by Ramona Finn
I didn’t have to school my expression for long, however, because surprise pulled my dark eyebrows together when it was Dahn who opened Haven’s door. Never once had I ever had company when I’d been summoned to Haven’s office.
“Dahn.”
“Glade.”
He stepped aside and I walked into the office. Haven rose smoothly from behind his desk as I came in. His silver hair caught the fluorescents like a scar in the moonlight. He came around the desk and right toward the red armchairs where he and I usually sat when we spoke to one another. I had just enough time to catch the quick quirk of Dahn’s face. Maybe he and Haven always sat at the desk when they spoke.
Haven sat in one of the red chairs, crossing his legs and leaning one elbow against the armrest. He looked like he was on vacation. He gestured me into the other armchair and Dahn stood off to the side, looking between Haven and I.
My stomach tightened when Dahn finally turned and went to stand beside Haven. He crossed his arms and his gray gaze remained intently on me.
I reached out to him with my tech.
He shifted on his feet, but said nothing in reply.
“It’s good to see you, Glade.”
My eyes were drawn back to Haven’s metallic ones. He looked like a coin blinking up from the bottom of the ocean.
“Yes.” It was the best I could do.
“Dahn tells me that the trip to Io was successful.”
Successful? I spat the word through my tech toward Dahn. This time, he didn’t even flinch.
“We buried my mother and set up care for my sisters. If that’s what you mean by successful.”
“It’s a shame your sisters aren’t old enough to join us here on the Station yet. It could have all been much simpler.”
I valiantly kept my lip from curling and forced my fingers to relax. I knew a threat when I heard one. “I know they’ve had some preliminary testing done that indicates they might make good Datapoints, but they’re too young, and I’m still not convinced.”
My face showed nothing, and neither did my voice. “They’re very emotional people.”
“Sure.” Haven bobbed his head. “Though, what we need from Datapoints is changing so fast these days that maybe the criteria for who is eligible will change, as well.”
“What do you mean?”
Dahn shifted slightly on his feet and I felt his eyes on me. But when I looked up, he was staring at the wall behind me.
“I mean,” Haven began, “that you have changed the rules of the game, my friend.”
I couldn’t completely control my visceral recoil at that word in his mouth, but if Haven noticed, he showed no sign. “My performance in the simulator, you mean?” I asked.
I refused to refer to myself as the chosen one in front of Haven. It would be like admitting something that would frenzy him. Blood in the water.
“Because you can do something that no one else can, Glade Io.” He paused and, for a moment, he looked both exhausted and energized. It gave him a strangely wild-eyed appearance. But the look smoothed away so fast that I had to wonder if I’d even seen it. “The Culling is coming. It’s been ten years since the last one. If I told the two of you something that only the Authority knows, I wonder, would that information stay safe and secret?”
Good Christ. I could practically feel Dahn’s chest swelling with pride from over here.
“Absolutely, Sir Haven,” Dahn spoke up.
It was a true miracle that I restrained my eye roll. But I wasn’t a fool. I wanted this information as badly as Dahn did. I just happened to want it for the opposite reasons. “Yes, sir.”
Haven rose and stepped over to the huge glass screen on the wall. He woke it up with a wave of his hand and navigated through a few pages before he pulled up a graph. His hand sucked away from the screen then and the movement made the image bleed outwards, turning 3D. The computer nerd inside me couldn’t help but think that the show was really cool. I leaned forward to study the graph.
But suddenly the light blinked off, and Haven turned to us. “Before I show you, I wonder what the two of you think of the Culling?”
This time, I couldn’t hide my recoil of surprise. What the hell was he asking here? And why was he speaking so candidly?
A memory whispered in my ear, responding to my surprise. Something I’d seen on Io just a few years after my father had died. An older man, starving, in rags, maybe a few weeks from death’s doorstep, who held a scrap of meat in one hand. He had crouched in the mouth of an alley and I’d been able to smell the trash fire he’d started to keep himself warm. He’d held the meat out toward a stray cat and made sweet, crooning noises. The cat had eventually wandered toward him. Maybe she’d smelled the meat or maybe she’d wanted a friend. Either way, the second she was within reach, the man had pounced on the cat, wringing her neck and skittering away back into the alley where I was sure he was going to cook her.
I’d never missed Kupier more than I did in this moment. And I’d never felt more alone. I thought about reaching out to Dahn again with my tech, but he’d ignored me twice already. Not to mention the fact that his eyes were burning with conviction and patriotism as he opened his mouth to answer Haven.
“It’s a necessity, Sir Haven. An imperative action to keep the innocent citizens of our solar system safe. Without our culling the violent and the murderous, they would be free to mingle and interact with innocent citizens.”
It was a textbook response. Exactly what every citizen was told from the first day you joined public school.
Haven barely acknowledged Dahn’s words. His eyes fell to me. “Glade?”
“It’s the bedrock of our system of government,” I replied carefully. I wasn’t going to get myself killed here, but I definitely wasn’t going to toss flower petals at Haven’s feet the way Dahn had.
He tipped his chin down just once, those silver eyes boring into me, like he was trying to see my brain itself. “Exactly.”
