Kayla stepped closer. The sound of her footfall on the gravel-strewn rock caused the woman to slowly open her eyes. She fixed on Kayla but betrayed no emotion.
Kayla felt awkward under the scrutiny of such an unwavering gaze, but only a little. A larger part of her was too fascinated with this situation and this person to be overly self-conscious.
The woman beckoned and Kayla sat across the fire from her. “I’ve felt you calling me, so I called to you,” the woman said in a smooth, deep voice.
“I … called you?” Kayla questioned. What was she talking about? She didn’t even know who this was.
“My name is Eutonah. You want to know about the soul.”
Kayla breathed in sharply. “How did you know that?” she asked.
“We’re all part of the same dream. Those who know how to listen can hear,” Eutonah replied. “The soul is the original being — what the being was before it entered the earthly plane, what it will be again when the earthly plane is done with.”
Kayla felt as if she were in a dream. It was the same as a dream, where something made no sense and yet seemed perfectly logical at the same time. “How do you know it’s there?” she asked. “The soul, I mean. There’s no proof it even exists.”
“You are your soul. There is no it other than you.”
“Where am I?”
“Remember this place,” Eutonah said. “Imprint it in your mind’s eye so that your internal guidance will enable you to find it again when you need to. Remember the white face.” Getting up, she walked off down a dirt trail until she disappeared into a pine forest.
The icy wind blew up the back of Kayla’s shirt and she shivered again. The wind blew so hard and cold that she squeezed her eyes shut …
… and was back in the warehouse, the helmet on her head. “Where did I go?” she asked, lifting it from her head. “I met an amazing woman. I was in the mountains somewhere.”
August took the helmet from her and examined its readout. Mfumbe looked on with him. “I never saw these numbers before,” August said.
“What numbers?” Kayla asked.
“The numbers on the helmet tell what virtual reality site you’ve been at. It sounds like you traveled to the Adirondack Mountains. A lot of resistance groups live around there,” Zekeal told her.
The Adirondacks? Kayla remembered that her father had maps of the Adirondacks at the time he died. Her mother had thought he was planning a vacation. “Why would resisters go to the Adirondacks?” she asked.
“It’s easy to hide up in the mountains,” Mfumbe explained, “and they’re close to Canada. If things really went bad, you could get into Canada inside a day. Canada doesn’t have the bar code yet.”
“Yeah, but these numbers are new. It’s a site we’ve never been to before,” August said. He looked to Kayla. “What exactly did you see?”
She described the location and the woman.
“I’ve heard about Eutonah. She’s a Cherokee shaman and a bar code resister.” Allyson said. “She was putting out articles warning against the bar code when the thing was still in Asia. There’s a mystical angle to everything she writes. The article I read was about how you can resist the bar code with your mind.”
“How do you do that?” Nedra asked, clearly skeptical.
“Well, according to Eutonah, we all have undeveloped telepathic and telekinetic powers,” Allyson said. “She claims we can all learn to access those abilities.”
“So what are we supposed to do, float the bar codes off everyone’s wrist with our brain waves?” Nedra scoffed.
Allyson stayed cool. “She says the power of our minds is so powerful it’s atomic. And it’s true. We’re atoms. That’s what we’re made of.”
Kayla closed her eyes and imagined Gene Drake deflecting the guards’ bullets with the power of his mind. If only he’d been able to. Then maybe he could have closed down the post office and they would have brought in reporters. Then he’d have told the world what he knew about the bar code.
“That’s just nuts.” Nedra spat out the words. “I don’t believe you even saw her, Kayla. You probably just read an article and dreamed up the whole thing to get attention.”
“That’s not true. She was real,” Kayla insisted. “She told me to remember the white face. Does that mean anything to any of you?”
They glanced one to the other, then shook their heads. “No,” said August, “but maybe we should remember it, just in case we need to know it later on.”
“That’s crazy. She didn’t see anybody,” Nedra insisted.
