Pass/Fail (2012)

by David Wellington

  userid ZURAW

  psswd 0308AMG07

  Jake understood instantly what he’d been given, though not what it was supposed to do for him. The strange box in Mr. Zuraw’s desk drawer, the one that was a combination of a television set and a typewriter, had asked for two pieces of information before it could be used. It had wanted a userid and a password, and here they were.

  He tried to remember the names of the file folders displayed on the television screen. They’d had something to do with testing and evaluation, and they had referred to H—the code letter the Curriculum used to represent Jake. Somehow, he thought, you had to be able to use the box to access information on all the tests Jake had already taken—and all the tests he was yet to take. It was quite possible, he thought, that Mr. Irwin had just given him a cheat sheet for the remainder of senior year.

  If he knew all the answers ahead of time—and when cheating was permitted—he could do it. He could pass, easily, and graduate. He could survive.

  Mr. Irwin had taken an enormous risk getting him this information. Jake wished there was some way he could show his gratitude but he couldn’t imagine how. Well, he could use it. That had to be what Mr. Irwin intended him to do with it.

  He fell asleep that night imagining what his life could be like once he graduated. He could devote all his time and energy to figuring out why Megan had rejected him, he thought. He could work on changing her mind. Thoughts of college and careers and raising a family of his own were nice options, too, but they took a pretty distant second to getting back together with Megan.

  In the morning he walked to school with her as always. He was desperate to tell her what Mr. Irwin had given him, and terrified of what might happen if he said it out loud. He couldn’t even tell Cody about this, he thought—not, at least, until he was sure he could get away with it. So he skipped homeroom and made his way down to the guidance office, intending to break in and steal Mr. Zuraw’s box then and there.

  When he checked the windows of the file room, though—that was how he’d gotten into the office the last time—he got a nasty surprise. It had been simple to jimmy the locks on the windows before but now that was impossible. Someone had come by and sealed all the windows shut with thick rivets. Jake tried rattling one of the windows in its frame but it wouldn’t budge even a fraction of an inch. He supposed he could break the window, but then he would have to crawl in through shards of jagged glass as sharp as razors. He thought maybe he could go a different way, through the door of the guidance office, but when he stepped inside the teacher’s wing to take a look a camera mounted on the ceiling turned to focus on him.

  It wasn’t a hidden camera of the kind he thought watched his every move. It was a closed circuit security camera, a white box with a black plastic auto-focusing lens. It could be turned through 180 degrees to see anything that happened in that hallway. There were cameras like it watching all of the school’s exits, Jake knew. He’d seen them thousands of times before—they were there to prevent anyone from entering the school after hours, and they were electronically linked to display screens in the principal’s office. There was a security guard in there whose entire job seemed to be watching those screens all day.

  There had not been one in the teacher’s wing before Jake discovered the box. It was a new installation and Jake had to assume it was there to keep him from trying to get into the guidance office again. Presumably the security guard had instructions to watch for Jake and to respond immediately if he tried anything funny.

  Cody had only one idea when Jake explained the problem to him later that day. “You can make an appointment with Mr. Zuraw. He has to let you into his office then. Once you’re alone with him in there you can punch him out, then take the box and leave.”

  Jake laughed. “Tempting,” he said. “I’d love to take out my frustrations on him that way, sure. But do you know how to knock a full-grown man unconscious with just one punch?”

  Cody shrugged. “No.”

  “Neither do I. I’m not exactly a championship boxer. No, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. I’m going to need your help,” he said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Cody replied.

  “And Megan’s too. It’s going to be a real team effort.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The plan went into action at exactly 11:07 in the morning on the following Monday. Jake had learned enough about problem solving to keep things simple, and to be prepared. That morning the three of them had met before school and adjusted their watches until they all showed precisely the same time. There was no way for Jake to communicate with Megan or Cody once it started, and no way to know exactly what was going to happen, so everything had to be scheduled in advance.

  At 10:58 Cody got into position in the ruins, crouching down behind an unfinished window where he could watch the back door of the school, the door that led into the teacher’s wing. He saw Mr. Schneider and Mr. Dzama standing to one side of the door sharing a cigarette. He was not surprised to see them there. The teacher’s wing was never completely deserted, there was always someone in one of the lounges or working on a lesson plan in their office. Jake settled in to watch the teachers, and to get ready to move.

  At 11:00 exactly the bell rang inside the school, ending third period. Jake could just barely hear it from where he was. The next period started at 11:06, giving the students time to get to their next class. This was the first period when lunch was served and that meant about a quarter of the students would be headed for the cafeteria, near the front of the school.

  One minute later Megan started pulling fire alarms all over the school. This time Jake could hear the bell clearly—it was much louder and more strident than the bell that signaled the start and end of classes. Megan pulled as many alarms as she could. She had a route they’d laid out in advance that let her pull six different alarms before running out the front doors and joining the massive crowd of confused students and frantic teachers that was already gathering there.

  Mr. Zuraw had been in the guidance office the last time Jake had checked. Now he stepped outside of the back door and said something to Mr. Schneider and Mr. Dzama. It didn’t sound nice, and the hand gesture he used was pretty rude.

