The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  He nodded, halfway shrugging, like, Whaddaya gonna do?

  She frowned further. That smile she’d just shot his way might have jumped his heart a little bit. But he had to admit, there was definitely something about that frown.

  “Are you saying that you’re murderous and violent?” she asked slowly.

  Her knuckles whitened where they clasped together and it was that that kept him from making a joke.

  “No, I’m not either of those things. And I’m saying that you would still cull me.” He sighed and scraped a hand over the top of his head. His hair was getting too long. He dragged his hand over his chin. His beard was, too. He sighed again. “Just watch.”

  With a few keystrokes, Kupier activated the program. He considered going to the back of the room, where he wouldn’t have to watch this entire, monstrous thing again. But he thought of those white knuckles of hers, and went to sit on the floor at her feet, leaning back on one leg of her chair.

  This wasn’t going to be easy for her to see.

  Chapter Eleven

  I was sitting like Haven again. The casual cross of one leg over the other, the slight lean to my shoulders, the skeptical eyebrow. I could feel the tension in Kupier’s body where he pressed up against my leg. He was leaning forward, his hands steepled under his chin like a man in a house of worship. I shifted slightly away from the heat of his back.

  The video was a journey through time. It started with memos and documents, correspondence between members of the Authority from almost a hundred years ago.

  ‘Din Io,

  I recognize now the wisdom of your words. There has been trouble here on Enceladus. I have yet to figure out what the leader’s demands are. But you’re right. It would be easier to get rid of him than it has been to work with him.’

  And another.

  ‘The remaining members of the rogue group have been dispatched, in the way that you suggested. They should be reaching Charon in the next month.’

  There was letter after letter between Authority members, confirming exactly what Kupier had told me. That all of these ‘rogue’ members of the cols had been getting shipped off to Charon almost a century ago.

  I frowned as I continued watching. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. I felt the way I did when I was in class on the Station. Mildly interested, slightly bored. Kupier, on the other hand, was reminding me of Dahn. Devouring every bit of information on the screen, immediately clicking it into place amongst everything else he’d ever learned about our world. The only difference was that Dahn believed in the complete righteousness of the Authority, and if this video was any indication, Kupier believed in its complete corruption.

  My heart sped up just a touch when I saw what came next. Letters between these same Authority members, congratulating one another on the success of the extraction program. Admitting to each other that some supplies were going to have to be regularly sent out to Charon. It wasn’t a death sentence for those citizens after all, ha ha ha.

  Interesting.

  And then.

  Letters and emails and personal journals of Authority members all flashed over the screen. They discussed ‘the Extraction’ in great detail. They compared the peacefulness of all of their cols. They realized how much better things were with the rogue citizens removed, not causing dismay and dissension among the other citizens spread over other cols.

  Whoever had fabricated this video had gone to great lengths. None of what I was seeing was difficult to fake, in theory, but everything did look pretty authentic. All the different handwriting… and it must have been a pain in the ass to acquire all these different types of paper that the alleged Authority members had written on. I could almost understand why Kupier was holding all of this in such high esteem. As if it were real.

  And then there was a historical record that I was very familiar with. They hadn’t had to fake this one. Every citizen in the solar system knew this one. It was the first draft of a piece of legislation written by Din Io. It was framed and on the wall of most rooms in the Station. I’d studied it in school.

  ‘We cannot, as a good and just government, sit by and condemn our citizens to a life penned in with lesser individuals. We are an orphan species as humans. Earth is no longer our home. We live scattered and confined. And I find, on this day, that it is the government’s duty to protect the common citizen from the dangerous one. We cannot run free on our inhospitable planets, penned in as we are to our small colonies. It is the government’s job to cull dangerous individuals for the good of our futures, our species, our precious world.’

  There, right in front of me, was the birth of the Culling. The godfather of the idea and the document that had started the legalization of the process. The process that an entire solar system trusted as the best way. More than that, as a way to define our people.

  I cocked my head as I read the familiar words. We’d always been taught that the idea for Culling had been something that had occurred to Din Io like a lightning bolt. That he’d just naturally had the insight into human psychology that was necessary for him to understand what had to be done to keep us all safe.

  But according to these ‘original’ documents from the Ferrymen, it seemed very clear that this Extraction program they’d run to Charon was the thing that had started it all. It had made it very clear that subtracting certain citizens from the population was much better for the society as a whole.

  And then Din Io had come up with the idea of Culling the violent.

  Could it be true? I shifted in my chair, shaking my head to one side as if I could erase the question from my mind. But, of course it wasn’t true. This was a bunch of crap that the people of Charon had scraped together in order to radicalize the Ferrymen. Right. They were an estranged, unhappy people who were trying to blame their problems on the Authority. Every document that I was seeing must have been faked. There was no way to prove that they were real. So there.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and planted my feet flat on the ground. I had the strange desire to bounce one foot and I didn’t like it. I just wanted this to be over.