He turned back to the screen and pulled up a very familiar image, this one also in 3D. It was very familiar. Our solar system. The proportions were all out of whack, though. The sun was a bright pin prick in the center and the moon colonies were overlarge so that we could see them. “If you think of our colonies as states or countries, you can see that there is one very large issue when trying to govern them.”
Haven flicked his hand and the image projected to each corner of the room. We could see the tiny sun, the colony on Earth’s moon, and the Station winking in the asteroid belt. But the rest of the colonies were too far off to be projected within the confines of Haven’s office.
“Distance,” Dahn said.
“Yes,” Haven nodded. “How does a government maintain a tight…” he cleared his throat, “maintain a support system for groups of people who are literally days or weeks away by space travel?”
He clicked back to the first image, where we could see all the colonies at once, and this time he made them rotate through their orbits. The solar system was often visualized as a straight line of planets around the sun, but it almost never was. The planets and their moons orbited the sun at different rates and on separate planes, making the representation look much more like a cloud than a line. Distances between planets were changing every second.
“The citizens have to feel the presence of the government even when it’s not physically there,” I commented.
Haven turned to me, something flashing in his eyes. “Exactly,” he repeated. “Our local governments do their best. They handle small issues, and each moon colony has their own culture and customs. The Authority long ago agreed not to interfere with that. There is a certain amount of improvisation that must be allowed, or else the citizens will feel completely detached from their system of rule, which we don’t want. But. But. BUT. The whole thing works because the Authority is strong enough to hold up each branch of the tree.
“The Culling is a procedure that is strong enough to speak for itself. It is very effective, and citizens beli
eve in it, understand it, and heed it because of that effectiveness.”
He turned back to the screen and pulled up that graph from before. “Do either of you know what the most important part of that sentence I just said is? Believe it, understand it, or heed it?”
“Heed it,” Dahn answered without even pausing. “If we’re talking about the law of the land, then the most important part is to heed it.”
My eyes darted away from the graph and, like I knew they would be, Haven’s eyes were on me. “Believing in it,” I answered, thinking of the Ferrymen. Of Kupier. They didn’t heed our system of government at all. Because they didn’t believe in it. In fact, they thought it was a load of crap. And they’d rather be outlaws than have to wade through crap for the rest of their lives. “The citizens have to believe in the Authority and what it stands for in order to respect it—in order to heed it.”
I was glad Haven didn’t say ‘exactly’ one more time. I thought it might make Dahn wither into a raisin in front of our very eyes.
Instead, Haven gave a brisk nod. He zoomed in on the graph. “Here are the statistics that we send to each colony’s government. They are a matter of public record, and any citizen who wishes can go to their local town hall and look them up. They show the results of all of the last three Cullings. One per decade.”
He scrolled through the records, showing a few different components. Total number of citizens in the solar system and on each colony. Number of citizens culled from each colony. Etc. I’d seen these graphs before.
“Now.” Haven turned back to us, and I realized that Dahn had moved from next to Haven’s chair to next to mine. “What I’m about to show you is something that has only ever been seen by members of the Authority. I don’t think I need to explain what will happen to you if this information leaves this room.”
Yeah, yeah. Torture, threats against our loved ones, deaths of our loved ones… Oh, wait a second, he’d already done all that to me.
“Yes, Sir Haven,” Dahn and I parroted in tandem.
He searched our expressions and turned back to the screen. “Here are a few unpublished statistics.” A new graph bloomed before our eyes. I rose up slowly from the armchair and squinted at what I was seeing.
There was a smattering of graphs before me. Solar system-wide and colony to colony. These graphs showed the number of violent and murderous citizens detected before the Cullings, and the number of that same population after. I blinked.
“But…” Dahn started, obviously as confused as I was, “there are so many remaining after each Culling.”
We knew that people formed violent and murderous intentions in between each Culling, but directly in the wake of a Culling, there should have been a near perfect rate of peaceful citizens.
“Yes.” Haven sighed and flicked off the screen. Both Dahn and I stared at the blank space where the damning information had just glowed. “Any guesses as to why there might be so many remaining who are violent and murderous directly after a Culling?”
We were both silent as we watched Haven take his seat again. He eyed us carefully.
“Human. Error.” He’d answered himself, punctuating the words slowly, his lip curling like he was being forced to swallow something disgusting. “As you are both very well aware, Datapoints are human. Their tech gets them as close to machine-like accuracy as possible, but still, these are human brains we are dealing with here. You know,” he mused suddenly, his eyes growing distant, “there was a time when we considered creating AI to implement the Culling system. But we decided that it was too dangerous to put that kind of life-ending technology into the hands of something that had absolutely no reverence for human life. You never know what kind of mistakes could be made. Ultimately, the Authority landed on the Datapoint program. Tapping into our population to find the most logical, left-brained citizens that we could possibly find. And then we integrated computers into those brains of theirs,” he gestured toward our tech, “and we were as close to perfect as we could get. And yet… human error.”
