Bogus to Bubbly Read online

  What Shay didn’t know was that she was being watched. After the Crims’ escape, the local head of Special Circumstances had interrogated Zane before his pretty operation. This very determined Special, Dr. Cable, threatened to keep him ugly forever unless he told her everything he knew. She was obsessed with the possibility of humanity escaping the bonds of the pretty operation and threatening the planet again. Dr. Cable feared that the Smokies would reveal the truth about the Prettytime to the wider world, and made their capture her personal mission. Zane told her about David, the secret paths to the Rusty Ruins, and the existence of the Smoke. But he didn’t know its location.

  The Smokies had always been careful. They checked runaways for tracking devices and used coded clues instead of maps to guide them. These precautions made it unlikely that many outsiders would ever find the Smoke.

  So when Shay disappeared to the Smoke a few nights before her sixteenth birthday, Dr. Cable realized that Shay’s new friend, Tally, might be useful. Faced with the threat of remaining ugly forever, Tally was forced to follow Shay to the Smoke and betray the runaways.

  At first the plan worked: Tally set off across the wild on her own, and reached the Smoke, following a set of clues left behind by Shay. She decided to join the Smokies’ cause, but accidentally activated a tracking device. Special Circumstances arrived and captured almost all the Smokies. Only David and Tally remained free.

  History, of course, shows that these two were more resourceful than Dr. Cable could have imagined. They traveled back across the wild to Tally’s city and managed to free several Smokies (including Maddy) from Special Circumstances headquarters. These renegades formed the New Smoke, dedicated not merely to escaping the cities but to ending the rule of the pretty regime forever.

  The New Smokies’ most important accomplishment was the invention of a treatment known as “the cure.” These nano-pills reversed the effects of the bubblehead operation, returning pretties to their normal intelligence and willpower. The first recipient of the cure was to be Tally Youngblood, who gave herself up to the authorities to become pretty so that she could serve as a test subject. But once again the Crims found themselves making history.

  After Zane’s operation he had restarted his old clique, gathering new pretties who had been tricky in their ugly life. The Crims were focused on staying “bubbly”—trying to recall their days as rebellious uglies. Without realizing it they were naturally fighting the effects of the bubblehead operation. Recaptured Smokies like Tachs and Tally joined the Crims, adding their knowledge of the wild to Zane’s enthusiasm. So when the cure was smuggled to Tally, she shared the pills with Zane.

  As the cure took hold of his mind, Zane planned a mass escape of the Crims. Dozens of them fled the city in one night. Tally, Zane, and several others were soon recaptured, but the other escapees gave the New Smokies a huge boost in number and in technical skills.

  The New Smoke began to distribute the cure in several cities, including Tally’s. Hundreds, then thousands, and finally tens of thousands of people gradually found their bubbleheadedness fading.

  The world was waking up.

  HISTORY #5:

  THE DIEGO WAR

  This city was never like ours. They didn’t have the same barriers between pretties and uglies.

  —FAUSTO

  Nowhere were the effects of the New Smokies’ cure more profound than in the city of Diego, where independent thinking had always been encouraged. In fact, Diego’s government greeted the changes with enthusiasm, admitting the truth about the operation to their citizens. (Other cities continued to keep the secret, though rumors soon began to spread.) Diego announced a “New System,” in which citizens could have their bubblehead surgery reversed.

  In an unexpected side effect, repealing the Pretty Committee’s guidelines caused an explosion in strange new surgeries. People used their bodies as canvases for self-expression, and the strict lines between uglies and pretties began to crumble.

  More fatefully, the New System guaranteed that anyone could become a citizen of Diego for the purpose of being cured—even pretty runaways from other cities. Diego’s Rangers coordinated with the New Smokies, setting up escape routes to help runaways reach sanctuary.

  Of course, the Special Circumstances of other cities found events in Diego disturbing. As the cure spread, their own citizens were showing signs of the bubblehead operation wearing off. Pretties were questioning the social order and demanding more freedoms. How could the Specials guard the world if everything was out of order?

  Something had to be done about the New System and all it represented. And Dr. Cable soon decided that she should be the one to do it. The stage for the Diego War was set. . . .

  In another twist of history, it was Tally Youngblood who provided the reason for war.

  After their mass escape, Tally, Shay, and several other recaptured Crims had fallen into Dr. Cable’s hands. Using surgery and brainwashing techniques, she had made them into a new group of Specials called Cutters. These Cutters were violent and self-reliant, their bodies modified for military use and capable of living in the wild for long periods of time. Dr. Cable’s purpose for them was to track down the New Smokies, but these young, independent-minded Specials proved hard to control—and even dangerous. While arranging an illegal escape for Zane and his friends, Tally and Shay accidentally destroyed their city’s military archive. Dr. Cable couldn’t admit that her own Specials were so out of control, and blamed the attack on her current obsession: Diego.

  Tally’s city’s government was already nervous—the cure was spreading, politics had become tumultuous, and more uglies were escaping every day. Even pretties were running away. The civilian authorities, believing that the New System had brought back the insanity of war, gave Dr. Cable temporary command of the entire city.

