Age of Order

by Julian North

  All too quickly, people noticed me. They did it without pointing. But heads flipped, eyes spoke, whispers flew. My spider-sense felt the looks: curious, hostile, incredulous. These people had been together for years, in school as well as Manhattan society. I could no more blend in here than a highborn could’ve gone incognito at a Bronx City club party. I held my chin high, my breathing steady. I let them have their stares. Then a beam of pulsing light found my chest. My instinct, instilled from a lifetime of dealing with Authority’s enforcement machines, was to bolt. But I caught myself in time. That’s what they want. The light came from a familiar overhead. I just managed to keep my pace steady, my face blank. I heard a few snickers, but they faded quickly. So did the beam. I didn’t smile on the outside.

  I climbed the great stone steps, trying to project confidence while the rest of the student body continued to mill around on the street. At PS 62 they used a metal bell to alert everyone that classes were about to start. They probably used a live orchestra here.

  The lemon-coated guards in the reception box took a careful look at me when I entered, but eventually waved me through to the musty premises beyond. I realized I had no idea where I was going. A schedule had been transmitted to me, but my viser had stopped functioning as soon as I had entered the school. I was as lost as a rat in a maze. I was about to ask for directions when a diminutive girl with hair as dark as mine came briskly towards me, her face set with the worry of a harried bureaucrat.

  “Daniela?” she asked, as if some other Latina in street clothes could’ve gotten past the fruit patrol out front. Her eyes stretched like polished almonds, her coloring hinting at Asian ancestry.

  “Yes,” I replied, trying to sound pleasant.

  “I’m Alissa Stein. I’m your navigator.” Seeing my blank look, Alissa added, “I’ll help you get acquainted with Tuck, and hopefully answer as many questions as I can. I’ll try to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, trying not to sound too cold. I couldn’t decide if she was highborn or not. Her skin was as perfect as Kortilla’s, but she seemed too short—she couldn’t have been more than an inch or two over five feet—to have undergone genetic correction. And she didn’t have a double-barreled surname.

  “First, let’s get you onto Castle. That’s what we call the internal Tuck network.” She placed her viser-clad arm over my own and began flicking fingers like a practiced pianist. Like most experts, Alissa had no need for a virtual keyboard. Her viser looked like it had been tattooed on her arm. I couldn’t tell where the circuits ended and the skin began.

  “Interesting device,” I said.

  Alissa answered without looking at me, never taking her eyes from those fast-moving fingers. “The viser’s Rose-Hart tech, latest model. All the rage this year. It’s bioengineered, integrates into your skin. Apart from being practically unbreakable, it doesn’t respond to anyone except you.” As she leaned over my wrist, I noticed she had a silvery bead, no bigger than the end of a pin, embedded into her skull behind her ear. It wasn’t cosmetic. The flicking stopped. “All ready for you. Welcome to Castle.”

  I looked at my now functioning, archaic viser with relief. It displayed a school map, suggested routes, as well as my class schedule. Alissa glanced at my screen along with me.

  She gave a sigh of disapproval. My back stiffened.

  “It’s nothing,” Alissa explained in a hurry. “Only…they gave you Marie-Ann’s schedule. I guess everything else was full. Typical.”

  The name echoed in my head. “You knew her?”

  “Sure, we all know each other,” Alissa said. “We’ve got a couple of classes together.” I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not.

  My viser vibrated. So did Alissa’s.

  “That’s the bell. The flood is about to start,” she told me. “Let’s get going. We’ve got Literature together. I’ll show you the way. But let’s stop downstairs first. You can borrow one of my skins—that’s what we all call the uniform—until you get your own.”

  I laughed. Our heights weren’t even close.

  Alissa endured my ignorance with a neutral expression. “The skins only look archaic. They’re one size fits all; they adapt to all body types. Also, they can regulate their temperature.” I should’ve known the richies couldn’t just wear clothes like the rest of us.

