| |
ENORMOUS, MS. JONES
NEARLY EIGHTEEN MONTHS later ...
TIERNEY JONES
So ... breeders are real.
I always thought they were a rumor, something people got drunk and slurred about at parties. But my interviewer is quite clear, his diction fine. And so are my ears.
I’m busy silently digesting the fact, but Dr. Caruthers just trucks right through the silence of his office, like he didn’t just tell me I’d be working with Reproducers ... AKA breeders. “You’ll be in the Department of Human Engineering.”
My bland smile is forced. “Working with ... reproducers?”
Dr. Caruthers taps his thumb on the desk, leaving striated marks on the chrome surface like a row of footprints on sand, trailing straight toward me.
He’s a big man—6'4" according to the glowing blue letters of the holographic feed over his head which lists his name, ID number, height, weight, address. And his body, beneath his suit, speaks to exercise and strength. Wide shoulders, lean hips, a face that speaks to mingled ancestry. European and Indian maybe, or South American. Thick dark hair, tan skin.
“Yes,” he says.
A hundred ... a thousand questions bubble up, but I force my brain to go quiet. The less you reveal, the safer you are. Mom’s number one rule from the day I was old enough to form complete sentences. Just do whatever they tell you, was her number two. Rules I’ve lived by.
He scratches a thumb along his hard jaw, through the dark hair of his beard, and one side of his mouth tightens into a hard line.
“Your thesis work on the coding of nanochips for sleep induction was very good.” His imitation-leather chair creaks and, somewhere behind glossy black walls, a pipe runs, ticking in the silent room. “Do you socialize much, Ms. Jones?”
He knows the answer. It’ll be in my file along with everything else about my mom and my dad and my crazy sister and the mountain of bills I never manage to pay, the house I can’t afford. “No.”
“What made you choose sleep?”
I force my fingers to unclench their death grip on the chair. “My mother was a bad sleeper. She used to joke that if only we could ...” I stop myself. To him, my mother was nothing but a human warning, a renowned government psychologist whose death sent her husband raving and her eldest genius daughter into the psych hospital and her youngest there to sweep up the mess. “She used to joke about a magic button to make ourselves sleep. It occurred to me, maybe I could make such a button.”
“It may be the most novel—and ambitious—concept I’ve ever seen from a grad student.”
I clamp down on my tongue so I won’t grimace. Mediocrity has ever been my armor. I hoped sleep was sufficiently boring to avoid notice.
“We tested your thesis in a select group of Outlaw test subjects. Your scientific knowledge is impressive.”
He studies me like I’m a beige caterpillar who suddenly and unexpectedly mutated into a pipevine swallowtail butterfly, and I study him back. He’s hiding behind his beard and his suit. When I first saw him, I wrote him off as an older, bearded, suited interviewer. But now, I see he’s actually quite handsome, and not much older than I am. And I swear, there’s the tiniest smile hiding under that beard.
“We inserted the second chip into the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus,” he says in that deep, resonating voice. “They did the work themselves, just as you hypothesized. It was seamless.”
My lips part, and in spite of myself, am instantly curious. I am my parent’s child after all. Science fascinates me and so does solving problems. “It put them to sleep?”
“Yes.”
This is a massive breakthrough. “How long does it keep them asleep? Is there any kind of developmental immunity? Any effect on daytime drowsiness?”
I swear he almost smiles at me. “Keeps them asleep for as long as their body normally would. Mild developmental immunity. No effect on daytime drowsiness.”
This is huge. Huge! The implications are sweeping.
Boundless. Too boundless. He keeps talking but my eyes are lost outside the window, fixating on all the potential. Outside the massive window behind his desk, carbon-dioxide-absorbing vines on his balcony flutter in the breeze like ghosts.
Human Engineering. Mind Control. A thousand whispers from drunken voices at parties in school. Whispers about eugenics, drugs, secret government programs, breeders, warehouses full of men with their testicles all frozen up like ...
Dr. Caruthers’ words cut through the noise, “ ... enormous, Ms. Jones.”
“What’s enormous?”
His full lips curve. “The scope of this project.”
