by Melissa Faye
“That’s a good start,” said Omer. I was absorbed in thought; it amazed me that someone my age could create a program like that for the TekCast. I hadn’t learned programming in high class; I just had classes related to fertility. I did wonder how I could use those skills to program our data mapping equipment. It was another case of color separation hurting us, rather than helping.
“That’s really risky though!” Laurel said. “Alexis, I should do it. I think...Greta likes me more.”
Everyone looked at me. I had a duty here. It was Laurel’s first day. “No way,” I said. “She does like you more, you’re right about that. But I just brought you here. Let’s let you get settled into the group before you risk your job.”
It was settled. I had the program, and went over how to use it a few more times. There was a palpable excitement in the room as the meeting came to an end. I finally had something tangible to do that could help the group. I was as excited as everyone else. And also scared out of my mind.
I WANTED TO GET GRETA’S information the next day, but Laurel cautioned me to wait. We took turns throughout the day sneaking out of our lab to see where Greta was. We witnessed a clear pattern where she cycled through each of the labs in the morning, then met with the heads of each department, then lunch, then worked in her office, then completed a final cycle of the labs. We checked the next few days, and the pattern was almost exactly the same. I decided I would sneak in during Greta’s morning rounds.
Laurel wanted to help by keeping watch, but I wouldn’t let her. We couldn’t both leave the lab outside of break time without it looking suspicious. If someone asked, Laurel could say I was running into another lab to pick up supplies. Hopefully no one would ask. Especially Forrest.
We watched the clock carefully, and Laurel snuck out to check when we thought Greta was out of her office. She came back to the lab and nodded discretely towards me. I made myself wait four minutes then headed to her office.
One of the benefits of the community being so safe was that few doors were kept locked. I slipped into Greta’s office while the hallway was clear and sat down at her desk. With shaking hands, I connected my TekCast into her terminal and pulled up Bradley’s program.
“DATA UPLOADING...TWO MINUTES REMAINING”
Two minutes? I thought. Bradly made it seem like the program was automatic. I supposed I shouldn’t knock him for this. He was still an intern, and I had no idea how complex any of this was. Maybe it had something to do with the sheer volume of messages Greta sent.
The time ticked down so slowly that I could have sworn the clock was off. 1:30 remaining. One minute remaining. 45 seconds remaining. There was a slight buzz when the program finished. I pulled out my TekCast and headed for the door, running right into Greta.
“What are you doing in here?” she said. There was something terrifying about the way she spoke – quiet, but more forceful than I had ever experienced. Her face was puckered into a sneer, her eyes two small slits. The force of her look somehow pushed me back a foot. I couldn’t speak.
“I asked you a question, Alexis. What are you doing here?” She walked closer to me, closing the space I had made between us. I looked around the office, pathetically trying to think of an excuse.
“I...”
Greta crossed her arms and waited. I stuttered.
“I – I was looking for you,” I said. The words escaped my lips in a stumble of nonsense. “I wanted to ask you...a question. About...interns.”
“What was your question, Alexis?” Greta asked. She must have known I was lying; her face didn’t change.
“I was wondering...how long....interns...”
“Enough.” I felt my heart beat in my throat. “I saw you getting up from my desk, Alexis. You have no business being in here. I don’t know what you were doing, but it is unacceptable for you to be in here without my express permission or invitation.”
I tried to take deep breaths to calm my nerves. I knew I was shaking a bit and that it was just making me look more suspicious.
“Take a seat.”
I sat in the chair across from the Chief’s desk and waited while she sat down and stared at me. After a while, she got onto her own TekCast and started sending messages. A warm blush crept across my cheeks.
“From now on, consider yourself on probation,” Greta said. “I’ve messaged Forrest, and for the rest of your rotation in his lab, you will be supervised by him or another researcher. If you need to use the restroom or go to the break room, you’ll ask permission and return quickly. I do not trust you, and you will stay on probation until you have earned my trust back.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had never heard of anyone being on probation. Especially not interns. We all worked so hard; why would we get ourselves in trouble? Yet here I was. Ruining my career.
THE SHAME OF MY PUNISHMENT should have been enough to ruin my days at work, but it also seeped into my personal life outside of the office. I forwarded the program data to Bradley, and when Omer reached out, I didn’t respond. I feared the extent to which Greta was tracking me. Was she looking at my TekCast data? Could she? Was she following me around after work hours? Being tracked in the lab only made me more paranoid in my normal life. I would walk to the market and flipped my head around, convinced someone was following me.
Javi tried to get me go to an Underground meeting. They were going through Greta’s messages and needed more help. I declined. What if I was followed? Or worse, what if everyone looked at me with accusation? Or pity?
I hardly talked to Laurel anymore outside of work. I knew that she would have completed the mission successfully. As smart as I thought I was, I had tried something that was too hard for me and I had failed.