  The video went on. I saw draft after draft of the legislation until it was perfect. Until there wasn’t a chance that Culling could be considered murder. But there wouldn’t be a Culling for thirty more years. Din Io would never get to see an actual Culling.

  No, the technology wouldn’t be effective enough for a long time after he died. No one was comfortable with executing a Culling until the tech could be trusted completely. And that’s where the video took me next.

  Against my will, I found myself leaning forward just a little bit. There was surprisingly little information available about the development of the integrated tech – it made sense to keep such a powerful tool as secret as possible –– and here was a whole history lesson on the subject.

  Schematics and blueprints scrolled across the screen and my brain did everything it could to interpret the documents as fast as they came across the screen. I could imagine the upside down image of them reflecting against the dark of my eye. Uploading. The second a Datapoint gets their integrated tech, listening becomes more like uploading. But my tech was off, dead silent, and all I could do was try to drink in all the information in front of me.

  Unlike with the first part of the video, I no longer had my own version of the facts to rely on. And, unlike with the first part of the video, this wasn’t, on its own, damning for the Authority. This was just the slow and methodical advancement of scientists and engineers. Maybe that was why this portion of the presentation seemed a bit more believable than the rest. The progression of the integrated tech from prototype to prototype looked real to me.

  I shifted in my seat. If this is real, then could the rest be real?

  Ridiculous. I shook my head. If my tech were activated right now, it would be informing me of all the ways this video had been hacked and doctored. There would be no question of whether or not the Ferrymen had altered this information. So,
I just needed to keep my head on straight here. This was all manufactured, fake.

  The video took me through all the supposed pilot programs for Datapoints. I winced, but didn’t look away as I watched videos of the first integration processes. I’d seen a few stills in the one lesson we’d had on the topic, but never videos before. And those photos were on the wall of the Station, a way of honoring the first Datapoints to attempt to integrate more than a piece of the history.

  I say attempt because they didn’t successfully integrate right away. None of the original four Datapoints to attempt the pilot program survived the integration process.

  They started from scratch. Redeveloped the tech. With the next group, it worked. And with the next group, it worked even more smoothly.

  All this I already knew. I glanced down at Kupier, his face next to my knee, lit blue by the screen.

  And when I looked back up, my stomach tightened reflexively.

  Because there was a face I recognized, but perhaps thirty years younger. Jan Ernst Haven. But with black hair. The color difference was startling. It had never once occurred to me that he hadn’t always been silver.

  Then came letter after letter. His first correspondences with other members of the Authority. It was his first few years, and he was considered an upstart.

  I leaned forward in my chair. It looked like…

  He was attempting to convince the other Authority members that the parameters of who got culled should be expanded.

  ‘I find myself wondering about this word, violence. It’s one that we hold almost sacred, as it is who we have deemed necessary to cull. But unrest, dissatisfaction, resistance, aren’t these a certain kind of violence, as well? We are here to bring peace to our citizens. Their quality of life is in our hands. Are we not abandoning them at the eleventh hour? Are we not condemning our people to live alongside those who, though perhaps not physically, may end the lives of those around them through rogue leadership and unrest?’

  I squinted at the words. That didn’t make sense at all. He was suggesting that those who didn’t agree with the Authority should be culled? I wracked my brain. I’d never heard him say a single thing like that. I glanced down at Kupier again. He was staring rigidly at the screen.

  My heart galloped in the cave of my chest. Ridiculous, I told myself. I knew Haven personally, and he’d never suggested anything even remotely like this. So why do you believe it? That small, terrible voice asked me. I didn’t believe it. All of this was doctored to look a certain way. There was no reason to believe that Haven had wanted to engineer the program in order to cull whoever the hell he wanted to cull.

  I slipped down an inch in my chair, my knee pressing Kupier’s back, and I realized it was because I was sweating. I wiped my palms on the legs of my pants.

  Next was letter after letter from Authority members, all of them rejecting the ideas that Haven had brought up. There was outright condemnation of the ideas. In fact, there was outright condemnation of the original Extraction at all.

  One Authority member wrote:

  ‘Though the idea itself gave birth to our greatest societal achievement, the Culling, we must move on from the idea of Extraction, as it was a cruel and expensive practice. A stain on our history.’

  So, if it were true, that they’d really extracted people to send to Charon, they didn’t want the citizens to know. And they didn’t want to make the same mistake of doing it again.

  I watched as more very familiar images came to the screen. Brain scan after brain scan. Brains to be culled and brains to be left alone. I could recognize them with no trouble. And the sight of them was strangely soothing to me. I’d spent years studying them, after all. Culling was my life’s work. My entire world.

  And then. There were images of code. Some of it written in a hand that looked strangely familiar to me. Other parts of the code were inputted into a dummy computer, in an attempt to see what they would turn out. I was shown draft after draft of one program, attempting to be written from scratch.

  No. I leaned forward in my chair. This wasn’t a program that was being written. This was a virus.