  We went to the sub-levels, into the girl’s locker room. I felt that beautiful track calling to me from nearby. Alissa handed me a navy garment with white trim, which I handled as I might a snake.

  She chuckled. “It won’t bite.”

  I put it on like any other outfit, albeit slower. It oozed into the correct form, reminding me of lurker sludge coming out of a Bronx City alleyway.

  “You can control the temperature and tweak the sizing with your viser. You could even make it change colors, if you hacked the Castle network’s restrictive protocols. Of course, that’s probably an honor code violation so I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Honor code violation? Usually, you’re thrown out of school. Of course, they can recommend a more lenient sentence for general mischief, but cheating, stealing, fighting, other dishonorable conduct, is an automatic expulsion. If that happens, you’re doomed to walk the earth as a Tuck has-been.”

  “If you’re like me,” I said.

  “Even the highest of the highborn can be kicked out,” Alissa assured me, confirming that she was not one of them. “The headmaster and his masters on the Board of Trustees might set the rules, but we all have to live by them, even their little darlings. It happened a few years ago. A couple of boys hacked the network to try to steal a test. Even their elite allocator parents couldn’t save them.”

  “They were still rich, still highborn, though,” I noted. “Getting expelled wouldn’t be worth killing yourself over. They’d never be really desperate. Like Marie-Ann must’ve been.”

  “Look to the future, Daniela,” Alissa advised me. “The school will assign a locker to you by the end of the day. Skins, digiBook, and everything else you need will be inside. You’ll get the details on your viser. The cost is deducted from your student account.”

  “Uh, great, I guess.”

  “Cheer up, I hear you’ve got track tryouts this afternoon,” Alissa said. “They reopened the team just for you.”

  “How do you know?” I was starting to feel annoyed that she knew a bit too much about me.

  “The whole school knows. Everyone is looking forward to getting a look at the best runner in Bronx City. I’ll be there too. To cheer you on, of course.”

  I clenched my teeth. They were coming to see the monkey perform. I willed the anger bubbling inside me away. All for Mateo.

  “Let’s get to Lit,” Alissa said. “Mr. Lynder is pretty tough. Let’s not test him.”

  She led me upstairs with the ease of someone walking through their own home. The halls were empty. Paintings of old, dead people stared down at me from the wood paneled walls as I traipsed through the corridors, wearing clothes that weren’t mine. We walked into class with the subtlety of a pair of elephants. Every student looked up to check me out; Mr. Lynder, a man as old and rundown as my apartment building in the Bronx, pretended not to notice us. Alissa directed me to one of the two empty desks in the room with a silent finger before taking her own seat. I slid into the ancient writing space gently, its surface rubbed smooth by the illustrious bottoms of hundreds of wealthy Manhattanites before me. The desk was of the double seater variety. My seatmate glanced over at me with sapphire eyes and a gaze as warm as a blizzard. He reminded me of a statue come to life, his hands enlarged like those of Michelangelo’s David, his hair as golden as a crown.

  Lynder held a genuine paper notepad in his hands, its cover worn to near rot. His voice reverberated with a depth possessed only by the naturally aged.

  “…they had all been brought up, we suppose, to be fine boys—in the old English tradition, with proper manners. When did it all begin to
go badly?” He paused, scanning the room. There were a mere twenty of us in the classroom. That was the line for the bathroom back in my public school.

  “Mr. Sorell-Weaks?” the teacher said.

  A narrow-shouldered boy near the front answered, his voice easy, confident. “It’s not about when it went wrong, sir. They had the savagery within them the whole time. You could say it went bad the moment they fell out of the sky onto that island, with no communication. You could even say it happened at birth.”

  “Ah, so you think Golding is trying to say something about humanity itself?”

  “Yes, that they are all savages inside. Civilization keeps them in line. Without it, they are animals.”

  They are all savages, not we. Not the highborn.

  “And where else can we find themes like these? In reading or in life. An example, Mr. Sorell-Weaks, of the opposite view. That man is good, and civilization corrupts. Please.”

