National Standardized Placement review committee, Washington D.C. June 10. 1:08 PM New Eastern Standard Time.
“We're gonna want to keep an eye on this one, you know. She hit the first two alert scores when she was ten, but her parents are both professors, so she lived on-campus already. It seemed unnecessary to reassign her. She and her family are unaware that she hit above-mark that year.”
“What was her high point?”
“She doesn't have one in particular. Her score is cumulatively much higher than average, though it looks like she slipped a bit during the tech portion...”
“Slipped?”
“She was doing well, completely bungled section 3A, and then picked back up for the remainder.”
“A herring?”
“Not as far as I can tell. There aren't any other repeating trends, and her written responses didn't set off any red flags. Probably just fell asleep or got distracted.”
“So why is she on the watch list?”
“Do you know what the average cumulative Standards score is?”
“Isn't it calibrated to a thousand?”
“Published results are—the ones sent to the families. The actual points system totals at about 2,500. The national average is about 1,000. A score of 1,500 is a code yellow, so the computer monitors their next set of written responses more closely—except in the case of twenty-ones, there it only influences job placement. She hit this mark in her tens. A score of 1,750 trips the reassignment list. The highest recorded score for her age set in its testing history was 1,987.”
“And her score?”
“She hit 2,178, not even counting the section she failed.”
“Oh hell. Doesn't that make her—?”
“A candidate for the NCIMSD? You bet it does.”
“So why don't we have her in custody?”
“She lives on campus 21. They're running an experimental control method out there, and she's the perfect candidate. They req'd her out of our system as soon as her results tipped their alerts.”
“So we're using her as a test subject? Does she even know about it? Did her parents give consent?”
“Oh, my naïve friend. It's a good thing you've got an understanding supervisor, or you might have just bumbled your way out of a job on sheer ignorance. Of course her parents gave consent. They gave consent in order to conceive, just like everybody else.”
“But they weren't expecting it to mean anything! Jesus, they just wanted to have a child, didn't they? They weren't breeding some government material!”
“Hah! Haven't you learned anything in training, soldier? We're all government material. Who the hell do you think you're working for, anyway?”
National University campus #21, centrally located in Minepaulson. July 1. 9:00 AM New Midwest Standard Time.
Layme sat on the edge of her bed, gazing rather blankly at the motionless wall in front of her. Passerby would not have noticed anything amiss—because, thought Layme, there really isn't anything—even though to the thin sixteen-year-old resting still as a statue on a featureless bed, everything was shifting. The Earth was rotating very slowly, and in the wrong direction. Perhaps the poles had abruptly reoriented themselves to somewhere on the equator, and the planet was rotating like a child doing some sort of clumsy somersault through the vacuum of space. It seemed possible—hell, it seemed likely at this point.
I guess it always does when reality sets in, she thought, still seemingly content to stare at the now-blank wall in front of her. Reality had certainly set in. A month ago, she had been content with her life in its relative stability. Now she was preparing to move out at sixteen, and it was all completely legitimate, and completely different from everything she was used to. She thought back to the moment she had realized her life was about to shift, and she found it was like thinking of a dream.
It was beginning of the summer. She had taken the Standards a week ago, and she was just as glad to be finished as every other five-, ten-, sixteen-, and twenty-one year old in the country. The tests weren't exactly torture, but they were challenging, and they were long. The entire last school week of the year was entirely devoted to free-testing for the Standards: come when you want, for however long you want, as long as you finish the section assigned for that day. Math, Reading and Comprehension, General Sciences, Technology Aptitude, and Written Response were spread out across the week, and each one loomed ominously before the four different age groups with its own set of challenges and consequences if you were to fail.
Strangely enough, no one knew exactly what the consequences were if you failed Standards. Like most of the other “information” about the national tests, nearly everything was an inseparable mix of rumor and truth. The fact that teachers and other authority figures were deliberately vague on the subject—so people wouldn't cheat, they said—only fueled the tall tales built up around the events.