  The only real battle of the war was an attack on Diego Town Hall, the city’s center of administration and government. Dr. Cable’s military drones swept into Diego in the middle of the night and destroyed the building. Although no one was inside Town Hall, seventeen patients in the adjacent hospital were killed (including, most famously, Zane).

  The attack may have been a military success, but it was a political disaster for Dr. Cable. Other cities condemned the invasion, horrified that war had returned to plague humanity after more than two centuries of peace. And when Diego broadcast interviews with Shay and other cured members of the Cutters, the sight of sixteen-year-olds with military body modifications shocked the entire world.

  With its town hall destroyed, Diego staggered through the next few weeks. But soon the value of the New System revealed itself: Cured people could function in an emergency far better than bubble-heads. The wardens, Rangers, and cured Cutters helped to organize the citizenry and keep Diego functioning.

  Back in Tally’s city, Dr. Cable was discovering how many of the citizens under her control had already been cured by smuggled pills. They began to question her leadership, and her grip on power slowly slipped. People even began to debate surgical “despecialization,” a final end to Special Circumstances.

  Dr. Cable was removed from power a few weeks after the attack on Diego. Specials across the continent were scheduled for despecialization, and the last military archives were destroyed. The cured Cutters in Diego were allowed to keep their physical powers thanks to their service in the war. But ultimately, the only true Special on the continent was Tally Youngblood, who disappeared into the wild just as the war was coming to an end.

  As the cure took hold in more cities, the truth about the operation began to spread. Within another year the bubblehead procedure was no longer being performed on the continent.

  But the forces unleashed as the Prettytime ended were harder to control than anyone (except maybe Tally) had predicted. As the cure spread, overturning two centuries of stability and peace, a new term came into use for the New System, the new inventions, and the strange new social orders coming into existence.

  The “mind-rain
” had begun to fall.

  HISTORY #6:

  THE MIND-RAIN AND THE EXTRAS

  Freedom has a way of destroying things.

  —TALLY YOUNGBLOOD

  The mind-rain first took hold in the western half of the North American continent. And once Diego had rebuilt itself, the New Smokies set about to transform the rest of the world.

  Teams of agents traveled first to South America and the eastern seaboard. In each city they recruited the tricky uglies they encountered on the edges of the wild. The cure was propagated through these young people and spread into every city like the tendrils of a vine.

  Reinforced by new recruits as they went, the New Smokies soon moved on to Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia. But as they traveled farther from home, they discovered something unexpected: Many cities had already “cured” themselves. Governments had seen the changes on the global feeds and didn’t want to be left behind in an era of technological and social innovation. So they had elected to join in the mind-rain on their own.

  Of course, a few cities were like Tally’s, with local Special Circumstances ready to fight any change. But the New Smokies discovered that every society had its own Crims, discontents who were more than willing to subvert the social order. And for the most hard-to-crack places, the New Smokies called in the Cutters with their superhuman powers to impose the cure.

  Nearer to home, other New Smokies worked with the few pre-Rusty tribes who had survived outside the cities. These people had been kept in a Stone Age state for research purposes, and many of them now wanted to be integrated into the rest of the world.

  But as the mind-rain fell, what exactly was that world becoming?

  For two centuries the bubblehead operation had suppressed human imagination and will. Technology, the arts, and culture had stagnated. But now anyone, not just official scientists, could use the vast resources of the city interfaces to study, to experiment, and to share their knowledge with the rest of humanity. Global creativity was about to explode.

  A host of new technologies were invented in the first years of the mind-rain: eyescreens, smart matter, and hoverball rigs, to name a few. People also set about reclaiming all that had been lost during the Prettytime: Ancient rituals, local customs, and old religions were rediscovered, along with all the family traditions that had been discouraged by keeping uglies and pretties separate.

  A more sinister change occurred in the rules that the cities had lived by. For two centuries there had been no mining for metals, no burning of fossil fuels, and no clear-cutting of forests. But as the mind-rain fell, the old Rusty appetites emerged. The cities began to swell, encroaching upon the wild with new suburbs and factories.

  The Expansion had begun.

  Of course, Tally Youngblood had predicted all this. In her famous “Manifesto,” she had declared herself and David to be the “New Special Circumstances,” ready to protect the wild in any way necessary.

  No one doubted her willingness to intervene, especially when, one year into the mind-rain, a mining operation near the city of Londinium was destroyed in a suspicious nano accident. As populations increased, so did the pressure for resources, and soon the cities turned to a new source. During the Prettytime, the Rusty Ruins had been carefully preserved as monuments to waste. But the Rusties’ ancient structures were suddenly valuable: They were full of metal that could be recycled to make new buildings. Here was an easy way to keep expanding without tempting the wrath of New Special Circumstances.

  But the metal from the ruins couldn’t last forever, and then what would happen?

  As the Expansion grew in strength, a secret and global clique called the Extraterrestrials (or Extras) was formed. Their leader, a man named Udzir, had determined that the only way to protect Earth from humanity was to move humanity off the planet.