“How do you know Kayla didn’t meet her?” Mfumbe argued with Nedra. “The Adirondacks is resistance central. Some of those groups are nutty, walking around the woods with machine guns, or trying to contact passing spaceships. But it’s the center of everything. If you need to know something about the bar code resistance, eventually you have to touch base in the Adirondacks.”
“You know,” August said, “now that you mention the Adirondacks … I want to talk to you guys about something. I mean … I don’t want to talk about this, because I hope this doesn’t happen, but I think we have to….” He breathed deeply, as if to steady his nerves. “What if this all starts to go down badly? It could, you know.”
“What do you mean?” Zekeal asked.
“Say Dave Young can’t make a difference and Global-1, or the government or whoever, starts coming after resisters,” August said.
“I don’t think that will happen,” Allyson replied.
“Okay … I hope you’re right, but if it does, I think we should have a plan,” August said. “Someone to contact or someplace to meet.”
“What about the Adirondacks?” Mfumbe suggested. “It would be a good place. You could follow the Superlink straight up. Eventually you’d run into other people who would be sympathetic to you. It wouldn’t be too hard to find help.”
“If it’s so easy, then Global-1 could find you, too,” Nedra pointed out.
“The Adirondacks are huge,” Zekeal said. “They wouldn’t find you that easily. But, for the same reason, we’d never find each other. We’ve got to have a specific spot.”
Kayla thought about the place where she’d just been. Eutonah had said she’d need to find it. Would she someday meet this group there? Was her future already that intertwined with theirs?
“I’ll get some maps,” August volunteered, “and then we can pick a place to meet.”
“August,” Allyson said abruptly. “Is there any more space available in the ’zine?”
He opened his ’zine files and checked. “I could probably piece together a column or so. Why?”
“When I was using the helmet, I got into a San Francisco website where they were discussing Tattoo Gen,” she said.
“I’ve heard of that,” Mfumbe said. “What did they say about it?”
“What is it?” Kayla asked.
“It’s a gung-ho youth group funded by Global-1,” Allyson explained. “They’re very into the bar code — a tattoo pride kind of thing.”
“That’s sick,” Zekeal said.
“It might be sick, but it’s real. The San Francisco group was saying that they’re very open in the Bay Area,” Allyson reported. “They wear these bar code T-shirts and highlight their tattoos in fluorescent colors. Lately, gangs of them have been wearing a red jumpsuit uniform and beating up anyone who’s not coded.”
“Is anyone doing anything to stop them?” Mfumbe asked.
“If they are, I haven’t heard about it. They said that here in the east, Tattoo Gen is much more undercover. They have a mission to seduce kids into getting the bar code. If they see someone who’s undecided, they befriend them and try to talk the person into it.”
“That’s so low,” Kayla said.
Allyson nodded. “I’d like to write an article in the ’zine exposing the group.”
“No one will believe you,” Nedra argued. “I’m not sure if I even believe you. I’ve never seen one of them.”
&nbs
p; Allyson sighed, exasperated. “That’s the point, Nedra. You’re not supposed to see them. They’re undercover — at least on the East Coast.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nedra insisted.
“I can give you the space if you want it,” August told Allyson.
“I want it,” Allyson agreed as she placed the helmet back into the case.
Zekeal stood. “I’ve got to get home. If I don’t write that report for science, I’m not graduating.”
“Me, too,” Mfumbe agreed, folding his chair. The glowing light from the bare bulb guided them out of the warehouse until August shut it off with a remote clicker from the door.
Mfumbe locked the heavy door and afterward showed Kayla the metal key. “Can you believe people depended on these once?” he said. “This door is one of the last of its kind. It’s so primitive.”
Kayla studied the key he handed to her. “Where did you get this?”
“My dad owns this warehouse,” he told her. “He inherited it from his father. I think he’s forgotten all about it. I just took this key from his desk one day when I was a kid and I’ve been coming down here ever since.”