Rumor had it that no one had ever failed, because the tests were geared towards the lowest common intelligence. Rumor had it that tons of people failed, and that's why sometimes people you used to see around, older kids who used to play with you who took their tens before you, just suddenly weren't around anymore. Rumor said that “testing out” was a good thing; it meant that your job assignment would be in a higher merit city. One thing rumor seemed to agree on was that you either tested out after your tens, or you simply didn't test out at all. This was held to be true by both the people who viewed testing out as a good thing and as a bad thing. If it was a good thing, it made sense—you didn't just become super smart in six years. If it was a bad thing, well... if you were dumb enough to fail the Standards, you would be out of everyone's way by the time the tens were done. The tests taken at sixteen and twenty-one were viewed as little more than a tradition.
Layme had always viewed the Standards with a kind of bored annoyance, and she seemed no less immune when the time came to begin preparing for her own sixteens. The atmosphere of panic the test created among her classmates never seemed to sink its static fingers into her, but rather simply made people a little bit more unbearable to be around. That didn't change her circumstances much anyway. People tended to be unbearable quite a bit more frequently than they thought they were. So, as the beginning of June loomed ever closer, people preparing for their sixteens grew withdrawn and distracted—after all, there was the additional section of written responses to take this year. But Layme hadn't worried any more than she usually did—which was not at all—and on the first day of testing, she entered the city testing center at the nonchalant hour of ten in the morning. She was done with the entirety of the Mathematics section before noon. Most of the other sixteens had been in the center when she'd arrived, and not one of them left before her.
The other sections went about the same way. She actually had to force herself to slow down and pretend to stop and think during the Technology Aptitude test. It wasn't well known, even among students that Layme was a tech junkie, albeit an amateur one. Her experiments were small and harmless, but they still carried a feeling of rebellion with them. In a rare moment of paranoia, she decided to completely botch one of the test sections for Technology. If anyone had asked her about it, she would have said she had just gotten bored and skipped through it, but the truth was that for some reason, it made her uneasy. Still, the Standards were such an insubstantial part of her life that she forgot about the section long before she had finished her written responses the next day.
The written responses weren't hard for her, but they were a little bit surprising. She'd expected prompts like she had gotten used to receiving in English class, like “Write about a time you tried hard for something and succeeded.” Instead, the questions on the Standards seemed mostly government-oriented. “Write one paragraph on what the merit system means to you.” “Write one page about the meaning of the restrictions defined in the Provision of 2027, and how they affect you.” She wrote out the answers well within the time limit, idly wondering why the section was even on the test as her stylus slid in its usual narrow loops across the screen. The answers seemed evident, and not much deeper than a history quiz.
And then she was finished, and the Standards were gone from her mind completely until one morning the following week.
All seemed to go as usual at first on the morning the orbit of her world had shifted itself. She slept in until well after her father left for work. She was staying in his apartment this week and moving back into her mother's apartment across campus when she grew bored, just like she did every vacation. She would rotate back and forth from the English and Languages staff block with her father to the Chemistry block with her mother whenever she felt like it, until staff and summer students in both places greeted her as a fixture as familiar as the smart-steel structures of the dorms and classrooms. There were perks to being the daughter of two professors, and freedom to roam the campus was one of her favorites. Of course, she was confined to the staff sections with a limited piggyback clearance; the student and spec-ed sections were forbidden to her. Even without the additional clearance, though, the staff and academic buildings were sufficient enough to occupy her attention most of the time.
She rolled out of bed and crunched a toothpaste bead, grimacing acceptingly at the strong taste, and then went straight to the bathroom. She had only been awake two minutes, and in her opinion, that was already too long to last without her conscreens. She thumbed a small button on her bathroom counter and her compartment opened up—a small box-like area embedded below the counter's surface that was filled with techrings in various colors and shapes, and an unusual amount of temporary makeup. She hadn't gotten around to getting anything permanently
done yet, even though Campus 21 was testing one of five Morphological Studies pods, and she could have had pretty much any facial alteration she could wish for. The thought of having to stick with one color of eyeshadow or one glitter design on her face for the week-long minimum made her feel oddly cornered, which was probably why the color of her short, spiky hair changed every few weeks. Currently it was an iridescent blue, and sleep had sculpted it into odd swoops and angles. Paying the schizophrenic appearance of her hair little attention for the moment, Layme rummaged through the assortment of objects in the counter's compartment until she found what she wanted: a small white and green smart-plastic case filled with a microbe-saline mixture. Grabbing it with a triumphant sound, she popped open the sides and fished the thin membrane of one conscreen from the liquid. She slid it over her eye with the smooth efficiency of a constant contact-lens wearer, and after a hard blink or two, the lens centered over her iris. She saw the characteristic slow flash of blue light that meant her retina had been scanned, and then repeated the process in her other eye. After she was done, she blinked again, testing that they were both working.
