The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

because you’re at the age where things are changing fast. Too fast. And that’s why I wanted you to see this educational. I want you to know those feelings are okay. That they’re normal. Sex is as human as any other impulse is.”
    “But I already know all this, Mom,” the girl says, huffing. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
    “Then you know that it’s against regulation for you to date before you test, right?”
    “I said I know.”
    “You have to wait for your test card,” the mother says, her voice now filled with authority. “And even then, when you do meet someone, you have to check in with the health office to avoid genetic conflicts. Are you hearing me? Molly? I asked you a question. Are you hearing me?”
    The girl folds her arms.
    Her mother gives up.
    They sit in their seats, both of them looking straight ahead, staring at the blank screen. A quiet eternity seems to pass. I’m aware of my own breathing, and I make an effort to be quiet, wanting to remain undiscovered. At last, the screen hums to life, glowing a dull silver, the mother and daughter silhouetted against its bottom edge.
    Without taking her eyes off the screen, the daughter says:
    “What happened to him?”
    “What happened to who, darling?”
    “The boy.”
    “Oh, him ...,” she says, her response quiet and delayed, as if maybe traveling to her lips from the distant past. “He didn’t test well. They sent him down to Level 6.”
    The educational begins with an image of a cell suspended like a Mylar balloon in a black sky. Music fades in. The cell divides into two daughter cells that grow and then themselves divide, making four. The tempo quickens. The cells divide again. Four into eight, eight into sixteen, and soon the entire screen is filled with thousands of cells nestled together like algae muffins on a baking sheet. The camera pulls back, revealing the cluster to be an egg. A hundred thousand sperm swim at it from every angle, bashing themselves against its outer walls.
    Symbols clang.
    Again and again the sperm push against the egg until one slips through and slithers into its center, coming to rest.
    Quiet now.
    Violins.
    The black background changes to a deep red that gradually lightens. A drum roll. The triumphant sperm combines with the egg, becoming a zygote, then the zygote dividing and folding and growing into an embryo. As the drums fade to silence, the embryo develops into an alien fetus floating in a soft pink sea.
    Cut to: Ancient footage of gorillas in a zoo, before the War, before they were extinct. A silverback sitting on a rock, a female circling him, her behind pumping high in the air—one, two, three revolutions around his rock she turns, taunting, tempting. The silverback surrenders to the dance and rises from his rock as the female shrinks away, subservient, waiting. When he mounts her, she closes her eyes. He pumps fast, his head turned to gaze idly at something off screen. Almost before he’s begun, the silverback is finished. He returns to his rock and sits while the female rolls away to lie on her back, cradling her hairy belly as if already expecting something there.
    My eyes droop, the picture fades ...
    No longer in a theater five miles underground, I’m tucked away in my mother’s arms. I see her face, the face I imagine from my father’s descriptions, her hair brown and soft and straight. She smiles down at me and rocks me, and for the first time I feel safe.
    I look up and watch her fade away.
    When I wake from my dream, the theatre is dark. Nothing on the screen, no lights except the soft LED glow of the aisle markers. The mother and daughter are gone.
    Stepping from the theater into the dark square, it appears to be long after curfew because nobody is out. Even the public house is shuttered and dark. Now I’m in trouble. Not from the police—we have very few, and they don’t enforce curfew—but from my dad. The last time I came in this late he grounded me. There seems no point in