by Ramona Finn
The Ferrymen were innovators and inventors. They’d been banished to the farthest moon in our solar system, Charon, two generations ago. They were always seen as rebels and rabble-rousers when, really, they were just free, independent thinkers who rejected the restraining, overbearing presence of the Authority. At the time when they’d been banished, it had been considered exile, but honestly, the Ferrymen were lucky that the Authority had banished them. Because once the Culling had been conceived of and implemented by the Authority, bringing Datapoints to Charon to cull the population there had been far too complicated. The Culling simply hadn’t been feasible on Charon.
Not until now. I glanced down at the horrid, crystal-like tech on my arm. The tech that had been surgically implanted without my consent. It was beautiful in a way. Iridescent and intricately geometric, like the first spears of ice over a freezing lake. Still, I looked away, barely able to look at it. This tech was a horrid weapon. It allowed me to be able to cull from great distances. And to cull huge numbers of people all at once. I’d been the only Datapoint who was given this tech. The Authority, and one member in particular, had rested all their hopes on me and my abilities. And then I’d run for my life and couldn’t have been more relieved when the Ferrymen stuck me in the dampener and shut down my tech.
I wasn’t going to be responsible for the death of innocent people.
I sighed and leaned back in my creaky chair in the cockpit. What a life this was. The view outside the windshield was killer, at least. An arm of the Milky Way stretched diagonally downward and Neptune, the same deep impassable blue as the marble that Kupier carried in his pocket, was lit from one side, winking in the distance. But I didn’t watch the view. I watched the small, unchanging monitor in front of me. It was a radar screen, with a blinking red dot in the middle of dozens of green circles. The red dot was not moving.
“You know that we have about 400 systems programmed to notify us if it moves,” said a voice from over my shoulder.
I turned and saw Aine, the second in command on the Ray. The dim blue and green lights from the control panel glinted off the smooth dome of her shaved head. She towered over me even after she lowered herself into the chair next to mine. Girl had height.
“I know that I don’t have to manually watch the radar.”
“Yet, you come down here every night.”
She’d been watching me. Well, that wasn’t exactly a shocker. I was kind of a fox in the henhouse. Datapoint in with the Ferrymen. And, I guessed, I was a girl who Kupier spent an awful lot of time with. Flirting with. She had lots of reasons to keep an eye on me. But far fewer to drop down in the seat next to me, casually, like a friend might.
I eyed her speculatively, taking my attention fully away from the radar for the first time in half an hour. I shrugged in response to her words.
“You don’t trust our warning systems?” she asked. There was an affronted tone in her voice as if she were attempting to accuse me of something. But I heard the question there, as well. Aine was a gifted programmer, but she’d never had any formal training like I’d had back at the Station. I knew she was curious about what I could or couldn’t do with just a few lines of code.
“They’re solid,” I responded. “Especially the ones that I hacked into and fixed myself.”
She glared at me and looked like she was about to rise up and leave. She opened her mouth and then clapped it closed instead.
I rolled my hand through the air. “Say whatever you’re gonna say, Aine. There’s no reason not to.”
“You’re an asshole, Glade.”
The urge to smile washed over me like a draft through an open door. Kupier was rubbing off on me. My response to everything used to be a neutral expression that gave away nothing. Now, a month on the Ray in, I wanted to laugh hysterically at the pissed off expression on Aine’s face. In a way, I was relieved that she was finally getting this off of her chest.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re cocky and arrogant and you make learning from you really freaking frustrating. Which is annoying. Because you obviously have a lot to teach us. And I don’t want to sit and listen to an asshole be an asshole. But I have to, if I want to learn from you.”
That did sound frustrating. I knew that feeling first-hand, though. Datapoints were jerks. And Datapoints were exactly who had taught me how to be a Datapoint. “I’m not doing it on purpose,” I told her simply.
She glared at me, her eyebrows raised.
“Well,” I amended. “I’m not always doing it on purpose.”
That seemed to appease her a bit, because she no longer looked like she was about to stand up. Instead, she leaned back in her chair, arms crossed and a foul expression on her face. “I just think that we’re pretty short on time here,” she offered after another moment. “The Culling could be any minute We have no idea of the Authority’s next move, and we’re here, trying to read between the lines of an instructor who can’t help but insult us as much as she teaches us. I’m losing my mind.”
I frowned at her. I’d been through all of this with Kupier already. It hadn’t occurred to me that his crew might be in the dark about it. “I don’t think the Culling is bearing down on us.”
She turned her head to me like there’d been a loud, unexpected noise. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I was pretty much the entire Culling.” I raised my tech toward her. “They spent a long time training me to cull the way they wanted me to. And then they had to implant this monstrosity and wait for me to heal. All of that, with another Datapoint, would take at least two months.”
“But they could have trained another Datapoint to do your job by now. That would mean that the Culling could still be in a month.”
“That’s assuming that they trained her from the second that I left the Station. Which…” I shrugged. “They probably didn’t. I’m sure they would have spent some time looking for me. Investigating. Making sure I wasn’t kidnapped, that I really defected. Besides, I was naturally inclined to be good at this new form of the Culling. Culling hundreds of thousands at once instead of hundreds here and there. I don’t think it’s something that she could learn in just a month.”