  I frowned. I recognized that handwriting.

  I watched as, little by little, I could follow the arc of the evidence being presented to me. This virus was apparently being inserted into the Authority database. The very thing that synced with all of our integrated tech.

  But what did the virus do? I watched in sickened fascination as my question was almost immediately answered.

  We were back to the brain scans. I recognized them as coming from people needing to be culled. They were violent and prone to murder. But then there were different brain scans in the screen next to the first. These ones I didn’t recognize. I’d never seen ones like these.

  The red on these brain scans were in strange places, suggesting activity in different parts of the brain. I didn’t know what to make of them. What did they mean? And almost as if I’d asked the question out loud, words appeared in that same handwriting, below the many images of the scans. Rebellious. Stubborn. Defiant. Artistic. Rogue. And then there was one word underlined five times. Rebel.

  I leaned forward. So these were brain scans for someone with these traits? How was it that I’d never seen one before? I knew that people like that had to exist. And if they existed, then I would have come across their brain scans at some point in the hundreds of simulations I’d undergone.

  But then I sat straight back in my chair as I realized that the virus had initiated on the screen. The two brain scans were overlaid, the violent and the rebel, one over the other. The rogue brain scan disappeared, absolutely dissolved into the violent brain scan.

  I made a noise as if I’d been slapped.

  This virus made rogue brain scans appear to be violent? Murderous?

  My father.

  The thought choked me. Murderous.

  No. Rogue.

  I felt a rising tightness in my throat, in my head. I wasn’t getting enough air. And then it hit me whose handwriting that was. I knew exactly whose it was. I’d seen it a hundred times on the desk in his office. Jan Ernst Haven’s.

  I glanced down at Kupier. His face still blue and his eyes still forward. Kupier believed this. Wholeheartedly. Enough to lead people into battle over it. Enough to risk his life. To fight the Authority. And he was sharing all this with me because he wanted me to believe it, too.

  Murderous.

  Rogue.

  I slammed my eyes shut for a second as my brain rearranged all the books on the shelf. As a Datapoint, I had to ask myself one question. Does this make sense?

  And the truth? The truth was that part of me, some small, defiant part of me, wanted it to make sense. I wanted a world where my father wasn’t secretly violent and murderous. I wanted a world where Kupier wasn’t on the side of truth, or morality.

  But this video? It was asking way too much of me. There were so many ways this information could have been altered.

  I felt a horrible relief leak through me. Relief because I realized that I didn’t believe the things I’d just seen. This didn’t make sense. I’d never seen a single shred of evidence that there was a virus in the culling program. I’d never heard Haven say a single thing about culling anyone who wasn’t violent.

  The Ferrymen were wrong. I didn’t believe this. Especially not the part about culling was coldblooded murder. No. Culling was good for society. Necessary. And no one was culled unless they were murderous.

  I'd been freaked out there for a second. Of course, it was a lot of information to digest all at once, but ultimately, it was a tremendous relief to know that I didn’t have to turn my world upside down completely. That I didn’t have to reorder every belief I’d held since birth.

  I looked down at Kupier, at the tilt of his neck as he scraped a hand over his face, and I was big enough to admit that for one second, just one second, it had all made sense to me. His side of things. Because my father had been culled. Murderous, they’d called him. My fath
er the murderer. That had never once seemed real to me.

  My father, the rogue? That I could believe. And part of me wanted to.

  But it wasn’t true. And it was time I got used to it. My father had been murderous. I just didn’t know it. The Ferrymen were wrong. Kupier was wrong.

  If he’d been expecting tears, or for Glade to stumble from her chair, for her to yell or rage or despair, well, he would have been sorely disappointed.

  But he hadn’t been expecting any of those things. Because he knew Glade.

  So when Kupier flicked off the screen and turned to face her, he wasn’t surprised when she just raised her eyebrows at him, looking at him dully.

  “Very interesting stuff you’ve got there.”

  Kupier nodded, eyeing her. He wished for x-ray vision. He wanted to see the tremble of her heart in her chest, the whirring blood in her veins. She looked bored, unamused, and skeptical. But he would have bet the Ray that, on the inside, she was scrambling to keep her world in order. He said nothing and she watched him carefully.

  “Is there more?” she asked. “Or can we head home now?”

  Again, he said nothing. He merely reached out to take her hand, pressing his palm against hers.

  He didn’t want to push her. Not tonight. But time was running out. They were practically counting down until the next Culling. And he could see that he needed to test her trust for him. He’d worked so hard to build the bridge between them. But what good was it unless he walked out onto it?

  “Yes.” He spoke quietly and reminded himself of Luce again. “There is more. Do you remember the first question you ever asked me?”

  Glade shifted. Her face serious, but her hand still clutched in his. “I asked you why you'd brought me to the Ray."

  He slid his hand up to her wrist and slowly, gently, traced his fingers up the tech that was embedded there. “Because of this.”