive.”

“Umm . . .” he began pensively.

“Yes, umm?” she teased.

He squirmed in his seat. “I was wondering if we could get together and do something fun, even a little near the edge. I have this idea for, let’s call it, an adventure, but not quite as dangerous as the one I recently had. This time, one without motos and racnines.”

“Near the edge?” Daisy’s eyes widened. She wondered what her father would think if she embarked on anything close to what Sord and Robbie had done. “I’m not sure about doing extremely edgy stuff.”

“No. No, no, no,” he stuttered. “I don’t mean edgy like that. This is close to but not outside city limits. Not outdoors. A place I doubt you’ve ever been before. In fact, it’s a place I’ve never been.”

“Hmm? This town isn’t that big, and I think I’ve been just about everywhere.”

“Should I tell her now or leave it a secret?” he wondered. “No. This might not be the time to bring up my father. Sure, I could get the pity vote, but that might make her all the more hesitant about coming with me. This can’t be that edgy. It has to be exciting and scary, but not edgy.”

“Well, there is a place I know about personally that few others are aware of or even remember.”

She looked puzzled. “Is it safe? Are you sure it’s in the city limits?”

“Yes. It’s safe, and yes, it’s in the city limits. We won’t need oxymasks to get there or anything. Just the shuttle. But we may have to walk a bit since my mom has sworn me off motos and other things with wheels for a few months,” he laughed. “But it won’t be bad. It’ll be fun and different in comparison to anything you’ve ever done before or will do again.”

Daisy shifted back slightly from the camera, puckering her lips and pondering the possibilities. Her dad had mentioned nothing about Sord aside from asking how he was doing after she visited him in the hospital. Otherwise, he hadn’t the slightest clue about her love interests.

And she was so tired of seeing the same old places every day. As much as she wanted to explore the other city-states, or at least travel some of the underground tunnels between them, her dad was reluctant to let her extend anywhere beyond city boundaries.

As a member of the Search and Rescue team, Daisy’s father had seen enough danger outside Prosperity to convince him never to let her go past the outskirts of Durango. Allowing her to visit Silver City or Evanston hundreds of kilometers away by herself was out of the question. Though much improved in the last decade, defensive conditions between distant city centers were still tenuous, and venturing anywhere beyond Durango’s boundaries held some personal risk.

“Sord,” she insisted, testing him with a half-smile. “We hardly know each other, and you’re trying to get me into a little trouble, I believe.”

“Not trouble, Daisy. Not at all. Just excitement and adventure.”

“You’re not too tired of adventures? Seems your last one didn’t go so well, or have you somehow forgotten about that?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he repeated. “This is nothing like that small mishap.”

“Can you give me a hint?” she asked.

That was it. He knew he had her convinced. Nobody asks for a hint if they’re not interested.

“I’d like to, but that would ruin the surprise. Just know it’s safe, it won’t take all day, and we can stop to eat wherever you want along the way. You’ll see something few other people in Prosperity have ever had the benefit of seeing.”

***

Sord didn’t intend on being late for their nine o’clock meet-up, but his nervous stomach took hold of him.

“Are you okay?” Becca asked next to the bathroom door.

“Mom! Geez. Can I have some privacy, please?”

When the momentary trauma was past, he attempted to scurry out quickly. Becca was in the kitchen flipping through news stories on her pad, directly facing the front door.

“Where are you off to so early, Sord? It’s Saturday and very unlike you to be ready to go so soon. Out with Robbie somewhere?”

“Oh, crap,” he whispered inaudibly.

Sord had hoped to quietly leave the apartment sight unseen and message her later that he was out for the day. Not only was there risk in being late, now he had to explain his plans to his mother. “A guy never wants to talk about girls with his mom. Never,” he considered.

“What?” she asked. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

Becca knew something was up. Sord’s typically matted Saturday morning hair was clean and combed after his shower. In fact, she could not recall him taking any showers on Saturday mornings except the day of his father’s funeral five years earlier.

He remained facing the door. “It’s nothing, Mom. Just going out for the day.”

“Would you mind turning around and talking to me?” His visible tension at the door was unusual. Sord was usually worry free and often quite amusing.

“Must be a girl,” she thought. “I’ll bet it’s the one from the hospital.”

Sord slightly turned to face her as she peered over her tablet, purposely keeping it raised to signal to him that she was not overly concerned. She noticed the half-grin, half-frown face he made when slightly annoyed.

“You look nice,” she continued. “Very nice. I like that shirt.”

“Mom, I have to go.”

“Okay. Will you be gone all day?”

For Becca, a great deal of joy in life came from watching her son grow up. She cherished every moment, every opportunity to speak with him, though the relative assurance of a potentially infinite life for both of them had no effect on her enjoyment. This was the first and perhaps only time to see her son at this awkward, innocent stage. He might grow to be forty, then revert slowly back into his twenties, but they would never likely be these same two ages again, not at the same time. Indeed, this first experience was all the more meaningful because of its freshness.

“Yeah, all day.”

“Meeting with friends?” This was her test to see if he felt comfortable enough with her to expose the toughest thing for a teenager to admit – a love interest.

“That girl,” he stated almost inaudibly.

“Which girl? You mean the one from the hospital?”

“Yeah. Daisy. Mom, I’m late,” he urged, his hand gripping the doorknob.

“Becca,” she said to herself, “let him go. Don’t give him the fifth degree. Lay aside your maternal fears and calm down. You’ve trained him well, and he’s a smart kid despite his recent antics. He’ll make mistakes, and you can’t help that. He needs to learn.”

“Can I expect you for dinner, then?”

“Not sure,” he replied, sensing this was the final comment she would make.

“Okay. Have fun. Tell her hello from me and that it was so nice that she and her friends visited you and Robbie in the hospital.”

She thought she heard him say ‘goodbye’ as he quickly sped out the door.