she thought. * Yutao was just sitting there on the tree branch with her Pensive Face on, which was no good at all. Marie knew the Pensive Face. There were good versions of it, but this was most definitely not one of them. It didn’t make any sense. Why did Yutao invite her over? From the moment that frantic invitation reached her inbox she’d been wondering at what could possibly be wrong – and here they were, sitting on a tree branch, still going through preliminaries. “What’s up.” she found herself saying. “I’m fine.” “I don’t know. You seem quiet.” “I always seem quiet. I am quiet.” “I don’t know about that. You weren’t always.” She really wasn’t. Not as much as she liked to pretend. Not in creche and middle school, during the war, where Yutao sheparded Marie the New Girl (and the Girl Whose Parents Weren’t Around, at that) around the social scene, always sharing with people the coolest places to explore and trying to sneak over to climb the intact section of the Golden Gate Bridge. She was the one who had all the secrets, who knew who liked who and who had their overlays linked in illegal chat networks during tests. Hell, Yutao had introduced Marie to Jason, partway through high school, the two of them sitting on a fence talking about the oiltrees. “This is Marie. She helps me with that oiltree theory,” Marie remembered Yutao saying, and something about that had felt off, but Jason was cool and it was nice to have a third person in on the plan and Marie just felt thankful to have Yutao as a friend. Always been quiet? What happened? * “Yutao, you’ve never been quiet”, continued Marie, as if she hadn’t been paying attention to the last twenty years since middle school. She’d always been quiet. And it made sense. There was shit to do, hours to put in. Of course she had gotten quieter, because the War had ended and there were better things to do than sit around and hang out with the same clutch of people reenacting the lives of their parents, there was research to be done, data to be gathered, and not a lot of time to do it in. The last generations had called it climate change. They had to dredge that up from the history books, but Yutao always thought it was a stupid phrase. Change sounded normal, gradual. It’s what parents tell you to accept. The oiltrees were a perfect demonstration of the problem: a previous
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