  Mr. Dzama hurriedly stubbed out the cigarette and the three teachers dashed inside the back door. The standard fire drill had everyone filing out the front doors of the school into the parking lot and the athletic fields, far from the actual school building.

  Within two minutes even Jake, far from the crowd, could hear the rumbling noise of them, could hear the occasional students laugh in excitement or the occasional tense questions as teachers tried to verify all the students were present and accounted for. The principal was making some sort of announcement but Jake couldn’t make out the words. He was probably telling everyone to stay calm.

  The local fire house wasn’t far away. By 11:05 Jake could hear sirens approaching. The amount of time Jake had to get into the guidance office at this point was limited. If Megan had only pulled one alarm it would have taken the firefighters only a few minutes to check and see that there was no fire, but because she’d pulled several of them they would be forced to check every part of the school. Jake had been through enough fire drills to know that this would take about twenty minutes, which should be plenty of time.

  He waited to enter the school until exactly 11:07, however. When they’d been putting the plan together Cody had asked what would happen if one of the security guards stayed inside the school during the fire alarm—or even worse, what if a Proctor stayed behind to watch the security monitors. They knew from past experience that the Proctors didn’t fear for their own lives, and that the threat of a fire might not be enough to get them all out of the building. This required the second phase of the plan, and Cody had volunteered—after much debate—to run it. Megan had borrowed a bottle of syrup of Ipecac from her parents’ medicine cabinet. It was a brownish liquid that smelled horrible. Drinking more than a spoonful of it was guaranteed to
make you throw up everything in your body.

  Cody had spent most of the morning eating cheese puffs and drinking milk until he thought he would be sick even without the syrup. By 11:00 he was in the boy’s bathroom directly opposite the principal’s office. At 11:06, with the fire alarms going off all over the school, he drank as much of the syrup as he could stand and then ran out of the bathroom and into the hall.

  Jake had no doubt that his best friend was vomiting white goo all over the principal’s door by now and wouldn’t be able to stop until every last particle of food in his body was expelled. If there was a security guard or even a Proctor in the principal’s office they would be very aware they had a sick student out in the hall in the middle of an unscheduled fire emergency. A security guard would have no choice but to help Cody get out of the school, and in so doing, abandon his post. Even a Proctor would be so distracted by the noise and the awful stench that he might ignore the monitor screens for a few minutes to see what was going on.

  At 11:07 the entire school would be empty and unsupervised. Jake didn’t waste another minute. He dashed out of the ruins and through the back door—no exterior door of the school was allowed to be locked during a fire alarm. Inside the clanging bell was deafening and emergency lights strobed up and down the hall, dazzling him. Jake didn’t stop, though, until he’d reached the door of the guidance office. It was locked, of course.

  The plan had to be kept simple. Jake wrapped a hooded sweatshirt around and around his right hand, then made a fist and punched through the glass window inset in the door. Then he reached through the shattered pane and unlocked the door from the inside.

  A second later he was sitting in Mr. Zuraw’s chair. He went to the drawer that held the strange box and took it out, placing it carefully on the desk blotter before him and opening the lid just as he had before. When it asked him for his userid and password, he entered the letters and numbers Mr. Irwin had provided.

  It worked. By 11:08, Jake had access to Mr. Zuraw’s most secret files.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The hardest part of using the box—the part that took him the most time to figure out—was how to open the files. He’d never used anything like the box before in his life.

  At first he tried just typing words. He tried “open” and “file” but neither of those did anything. The words didn’t even appear on the screen. Clearly it was more complicated than that. He turned his attention to something he’d already noticed but which he didn’t understand. The keyboard only took up about half of the lower section of the box. Below the keyboard was a recessed square of soft plastic and below that two buttons. Pressing the buttons did nothing, but when he touched the plastic square he finally got a result: a small black arrow appeared on the middle of the screen. By moving his finger around on the square, he could make the arrow move around the screen. At first it jumped and swerved wildly around but he quickly realized that a small motion of his finger made the arrow move much farther and soon he could get the arrow anywhere he wanted with some precision.

  There was a little picture of a file folder called H_TESTING on the screen. Jake moved the arrow over the file folder and tried rubbing it, tried running the arrow across the top of the folder, tried drawing a circle around the folder, all with no effect. Then he met with a lucky accident. His thumb was resting on the buttons under the square and as he was moving the arrow around frantically, his thumb pressed down on the button. And the folder opened.

  Jake squirmed in the chair as a white rectangle appeared on the screen, expecting to see a message there saying he’d been caught, that he’d met an automatic failure condition, that the Proctors were on the way. Instead the rectangle filled up with a grid of numbers and letters in seemingly random combinations. The only thing he recognized was a row of Ps and one F down one column on the far right. Those represented tests he’d passed and failed, he decided. This file was simply a list of what grades he’d received on his various tests. He tried poking around with the arrow and the buttons but the file didn’t seem to contain any clues or even descriptions of the various tests—just letters and numbers that meant nothing to him.

