The Labs (The GEOs Book 2)

by Ramona Finn

  “Before Father made us an official match, we were about to…”

  “Kiss,” I finished for him. My heart began to do its strange dance again.

  Ben bit his lower lip and blinked hard. His lashes caught my attention and I focused on how they curled up so perfectly symmetrically. “I want you to know that our match has nothing to do with how I feel about you.” He paused. “That didn’t come out right. I meant—”

  “I know,” I said, secretly relieved. I’d needed him to say these words. I wanted to trust that he really liked me for me.

  “I want us to have a real relationship,” he continued. “Even though it’s not necessary, I believe our partnership could be good for us. We could support each other, especially working in such a harsh environment as the Labs.”

  I couldn’t help thinking Ben had no idea what ‘harsh’ really was.

  “There’s so much back-biting and melodrama; the writers barely have to make any of that stuff up,” he said, squeezing my hands as he spoke. “Once we’re partnered, I hope it will all stop, and we can simply focus on the work.”

  “Where would the entertainment be in that?” I asked, repeating what he’d told me in the medical sector.

  He chuckled. “The writers will have to leave me out of those love triangles once I’m matched to you officially. Father will see to that.”

  “So, what’s the next step?”

  “I’ve always wanted an actual ceremony,” he said with an eager grin. He looked like a young boy who’d gotten the best surprise ever. “I regret never getting to know any of my biological parents. When I was younger, I promised myself that I’d find a partner to live with, and then get permits to raise our own offspring.” He raised his hand to stop me from saying anything. “You wouldn’t have to carry them, but we could at least live with them, and get to know them, instead of handing them to the family to raise. Wouldn’t you want that?”

  I opened my mouth, unable to say much. He was already talking about several life stages away from where I was. He’d planned out everything, it seemed, and I hadn’t even begun to accept my new life here. My breaths came in short and shallow, and before I knew it, the room was spinning.

  “Slow breaths, Tylia,” Ben said, letting go of my hands and running to the kitchen for another glass of water. “You’re hyperventilating.”

  I got my breathing under control and gulped down another glass of water.

  “I’m rushing you into this,” he said, sitting down at the far end of the couch, giving me space. “This has been a lot for you to take in one day. Please, don’t feel anxious. We can take our time.”

  I stuck the glass out to him for another round, and then I gulped down the next glass of cool water, too. I pondered everything that had happened that day, as well as everything Ben had just said.

  “We can’t take our time,” I finally said. “If we have to save our people, we should move fast.”

  Ben frowned, and I realized how my words must have sounded to him. I was an idiot. I shut my eyes for a moment and breathed in and out a few times. I reset my thinking and tried again.

  “Ben, sorry. That came out all wrong on my part.” This time, it was me moving over to him and taking his hands. “You’re right about everything happening too fast, but I know how I feel about you, too.” I paused to lick my drying lips. My heart wouldn’t settle down into a regular rhythm, so I decided to just finish what I needed to say. “The fact that R.L. made us a match simply sped up what I believe would’ve been inevitable between us. And, the fact that our genetics together could save our people is an added bonus.” I didn’t want to say it was the main purpose for moving ahead. A part of me dreaded the idea of having children so soon, whether naturally or in a lab. But then I focused on all of those people underground, and my reluctance melted away. “Our union would be beneficial on so many levels, not the least of which being that you and I would get to spend our lives together.”

  “Yes, exactly!” Ben said. “I couldn’t have put it any better than that.” He beamed.

  I exhaled loudly and let go of his hands. “I would like at least a day or two to catch up on sleep and to see my parents before we go running off to get partnered, though.”

  Ben sat back and laughed. I moved closer to him. My heart pounded so hard in my chest that I thought it might just fall right out and splatter onto the floor.

  “There’s just one thing,” I said, leaning into him. “We never got the chance to finish that kiss.”

  He faced me squarely. “You’re right,” he said with a grin. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  “You forgot?” I teased.

  His face and ears turned bright pink. “Never,” he said. “I was just being polite. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.”

  “Well, I don’t think R.L. is about to walk through that door now.” I licked my lips.

  “So, should we try again?” His face was so close to mine, I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face.

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” He chuckled, brushing my lips with his ever so gently. “We could wait for the partnering ceremony.”

  I didn’t wait for anything. I closed that last centimeter of space between us and made contact.

  Chapter Twelve

  This time, my visit to the lab was welcomed by all. Ben gave me the grand tour of the place where everything happened.

  We began at the box-room, the façade version of the labs that was the set of The Cure. Given the chance to look around without fear of capture gave me a better perspective of the set. The windows which on TV looked like they overlooked the Greens’ regular view were called ‘green screens.’ Ben explained that, when the show was broadcast, they projected the views onto those screens so the audience saw what the scientists actually lived with outside of the set. On bad weather days, this technique allowed the crew to project nicer weather than they had in real life—just so it would all look perfect.

  He introduced me to the main characters—scientists who’d been picked for the show. There was Chen, his sister, and several others whose names I tried but failed to remember. I kicked myself for not paying more attention to all the goings-on of the show. Viv would’ve known every one of them.