The group walked together past the clubs. Nedra headed for a sleek silver sports car. “Are you coming, Zeke?” she asked.
Zekeal looked trapped, shifting from foot to foot. “Yeah, sure,” he said with a quick wave to Kayla.
Nedra tossed a triumphant glance at Kayla before slipping into the car. Behind her, August and Allyson got into August’s beat-up 2010 magnetic Honda, one of the first of its kind ever made.
“I can drop you off,” Mfumbe offered.
“Thanks, but I’ll walk. I don’t live far.” She wanted to walk along the river and think about everything — to brood about Zekeal jumping into the car with Nedra after all. How could she have so totally misread the situation?
“You sure?” Mfumbe checked.
She nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
He was nice, really nice, and she suddenly had the feeling that he might be interested in her, probably had been for a while now. He was attractive, too, with those striking light eyes against his dark skin. But it was Zekeal who made her heart race, who had gotten into her head. All she wanted now was time alone to replay the evening they’d spent together.
She walked back toward the river. The nuclear power plant lit her path for a long time, until its glare faded and gave way to the softer light of the full moon. As she went she relived the jolt of energy she’d felt as he’d turned her palm over, checking for the bar code. She went over everything: the vulnerable expression on his face when he’d talked about his family, the adrenaline-charged half second when she’d turned and seen he was the one who’d been following her, his calm command when he’d insisted she be allowed to stay at the meeting.
The bulletbus took nearly a half hour to come to its stop at the GlobalTrac station. By the time it let her off, she felt she’d been away from home for a long time — even though it had been only hours. So much had happened.
As she neared her house, she saw a figure by the halogen lamppost in front. The intense glow of the white light made him easy to see.
She hurried toward Zekeal, knowing exactly why he’d come — for her. He’d come for her.
He saw her running and walked quickly toward her. When they met, he held her and kissed her hard.
NEW PHENOMENON OF SELF-IMMOLATION PUZZLES PSYCHIATRISTS
Baltimore, MD. May 15, 2025 — A team of psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins Medical Center held a press conference today describing a bizarre new medical phenomenon they’ve dubbed Tattoo Manic Psychosis. Dr. Herbert Carver, head of the team, described this mania in which a person becomes convinced that the bar code tattoo will somehow do him or her harm. This creates a state of deep disturbance within the person.
The first stage of TMP (Tattoo Manic Psychosis) is often manifested in self-destructive behavior such as alcohol or drug abuse. At stage two, the person becomes desperate to have the bar code removed at any cost, despite the fact that bar code tattoo removal was outlawed in the same 2024 bill in which tattooing for decorative purposes was also outlawed. The patient can become so desperate to have the bar code removed that he or she resorts to an attempt to burn the bar code from his or her skin. “This has resulted in many catastrophic burns,” Dr. Carver told the press. “In the last six months we have treated nearly 200 people for self-inflicted immolation.”
May 17, 2025
To: Artgirlglobalnet.planet
From: (AT)cybercafe1700globalnet.planet
Hey, Kayla,
I finally got to a cyber café in Carson City. I’m here with my cousin Emily to buy stuff. She and I are the only ones who can actually make a purchase since we have working bar codes. I feel like a secret agent since I have two secret missions.
My first mission is to sneak away and e-mail you. Emily doesn’t even have a computer. A few months ago, she decided the CIA was spying on her through the computer, so she smashed it with an ax. Yes, that’s right — my cousin Emily is a full-blown mental case! You can imagine what a joy it is to live with her and be dependent on her for everything.
Actually, my code can still buy some things as long as my parents keep my account up. They do this by trading in all their stuff. My dad got lots of credits by giving a car dealer his Jag. (Although he says the guy ripped him off big-time because he knew we were stuck.) My code seems to only go so far, though. We tried to apply for a loan for me and it crashed out. It seems like I have the family bum code, too — it just hasn’t totally caught up with me yet. I can still get gum and milk and antiperspirant and stuff like that, thank God. As long as they still take it at the gas tanks, we’re not totally banged out.