  If he’d had more time—if he could steal the box and work with it over the course of days or even weeks—he thought he might be able to figure out what some of the letters and numbers meant. They had to be in some kind of code, he thought. But he knew that by 11:27 the fire alarm would be over and teachers would start coming back to the teacher’s wing. He glanced down at his watch.

  It was already 11:21. It had taken him all that time to figure out how the arrow and the buttons worked.

  In a rush he opened up folders called H_SYSTEMICS, Y_SYSTEMICS, and H_EVALUATION, but without much success. EVALUATION was just another grid of numbers and letters. Some of the values in the grid looked like medical data: blood pressure, pulse rate, and so on, but the rest of the information on the screen just baffled him. The two SYSTEMICS folders were even less useful. When he opened them black rectangles appeared, each of them blank except for a bracket in the lower left corner followed by a flashing vertical line. It looked like the same vertical line he’d seen on the rectangle that let him enter a userid and a password, so he thought it would be possible to type letters into those rectangles but he had no idea what he was supposed to write.

  Finally he opened the last folder on the screen, which was marked JM_DOSSIER. He didn’t hold out much hope for it. It had to be, he figured, just a version of the paper file he’d already seen in the file room which contained his transcript and his class picture.

  In fact, it did have those things. The white rectangle that appeared on the screen showed exactly the same information as his paper file, except for a couple small differences. The picture was a different one, showing Jake’s face but with his hair parted on the other side. The name above the picture said MCCARTNEY, JAKE A. That was weird—his paper file said MCCARTNEY, JAKE H. The other, much more frightening difference, was that at the bottom of the picture was the legend FAILED: SUBJECT TERMINATED BY Z.

  Jake’s breath went right out of his chest. His hands grabbed the edge of the desk and it was all he could do to make them let go, to release his fingers from their painful grip. They shook badly but he folded them in his lap and tried very hard to calm down.

  The file said he’d been terminated by Z. That must mean executed by Mr. Zuraw. And yet—he was still alive. It had to be a mistake. Or…

  At the bottom of the rectangle was the caption PAGE 1 OF 8, followed by a little black triangle pointing right. Jake steadied his hand enough to move the arrow over the triangle and press the button.

  The screen cleared, then displayed another page, PAGE 2 OF 8, slightly different from the first. This one said MCCARTNEY, JAKE B. The picture still showed Jake’s face but with much longer hair, almost down to his ears. Jake couldn’t remember ever having hair that long. Under the picture he read FAILED: SUBJECT MET AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION.

  So he’d died a second time? How was that possible?

  PAGE 3 OF 8 showed MCCARTNEY, JAKE C, who wore glasses. He’d been terminated. On the fourth page MCCARTNEY, JAKE D looked angry. MCCARTNEY, JAKE E looked almost exactly like Jake, but MCCARTNEY, JAKE F had hair dyed jet black with streaks of electric blue, as if Jake had chosen to go punk. It hadn’t helped. MCCARTNEY, JAKE F had been terminated by Mr. Zuraw like the others.

  MCCARTNEY, JAKE G didn’t even have a picture. There was just a blank space where one should have been, and underneath it the message SUBJECT REFUSED TO PARTICIPATE. MET AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION. That would have been before school even started—it was one year exactly before Jake had pulled Megan out of her burning car.

  Jake was starting to understand, a little, what he was seeing. He paged through to PAGE 8 OF 8 and saw his own face under the name MCCARTNEY, JAKE H. Below the picture he read TESTING IN PROGRESS. He was, after all, still alive.

  Eight of them. Eight Jake McCartneys, all but one enrolled in the Curriculum. What had happe
ned to Jake McCartney G? Had he failed to rescue somebody from a burning car? Had he just said no? That had counted as an automatic failure condition. Jake hunched down in the chair, feeling very small and very much alone. Seven of them had failed the tests. No one had ever passed and graduated. They were all—dead. All of them.

  Except—

  He’d paged through so quickly he had barely noticed, but there was one different entry. He found it again on the fourth page. MCCARTNEY, JAKE D, the angry-looking one, wasn’t listed as having been terminated either by Mr. Zuraw or by an automatic failure condition. Instead, under his photo Jake read simple the word INCOMPLETE.

  He was pondering what that could mean when a black glove grabbed the top of the box’s screen and shoved it forward, nearly crushing Jake’s fingers as the box slammed shut. Jake looked up slowly and saw Mr. Zuraw staring down at him.

  It was 11:29. Jake had been so engrossed in the files that he hadn’t even noticed when the fire alarm stopped ringing.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Jake was painfully conscious of the fact that he was sitting in Mr. Zuraw’s chair, and that the guidance counselor might want it. He did his best to stand up and get away from the desk, but fear turned his legs into blocks of wood.

  He had just been caught in what was probably going to be considered an automatic failure condition. Which meant certain, instant death.

  No guns came out, though. Mr. Zuraw didn’t summon a squad of Proctors to drag Jake out of the office. Instead he pulled up a chair to the far side of the desk and sat down in it, sighing briefly.

  “Questions,” Mr. Zuraw said, “present themselves to me.” His head tilted back until he was looking at the ceiling. “Alike to petals on a rose, waiting to be picked off, one by one. Yet where should I start? They are all equally compelling.”