A Crack in the Sky

by Mark Peter Hughes

  On a sign on the far wall was the same message Eli had seen posted everywhere he went: Forgiveness through Productivity, Contentment through Trust.

  Wandering between the tables were several other kids in drab green uniforms like the one Representative Dowd wore. Eli watched them look over the laborers’ shoulders, apparently checking their work. The Productivity Facilitators seemed to be the supervisors here. More intimidating, though, were the white-uniformed Guardians standing sentry along the walls like prison security. Unlike Representative Tinker, these were all large, flat-headed kids with impassive expressions. Eli didn’t like the look of them.

  Representative Dowd walked him to the only empty seat, at the end of one of the tables. “This is Representative Papadopoulos,” she announced.

  The nearby workers, all of them kids about his own age, looked up from the piles of shirt parts they were working on. Everybody smiled, glassy-eyed. No one seemed overly moved at hearing his famous last name.

  “Hello, Representative Papadopoulos,” they responded in chorus.

  Representative Dowd gave a quick demonstration of what Eli was supposed to do. His job title would be Matcher. The work was simple enough: he would sort through piles of shirt parts—sleeves, collars, fronts, and backs—and match sizes together. Completed sets were then passed down the table to the Rippers, who removed numbered tags from the material. Next the sets were passed to the Operators, who sat at antique sewing machines and stitched the different parts together, and finally to the Packers, who packed them in crates.

  Representative Dowd left, and soon Eli was struggling to keep up with the others. He sifted through his mound of shirt parts, making occasional surreptitious glances at the other kids at the table. They were all working fast. Nobody ever seemed to look up. The boy to Eli’s left was pencil thin, with short black hair, freckles, and eyes so big that he looked a little like a bug. He seemed about the same age as Eli. The beefy girl to Eli’s right was ghostly pale, with mousey brown hair and drooping eyelids. She looked older, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Even though she appeared half-asleep, her hands seemed to have energy of their own as they sifted through her pile. Eli worked up the courage to speak to them both.

  “Hi,” he whispered, “I’m Eli. What are your names?”

  Instead of answering, the girl glanced over, curled her lip, and growled at him. Then she turned back to her pile. Her hands never stopped moving. Eli wanted to sink into his chair.

  The boy seemed a little friendlier. He looked nervously around, perhaps to see if any of the Productivity Facilitators were nearby, and then, with his eyes on his work again, he whispered, “I’m Clarence. She’s Geraldine.”

  Eli decided to ignore the strange tension. “It’s nice to meet you, Clarence. Why are you here? What did you do wrong?” After a moment Clarence looked over as if he were going to answer, but then his face went red and he dropped his gaze once more.

  Eli felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Maybe you didn’t understand when I told you about the no-unnecessary-talking rule?” He turned. Representative Dowd didn’t seem angry. Her expression and tone of voice were like those of a patient parent reasoning with a disruptive toddler. “It’s not surprising. You’re new. But we have a quota to meet, three hundred seventy crates by the end of the day, which means each Matcher will need to process over nine hundred shirts. Reaching our goal will take everybody’s full attention. Please concentrate on your task, Representative Papadopoulos. You of all people should understand that everybody’s work is vital to the well-being of the organization.”

  Eli wanted to argue with what seemed like an unreasonable rule, but he decided against it, for now. Geraldine was giving him the evil eye and Eli could feel his face burning. Soon everyone went back to work. For a long time Eli didn’t look up at all. He kept his mouth shut.

  Lunch was served in shifts in a spacious cafeteria with tables and an area where Waywards could stand and stretch their legs if they wanted to. The moment the hungry workers stepped into the room and lined up for their meals, the place filled with loud conversation. Talking, it seemed, was okay here.

  Eli found an empty table near the back and set his tray down. He was starving. He examined his lunch: lumpy meat loaf, green mush, and some kind of yellow desserty thing that looked like it had sat out in the sun for a while. Just as he was working up the courage to test the meat loaf, somebody spoke just behind him.

