Unnaturals Read Free

messaged to her mother. Its logo is a pear, Mom, a real one, not a picture of a pear. Buy yourself one. The seller says that the computer with the orange is so last-week now.
    There, Mom wouldn't worry about her now. Mom grew worried if Mel didn't message, or sent a message that sounded unnatural. Mom would worry if Mel told her that for instance, the week before last, the computer logo in fashion had been a strawberry. That was too long ago. Natural people didn't remember, didn't care, about such a distant past.
    It had been a real strawberry. It could last a whole month, which WholeNaturalFruitsForUs, Inc. had determined to be the best duration for fruit.
    Not that anyone waited that long, even Meliora. What you didn't eat today, you threw away, and then you bought new food. You used a computer for about a week, and then you threw it away, too. So that the economy would develop. The advertising feeds and even people's feeds mentioned this once in a blue moon, when it was fashionable for people to be smart. Using words like economy made people feel smart. The old, old articles mentioned economy, too, but Mel of course didn't know if she could believe them. They also mentioned things like farms and out there in the wild, which were difficult even for Mel to imagine.
    A boy slightly older than Meliora bumped into her, then glanced at the computer in her palm and messaged her an apology. She replied. It was the polite thing to do.
    Ten seconds later, as he almost disappeared into the crowd, she turned and quickly followed him. She didn't know this person and had never given him her interweb address. He was not supposed to be able to message her.
    A minute later the outage happened. Everyone nearby lost their access to the interweb.
    Silence. It had never been like this, for the whole thirteen years of her life. No messages. No articles. No Mom. No friends, no advertisers in the little light piece of metal in her palm, not even those enemies that were everywhere, who might be recording everybody's feeds and using them for nefarious purposes. Nothing. Meliora stared at her computer and started trembling.
    The other people didn't stare. They rarely did. They started talking, instead, all of them together, in voices louder and shriller than anything she'd ever heard from many people in one place.
    She walked on. Few people walked with a purpose. They were just rambling, like they did even in their best times. However, while they usually rambled carelessly, happily, looking now at this, now at that, messaging, chatting, shopping physically and through the feeds, now they weren't happy.
    Their eyes darted around faster than normal and wouldn't stop on anything even for a second. Some shoulders were strangely hunched, while others were way too straight and strained. Feet shuffled with anxiety that Meliora had seen only in children with ACD right after the doctors gave them the pills, and fingers were clenching into fists just like some of those children's fingers. She'd never seen this in person, but parents loved posting videos of their children on the interweb.
    The children were " healed " when they got the pills. But usually it was one child at a time and place who needed healing, or perhaps two. There were a doctor or two and the children's parents, all of whom were bigger than the children, stronger. Mel imagined doctors streaming into the shopping mall now, bigger and stronger than adults, many doctors who would stop the shuffling, the shouts, the gestures that were suddenly becoming too close to punches and kicks. She knew about punches and kicks only from the decades-old articles.
    No doctors came. Mel was still trembling, with an unfamiliar feeling that she suddenly knew as fear.
    She walked on. She knew exactly where she was going, and she fingered the pills in her pocket. They were what the old articles called her lucky charm. She'd had them for eight years now, ever since the only doctor she'd seen for her own ACD had