Layme had often heard criticisms directed at the increasing utilization of conscreens, especially among the “under-legal population,” but personally she couldn't understand how anybody lived without them. Sure, you could access your drive and the System from a touchpad or a particle projector, but pads were bulky, and projectors were still too new, and they bugged out more often than they worked. I'd go absolutely nuts, she thought, and then she had to laugh: she knew she was a technology junkie. Still, having her drive at her fingertips—literally—was too good to resist. The only reason she had for taking advantage of the experimental Morpho pod so far was to have a set of thin, micro-membrane sensors embedded in her fingernails, effectively eliminating the need for a mouse glove. Combined with her conscreens, the sensors allowed her to access and interact with the entire System and her own personal drive without ever touching a computer.
It was a tech rebel's dream.
A few practiced flicks of her fingers brought her main screen up in front of her eyes, calibrated for clearest viewing by the retina scan done by her conscreens just moments before. She saw that she had a blip from her cousin, Tessa, and that one of her recent requisitions could be picked up at the campus Req Hall, before an unfamiliar overlay came sliding across her vision. It was a dark blue with white text, and when she moved her hand to slide it to the side, it wouldn't budge. She was about to open her override screen when she noticed the official seal at the top.
It was a Government overlay.
She felt her stomach flip over once, slowly, and suddenly she remembered the section she had bombed during Standards. Did this mean they had caught her? Had failing one section in one category really been enough to fail her? She didn't know. She had never failed a Standard in her life.
“You're being an idiot,” she mumbled to herself, her eyes still fixed on the Government seal on the top of the message. “Why don't you just read it and find out what it means?” As usual, the act of talking to herself helped her calm down, and she took a deep breath and zoomed in on the overlay.
Dear Miss Layme T. Ray (122018),
It has come to our attention that your General Intelligence Score as indicated by the National Standardized Placement and Assessment Test taken from May 31 to June 4 is well above the national average score. We congratulate you on this achievement, and it is with pride that we inform you that you have been accepted into the Specialized Education Department of National University Campus 21.
This acceptance into Spec-Ed 21 is a rare honor for you and for your family. You will receive proper authorization for that area of Campus 21 and all related areas and buildings assigned for Spec-Ed student access in the coming weeks, and any general access to campus areas or other educational buildings you hold at the present time will be revoked. As of July 1, it is expected that you will be connected with the system of your new residence (Spec-Ed Dorm 21.522-46518). We hope that this reassignment is not too much of an inconvenience for you or your family, and any temporary merit depletion due to this reassignment can be compensated by filling out requisition form number 851-216.
We thank you for proving yourself to be a valuable asset to your community and your country, and we trust that you will follow any and all instructions received with your new authorization when it arrives.
National Standardized Placement Review Committee, Washington, D.C..
Layme stood with her eyes completely focused on the dark blue letter, and so she could not see the horrified expression of her reflection in the mirror. She re-read the message once, and then twice before accepting the retina scan that confirmed she had received it. Almost before the cool blue light of the scan had finished, she was twisting the double-sided stud techring in her right tragus—the small curve of cartilage just at the front of her ear. The techring was formatted as her sound piece, and she needed it now. She was doing something she hadn't done since she was six and had broken her wrist on the playground.
She called her mother.
Now it was July first, and Layme was legally bound to sign into her drive from the Dorm system before midnight tonight. That left her with ten hours of limbo—everything in her “old” room had either been moved or recycled, and the thought of going over to the Spec-Ed building was much too large to contemplate first thing in the morning. In fact, the concept was so large and so foreign that just trying to think of it gave her a headache. She'd taken two acetaminophen slips for a headache already today, and she really had no desire to try and requisition more. Med requisitions were always scrutinized, and the rigmarole that would ensue if she asked for anything more powerful than the standard aceta-slips was just not something she wanted on her plate today.
