After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh Read Free Book Online Page B

shrugged. “Everyone is in debt,” she said. “Just most people have given up. Everything costs here. Your food, your dormitory, your uniforms. They always make sure that you never earn anything.”
    “They can’t do that!” Jieling said.
    Baiyue said, “My granddad says it’s like the old days, when you weren’t allowed to quit your job. He says I should shut up and be happy. That they take good care of me. Iron rice bowl.”
    “But, but, but,” Jieling dredged the word up from some long forgotten class, “that’s feudal !”
    Baiyue nodded. “Well, that’s my granddad. He used to make my brother and me kowtow to him and my grandmother at Spring Festival.” She frowned and wrinkled her nose. Country customs. Nobody in the city made their children kowtow at New Year’s. “But you’re lucky,” Baiyue said to Jieling. “You’ll have your uniform debt and dormitory fees, but you haven’t started on food debt or anything.”
    Jieling felt sick. “I stayed in the guest house for four days,” she said. “They said they would charge it against my wages.”
    “Oh,” Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Jieling felt more frightened by that than anything else.
    Instead of going back to the lab they went upstairs and across a connecting bridge to the dormitories. Naps? Did they get naps?
    “Do you know what room you’re in?” Baiyue asked.
    Jieling didn’t. Baiyue took her to ask the floor auntie, who looked up Jieling’s name and gave her a key and some sheets and a blanket. Back down the hall and around the corner. The room was spare but really nice. Two bunk beds and two chests of drawers, a concrete floor. It had a window. All of the beds were taken except one of the top ones. By the window under the desk were three black boxes hooked to the wall. They were a little bigger than a shoebox. Baiyue flipped open the front of each one. They had names written on them. “Here’s a space where we can put your battery.” She pointed to an electrical extension.
    “What are they?” Jieling said.
    “They’re the battery boxes. It’s what we make. I’ll get you one that failed inspection. A lot of them work fine,” Baiyue said. “Inside there are electric ray cells to make electricity, and symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria breaks down garbage to feed the ray cells. Garbage turned into electricity. Anti–global warming. No greenhouse gas. You have to feed it scraps from the cafeteria a couple of times a week or it will die, but it does best if you feed it a little bit every day.”
    “It’s alive?!” Jieling said.
    Baiyue shrugged. “Yeah. Sort of. Supposedly if it does really well, you get credits for the electricity it generates. They charge us for our electricity use, so this helps hold down debt.”
    The three boxes just sat there looking less alive than a boom box.
    “Can you see the cells?” Jieling asked.
    Baiyue shook her head. “No, the feed mechanism doesn’t let you. They’re just like the ones we grow, though, only they’ve been worked on in the tissue room. They added bacteria.”
    “Can it make you sick?”
    “No, the bacteria can’t live in people.” Baiyue said. “Can’t live anywhere except in the box.”
    “And it makes electricity.”
    Baiyue nodded.
    “And people can buy it?”
    She nodded again. “We’ve just started selling them. They say they’re going to sell them in China, but really, they’re too expensive. Americans like them, you know, because of the no-global-warming. Of course, Americans buy anything.”
    The boxes were on the wall between the beds, under the window, pretty near where the pillows were on the bottom bunks. She hadn’t minded the cells in the lab, but this whole thing was too creepy.

    Jieling’s first paycheck was startling. She owed 1,974 R.M.B. Almost four month’s salary if she never ate or bought anything and if she didn’t have a dorm room. She went