Spring 2415
Keeping out of trouble was simple when someone was always looking over my shoulder at work. I felt like I was on my toes all the time, and it started to feel normal. I was still talking to Javi and a few other friends, but I didn’t want to talk about the Underground. I knew he was working with Laurel on more ideas for getting information about the F-Lab, but I didn’t want to know. He quickly learned not to bother bringing it up.
Once all of my focus was back on work, I made a lot more progress in my research. I wasn’t seeing any positive results, but I was getting good at the daily grind. I woke up, showered, walked to work. Experiment creation, assisting researchers, reviewing their reports before publication, and sometimes publishing white papers by myself. Sometimes Javi and I would walk home together. The days were getting longer and the weather was warmer, so sometimes we could take a longer walk around the community. Although I stayed out of the Underground’s business, I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the social structures around me. I pressured Javi to walk with me through Silver and Bronze neighborhoods. It fed my anger to see the way my fellow community members lived. With my probation, though, there wasn’t much I could do.
As April turned to May, Yami and I were able to meet more often. I wasn’t busy with the Underground and was trying to spend less time working outside of work hours. Plus, Yami was like a ray of sunshine when I was frustrated by whomever had followed me around that day in the lab. Greta had not said a word about when my probation would be lifted.
“It’s all set up to maximize comfort and keep us from questioning things,” I said to Yami. We were in the common room in her dorm, and I couldn’t help talking about the community. “It’s as comfortable as it can be. The trees, the beautiful buildings, everything about being part of a small community where every face is familiar. But our choices are minimized.” It was easy to distract Yami from her studies, and sometimes I wanted to make sure she could see the bigger picture.
“What do you mean? What choices?” She looked up from the math homework she was reviewing, eager to avoid it.
“All of our choices,” I said. I had wanted to chat casually, but I felt a sudden sadness. I looked around the room to see who could be listening, and thought of Omer. He was one of
the smartest people I knew, and his house was so tiny. And that could never change. “Everything you do, Yami. Almost everything. Where you live. Who you know. Your entire career track!”
“I almost get to pick my job,” she said. She wanted a Gold career; she sometimes said she would get into fertility so we could work together. People said that the best way to get into Gold was to either particularly excel at science or demonstrate community leadership skills. Yami had some of the highest test scores in her grade, and spent more time than any other kid I knew doing extra science assignments on her free time.
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “You have no choice in your career. You could be the smartest person in the community and end up in sanitation.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! You love working in fertility.”
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. Outside, I could see dozens of elementary classers running around. Any of them could end up Gray, or Gold. I wasn’t so sure anymore if their test scores even mattered. “I do, I suppose. That’s what my career test said I would like. And then I spent four years in high class taking all the coursework to support this exact job. Did I have a choice, or was the choice, and my passion for it, made for me?”
Yami just gawked at me with a mixture of frustration and childlike enthusiasm.
“You were assigned to this community,” I continued, picking up steam. “You’re here in Young Woods. Your clones are elsewhere. Maybe there’s one who’s forty, living in Italance. Maybe you have one that’s seventy-five, living in Bali. None of them decided where to live. None of them chose to be separate from you.”
“New people means different combinations of peoples doing different work in different places. It means a better chance at finally solving the fertility crisis! What’s best for the community is best for me, right?” Her face turned red at having repeated the community motto. I remembered being her age, when I just discovered the Underground and was so excited to be involved in something more than the community. I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed, though, so I smiled encouragingly before I continued.
“It does feels great being here. We hear the same things over and over. Solve the fertility crisis. Cloning is the solution. Everyone works towards the solution. Everything is built to support us reaching that solution.” I saw my finger tapping anxiously on the table in front of me. “I’m at that fertility lab every day, Yami, and I don’t see us getting closer to finding that solution. I just see a lot of people who are mindlessly enjoying the pleasures of Young Woods.”
“Why is that a bad thing?”
“Not everyone likes things the way they are,” I said. “I know you probably don’t know anything about it, but there are people who think this comfort isn’t worth it. They want to know more about how we’re doing as a nation in solving the crisis. They want the information they do know to be spread widely. They want to open people’s eyes.”
Yami frowned. She got suspicious whenever I talked about my “friends,” and one time she had found the Underground symbol on a slip of paper in my old dorm room. It was an oval with a V in the middle, like an owl. It stood for intelligence and knowledge.
“Are you one of those people?” she asked me carefully. Was I? I used to be. I still felt that way, but I wasn’t part of the Underground anymore.
“I’m not sure anymore,” I said. “No, I am I think. I’m not doing as much as I could to change things.”
Yami raised her eyebrows and dropped her TekCast from her hands. “You have to do something!” she said, raising her voice. I saw some kids at another table staring at us. Yami saw, too, and tried to quiet herself down.
“You are the most thoughtful person I know when it comes to this stuff,” Yami said. “If you really think this isn’t right, then you have to do something about it.”