Sighing, she called her drive up on her conscreens. There were a couple of unanswered blips from Tessa that she hadn't been able to bring herself to think about—her cousin was her best friend, but she was sort of hard to deal with in times of stress. She decided to answer them; they would at least save her from stressing out alone, if not distract her from her situation. A few flicks of her fingers and she heard the ping-ping, ping-ping! that meant Tessa was online and active, and Layme told her drive to call Tess as she set up the little camera that was the only piece of technology she could never have internalized. It was the age-old paradox at work; you could never look at yourself, and so no camera embedded in you could ever see you, either.
The sound on her tragus changed to a quiet ringing, and Layme thumbed her camera on just as Tessa picked up.
“Layme!” Her cousin's exuberant voice filled her ears—the other tragus had switched itself on automatically, detecting a call being made—and her smiling face filled Layme's vision, translucently covering the blank bedroom wall.
“Hey Tess. How are you?”
“I'm ice. How about you, Lay?”
Layme grimaced. “I'm cold water at best, I guess. I relocate today.”
Tessa, who traveled around the world with her parents, a pair of political representatives to other countries, just laughed. “Don't worry about it, Lay, relocating is iced milk. No need to frizz up about it. All you do is figure out where they want you and use their permtech to connect to the System. A retina scan and boom, it's done.”
“It's not the actual relocating that freaks me out,” Layme argued. “It's what happens afterward. I mean, my entire life is changing.”
“It can't be that bad,” Tessa protested. “Aren't you just moving across campus?”
It was Layme's turn to laugh this time, and the bitterness in that sound surprised her. “Sure, I'm just moving across campus, to the spec-ed sections that I've never been allowed in, to start going to class with people I've never met. They're revoking my campus access, Tess. That means I'm not allowed to go stay with Mom or Dad, even over vacation. I'd need an escort to get me through Boundary and into the city, and somehow I doubt they're going to want me to do that.”
“Relax, Lay! It's not like they're throwing you in prison or anything, yeah? I mean, you're moving into a fucking Dorm! Do you have any idea how hard they party?”
This caused Layme's former train of thought to be lost completely. “Do they?” she asked, curiosity winning over nervousness for the time being. She'd heard rumors about Dorm parties, but the adults on campus tended to want to keep them quiet.
“Like it's the fucking end of the world,” Tess said, her voice serious and bordering on a kind of uncertain awe. Her eyes, Morphoed a deep red, widened gravely. “I was at a Dorm party in San Angeles and they had more alco than you've ever dreamed of. I've also heard that there are other things the Sciences students cook up that'll have you sliding better than a skate on ice. Do you believe it?”
“I don't know. Should it matter?”
“You're such a prude, Lay!” Tessa shrieked, laughing.
Layme stuck her tongue out at the little camera mounted on her wall. “Shut up, I am not. Just because I don't throw my life away on drugs and sex doesn't mean I'm a prude.”
“No, but it means you're no fun,” Tessa joked, smiling. There was a sneaky note in her voice that made Layme raise her eyebrows in question, but the other girl just laughed again, tossing her head and making her curls bounce springily—dark red to match her eyes.
“What?” Layme snapped, getting annoyed.
“Well, nothing... but didn't you just say your whole life was changing?”
“Yes. Your point?”
“Maybe you could change with it,” Tessa suggested, but Layme was hardly paying attention. She had just remembered something.
“Change with it...” she repeated slowly, more to herself than to Tessa. She wasn't really listening very hard.
“Sure. You're in Minepaulson, right? They're testing a Morpho there, I think.”
“They are,” Layme agreed distractedly, wiggling her fingers and their sensors at the wall cam and not even noticing the way it zoomed Tessa's face in and out.
