Turing's Delirium Read Free Page B

beyond mere chance.
    She puts on her earphones and looks for the news on the screen of her cell phone. Lana Nova, her favorite broadcaster, comes on. The virtual woman has her black hair in a ponytail, which accentuates her Asian features. Through the earphones Flavia can hear Lanas synthesized, enveloping voice, one that can move you simply by reporting on the weather. No wonder teenagers have taken to watching the news and papering their rooms in posters of Lana.
    For the second consecutive day there have been enormous protests against the hike in electricity rates. GlobaLux, the Italian-American consortium that won the bid to take over the power company in Río Fugitivo just a year ago, defends its actions by saying that the crisis has left it no alternative. It says the rate hike will allow it to finance construction of a new power plant. The Coalition is calling for a general blockade of streets and highways on Thursday. The protests in Río Fugitivo have spread to other cities. There have been violent confrontations between industrial workers, students, and police in La Paz and Cochabamba. A pylon was blown up in Sucre. Business owners in Santa Cruz are calling for community protests. Opposition politicians and indigenous leaders are demanding Montenegro's resignation, saying the months remaining of his term in office will be enough to destroy the country. It is early November. There will be an election in June of next year and a new president in August.
    She hears nothing about the Resistance that she hasn't already reported, and not a word about Vivas and Padilla. Luckily, her competition is in rough shape.
    She turns off her Nokia. Now that the bus has emptied she spots him. Sitting at the back, leaning against a knife-slashed seat, she sees the same guy she saw yesterday. About her age, maybe? Eighteen. Tall, curly hair, bushy eyebrows, earphones, and a yellow MP3 player in his hands. What music is he listening to to escape from the bus driver's tropical beat? The news? A soccer match in Italy or Argentina?
    Suddenly a pair of eyes pin her to her seat, just as had happened yesterday. She tends to ignore men, but there is something in the way he looks at her that is unsettling. She passes a hand over her hair, making sure it is stylishly unkempt. Her dreadlocks are tousled as if she has just woken up. She moistens her lips with her tongue. Oh, how ridiculous she must look in the school uniform that the nuns continue to insist on: the blue, knee-length skirt, white shirt, blue vest, and, horror of horrors, the tricolor tie that is a designer's nightmare. Is she really any less interested in boys than her friends?
    As she gets off the bus it starts to drizzle, the rain lightly tickling her face. She forces herself to keep her back to the bus, a small victory over the young man she pictures with his face pressed against the glass, ready to savor the moment when Flavia will turn around to look at him one last time.
    A garbage can swarming with blue-green, flies is in the bus shelter. An emaciated dog growls listlessly at anyone who passes by. Flavia thinks about Clancy, her blind Doberman, wandering through the house, running into walls as he anxiously awaits her arrival. The neighbors complain about his howling early in the morning; her mom has suggested that it might be time to put the old dog down.
    She has five blocks to go before reaching her neighborhood. The streets are quiet and Flavia likes to feel as if she owns them, walking down the middle of the potholed asphalt, equidistant from the sidewalks flanked by dusty loquat trees. She walks, then jumps along an imaginary hopscotch, wonders what her dad must be doing right now at work, and discovers—annoyed, embarrassed—that she is not alone.
    "From alpha to omega, from zero to infinity," comes a husky voice that is too old for the body of a young man. "A game with multiple theological and metaphysical connotations."
    When had he gotten off the bus? She