Oh. My hands drop. “May I see the study?”
His mouth twitches. “The idea was reviewed and accepted by one of our top executives, Titania Baldwin. Your bank account was updated this morning. You’ll begin immediately.”
I draw in a shaky breath. The increased money will mean I can afford to keep my sister Swann’s day nurse for another few months. When dad was declared Outlaw, the government claimed our parents’ savings as compensation for crimes against the state. We have the house, and I work nights doing contract coding, but we barely ever have enough money left over for food and taxes after paying the nurse.
Without the nurse, Swann wanders off, falls, forgets to eat, stumbles into public and runs her mouth saying dangerous things.
We’ve been drowning since mom died. Maybe this job is finally our dry land.
“You and Dr. Baldwin will be working on an ... adjacent project.” He sucks in a long breath through his nose. “You know what else that area of the brain controls, Ms. Jones?”
“The hypothalamus? Impulse control, Dr. Caruthers.”
“Yes.” He lets the word hang in the air.
“You want me to write coding to enhance impulse control?”
“We have some test subjects who we’d like to make more ... amenable to their circumstances.”
His words wash over me, as chilling and damning as a blast of water from the frozen expanse of Lake Michigan outside the window, endless ice as far as the eye can see.
So the opposite then of enhanced impulse control. He means ... . “Mind control.”
He glances up at the camera in the room’s corner, its round red eye all-seeing. A reminder or maybe a warning. Someone is always watching. “We’d like you to write codes just like your sleep study.”
I open my mouth, ready to offer a hundred reasons why it’s nothing like my sleep study.
“Starting a hundred years ago, the chips were outfitted with everything they need to perform self-alterations, repairs, augmentations. They’re pre-equipped to do this. It’s just that no one has quite figured out how to execute it. Until you, and you did it without even knowing about those extra parts.”
I swallow and tap the heels of my shoes together on the fake pony-fur hide carpet, wishing to be someplace far far away from here.
What am I supposed to say?
“Of course, if you aren’t interested ...” His lower lip pushes out, full and mauve-pink under the beard.
IdentityCorps has a way of always getting what they want. If it’s not me, it will be someone else who’ll use my thesis. They’ll develop it anyway. And I need the money for Swann.
My eyes burn, and even though it shreds off a jagged shard of my soul, I force a smile. “Okay, Dr. Caruthers. I’d be happy to accept the position in Human Engineering.”
He offers a thin smile. “I’ve raised your clearance. Do you need to be reminded that speaking of this to anyone outside of work would be an F-code violation?”
I swallow. Violations of Codes A-F are felonies, and a felony means immediate status change from Citizen to Outlaw. And Outlaw means ... total loss of company and government protection. It means the law no longer applies to you. It means being hunted down in the streets by government mandated Killers or worse, being taken away by someone for god knows what.
“I won’t talk about it.” I wouldn’t ever dare break the law. I know exactly what happens when you step out of line. The only safety lies in obedience, no matter the cost.
“I’ve brought in Bob Reynaldi to assist. He’s good. He works in Analytics. You’ll lead but he can provide support.”
His mouth twists like he’s running his tongue along his front teeth. “I want you to know you can trust me, Ms. Jones. You can come to me with any ... reservations or fears you may have.” He clears his throat, his brown eyes burrowing into me like he’s looking into my soul. “I am here for you.”
So spake every lying executive ever, fiends with hidden necessities, every single one. My mother and father probably included. There’s so much about them I never understood, but here I am, with yet another rule to stack on my rule pile. Trust no one.
Rules mean safety. Rules mean life. I live by rules.
So, I smile blandly, push my glasses farther up my nose and say, “Thank you, Dr. Caruthers. I’ll keep that in mind.”
With a sigh, he uses the fabric of his shirt to clear away his own thumb prints, rubbing his elbow over the marks. It must drive him nuts, the constant imperfection of his own hands marring his desk. He must clean it all day long. “You’ll be briefed when you get there. They’re waiting for you.”
He just stares at me with that handsome face of his, and it takes me a second to realize I’ve been dismissed.