“So why not go and try it out? Get something zinging to go with your hair.” Tessa waved one hand vaguely, apparently to indicate the concept of zinging, which could mean anything from color-changing eyes to a full-body pulse tattoo when it came from Tessa. Layme nodded slowly, still thinking. Then—
“Do you know your Standards score?” Layme asked abruptly. Tessa was six months older than Layme, and had turned sixteen just after the previous year's Standards, and so they had both taken them this summer.
Tessa looked surprised. “Yeah, sure. I grabbed an eight-thirty-five. Why?”
“No reason really.” Layme forced herself to focus on her cousin's digitally-reproduced face, sent over who-knew-what connections and airways to reappear on a set of lenses that were formatted to her eyes. The technology hardly phased her anymore, and didn't really do so now, except to to incite a passing thought on how big Tessa's eyes looked as they squinted at her in her own. “I think I might take advantage of the Morpho, Tess, that's a good idea. I'll talk to you later, alright?”
“Icy. Don't give up any good pulses or guys for me, okay?”
“Sure Tess. Stay cool.”
“You too, doll.”
Layme twitched a finger, and her drive overlay receded from her vision, leaving her looking at the blank wall in front of her again. She had stumbled upon a strange fact while she was talking to Tessa, her mind having done what it usually did, which was separate into compartments and think of more than one thing at any given moment. While Tessa was talking about Dorm parties, another part of Layme's mind had wandered to the Standards, and how her score must have been pretty high to warrant a Government letter... and then she realized that she didn't know her score at all. Normally it would have come in a blip with the same Government seal as that dark-blue-and-white one had, explaining the 1,000 point calibration and how every student in the country was figured into the average, blah-blah-blah—but this time all she had gotten was the reassignment. No score.
Maybe that means you got over a thousand in the calibration, one part of her mind whispered conspiratorially. Maybe that's why you're being reassigned. You screwed up their average. You were going to make everyone's score drop. She scoffed out loud at that; there was no way. It wasn't like she was a genius. Tessa was pretty close to her in intelligence, and she hadn't even broken nine hundred. There was no way she had wrecked the calibration.
So why did they move you? she asked herself.
I don't know. That was the total, honest truth. She didn't know. And she thought, with the part of her mind that had been dwelling on the matter since the morning of the message, that maybe it was better that way. After all, it wasn't like she anything would change even if she knew anything more. The Government was doing what it thought was best for her, and that would probably benefit them as well. Who was she to question that?
Just as she was preparing to head down to Morpho to see if she could maybe get her eyes to color-change or something for a while, there was a ping through her sound system. She checked it and saw there was a video blip in her inbox from someone she didn't recognize. The code number correlated with the Dorm number she'd been given with her authorization packet the week before. Curious, she decided to see what it was about before going anywhere else. Anything to waste time at this point, she thought.
She opened the video, and a boy with black and green spiked hair loomed in her vision. He was smirking, and Layme was reminded of Tessa's mischievous look over cam. More bewildered than ever, she clicked play, and his voice slipped smoothly through her tragus pieces.
“Hey Layme. My name is Zink, and I'm part of the Dragon Dorm—otherwise known as twenty-one five twenty-two. The word is that you're part of our new arrivals tonight, and we throw a big pulse for the fresh blood every year. This is your official invitation. No need to keep track of it or anything. Find your way to the main hall at ten o'clock tonight, and your official scan into the Dorm system will be the only thing you need to get you in. The girls tell me to tell you that it's a free-form bash tonight. They also say to tell you to 'have fun with it.'” There was an extra flash of trouble in his eyes to go with the grin that he shot through digital airspace, and one of his eyes dropped into a knowing wink. “You don't have to come, of course, but most new Dormies do... and I've heard that tonight's going to the the pulse of a decade. Hope to see you there. This is your ever-loyal fellow Dormie Zink, wishing you a lovely evening, and hoping part of that loveliness is spent with us.” He was still grinning when he cut the feed.
Layme had pulled up Tessa's contact almost before the blip had finished, and as soon as she heard the online pings, she sent another call.
“Hey, Lay, what'd you miss?” Tessa seemed confused and a bit dubious.
“If someone was talking about a pulse, and they called it 'free-form,' what would that mean?” Layme asked.