“Maybe you’ll get a little older and you’ll make change,” I said with a sad chuckle. Yami didn’t know about my probation, but I think she had caught on that I was less happy about work than I used to be.
“No, that’s not good enough,” Yami said. “Do something now. It can’t wait. My friend’s mentor, the one I told you about? In Gray? Jacob says they never meet anymore. Jacob hasn’t told anyone, because they’re breaking the rules, but Jacob says he doesn’t even want to see the guy. It’s too sad. No one should have to live like that, even if they’re working a Gray job. Everyone should have the same opportunities to make good money and have a good life.”
“Or even the career tests are accurate...” I thought aloud. “No one should be miserable at their job, and have no option to make a change.”
“So will you do something?”
I felt something click inside of me. My little, funny, best friend, curly-haired Yami was right. I couldn’t let the fear and shame of getting caught stop me from trying to help the Underground. I smiled more broadly than I could remember.
“I’ll try.”
IN JUNE, JAVI AND I finally felt ready enough for the mission we had prepared. Omer and everyone in the Underground had helped us plan it. We were going straight to the source. The Young Woods Records Room was only available to those working in Leadership and Records. Javi was only allowed to see a few of the rooms. But we were going to dive even deeper into the building.
Javi learned that there was a yearly council meeting where the Chancellor, the council members, and the Chiefs of each Gold sector met to discuss their work. The Chief of Medicine would talk about rates of disease and death over time. The Chief of Cloning would talk about their progress in streamlining the cloning process. The Chief of Fertility would discuss progress towards the solution. No one knew these meetings happened. But Javi found out that they didn’t just exist; the council secretary took notes that were stored on paper in the Records Room.
If we could get access to some of the back chambers in the Records Room, we hoped to be able to find minutes from those meetings over the past several years. It was a more direct way to get information on fertility without going through Greta. Other people volunteered to help, but Javi had to be there. He already had Leadership and Records access through his TekCast, and could get us part of the way there without causing any trouble. I insisted on joining him. I needed to make up for my last failure. This was also safer. We’d be breaking in at night.
That’s how Javi and I found ourselves standing outside the Records Room at 1 am in the pitch dark. I turned on my TekCast flashlight and cast a small shadow over the door. Javi swiped his TekCast to get us inside.
The Records Room was an entire building located next to the Chancellor’s mansion. It was much more discrete than the mansion, lacking all of the fancy brickwork and columns. It was a plain concrete building with large steel doors and no windows. Given all the beautiful landscaping and the distraction of the mansion itself, you could walk right by without noticing it.
Once we were inside the main door, Javi pointed out the different hallways and doors leading to rooms with a variety of information stored on actual paper, rather than digitally. “It’s much harder to get in this way,” Javi told us at the Underground meeting. “You’d have to get through the doors, which are impenetrable. Only Gold Leadership and Records workers can access the building, and even then our security clearances vary by role. And I doubt they ever have someone in some of the highest level positions in the community wanting to steal information.”
He pointed to the corners of the wall by the ceilings. “They have security cameras, but my councilman told me they’re not even plugged into anything. They’re for show. They keep people like interns nervous to be here when they shouldn’t, but the actual high-level leaders don’t want to be spied on.”
Until now, I thought. Javi led us down one of the two main hallways, past several doors. Each was steel, like the building’s, with small scanner pads next to the door handles. We stood in front of the door labeled C-M. “This is it,” Javi whispered. “This is the room with the council meeting minutes. Are you ready?” I nod
ded.
It was as straightforward as last time. Bradley worked with one of his coworkers, Shazzi, to create a program that would trick a scanner into thinking Javi’s TekCast belonged to someone else. We picked a council member who Javi almost never worked with. We looked at each other with bated breath, then Javi scanned his TekCast.
A little green light lit up along the top of the scanner. Javi pulled the door open. I exhaled slowly and led us inside.
The room was small but crowded with storage shelves. I wondered when was the last time that someone went in there to clean. I laughed aloud at the thought of a Gray being allowed in there, or of a Gold in Leadership deigning to do any sanitation work. Javi looked at me quizzically but I shook my head.
We split up to scan the shelves. Each box was labeled clearly. I found a row of boxes with career assignment data and wanted to go through it, but stopped myself. One thing at a time. Javi called me over to him.
He stood in front of a set of boxes labeled “Meeting Minutes.” This is what we were looking for. Javi read over the dates, and pulled down the most recent one. We flipped through the folders. They were in chronological order. Javi wasn’t sure when the Gold sector meetings happened, so we needed to open each folder to inspect its contents. Javi found one set of sector meeting notes from March, so I skipped to the March folders and pulled out the ones from the last few years.
We sat in silence as we read the minutes. It painted a strange picture of people who were well known in the community discussing the community in an oddly sterile way, like we were their lab rats. The secretary had included copies of any data that was presented, and an outline of participant discussions. They were easy to scan through, but I forced myself to read everything carefully.