  The Extras began to develop technologies for orbital communities. They experimented with radical new operations, readying themselves to live in an environment of zero gravity. Not wanting to alarm the metal-dependent cities, they gathered materials in secret from Rusty Ruins across the globe. Megatons of metal were smuggled to a hidden base in Southeast Asia, and a fleet of spaceships was constructed to effect this “New Expansion.”

  When this secret base was discovered by Tally Youngblood with the help of a young story-kicker named Aya Fuse, a series of misunderstandings almost led to its destruction. But since that time, the Extras have worked in the open, recruiting new members every day for their grand scheme of living in near-Earth orbit.

  The Extras’ First Fleet has recently launched, and a dozen orbital habitats have been constructed. So far the New Expansion seems to be working—tens of thousands of people live in space, requiring only negligible supplies from the mother planet.

  • • •

  But space isn’t for everyone—many of us don’t want to replace our legs with an extra set of arms, for example. So, for those who choose to stay on Earth, the issue of how to pursue our dreams while preserving our planet remains. Perhaps some big idea like the New Expansion will emerge from the creative cauldron of the mind-rain, solving the problem of overextended resources once and for all.

  Or maybe we’ll simply learn to ask every time we want something: Is this shiny new toy worth carving up another fraction of the earth?

  Because we don’t want to fail that test too many times. Tally Youngblood is still out there watching to make sure we don’t go too far.

  LIFE PHASES IN THE PRETTYTIME

  Once we turn, it’s new pretty, middle pretty, late pretty. Then dead pretty.

  —SHAY

  Here’s another document uncovered by the Awesome Librarians clique. Written in Aya Fuse’s time, after the mind-rain, it explains how the world used to work: how littlies became uglies, then pretties, and finally crumblies.

  Back in the Prettytime, the phases of life were carefully defined. Except for young children and their parents, people of different ages lived apart from one another. They obeyed different rules, entertained themselves in different ways, even spoke different languages.

  This system wasn’t an accident. It allowed the government to control each age group in its own way, by rewarding the behavior they wanted from that group. Most important, separating people who had undergone the bubblehead operation from those who hadn’t made it easier to conceal its true purpose. Because new pretties lived apart from others, their parents and younger friends found it easy to believe that humans suddenly became brain-missing as a natural result of turning sixteen.

  Of course, these phases of life have become less rigid since the mind-rain. To understand that world, you will have to cast your mind back to the time of uglies, pretties, and crumblies, when how old you were was what you were.

  LITTLIES

  From birth to age eleven, children lived with their middle-pretty parents in the suburbs. (Anyone who had children was, almost by definition, a middle pretty.) Littlies went to elementary school with other kids their age but maintained strong relationships with their parents. This was the only stage of life when traditional family ties were considered appropriate. In many cities, middle pretties were encouraged to have only one child every decade. This helped control the population and kept strong sibling bonds from forming.

  NOTE: In many cities the suburbs were separated from Uglyville by a swath of forest called “the greenbelt.” This geographical boundary enforced the differences between ages—leaving your parents’ home required crossing a symbolic “wild zone” of trees and parks. Littlies were discouraged from playing in the greenbelt, which was reserved as a place for uglies to act out their wild impulses.

  UGLIES

  At age twelve children left home to live in dorms in a part of town known as Uglyville. Away from their families for the first time, they went through systematic social programming. They were encouraged to insult one another with ugly nicknames like Slouch, Fatty, or Beady-Eyes. They wore only dorm uniforms, which were basic and unflattering.

  This progra
mming caused them to look forward to the day when they would turn sixteen and have the operation. With such a low self-image, it was uncommon for any ugly to question the need for an entirely new face and body.

  Ugly dorms were heavily monitored by drones and other surveillance devices, but uglies often subverted the rules and machines that governed their lives. It is believed that in Tally’s city, the government allowed, even encouraged, these tricks as a way of spotting personalities that might cause trouble later on. The rebellious uglies were monitored even after the operation, and those most resistant to bubbleheadedness were recruited for jobs that required aggressiveness and independent thinking. (See “Middle Pretties.”)

  NOTE: In Tally Youngblood’s city, Uglyville was separated from New Pretty Town by a wide river, which uglies were forbidden to cross without permission. This prevented them from keeping in touch with their older friends who had already had the operation, helping to hide the bubblehead effect.

  NEW PRETTIES

  When uglies turned sixteen (or seventeen or later in some cities), they underwent surgery to become new pretties. The operation was, of course, many small operations: a full skin graft, cosmetic surge, body morphology change, and the replacement of teeth and other bones with stronger materials. Most important, and secret, was a form of brain surge developed early in the post-Crash era. This “bubble-head surge” made human beings much less aggressive and less inquisitive, overall less likely to question the social order.

  Of course, human brains are very good at rewiring themselves after being damaged in this way (some more so than others). Thus, the effects of the bubblehead surge were more obvious in new pretties, who had recently had the operation. As a way of hiding this so-called bubblehead effect, new pretties were kept apart from people in other stages of life. In addition, new-pretty culture was full of mindless distractions: drinking, bungee jumping, hot-air ballooning, all organized around nightly fireworks displays and parties.