by Ramona Finn
I gripped the sides of my own head and screamed into the strain of it. It was useless. I was too exhausted to distinguish them.
Mass Culling.
I could all but feel the breath of Jan Ernst Haven in my ear. Mass Culling.
Individuals didn’t matter.
The red blur of their pulsing brains seemed to cloud around me, bearing down on me. They were so close. Everywhere. I lifted one hand in the air – the arm where my integrated tech had been implanted. My brain warred for dominance with the computer that had been implanted in me. The integrated tech strained, searching for just the cullable citizens. My own brain strained for silence, for this to be over. I felt the familiar feeling of my tech’s grip on the brainwaves of a citizen. I always visualized a hand gripping a giant plug. This was bigger than any plug I’d ever pulled before. But there was no looking back now. The red of each citizen was about to collapse on me. I couldn’t hold them all. It was me or them.
My brain and my tech synchronized and, in one crystal clear moment, we, as one, yanked the red brainwaves together. The citizens, such a large group, resisted at first. Pulling one citizen’s brainwaves was easy. It was like plucking a hair from a head. But pulling thousands at once was like yanking out a whole handful of hair.
But my brain was strong. And so was my tech. With a scream like a warrior, I gritted my teeth and gave a final yank. I felt the brainwaves come loose from each citizen, blinking instantly into blackness. Into silence. My tech immediately stopped blocking my senses. And there were the two colonies. One icy and gray-blue. The other baked red and blistering hot. Both of them silent as a tomb. And not a brainwave to be found.
I sighed as soon as the door to the simulator creaked open. I knew exactly who was standing on the other side and I knew exactly what he was going to say.
“You’ve got to be joking, Glade.”
Apparently, he always thought I was joking. I merely raised an eyebrow at Dahn as I pushed past him, out of the simulator and into the training room. Everything was gray metal and brown upholstery – even the command chair where Dahn had just been sitting. For one brief second, I thought wistfully of the two gorgeous landscapes he’d just shown me in the simulator. And then I thought of the vacuous silence I’d left in each of them. I shoved that thought away.
He let me brush past him, but immediately chased after me. When I didn’t show signs of stopping, Dahn slid his stocky frame in front of mine, blocking my way. His dark hair stood out starkly against his pale skin as he stared down at me, his arms crossed over his chest. It always annoyed me in moments like this that he was so handsome.
“All of them, Glade? All of them? Every single citizen?”
I shrugged, acting as if I wasn’t sure what was so wrong about the choice I’d just made. “You heard Haven. He wants us to focus on mass culling.”
“Don’t play dumb. You know he wouldn’t have meant for you to cull every single citizen.” A piece of his long dark hair fell forward across his forehead and he elegantly tied it back with the rest. “I don’t even know how you manipulated your tech to cull the citizens who didn’t require it.”
That gave me pause. Actually, now that he mentioned it, that part hadn’t been hard at all. Even though my tech wasn’t designed for that purpose, it had been surprisingly easy to cull everyone.
I cleared my throat and gave the only answer I could think of. “It was too many people. My sensors were completely fuzzed over. I couldn’t tell one from the other.” I tried to step past him, but he smoothly moved right along with me. After years of knowing Dahn, this behavior didn’t surprise me. He’d been smoothly putting himself in my way since pretty much the day I’d met him.
“You’re telling me that you had trouble distinguishing between them in the simulation?” he asked, a line of worry forming between his eyebrows.
That was Dahn for you, always balancing frustration and worry.
“So what if I did?” Not an answer, exactly, but not a lie, either.
Dahn narrowed his eyes in that way of his. The way he did when he thought he was hiding his temper. “Let’s go through this one more time.”
He waved his hand through the air like he was wiping something clean between us. A glowing projection of a human brain appeared where his hand had just been. I envied the ease with which he was able to manipulate his own tech to do what he wanted.
I’d been selected to be a Datapoint – just like all of the other Datapoints – because apparently, I was naturally inclined to be one. And sure, give me a computer, no matter how archaic, and I could make it stand up and dance for you. But the integrated tech they installed when you started your training as a Datapoint? Well, even after two years, it still felt unwieldy.
I traced my own hand over the shimmery, clear motherboard that lined my left arm like crystal jewelry. As my fingers brushed the tech, I felt the shivery corresponding buzz in the tech on the left side of my face, also illuminated by iridescent crystals.
Dahn’s own tech pulsed with light at his temples as he almost carelessly rotated the projection of the brain to face me. A flick of his fingers, and the brain lit up red in a few different zones. Dahn raised one of those imperious eyebrows at me. His soft gray eyes shone with frustrated expectation.
I sighed, surveying the projection, knowing exactly what he was asking of me. We’d only done it about a thousand times before. “It needs to be culled, of course.”
He flicked his fingers and the red zones on the brain shifted, but infinitesimally.
“Culled,” I repeated, almost bored.
The red zones in the projection shifted again, this time indicating a person who shouldn’t be culled.
“That one’s to be left alone.”
Now the projections went faster and faster, showing different zones each time.