“You say ‘she.’ Do you know who your successor would be?”
“Yeah.” I sniffed and dropped my chin onto my fist. “Sullia.”
Aine frowned even further. She knew Sullia. The first time I’d been with the Ferrymen, on the Ray, when they’d kidnapped us, Sullia had been there with us. Aine had seen just how sneaky and manipulative Sullia could be.
“She’s the worst.”
I nodded. “Yeah. She’s self-serving and sociopathic. She’s also been literally tortured by the Authority, both for information and for punishment no less than three times in the last few months.”
“Is that sympathy I hear in your voice, Datapoint?”
If it had been Kupier asking me the question, I would have seen a sparkle in his eye when I looked up. In Aine’s eye, though, I saw nothing but confusion.
I shrugged. “Not sympathy,” I said, though I wasn’t completely sure about that. “Just frustration. I hate that the Authority gets to make monsters out of anyone they want to.”
Aine nodded slowly. “That’s true. They get to decide exactly who we have to fight through to get to them. And some of their soldiers will inevitably be people you know.”
My brain automatically flashed to Dahn, my oldest friend and my only ally left on the Station. My stomach gave a confusing half-flip/half-sinking when I thought of his silvery gaze, his broad shoulders. I loved him, in many ways, but he hadn’t come with me. He’d chosen the Authority, and I’d chosen the Ferrymen. I’d do everything I could from behind the scenes to keep him safe, but that didn’t mean that he definitely wouldn’t end up in the line of fire. It didn’t mean that he wouldn’t end up my opponent. And we all knew what Datapoints did to their opponents.
I dropped my forehead fully into my palm and let my eyes rest on that blinking red d
ot on the radar.
“Glade.”
I rolled my head and looked up at Aine.
“What I’m trying to say is that we don’t get any choice about who we’re fighting. But that doesn’t mean they get to tell us who our enemies are, okay? Look at you and me. Cats and dogs, but here we are.”
They don’t get to tell me who my enemies are. I rolled the thought over in my brain, nice and slow like it was a pancake on a griddle and I was checking the bottom. The Authority had controlled me for so long, all the way down to the literal thoughts in my brain, that sometimes I still had trouble remembering that I’d broken their leash on me. I’d gotten free. I’d turned off my tech, switched sides, and was currently moving to the farthest reaches of the solar system. They didn’t own me anymore.
“Here we are,” I agreed. “Kicking back after a hard day’s work, just keeping surveillance on a bomb that might end us all.”
Aine chuckled, surprised at my tone. “How relaxing.” Her eyes followed mine to the radar. “Haven’s bomb hasn’t moved from the moon’s satellite, you know. Not an inch.”
I’d stiffened at his name, but I couldn’t help it. Rage chemicals had instantly flooded my veins upon hearing it. I was sure I’d stopped breathing. Haven. The unofficial leader of the Authority. The man who’d bullied and threatened my family. The man who’d implanted this reprehensible tech into my brain without asking me. The man who’d invented a virus to augment every Datapoint’s tech so that we’d ended up culling innocent people. Free thinkers and revolutionaries who Haven had wanted to silence. Haven was the man who’d forced everyone’s hand into accepting this new form of mass Culling. The man who’d had me tortured until I’d wished I were dead. The man who’d dangled the lives of my sisters in front of me like they were goldfish on a line. And, oh yeah, the man who’d pushed a poisoned dart into my mother’s neck like it was no big deal. The man who’d made her eyes go glassy and still. The man who’d killed her.
Also, Haven was the man who’d had a bomb built into a one-man Ferryman ship and was storing it in a satellite that was orbiting Earth’s moon. Its destination? Charon. We’d know the second it left the satellite. Kupier had assured me that the Ferrymen would be able to intercept the bomb before it blew an entire moon colony into yesterday. No big deal, Kupier had said.
Even so, every night, I found myself down here, staring at the radar screen, reassuring myself a thousand times over that the people on Charon, including my sisters, weren’t seconds away from total annihilation.
“I know,” I finally replied. “I don’t know why I come here.”
“I do,” she responded immediately. But then she rose up in that graceful and yet blocky way of hers.
“Wait!” I called after her as she started to skirt around the pilots’ chairs and head toward the door. “You’re not going to tell me?” “Consider it payback for being such an ass during training sessions.”
I stared after her and then turned back to face forward. That hadn’t felt hostile. Or suspicious. It had felt strangely… normal.
Huh.
Chapter Two
Two nights later, I was in the cockpit again, feet up on the edge of the radar and tinkering with a tiny computer chip on a tray in my lap. It was the size of a bullet and massively complicated.
It would have been a breeze for me to analyze and run diagnostics on it if my tech had been on. But, of course, my tech was off. And I was loving it. I’d always loved solving puzzles of any kind, too, and this little thing I’d just dissected into about a hundred pieces was the most complicated puzzle I’d attempted in a long time.