My other secret mission is to buy my mom hair dye. Emily doesn’t believe in hair dye. She says people are meant to age naturally, so she won’t buy any for Mom. I know it’s dumb, but Mom is completely twisted out over this. Every time she looks in the mirror, she gets all teary. So I said I’d try to score her a box while I’m in town. I don’t know how Mom will explain her sudden lack of gray hair. Hopefully, she’ll think of something.
Life here is more or less hell. All the kids around where my cousin Emily lives go to Cyber School since there are so few of them; it’s not worth building a real school. Since we have no computer and our nearest neighbor is miles away, I can’t even do that.
Well, enough about the horrendous waste of my young and beautiful life — how are you? I’m going to stay here in the café for as long as I can and hope you get this message in time to reply.
Amber
May 17, 2025
Reply to: (AT)cybercafe1700globalnet.planet
From: Artgirlglobalnet.planet
Amber! I can’t believe it’s you! I am so glad (shocked, amazed, thrilled) to hear from you. I’m sorry your cousin Emily is so banged out. But don’t feel alone. Everything is weird here, too. You wouldn’t recognize Winfrey High, at least not the teachers. They made them take this big test and then dumped the ones they claimed didn’t do well. I don’t believe it, though. Mr. Curtin, our Language Arts teacher, is one of the best teachers in the school. Well, he’s one of the teachers who didn’t pass the “test.” The other day I saw him collecting cans on the road for recycling. He had a big plastic bag full. I wanted to talk to him, but I thought it might embarrass him to have one of his students see him. But I noticed one thing about him — he doesn’t have a bar code. And get this! Mr. Kerr — my guidance counselor — he’s now the principal! We have these big assemblies every week where we explore our “feelings.” Aghh!
So much bizarre stuff is happening. My neighbors, the Ferns, disappeared one day. The Globalofficers came to our house asking if we knew where they went. My mother was friendly with Mrs. Fern, but she had no idea that they were planning to leave. (Although that’s not really so odd. She’s completely clueless about most things these days.)
Actually, you’re not the only one who has secret missions, either. I’
ve started having a secret love affair with Zekeal Morrelle! Here’s why it’s secret: Nedra Harris and Zekeal used to go with each other and he’s afraid that she’ll go ballistic and try to make trouble for one or both of us if he doesn’t break off with her just right. So we’re waiting for June, once school is out and they all graduate, for him to tell her. That way she’ll go away to Cape Cod for the summer with her family, like she does every summer, and we won’t ever have to see her again.
Because of this, we’re not openly seeing each other, but I go to his place a lot at night and we find time to be together whenever we can. I’m just so completely in love with him. And I know he feels the same.
Are you still there? Can you reply?
Kayla
May 17, 2025
To: Artgirlglobalnet.planet
From: (AT)cybercafe1700globalnet.planet
Oh, thank God you’re there. I’d have died if I missed you. Don’t get mad. I’m only saying this because I care about you, but what’s with Zekeal Morrelle? Do you really think Nedra H. is such a flaming psycho that he can’t break off with her? Are you sure he isn’t two-timing you? I don’t want you to get hurt. And, yes — he’s gorgeous. But what good is gorgeous if he turns out to be a creep?
Sounds like your mother isn’t doing too well. How are you two living? Tell all!
Amber
May 17, 2025
Reply to: (AT)cybercafe1700globalnet.planet
From: Artgirlglobalnet.planet
My job at Artie’s has been great. I love working for Artie, and it’s the only thing paying the bills.
I’m not mad at you for what you said about Zekeal. I’m also worried that he’s handing me a line about Nedra, but I don’t really think that’s what’s happening. I can’t believe he ever liked her. He says he thought she was “hot.”