  “I stopped working.”

  Eli turned. The freckled boy from the worktable was standing there with his tray.

  “You asked what I did wrong to end up here, and that’s the answer. One day I told my boss at the tanning salon that I wasn’t showing up to work anymore, and that was that. I meant it too. For days and days I didn’t go back. People kept coming up to my room and knocking on my door to tell me I had to report to my job, but I just stayed in bed.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just felt … sad. I had this terrible, empty feeling all the time. So I stayed in my room. I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t do anything. Eventually they sent me here.” He set his tray next to Eli’s and sat down. “I know. It was a stupid thing to do. I guess I was so wrapped up in my self-absorbed wrong thinking that I didn’t consider the consequences. No worries, though. I’m better now.” He held out his hand. “Sorry we couldn’t talk earlier. Let’s start again. I’m Clarence.”

  “Eli.” He shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Clarence picked up the grayish pizza from his tray and took a bite. He covered his mouth as he spoke. “Listen, I know what you’re going through. The first day is always the hardest. I see it all the time. Everybody here remembers what it was like to be a newbie.”

  “Thanks. What’s up with that no-talking rule, anyway?”

  “Yeah, they can be kind of a pain about it,” he said with a half smile. “But you can get away with talking if you learn how not to get caught. Like I said, don’t sweat it. You’ll get with the program soon enough. I bet it’ll only take a few days before you learn to like it here.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” he admitted, glancing at the line of Guardians watching from along the far wall. Eli couldn’t help feeling grateful to this kid, who was obviously going out of his way to be nice. Now that he saw him away from the frantic pace of the work line, he seemed normal, like any regular boy Eli might have passed on the street at home. Not somebody he would have pictured working in some faraway dungeon on the sea. “How long have you been here?”

  “Eight months. More than some kids, not as long as others.” He nodded in the direction of a table where the big, pale girl from the work line sat alone, her expression vacant and her mouth moving as if she were talking to herself. Everybody else seemed to steer clear of her. “Geraldine was here long before I started.”

  “What’s her problem? The way she looked at me, I thought she was going to bite my head off.”

  “Oh, she’s harmless. Just stay out of her way and you’ll be fine.”

  “No, really. There’s something wrong with her. What is it?”

  Clarence was quiet a moment. “Well,” he said, “most kids get with the program pretty quickly, but the ones who dont …” He shrugged. “They sometimes end up like her. Kind of freaky and quiet.” He leaned in close and dropped his voice. “Geraldine was a Resister.”

  Eli could only blink at him.

  “A holdout,” he explained. “An unrepentant Wayward who clings to wrong thinking and refuses to get it that we’re all on the same company team. It’s a shame. After a while just about everybody comes around on their own, but every now and then we get somebody who doesn’t. When I first got here, Geraldine was kind of scary and violent. People got hurt. She went to Solitary Instruction a few times, but even that didn’t work. Finally they brought her up to the fifteenth floor. That’s what fixed her.”

  “The fifteenth floor?”

  Clarence nodded. “The Special Training are
a. When Geraldine came back, she forgot all about resisting. Now she’s one of our most productive teammates.”

  “What the heck is Special Training? What did they do to her?”

  “Nobody knows, but whatever it was, it sure fixed her head up quick.”

  Eli recalled the powerful sphere he’d faced for a short time in the gray room and how it had played with his mind. He shuddered at the memory. “I think I may have already seen the Special Training area,” he said. “As soon as I get the chance, I’m going to stop my cousin Spider from doing this to people. When my grandfather finds out about this place, he’s going to shut it down.” When Clarence didn’t react he added, “My grandfather is the Grandfather. The man who saved humanity? I’m Eli Papadopoulos.”

  Clarence only smiled amiably. If Eli didn’t know better, he could almost have believed the kid had never even heard the name.

  Eli glanced over at Geraldine again. Her eyes were closed, and she appeared to be in some kind of trance. “Why was she brought here in the first place? What did she do to end up in an InfiniCorp reeducation facility?”

