by Lumen Reese
Most of me was scared, but part of me was excited, too. Wouldn't it be exciting? I was going to be the hero for once, for the whole family. I would not go hungry anymore. Maybe they would let me write letters home. Maybe they would assign me somewhere nice. Maybe they would even assign me some friends.
The building, for its sinister purpose, was warmly painted, decorated with abstract art. It was a simple lobby with a row of five desks. Only one was occupied; it was approaching ten o'clock and there was only one other person, a man, grimy looking, and he was speaking to the receptionist. I stood and waited, though there were rows of comfortable looking chairs. Each reception desk was encased in a tube of glass; I would suspect bulletproof.
Since the last abortion clinic in New York -which was also the last in the United States- had been starved to death a decade ago by increasing taxes and regulations, Four Quarters had risen to its gargantuan success and taken the place of top ridicule with human rights activists. And so, as abortion clinics had once been, Four Quarters was ripe for shootings and bombings, most the product of a particular human rights group called 'SHEEP'.
There was much debate about where the name SHEEP came from. Some said it was 'Sub-Human Ethics Elimination Project' others said it was simply from a bible quote .
And as for birth control in our over-populated society? That fell to high taxes for having children, and their repossession and selling to work camps if parents could not pay. For some it was incentive enough. But for others, there was no avoiding the pitfalls of parenthood. If you dared bond with your partner on the police force, and if he had the bad fortune to be killed, as had happened to Joey, then you ended up with a Stella. If you dared do something stupid like fall in love and hope to fill your life with what little joy you could find being ground between society's gears, you ended up with an Anna; if you broke a condom you ended up with a Josie; if your brother-in-law died you ended up with a Dean. And if you ended up with all of those things and on top of it had a shit year, you could kiss either one or all of those kids goodbye. It was a cruel thing, and I hated to go behind his back to sell myself, but hopefully he would forgive me when he had all his biological children around at Christmas time.
Our society seemed especially broken when viewed through the lens of Joey Maldonado, who was exactly the type of person who ought to have at least a dozen children; because each one would be putting out more of himself into the world and making it that tiny bit better. And so that fact that he could not manage to keep even three afloat when hit with a bit of struggle was a farce.
“Hello?” the pretty lady at the center reception desk called out to me, and I realized I had drifted off.
The man she had spoken to had sat down with a clipboard and was filling out papers. I approached the desk. “Hello.”
“How can I help you? Are you interested in signing up or are you just looking for information?”
“Uh...” my tongue had swollen to twice its normal size. I had been so set, but there were three weeks left before tax time, and I suppose, I thought it distantly possible we might come up with a less drastic solution before then. Maybe Corso would turn up like some black knight with an incomprehensible amount of savings. Maybe Joey would make some big bust and get some commendation he greatly deserved. Maybe I would win the lottery.
The woman saw my trepidation. “We can put you through some testing, show you where you would go and what you would be doing, all without any commitment from you. After that we can keep you on file for thirty days so you can think about it, talk it over with family, come back if you decide it's what you want.”
I was shocked by the helpfulness of her, and instantly wary. “Really?”
“Completely legitimate, I promise. You wouldn't sign anything except for consent for the medical testing, and release to keep your test results for the thirty days, after which if you haven't come back, it will all be destroyed.”
“And there's no cost for any of this?”
“No. If you're a little bit worried, just read everything carefully to give yourself some peace of mind.”
“Alright.”
She produced a clipboard which she slid to me through a small window at the bottom of the bulletproof glass divider. I accepted it, and turned back to her after a moment. “You're very convincing. I hope they pay you well.”
She smiled and nodded, as if to say, 'I know, and they do'.
I sat down several seats away from the man. The papers she had given me were asking a lot of questions about my family medical history and my own, as well as some questions strangely out of place.
If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
I considered that a moment, and while I wanted to think I would be a lion, a more honest answer would be a mouse. I compromised with a rabbit .
You are locked in a windowless room, what do you do?
The question was so open-ended that it annoyed me, and at first I wrote that I would pick the lock, but realizing it might make me sound criminal and considering I didn't actually know how to pick a lock, I crossed it out. I ended up writing that I would tunnel my way out, since they had provided no other description of the room or its floor.
True or false: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
True, of course.
Could you live without electricity?
I could.
Could you take life to save life?
I could not.
What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?
Sleeping children, safe and happy.
What scares you most?
This.
I turned in my completed forms before the other man had finished his. The woman at the desk fed them into a scanner and waited a moment for something to process, then clicked around and typed a few things. A new, single sheet printed and she handed it through to me.
