Character Building: Alsanara Naomi Jacobs

She is the epitome of average at her surface. Her grades are good, but only with hard work and studying. She fails the occasional exam, but keeps her school work at a solid just-above-middle-ground score. She took her Standards six months ago. She did not test out, and she was glad. It wasn't as if she expected to: her scores have always been average. But this year's test had the written responses, and she had been afraid that they would see through their hollow webbing: her answers were dazzlingly lower-average, exactly what would be expected from a sixteen year old test-taker in the middle of the Hog. They were also as fictitious as her mother's old fairy tales. Yes, Alsanara is average, but she is not stupid.

Her mother taught her well. Mother, who sometimes looks at the 3-V as if she wants to shout at its projected reporters and political officials. Mother who, more and more often, doesn't go into the bedroom she shares with Dad, even when he comes home in the middle of the night from his job as a labor force worker for the city's public services department. Mother who stopped drinking tea sweetened with honey when she started arguing with Dad, and started drinking tea sharpened with something clear and alcoholic. Something most likely illegal, and almost definitely unhealthy.

No, San is not stupid. She feels the tension in the air like the pollution that rides through the currents of the city. The pollution that turns the dense smog a bright red when the sun rises. People are not happy, and those people who, like her, have tuned their eyes and ears to the frequencies of the arrests and executions, are whispering. They are whispering, they are gathering, and it's rumored that some of them are fleeing.

And so San is running. She is running through the alleys and auto-industrial buildings of the factory district with messages and codes embedded in her fingers and “fluffers” on her eyes. To the occasional retina scanner, she is a non-person, a ghost.

She is running with what she thinks of as secrets. After all, she's not the only one keeping secrets, is she?

They have secrets too. She knows they do. And who are “they?”

The Government, of course.

They might be listening.

Shh!