  “And this is Mara, the director,” Ben said, walking me up to the lady with the giant headset.

  I gave her an awkward smile before remembering that she had no idea who I was. She didn’t know I was the one who’d attempted to steal her pad but dropped it before getting away. She didn’t know that I’d overheard her conversation with Lou about the script.

  Which explained why she shook my hand with no more interest than meeting any other unknown Elite.

  “Ben, we’re getting ready to shoot in an hour,” Mara said. “Are you going to be ready?”

  “Don’t worry, Mara,” Ben assured her. “I’ve got my lines memorized already. I just want to show Tylia the real labs.”

  I stared at Ben. “So, there are real labs somewhere else?” I knew these weren’t real, but I’d almost believed that that was it. It had never occurred to me that Ben worked in an actual lab. Silly.

  He scoffed playfully. “Of course! Do you think we spend our whole day staring at green screens? No way. Come with me.”

  Ben led me to a corridor just beside the set. It was dark, and at the end there was another door. Just before we reached that door, he turned to me and gently pushed me up against the wall. He leaned in for a long, slow kiss.

  After that first kiss, I’d found it hard to stop. It was like a switch had gone on in my brain, and I just couldn’t get enough of him. He seemed to be in the same position, so whenever we had a moment out of other people’s sights, we ‘practiced.’

  “That was nice,” he said, pulling away. “But we haven’t got much time. Let me show you the real excitement.”

  My heart was still racing from my version of real excitement, but I thought I’d see what he meant. Opening the door at the end of the hallway, Be
n led me into a brightly lit room that was at least three times the size of the fake TV lab. It was probably the size of our entire Union Hall, but nowhere near as crowded. There were rows of counters running neatly from where I stood to about halfway through the room. Each counter was loaded with lab equipment, strange looking machines, and the most advanced computers I’d ever seen. On the other end of it were individual work stations, much like the ones we had in the Coding room where I’d worked in the Geos. But these were much nicer.

  For one thing, everything was white—the walls, the tables, the stools, the division panels between workstations, and most of the equipment. This was what I’d imagined a top-of-the-line laboratory to look like. I couldn’t hold in my reaction when I saw how advanced their equipment was.

  “Look at these terminals!” I stood in front of a row of the drool-worthy computers. If we’d had these in the Geos, I could only imagine how much more efficient we could’ve been. I reached out a hand and brushed the wide, thin-as-ice, and almost transparent monitor with the tips of my fingers, careful not to get any prints on it. I held my breath, admiring the computers with an awe that even mountains couldn’t inspire in me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ben said over my shoulder. “But these wouldn’t last in the Geos. The moisture levels down there would ruin these before you could finish your first program. The ones you have down there were built for sturdiness more than beauty, but they’re just as efficient.”

  That wasn’t true, and I had a feeling that he knew it, too. Especially since he avoided my gaze at his words. Our computers were old tech, built from old materials that rusted and went moldy just as fast as anything else. They weren’t built for sturdiness—they were leftovers that were thrown out when the new ones got made.

  Ben had just lied to me for the first time. Or maybe it was a white lie, meant to placate me. Because I knew that, even with computers two generations older than the ones in front of me, we could have grown more food, and faster. Fewer things would’ve broken down, and coders wouldn’t have spent so much time fixing problems caused by old-time software and rusting hardware. How many families had we failed because we had old tech? How many people had starved because of it?

  Thinking of this, I couldn’t pay much attention to the names of the other scientists in the room. There were so many of them, each at their own station—all of them looking through microscopes, working with samples, and squinting at multiple monitors. As Ben introduced each one to me, I did notice something odd, though. None of them seemed happy to be working there. In the Geos, even when we were hammering out the worst of our problems, people complained and were often grumpy, but we still managed the occasional joke, smile, and moment of silliness. Here, everyone was so serious. They just nodded their heads at me. One or two shook my hand, but no one made conversation. No one was interested in anything about meeting me or chatting with Ben. It was just business.

  How could they not be happy working in a place as beautiful as this? Down in the Geos, we barely had light. Here, they were flooded with it. We had old, rusty tech that took forever to upload or download. Here, everything was instant. The amount of work that could be accomplished here was mind-blowing. And yet, they didn’t seem to appreciate it. I thought that any coder or scientist from the Geos would give a limb to have this equipment. We all would have appreciated this, not to mention we would have been happy working there in the Labs.

  The Elites were unhappy. And, a lot of the time, the Geos people were unhappy. So, who was happy then? My mind immediately went to the kids at play in the forests. The Rejs had fun. Skylar Two had a joy about him when he wasn’t griping about the Farrows—it was something that no one here had, and it made me wonder what the point of this was. Were we all cogs stuck in an everlasting rotation of gears, going round and round year after year…achieving nothing? Were we fooling ourselves into believing our lives had purpose?

  “And this is Nina,” Ben said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “She’s in charge of data entry.”

  Nina was another one in a white coat. She had short hair pushed behind her ears. She looked up for a second, gave me a cursory curl of the lip that couldn’t have been considered a smile, and went back to her terminal.