“Culled, left alone, culled, culled, left alone, culled.”
Dahn snapped his hand closed with barely disguised frustration and the projection disappeared, leaving behind only a slightly black spot in my vision.
“Explain it to me then, Glade,” he bit out. “How you can score with one hundred percent accuracy on the projection tests, and fail so catastrophically in the simulations?”
With a strange tug in my stomach, I thought of the strain of distinguishing between the citizens, how unnatural it had felt. And then I thought of how relatively easy it had been to pull the plug on all of them, rather than just the ones needing to be culled. But I said nothing. Instead, I did what I pretty much always did around Dahn. I shrugged.
His temper flashed bright in his gray eyes for only a second before they dimmed. “This isn’t something you can shrug off, Glade. This is the Culling. The glue that holds our entire society together for God’s sakes. And the decade is up. It’s coming. Around the corner, and you’re not ready for it!”
Shame sliced through me for just a second, white hot. Dahn was right. Frustrated with my inability to do well in the simulations, I’d begun treating my training with disdain and indifference. “I know.”
His look softened, but Dahn Enceladus had never been one to pass up the opportunity to make a point. One of his graceful hands floated back to gesture at the simulator. “You just culled people who shouldn’t have been. Instead of concentrating and ferreting out the citizens with violent or murderous tendencies, you culled every single one of those people. Including the people with attributes that strengthen our society.”
I cleared my throat and tossed my long black hair back over my shoulder. I shifted my weight onto my good leg; even so, I felt the tremor in my knee. I was exhausted from the simulation, but I’d be damned if I showed weakness in front of any other Datapoint, even Dahn. “I know what I did, Dahn. Now, if you’d get out of my way for a second…”
Instantly, his soft gray eyes went from boring into mine to scanning down my body. The black workpants and tight black t-shirt that every Datapoint was required to wear didn’t do much to hide the trembling in my muscles.
&n
bsp; “You’re exhausted,” he said, stepping back, and a look came over his face that I couldn’t interpret. I’d seen that look before from him and it confused me every time. It was… soft. He reached one arm toward my elbow.
“I’m fine. I just need to—”
“Glade Io.”
I tried not to wince at the reedy voice that always seemed to be speaking directly into my ear. There was only one person who consistently called me by my full name. I’d hoped that he hadn’t taken it upon himself to watch that particular simulation, but he always seemed to be keeping an eye on me.
“Sir Haven,” I addressed him, turning on my heel and nodding once to show respect. As a member of the Authority, Jan Ernst Haven was one of the seven most important people in our solar system. Each of the seven members of our government served for a lifetime, working together to uphold the laws and rules of our solar system. He was the only member of the Authority I’d ever actually met, and he lived on the Station with us. Really, it was an honor that he’d taken a personal interest in my development as a Datapoint. But one look at the subtly disappointed expression on his face and his interest once again felt like an additional burden.
“Perhaps you’d like a private word with me?” He always spoke like this, softly and in question form. Thing was, they were questions that had only one answer. Whatever answer he wanted.
“Yes, sir.”
Without even acknowledging Dahn’s presence, Haven turned, and I dutifully followed him through the training room and toward the private office he kept.
The Station, where all us Datapoints trained and lived, floated in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Because it had to be of a fairly indestructible nature (given all of the asteroid collisions it was dealt), everything was built for durability, not design. It gave the entire place more the look of a glorified jail than a space station.
When I’d first come here from my sweltering, volcanic planet, I’d been shocked by the lack of color. Where there’d been glowing streams of red hot lava in my past, here there were only gray and brown hallways. Where the sun had burned yellow through our navy sky at home, here I saw only slivers of black universe through the rare and tiny windows. The only light we ever got were the pinpricks of the distant stars and the synthetic florescent lights that lined the ceilings.
Two years later, and I was mostly used to it. The only room that still turned my stomach was Haven’s private office – and, oh look, there we were.
He sat in his royal blue armchair, the way he always did, and I sat on its twin across the room from him. For a long minute, Haven said nothing. He merely looked at me across the office. Everything about him seemed to be silver. His hair was like gossamer spider webs, perfectly metallic in color. His eyebrows and eyelashes the same. Even his eyes looked as if they were two silver coins in his perfectly symmetrical face.
I’d heard plenty of the other Datapoints going on about how handsome Jan Ernst Haven was, but I couldn’t see it. The strange lightness in his eyes, the unblinking stare… I found it all to be the opposite of attractive. Repellant, even.
“How long have you been training here, Glade?”
What was the point in asking a question he already knew the answer to? “Two years, plus a month or two.”
“So, at sixteen, that would make you on the older end of our fifty or so trainees now, wouldn’t it?”
He knew exactly where I fell amongst my peers.
I nodded.
He nodded.
I resisted the urge to sigh.
“Glade, tell me, what’s the first thing any Datapoint is taught to do after their tech is integrated into them?”
I tossed my long hair back over my shoulders. Dahn and I once saw footage of an old movie from Earth where a black horse did the same thing with his mane. Dahn had teased me about it for days after that. I pretended to be annoyed at the time, but since then I’ve come to like the comparison. The creature in that movie was proud. Confident. Doing exactly what it was born to do. I channeled those feelings as I answered Haven.