  A pause followed the question. I heard the ticking of an ancient clock. The tension grew thick. Sorell-Weaks squirmed in his seat. The teacher showed no sign of offering mercy.

  “Frankenstein,” came the reply at last. “The monster was good but became evil. People made the monster evil.”

  “And now, let’s see…perhaps Ms. Machado,” he said. My heart hurdled into my throat as every eye in the room focused on me. “Which of these themes have been laid out in a more compelling manner by the authors, in your opinion?”

  I blinked, my mind balky. “Ah…”

  “Oh, are you familiar with these titles? We are discussing Lord of the Flies and Frankenstein, of course.” I hadn’t read them. I doubted a single student in my old school had. We had more important things to deal with. Like staying alive in the halls.

  “No.”

  “I see,” he noted in a baritone voice thick with disapproval. “Here, we give our opinions, and support them with logic. All of us. If you are going to be in that seat, you must be ready.”

  My face burned. Condescending bastard.

  He moved on to the next student. The statue next to me glanced in my direction. I imagined a snide grin crawling up his chiseled face, even though there wasn’t one. Yet. My temperature rose to a boil. Even the teachers are against me. The remainder of the class passed in an angry haze.

  Alissa hurried over when the lesson concluded.

  “Mr. Lynder knows no mercy,” she told me in soothing tones. “We’ve all gotten hit. You’ll get over it. Look on the shelf under your desk.”

  I did, pulling out a hardcover book from beneath the desk. It had the severed head of a bleeding pig on its cover. I could sympathize. The author’s name, William Golding, was emblazoned at the top left.

  “You use paper books?” I asked. Ridiculously expensive and inefficient.

  She placed her viser over it and did a little wiggle. “Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.”

  The book cover transformed to show a grotesque monster on its cover. I opened it. The inside pages had changed as well. Of course, the richies couldn’t just use e-readers.

  “This is the class digiBook. There will be one at almost every desk you sit in, and another in your pack for home. Your reading list is on your viser, along with access to the school library, which is basically infinite. Remember, Lynder shows no mercy, and he’s not the only one. Get caught up quick. You got the rest of your schedule?”

  I glanced at my viser and nodded.

  “I’ll see you in Chem,” Alissa told me, getting ready to walk away. “Good luck. And hang in there.”

  “Who was the guy next to me?” I asked, not quite sure why.

  “Alexander Foster-Rose-Hart,” she told me with a frown. “Alexander the Great, he calls himself.”

  I huffed at the presumption of his alias. But the actual name sounded familiar. Alissa saw me make the connection. She tapped the viser on her hand, the one integrated into her skin, reminding me of the manufacturer’s name: Rose-Hart. Then she walked away, shaking her head.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Once I got over the unfamiliar tech, the Socratic teaching style and the wary stares of pretty highborns, school was still school. History seemed fascinating, economics mostly propaganda and Trigonometry downright basic. Script was a killer. I hadn’t touched a pen in years and got ink all over my hands. My lab advisor, Eleanor Nest-Birditch, was a beautiful blond specimen who I would’ve pegged as a sim actress rather than a teacher. She gave me a week to think about my proposed area of study, but I told her then and there that I wanted to concentrate on bio-fabrication. I got a raised eyebrow in reply, but she said she’d get things prepared for me by the next day. Lunch blew me away. Real stuff, every bite. I ate two hamburgers, even knowing I had to run this afternoon. I couldn’t help myself.

  My last class of the day was Chemistry. My viser guided me to my assigned seat. I wondered if Marie-Ann had sat here before she died.

  Alissa hadn’t arrived yet, so I watched my fellow students shuffle in, easy laughter flowing from most. Natural light poured into the vintage classroom though giant rectangular windows. I perused the simulated pages of the digiBook at my desk, its contents far more advanced than anything I had previously seen, but logical enough that I knew I could catch up. The day was almost complete. I could handle the academics here. The highborn and other students were smart and quick, but so was I. Now I needed to get Mateo into the life facility.