  “Oh, I hear she snuck out of her dome without telling anyone. They found her wandering around Outside in the desert.” Clarence took another bite of his pizza. “So anyway, that’s why my advice to you is, don’t try to fight it. Do the right thing and admit you were wrong. You’ll feel better once you let yourself go with the flow. Really, it’s pretty cool here. You’ll see.”

  Back at the worktable again, Eli’s hands shook. He was still mulling over what Clarence had said about Geraldine, how after her visit to the fifteenth floor, she’d just forgotten about resisting. And yet nobody appeared troubled by this, or by anything else in this cheerless place.

  In fact, everyone seemed happy. It was weird.

  How could this be?

  The answer seemed a little clearer a moment later, when the overhead spheres suddenly glowed bright. All at once everyone set their work down and looked up, gazing contentedly at the glimmering orbs. Eli felt the pull of the CloudNet drawing his own eyes upward. He tried, but he couldn’t stop himself from looking.

  The stream in the sphere was short, a series of brief statements from famous celebrities about the high quality of company T-shirts and their importance to the InfiniCorp community. When it was over, Eli went back to his work feeling refreshed and invigorated. He was suddenly eager to meet the challenge of making his daily quota—even excited about it.

  Then he caught himself.

  This sudden feeling of euphoria wasn’t real. He would have to keep reminding himself of that. He had to stay alert to reality if he was ever going to find a way to contact anyone beyond the tower.

  It was past eight in the evening when the three hundred seventieth crate was packed. Eli was exhausted. At the sound of a whistle, he followed the other Waywards to the cafeteria where, still caked in sweat, he shoveled down cold spaghetti as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks. After that, everyone split into groups—boys on one side, girls on the other. Eli was told to stick with a group from his table. He followed Clarence down one flight of stairs to a cramped dormitory area with twelve bunk beds along the walls, several broken-down sofas, and yet another CloudNet sphere, floating in the center. Eli was shown to the only empty bunk, the one just below Clarence’s, where a clean uniform was waiting for him.

  After an unsatisfying shower where the water came out in a feeble stream, he discovered all the other boys lazing on the sofas, watching the CloudNet.

  “Come join us,” Clarence called, his eyes only briefly looking away from the sphere. “This is our Rewards Time. We earned it.”

  “Uh … no, thanks.” Inside, Eli was desperate to find a way to avoid watching any more of the CloudNet than he already had, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. In the end he climbed onto his bed and faced the wall. None of the other kids seemed to mind that he was being antisocial.

  In fact, nobody said a word, not even to each other.

  Much later, after lights-out, he lay awake, listening. Apart from the gentle snoring of the other boys, he thought he could hear the sound of heavy machinery grinding somewhere far below. The clang of metal on metal. A distant shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of pistons. He thought about the old man in the sky and the boy on the Bubble tram, and he wondered if what he was hearing was an oil pump, the sound of the last petroleum on earth being sucked from deep under the seabed.

  If only his family would contact him. Surely Mother and Father wouldn’t abandon him here. Not Sebastian either. They would come for him eventually. But by now a new set of worries was creeping into his thoughts:

  What if they didn’t know where he was?

  What if Spider was hiding him from everyone and was planning to keep him here forever?

  As his first week on Learning Floor 9-B came to a close, Eli’s hope began to fade. The Guardians watched everything, and nobody seemed willing to help, not even the other Waywards.

  Every day was pretty much the same. Work started at seven a.m. and ended when the quota was completed. Waywards were kept busy all the time, and every few hours the CloudNet spheres would blaze bright. Whenever Eli felt the pleasant numbing effect taking hold of him, he would make an effort to pull his eyes away, but it was hard to block it completely. Each morning he dragged himself to the work line less convinced he would ever get out of this place. He’d spend the rest of his days here, long hours filled with nothing but T-shirts and glowing spheres—a dismal, empty existence, despite the promise of contentment on the signs that were posted everywhere.