“Free-form means that it isn't fancy or anything. Sometimes Dorm pulses have themes or are dressy or something. Why?”
“Because I was kind of just invited to one.”
“Seriously?!” Tessa's voice was so loud, it made Layme wince.
“Yes, seriously. Chill. I kind of like my eardrums as they are—intact.”
But Tessa hadn't heard her cousin's rebuke. “A Dorm party?”
“Apparently. One of the guys vid-blipped me right after I hung up with you. Said the girls told him it was a free-form.”
“So what are you wearing?”
“Well, why do you think I'm calling you?” Layme asked, torn between exasperation and amusement. “I have no idea, Tess, I've never been a to a pulse before in my life. I'm no fun, remember?”
“My little Layme, all grown up!” Tessa joked, poking one finger at her camera.
Layme laughed. “Shut up and start making me not look like a choke.”
“Alright, alright, ice out and screen-share me.” Layme twitched her fingers until her drive screen was feeding to Tessa's conscreens as well as her own. “Now pull up your req program. You've got a full scan in there, right?”
“Sure,” Layme answered, already making gestures to find it. “Doesn't everyone have a full scan uploaded for fitting?”
“I guess so. Just figured I'd ask. Okay, so... this is where the fun starts! You might want to use your pad for this. It's better for the details.”
Layme began rummaging around her father's study for a touchpad while Tessa started making changes on the requisitioning program. She found it under one of his old-fashioned sports jackets and switched her visual feed from her conscreens to the touchpad with a scan of her fingerprint. Adjusting the settings for three dimensions, she watched a little scale model of herself, naked and motionless, rotate slowly around and around on the screen. Everything on the model matched how she looked exactly, down to the tips of her blue, spiky hair—every time she changed her appearance she was required to re-scan into the System for identification purposes. Anything designed around the little computer model would fit her and only her.
“Okay, Tess, now what?”
“Now we make you something zinging.”
Layme started flipping through what amounted to a digital closet. Thousands of options flowed across the part of her screen that wasn't taken up by the copy of herself, and the options that Tessa was looking at scrolled along in a slightly smaller scale to one side. Shirts, pants, jackets, dresses, jewelry—it all slid smoothly across the micro-LC screen.
“I have no idea where to start,” Layme complained.
“Show me what your first instinct is, then, and we'll work with that.”
“Fine,” Layme sighed, knowing that whatever her preferences were, Tessa would manage to get rid of almost all of them by the time they were finished. She sorted by item (pants) and then color (black) and picked a pair of microdenim shrink-fit jeans, and then a blue-green t-shirt so dark it was almost black, but shimmered in different lighting. Simple black boots and a silver necklace completed the modest outfit.
“That's all?” Tessa asked when she was finished, disapproval evident in her voice.
“Well, what would you suggest?” Layme asked, rolling her eyes even though her cousin couldn't see them.
“Something less boring!” Tessa declared. She moved items around on the screen, finally keeping only the shimmering t-shirt. “I like this material! Keep it. But do something interesting! Something more Layme.”
“This is Layme!”
“No it isn't,” Tessa argued. “This isn't the insomniac programmer—” she mouthed the word without sound, conscious of Layme's instinctive desire not to spread the word around. “—who messes up entire classrooms. This is someone who doesn't want to be noticed!”
“I don't want to be noticed.”
“What about Zink?”
“I—what?”
“Don't you want him to notice you, Lay?” The mischievous glint was back in Tessa's eye.
“No, I—I don't... I mean...” Layme felt torn between the feeling of safety that came with being anonymous and the desire to throw herself headlong into Dorm life as a totally different person. It was an internal battle that she'd been fighting ever since the letter. “Yeah, I suppose,” she answered finally. “Maybe I do. I mean, yes. Yeah. I want people to notice me.”
Tessa, her face small in the upper corner of Layme's display, nodded with strangely mature approval. This was her area of expertise—taking people at their most basic and molding them into h\what they were always too afraid to be. “So,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
Layme made a face, concentrating, flipping through options until she chose one—the one she saw first and would normally have picked last.
Tessa's face broke out into a smile. “Now that's what I was talking about.”
<< Prologue
No comments:
Post a Comment