His silver eyes inched over to the now blank screen. “The graphs you’ve just seen are the hidden interior of the Culling. A catch-22. We use human Datapoints in order to protect the general population, yet it is the humanity of the Datapoints that keeps us from one hundred percent effectiveness.”
“You’re saying that Datapoints simply miss the cullable?” Dahn asked. He sounded like he was having trouble understanding what Haven was suggesting.
“Every Datapoint does. Even Glade here isn’t quite as perfect as her simulation scores might imply.”
Dahn and I glanced at one another.
“You’re saying the system isn’t perfect,” I said slowly.
“I’m saying that the system is very far from perfect. But that it only works if it’s perceived as perfect.”
“You mean that in order for the citizens to believe in the Culling, and thus, in the power of the Authority, they have to believe that there are no flaws in Datapoints?”
I’d never heard Haven even hint at subterfuge when it came to the Culling. About ninety-five alarm bells were all chirping in my head right now. I thought of everything that Kupier had shown me. All the evidence that implied that Haven had rigged the Authority Database for his own agenda. That he wanted to cull anyone who was classified as a free thinker. At first I had rejected it because I had never seen anything from Haven to indicate that he was trying to manipulate the system. Well. If I hadn’t already been mostly convinced of what Kupier had told me, here was some pretty scintillating evidence. The man had just admitted to fudging the data.
I glanced at Dahn and found his face even paler than usual. That was the only indication that he was shocked to his core. Which I knew he would be. He’d always trusted in the Authority above all else.
You alright? I tried through my tech one more time.
He flinched, but didn’t acknowledge my words. His eyes were trained on Haven.
I cleared my throat and brought my attention back to the matter at hand. “Why are you showing us this?”
Haven shifted backwards and sat back down in his chair, his legs crossed and a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Because I need you two to understand the need for the new Datapoint training protocol. Considering that you’ll be teaching it.”
“What’s the new protocol?” I asked at the same time as Dahn asked, “Teaching it?”
I held back an internal sigh. Didn’t that just perfectly illustrate the difference between us?
My hand absently made its way to the tech on my arm as something gently tickled at my brain. A little alarm, a hint, a suggestion—
My comm! I knew that feeling. Someone had messaged my comm. Either it was Kupier, or it was whoever had called me Gladey as we’d been leaving Io. My mother? An imposter? Could it even be a trap set up by Haven himself? My heart started racing as I considered every possibility.
Haven’s eyes flickered down to where my palm was gripping my tech and I cursed myself for acting strangely. Instead of attempting an explanation, I dropped my hands and flipped my hair back over one shoulder. Wild horse. Free. Untamed. My natural state. His eyes searched me for a second more before he continued on, and I forced myself to listen even though I was dying to check my comm.
“Yes,” he said simply. “You’ll be leading it. It only makes sense. Considering your skills and your status amongst your peers.” He sighed. “As you know, the need for the traditional Datapoint role has subsided since Glade’s skills have evolved so much over the last few months. She, you, will be able to take over much of the heavy lifting. Considering you’re going to be culling the entire solar system on your own. However, we can’t assume that you’ll have perfect accuracy after all. Especially considering that you’ll be culling from a central location—the Station—since you can’t be on each colony at once. But the distance of it, the immensity of the task, all of this means that you’re going to need some help. Think of it as brooms coming up behind you to
sweep up the scraps.”
“You mean that we’re going to be training Datapoints to… cull individuals?” I asked.
“Exactly. Instead of culling groups of dozens or hundreds, the way they’ve been trained. We’re going to be re-training Datapoints to, ah, hunt down, for lack of a better phrasing, anyone who may have escaped Glade’s eye.”
Chapter Four
Something was wrong with Glade Io. Both Dahn and Haven knew that much with certainty. They’d both watched her excuse herself after Haven had finished explaining the new Datapoint program, and then exchanged a few more words with one another before Dahn found himself out in the hall. His hands in his pockets and a frown on his face. He considered going back to his own quarters or perhaps to the simulator for practice, but it was in the other direction that his feet were taking him.
He felt sick. His heart was beating too fast and there was a recurring darkness that his brain kept pulling back towards, no matter how many times he tried to leave it behind.
The Authority intentionally covered up mistakes that Datapoints had made. They’d altered the numbers in order to mislead citizens. Dahn didn’t like that. He hated it, in fact.
He could tell that it had bothered Glade as well, but unlike him, she hadn’t seemed particularly surprised.
And that bothered Dahn, too.
For the last few months, there’d been something tickling at the edges of Dahn’s consciousness. Something was off with Glade, and he’d known it—he just, perhaps, hadn’t wanted to admit it.
He started down the hallway toward her bunk room and tried not to think too hard on the fact that he’d seen her ten minutes before, and was now going to find her again.
He had to admit that she’d never quite been the same after she’d come back from the Ferryman abduction. But he couldn’t say if that was because of the Ferrymen or because of the interrogations she’d had to endure once she’d gotten back to the Station. Either way, he wanted the old Glade back. Snarky, arrogant, fifty percent-effort Glade. This new robo-Glade who was the best at everything and always looked slightly dead in the eyes was unsettling to Dahn, and for many reasons.