  But after a few more days, he started to feel a little different.

  For one thing, he began to appreciate his job. It was less stressful than his old life of tedious management studies. Compared with that, the mindless busywork of matching shirt parts was a welcome relief. Plus, there was something to be said for the fact that everyone really did seem happy. Eli was getting faster on the production line too. Several times a day Representative Dowd or one of the other Productivity Facilitators would look over his shoulder and comment. “Good work, Representative Papadopoulos,” they would say. “We’re so glad to have you on the team.”

  It was nice to finally feel valued.

  He still missed Marilyn and worried about what had happened to her, but even those thoughts started to seem distant somehow, as if he were standing outside himself and looking in. More and more, what he felt was regret that he’d let the company down. It seemed that Representative Tinker had been right when she’d promised that productivity would be the best thing for him.

  He spent his days working on the Learning Floor, and at night he joined Clarence and the other boys from his group as they trudged down to the glowing sphere in their dormitory bunk room. After just a few days he realized it simply wasn’t possible to block out the spheres completely. In spite of himself, he even began to look forward to CloudNet breaks from the production line. They were always brief. A short infomercial, an inspirational clip about some new InfiniCorp product, perhaps a sneak peek at an upcoming docudrama about how great it was to work for the company.

  Whatever it was, as he watched he felt his worries disappear like magic.

  “Believe in yourself,” a smiling boy might whisper as he stood at the edge of a high cliff. Then, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he would let himself fall backward off the edge, and the camera would follow him as he plummeted down, down, down, until finally he would land in the protective arms of a company executive. Then the boy would open his eyes again and whisper the words that appeared in the air above him:

  “Trust yourself. Trust InfiniCorp.”

  An attractive girl would show off her artificial ears, oversized and blue, which shimmered with light. “DESPERATELY SEEKING GLOW LOBES?” Every Wayward on the production floor would nod. Eli even caught himself doing it. After all, it really would be cool to have ears like that. “THEN BE THE FASTEST PRODUCER OF THE WEEK AND WIN A TRIP TO THE EIGHTEENTH FLOOR TO VISIT … THE GLAMOUR
AMA!”

  “Ohhhh!” the Waywards would murmur with excitement as the spheres dimmed. Everyone including Eli would throw themselves back into their work with renewed energy.

  At the back of his mind he realized his enthusiasm for these things came, at least in part, from the influence of the CloudNet, but that thought no longer bothered him as much. After all, what did it matter, really? It wasn’t like life was so horrible here. Everyone was nice, the work made him feel useful, and at night he slept on a comfortable, soft bed. The production area no longer seemed as dreary as it had at first. The air wasn’t as stale and the heat didn’t bother him. Even the fake flower arrangements on the wall seemed less depressing now. In fact, he kind of liked them. Leafy green vines had grown up the walls, along with little white and yellow flowers—many more than he’d noticed at first—and it totally brightened the place up.

  How could he have missed that before?

  It wasn’t that he no longer thought about contacting his family, it was just that it didn’t seem quite as urgent as it used to. Every morning he woke up more or less resigned to the idea of putting in another full day’s work for the team. And at night when he sank, exhausted, into his bunk, he slept peacefully.

  After two weeks of making T-shirts, Eli’s life had taken on an otherworldly quality, as if he were living in a beautiful dream game where smiling, friendly people helped each other by helping the company. The production area practically glowed. It was lush and green, alive with zillions of flowers of countless varieties and colors. They grew on all the walls, up the purple girders, and even across the ceiling. It was like working in a beautiful jungle. It was amazing. It made him happy.

  Deep down he knew this feeling wasn’t real, that it was just the CloudNet messing with his head. He would still remind himself of this, but less often now, and with less conviction. After all, what did it matter if this happy glow wasn’t exactly genuine? Considering everything he’d done—turning his back on his family, betraying the company by meeting with members of a criminal organization with nutty ideas about the end of the world—living this way was better than he deserved.