“To sync with the Authority Database.”
It was the one thing I hadn’t done during the simulation. And it’s the one thing I definitely should have done. Most likely, it’s the whole reason I’d failed. I knew this; Haven knew this.
Haven rose from his royal blue chair and stepped gracefully over to a steel panel on the wall. He touched the corner of the panel, and it recognized his fingerprint, lighting up immediately. The screen that appeared was something I’d always admired. A beautiful piece of technology. As usual, my fingertips itched to explore it. I desperately wanted to know how it worked, the intricacies. I wanted to learn how to use it. I was confident that, given twenty minutes or so of free rein, I could learn to use it. Yeah, I was that good. It was likely the reason I’d been chosen to train as a Datapoint. My fluency in all things computer. It was also likely the reason that Haven was so constantly disappointed in my performance as a Datapoint these days. Frankly, it just didn’t make sense that a computer genius like myself would have such a difficult time wielding the integrated tech on my arm.
Haven waved his hand in front of the screen, scrolling idly through parts of the interface he didn’t care to see – until he got to the Authority Database homepage.
“Square one,” I muttered.
He nodded, ignoring my tone. “Exactly. The very first thing any Datapoint trainee sees when he or she comes through the doors of the Station.” He stroked one hand against the edge of the screen and I wondered if he realized he was doing it. “It’s a lovely interface, Glade. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I nodded. Because I really did agree. Everything about the interface between Datapoints’ integrated tech and the Authority Database really was user friendly. Fun, actually. It was designed perfectly. Syncing to the Database was a joy for a Datapoint. A physical joy, even, considering our tech was a physical part of us. I absently brushed one hand over the tech on my arm, feeling the corresponding shiver over the tech that lined my left cheek.
Haven turned to me, his arms crossing loosely over his chest, his silvery head cocked to one side. He reminded me, for one second, of the winking of a distant star. “Then why do you resist it so fiercely, Glade Io? Every other Datapoint relies on – no – rejoices in the interface with the Authority Database. But you resist it. And to what end? Failing your simulations.”
He uncrossed his arms and turned back toward the screen, staring at the Database home screen almost lovingly. Behind his back, I tossed my mane of hair again and thought of the horse.
“The Database is here to help you, Glade. To guide you. It is impossible to do your job as a Datapoint without it. The strain you felt today?” He turned back to me and his silver eyes both tugged at me and repelled me. “If you allow yourself to sync with the Authority Database, it does the work for you. Takes that strain off of your shoulders, Datapoint. The Database identifies those to be culled for you. And then, all you have to do is the actual Culling.”
Pull the plug. All I have to do is pull the plug.
It’s true that, as Datapoints, we had been scrupulously trained on how to identify who was to be culled and who was to be left alone. But we were also simultaneously trained to rely on the Authority Database to complete the identification of those citizens for us. It had never made sense to me until the idea of mass culling was introduced. Until I’d realized that my simple human brain and the tiny tech on my arm couldn’t possibly handle a load of data that large without the Authority Database.
“So, tell me, Glade Io, why do you resist?”
It was a simple answer. Simple enough that I knew Jan Ernst Haven already knew it.
I didn’t trust the Authority Database. I would never give that kind of control to a piece of technology I didn’t understand.
“If I could just explore the Database, Sir Haven, understand a bit more about how it works, then I’m sure I could sync with much more—”
“We’ve be
en through that, Glade.” And for the first time, his tone was clipped, non-indulgent.
I snapped my mouth closed.
“There are things you simply do not have access to. And I have no intention of changing those rules and regulations. Rules and regulations which are there for good reasons that a child cannot understand.”
He turned back to the screen and flicked it off with his fingertip. When he turned back around, his temper had flared out. He was calm and quiet, as he normally was. “I have a theory that you’re actually very much like me. That you understand the language of computers much better than you understand the language of people. Your Datapoint entry testing shows that clearly enough. Not as high on the sociopath scale as some of your Datapoint comrades, sure. But high enough to be selected.”
He sat back in the royal blue chair across from me, crossing one leg over the other and leaning his silver-stubbled chin on one hand. “Humans aren’t computers, no matter what the Authority gifts them with.” He nodded toward my integrated tech. “And even if your brain is as devoid of empathy as we could possibly find, there are still… complications within you. Thoughts and emotions that make you impossible to program.”
It was almost as if he’d forgotten I was there, as if he were talking to himself, leaning on one hand, his eyes riveted to mine.
“Communication with humans has always been a personal frustration for me, though I find myself better at it than most. For words are not pure information. They’re inadequate. No matter how hard a human might try to communicate a thought or emotion, there is always a disjunction between what they say..." He lifted one hand, and then the other. “And what they feel.”
I tossed my hair back again and Haven followed the movement absently with his eyes before continuing on. “Glade, you say that you have trouble syncing with the Authority Database because you don’t understand it. Allow me a humble attempt at translating for you. What you really mean.”