  Everyone here looked almost identical in their white coats. The few in silver coats actually did look alike. They looked like Max and Dax. Once or twice, I peeked at their name tags, but none were the clones I knew.

  “Who are the clones made from?” I asked Ben when we were out of earshot.

  “They’re not one person, really,” he said, rubbing his chin. “They’re part R.L. and part other founding scientists. They were an unusual experiment. We haven’t continued cloning, so these seventy-something clones are all that’s left. They do the mundane work that the other scientists would rather not handle. They’re quite useful to have around, really.”

  As he finished speaking, a scientist whose name I’d already forgotten came up to him with a question. I watched him as he answered her, talking as if what he’d just told me was perfectly normal. The clones might have been an experiment, but weren’t they just as human as the Elites who were gestated in a lab? They weren’t that much different, and having met two of them, I felt they had different personalities even though they looked the same. It wasn’t fair to treat them as if they were useful pets or robots.

  Ben was so different from me.

  The scientist who’d asked the question took Ben off to another station, leaving me to explore the Labs for myself. I walked over to an empty terminal. My fingers were itching to get onto to the computer and check it out. I glanced around me. Everyone was busy. I sat down in the chair and swished my hand over the keyboard to ‘wake up’ the station.

  The monitor lit up with a “Welcome” sign. “How can I help you?” it asked.

  I squealed and then clamped a hand over my mouth. “Amara, is that you?”

  “Amara is the AI in the Geos,” the voice said. It sounded exactly like Amara to me. “I am SKY, four generations more advanced that Amara.”

  Four generations? We in the Geos were certainly behind the times with our tech. I couldn’t help the growing grumpiness inside me.

  “So, SKY,” I began, “show me …” What did I want to see? And then I thought of it. After eavesdropping on Mara and Lou’s conversation, I knew what I wanted to see. “Show me the progress made on the Cure.”

  “Will do,” the AI said in a cheerful voice. SKY had the ability to vary her (its) tone, unlike Amara, who was as monotoned as they came. SKY was clever.

  The monitor came to life with charts and numbers. I stared at the data. There was so much of it, and much of it I didn’t understand. Using my hands, I swished over several documents and moved things around until I found something I understood.

  There was a chart—a diagram, really, showing the progress of the research done over the last ten years. The early section of it had a lot of ups and downs. My eyes traveled to the right, where the line had begun to flatten out.

  “What are you doing?” Ben’s voice made me jump. I bolted up from my chair as he moved straight to the monitor and shut down the computer. “Who gave you permission to look at our data?” His tone was sharp, and almost cruel.

  “I…didn’t…think it was wrong,” I stammered.

  Ben’s face was shadowed with an anger that shocked me. He stood too close, towering over me. I watched as his chest rose and fell in a quick rhythm. He refused to look me in the eye for a long time, and I knew he was working hard to control his rage. Finally, his breathing steadied.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for. I’ve never brought a visitor to the labs before, and I didn’t tell you that the computers were off-limits. There’s a lot of sensitive data here that can easily be misinterpreted.” He stepped back away from me, folding his arms across his chest. Through slightly gritted teeth, he acknowledged my curiosity, seeing as how I was a coder in the Geos, and computers would be sure to peak my interest
. “You shouldn’t have to worry about what we’re doing here,” he continued, “other than to know that, because of you, we’re closer than ever before to the Cure. What you saw was old data…stuff that happened before you came along.”

  “I get that,” I said flatly. “I just wanted to know how your tech worked.”

  “I know,” he said.

  We stood in silence, both stewing in our anger and letting the emotions hang in the air between us, neither one of us willing to let it go. Then a bell rang, and there was a lot of movement in the lab.

  “Mara’s calling for the cast,” Ben said, his eyes still focused on the now blank screen behind me. “I have to go. I’ll take you to the exit. Can you make your way back to your apartment?”

  “I thought I was going to watch the broadcast,” I said, surprised.

  “Another time,” he said, taking my elbow and leading me out. “It isn’t going to be an exciting episode today. Pretty boring, if you ask me.”

  He led me down the dark corridor, past the wall where we’d been making out just minutes before. How different this return journey was. As the studio door slid open, I crossed the threshold, leaving Ben on the other side. It felt like a giant chasm had opened between us. One lie and one sudden burst of anger could do that, I guessed.

  “I won’t be late,” he said. “I can come by later to show you how the food synthesizer works. If you want.”

  I didn’t meet his eyes, but I nodded. “Sure. That would be nice.”

  The door swished shut, creating an icy breeze in the empty hallway where I stood. After a few seconds, I swung my hand under the sensor. The door reopened, showing that Ben was gone.

  Somewhere in the distance, a voice shouted, “Quiet on set!”

  I headed back to my apartment, knowing that I wouldn’t see Ben for a while.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I sat in my apartment watching the sky change from blue to a pinkish orange hue in the distance. When the sun set completely, I turned to the TV to watch the latest episode of The Cure. Ben had been right. It was boring—one of those episodes where lab assistants pottered about the room, looking busy, while Ben and his family talked in such general terms about their progress that nothing felt new. It was so boring, in fact, that I actually fell asleep before it ended.