Chapter One I am coming to the end of my tenth orbit around the sun I tell Ivan You’ve traveled nearly nine billion four hundred million kilometers Ivan says Ivan is super smart And skinny like stretched toffee Me I’m toffee before it got stretched short and wide Ivan and I have been best friends since kindergarten 1
How can traveling through space make me older I mean I can’t even feel it If you could you’d have no skin Ivan says Atmosphere burn A lot worse than carpet burn We’re in front of my mom’s old computer googling salt for a school project We’ve watched cars race across the huge salt flats of Utah they look like fields of snow and have learned that Canadians put more salt on icy highways than they do on food Mrs Zupan hands us steaming bowls of goulash through the window Here boys Ivan takes a bite Pass the sodium chloride I hand him the saltshaker 2
We stare at the screen again The cursor flashes in the search bar as if Google is tapping its toe Throw something at me Anything Okay Google I say The microphone throbs for input Google Google churns and spits out the top results for Google It has found itself Ha Ivan says My turn Okay Google But before he can speak I sneeze Ah-choo Google hears pet chip So as Ivan and I gobble our goulash we learn about microchips the size of a grain of rice that you can get injected under your pet’s skin The chip has a code so if the animal gets lost the 3