The chip was something that an inventor on Charon had created a few decades ago. It could be implanted into a person’s brain and it would prevent their brainwaves from being outwardly detectable. Meaning, they would be impossible for a Datapoint to cull. The major downside was that it didn’t just shield brainwaves; it basically weighted them down. People’s personalities changed when they had the chip. They became less emotional, less able to connect with others. Ironically, they became more like Datapoints.
I’d been messing around with this chip for weeks, figuring out how it worked and maybe, just maybe, how to adjust it so that it didn’t affect the user quite so much.
The only problem was that I didn’t have anyone to test it on. And even if someone volunteered, we had no way of sensing the brainwaves of an individual without our Datapoint tech.
I was just detaching one minuscule wire from its motherboard, using tweezers, when a thought occurred to me. I put the tray aside, confident that no one would bother it this late at night, and set off jogging toward the third level, where all the rooms were.
I knocked gently on Kupier’s bedroom door before I rolled my eyes at myself and the soft sound I’d just made. Nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake him up. A few light taps on his door weren’t going to do the trick.
I pushed open his door and let my eyes adjust to the darkness of his room, just as tiny as everyone else’s even though he was the captain of the Ray and of the Ferrymen. If I really stretched my arms, I could just about touch the two opposite walls, and it wasn’t much deeper than that, either. His single cot took up most of the room, resting under two port windows not much bigger than the breadth of my hand. Spots of light filtered in from the stars and I could see his sleeping form on the cot. His big chest rising and falling, the white of his undershirt outlined against his gold skin. His boots were askew under the bed, his socks poking out from where he’d stuffed them.
I ignored the tightening in my stomach, having long ago accepted my reaction to Kupier’s nearness. My response to the little details that made him him. It didn’t make sense, and so far, I hadn’t been able to talk myself out of these ridiculous feelings. So, I did the only thing I really could – I made an attempt to keep a dang lid on them.
I kicked at the bare foot that dangled off the edge of the cot. Nothing.
I kicked again. Still nothing.
Finally, I leaned forward and gently tickled the inside of his arch. He sat up like a shot, those blue eyes blurry and confused, and his mouth half open. “Wha—?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said quickly when his expression tightened from adorable perplexity to alarm. “I had an idea that I need to talk to you about.”
He slid a heavy hand down his face and then back over to his stubbled hair, barely half an inch long. “Alright.”
He didn’t tell me to get the hell out and come back in the morning. He didn’t even ask me why I was waking him up in the middle of the night. He just waited for me to fill him in on the idea.
“Okay. So, I was just working on the chip.”
“At 4:30 in the morning,” he interrupted me, having just glanced at the time.
“Yeah.”
“Naturally. Go on.”
“And I realized something.”
“Sit down.”
“What?” I cocked my head to the side, thrown off a little.
“Let’s be on the same level, but without you making me stand.” He reached up a hand and tugged me down onto the bed. I crawled over him and put my back against the wall, crossing my legs. In the days after my mother had died, there hadn’t been a night when Kupier hadn’t sat with me, keeping me company at least until I fell asleep. We’d shared this room and mine enough times that I wasn’t completely freaking out about sitting on his warm sheets in a cot so small that I could feel his steady breaths on my knee.
He lay back, feet off the edge of the cot and hands behind his head. I could feel the bright slice of his eyes even through the dark. I traced a shape on my folded knee.
“So. What’s the idea that’s so good it couldn’t wait until morning?” he asked.
“I want to turn on Cast’s tech.” I’d just plunged in, but I realized from the jerk of his head toward me that perhaps I should have greased the wheels a bit first. I was still learning the differences between emotionally normal humans and Datapoints.
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“You want me to willingly turn a Datapoint’s tech back on?” he asked slowly as if he thought he hadn’t heard me right. I wondered if he thought he was dreaming.
“Yeah.”
“While he’s living in the Ray?”
“Yeah.”
“The same tech that allows him to cull whoever he wants?”
“Well, I mean, I really don’t think he wants to cull anybody. But, yeah.”
“The same tech that allows the Authority to track him within a millimeter?”
“I think I could hack into his tracker and disable it pretty quickly. But, again, yeah.”
Kupier sighed long and hard, but the sound ended on a chuckle. I heard the scratch of his palm over his stubbled chin. And then that same palm landed on my knee and squeezed. “You sure don’t make things simple, DP-1.”
“I’m not trying to make things simple. I’m trying to make things safe.”
“How would arming Cast with his instant-death machine make things safe?”
“Well, you know I’ve been messing around with the brainwave chip.”
He went still. Kupier hated the chip. It had, after all, caused the Ferrymen to split into two groups. Those who wanted to use it and those who didn’t. I knew it bothered him that he hadn’t been able to find a solution to keep the group knitted together. He blamed the chip, considering it a faulty technology. “Go on.”
“Well, I think I might have figured out a way to use the chip differently. See, it was originally designed to create a shield to protect a user’s brainwaves, making them impossible to be read by a Datapoint. But we know now that it actually weighs down and dulls the brainwaves of the user. Which is probably why the other Ferrymen are such a bunch of tools.”
He laughed and shifted around on the bed. I could tell he was still uncomfortable with where this was going, but he was listening.