  A series of long and short vibrations on my viser interrupted my thoughts. The pattern was old Morse code. It felt so familiar I thought for a moment that it was Kortilla.

  “D-a-y g-o-o-d?” the person wondered in vibration language.

  I looked up and saw Alissa flash a wink in my direction. I forced the corners of my mouth upward. I appreciated the concern, but I wasn’t ready to tell her anything more.

  Chemistry was taught by Franklin Flinn III, a twenty-year veteran of Tuck. Unlike most other teachers, he ignored his students. He spoke to the formulas flashing across the smart boards as he lectured. By the conclusion of the lecture, I knew more about covalent bonds than I had ever before in my life—easy because my starting point was nothing. But I was focused on my appointment with Tuck track.

  Alissa found me at my desk. “How did your first day go?”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s over.”

  “This was our last class.”

  “I’ve got track tryouts,” I reminded her.

  Alissa glanced at the students milling around the classroom and adjacent hallway. “I’ll walk down to the lockers with you. You want to grab something to eat first?”

  “I’ve got two burgers in my stomach,” I confessed.

  “I know what you mean,” she said with a hand on her belly.

  I smiled in spite of myself. “I never get to eat—” I was going to say “real meat” but stopped. Even if Alissa wasn’t highborn, she was still a richie, still a Manhattanite. She wasn’t my friend, just my navigator, assigned by the school.

  Alissa didn’t press for the remainder of my thoughts. Maybe she understood enough about life outside Manhattan to get it. More likely she didn’t. With a gentle touch on my shoulder, she led me along a route away from the main staircases, away from the crowds, towards a narrow side passage. When we were alone, she spoke in a voice resembling a whisper.

  “About Coach Nessmier…he’s…a difficult sort…” Alissa said, the words halting with unease.

  The track coach was an ass. Perfect.

  “He’s not highborn,” she assured me. “But he’s…He’s what we call a ‘partisan.’ He thinks like them.”

  “What does that mean? How do they think?”

  The sound of ancient wood creaking warned us that some of our fellow students approached. “Just be ready for anything. Things work differently here, even in track. You’re expected to know that, even if you just got here. Like with Mr. Lynder. Merit only, no special treatment is what they’d call it. It’s worse than that, but…”

  A quartet of navy a
nd white approached us. Three were boys, each broad of shoulder, their features expertly sculpted, albeit from different types of clay. But there was no mistaking their leader: She rivaled the height of the tallest of the males, but was slender and as sleek as a leopard, with hair of gold and a face to distract Narcissus. Her eyes were a storm of blue.

  Alissa turned towards the group, a smile tight across her face. They all held themselves like rulers, heads high. The dark centers of their eyes glittered with the knowledge that the world belonged to them. They were older than Alissa and me—seniors, I guessed.

  “Alissa,” said the queen among these nobles of Manhattan. “Very nice to see you. And you must be Daniela Machado, our newest student. Welcome. I am so glad to have a chance to welcome you to Tuck. I’m Kristolan Foster-Rose-Hart. But that is a lot of words to say, so please call me Kris.”

  A porcelain hand extended towards me. I took it as I might candy from a stranger on the streets of Bronx City. There was a small head bow too.

  Her fingers pulsed with heat. “Daniela Machado,” I proclaimed, letting Bronx City come through in each word. I didn’t move my head. That was a highborn custom. One of the boys, an Aryan archetype, hissed at the slight. Kris brushed him with the back of her hand, and he quieted like a well-trained pet.

  “We do take pride in our track team here,” Kris told me, her voice honey, her smile one of welcome, despite the aversion of her entourage. My scowl was like an ice cube in the summer sun under her scrutiny. It soon left my face. “What you accomplished already is remarkable. I know my brother is anxious to see what you can do on the track, as are we all.”

  “Your brother?” I heard myself ask.

  “Alexander. He’s the team captain. Hopefully, you’ll join him to bring back a championship this year.”