“Thank you, Stella. There's some more testing, I'm going to send you to the next floor to continue on. The nurse on tonight is named Amy, she's a nice lady. She will have to take a blood sample. She'll send you on to the next floor up after she's finished, where you'll go through some more personality assessment, and then one more floor for a meeting with a counselor, Dr. Foster is the psychologist on site tonight. He'll explain more about the role you will have been fitted to and which of the quarters you will have been selected to enter. This should take no more than an hour or two, depending on you and your brain. After that you can go home. And if you want to stop at any time, you only have to ask.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“The elevator is to your right. Have you been in one before? I don't want you confused by the system we use, it's the European model. We're on the ground floor, which is sort of like floor zero. So to go up a level, you'll want floor one, not floor two.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and made my way over to the grey elevator doors on the side wall. They opened without me pressing a single button, and so I stepped inside. I stepped in and rode it up to the next floor. The doors chimed open and I was standing in a sterile, white room, where another woman sat at another desk. There was no bulletproof glass encasing her, this time. She was heavy set, with a stylish bob in her platinum hair.
“Hello,” she said. “You're Stella, we're expecting you for a few quick tests. This is Amy, she'll be administering those for you.”
There was another woman waiting off the side of the desk. She had her brown hair braided, wore scrubs and walking shoes. They both looked so normal, and smiled at me encouraging yet sympathetic smiles.
“Come with me,” Amy said.
I followed down the hall, to a scale. She weighed me, then took me to smaller sitting room with chairs, a computer, and an exam table covered in white paper. She had me sit there, and the paper crinkled below me. She asked me questions. Did I smoke? Did I drink? Not anymore. Did I get my periods? Sometimes. There she took my blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and finally a blood sample. It took no time at all.
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br /> She thanked me, I thanked her. She told me I could continue to the next floor. Floor two, she reminded me. Not floor three.
I did as I was told and took the elevator up. It was another hospital-seeming hall, where a male technician whose name I did not catch took me into another room where a large white machine occupied most of the space. He pulled a table out of the thing's gaping mouth and had me sit there, while he attached sensors all over my head, neck, chest and arms. He had me lay down and explained that he would sit at the computer in the back and monitor my reactions to a series of images which would flash by too quickly for me to consciously comprehend. Then he pushed a button and the table I was laid on began to recede into the white case of the machine. That was when the fear crept up, but I forced it down and waited for something to happen. The top of the medical-seeming machine lit up, and there were green lights flashing on me. Another minute and images started to flash by. I couldn't pick up much about them; there were many faces combined with scenery, people performing various actions; dancing, fencing, swimming, I thought I saw a butterfly, a sunset, a forest, an ocean. It all felt very surreal, and so probing and uncomfortable, and like I thought a hospital would be.
At least I supposed so; I had never actually been in a hospital in my life. I was born at home; and my mother died for that. She could have gone to the hospital, my father had told me. Maybe they could have saved her. But for payment, I was the only thing they had to give, and they wouldn't sign me up to be given to a work camp as soon as I was deemed fit to work by some agent of the company assigned to our case. Sometimes it was as young as five.
Being in that machine made me wonder what my life would have been if they had gone to the hospital. Maybe my mother would have lived. Maybe together they would have managed to raise the money to pay off the debt before I was sent away. Maybe I would have gotten to grow up with both parents. Maybe that small fact of my mother surviving would have made the smallest change to the world; my father would have been two minutes late for work and he and Joey would have ended up going on a completely different series of calls that night, and he wouldn't have been shot.
But that was a lot of maybes. I probably would have ended up in a work camp. For at least a few years, or until I turned eighteen. The only person I knew who had been sent down the river was Miles Corso. He never spoke of it, certainly not to me, but Joey had filled me in when they became partners. Corso had grown up on a cotton plantation from when he was six until he was sixteen. He had ended up a cop, sure, but before he met Joey, he had been something of a hoodlum, so I had heard. And still, there was a lingering hardness to him. Or, there had been.
The images stopped all at once. The machine spat me back out again and I couldn't get off that table fast enough, or remove the sensors fast enough.
“All your results are in here, now.” The male technician tapped the computer screen. “They're all going to the counselor you'll speak to next.”
I thanked him. He thanked me. I went back to the elevator and went up one more floor. There, one final receptionist, a pretty black woman with dyed red hair, asked me to have a seat in a waiting area.
“Dr. Foster will be with you in a few minutes.” She leaned over the counter and whispered conspiratorially, “It might have to do with your test results. The higher grade you receive the bigger your role would be in the Four Quarters of Imagination, the higher your salary will be. And A-level qualifications usually get passed on to one of the head designers.”
“And I got an 'A'?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“I don't know, it's just a thought. But you're pretty. Are you smart?”
I shrugged.
“I bet you're smart. I bet you got an 'A'.”
“Or maybe I got an 'F',” I said, and the tightness that had been in my stomach all night seemed to reach a peak.
“I doubt it. It does happen, but I've been here almost a year, and I've never seen someone fail. They always need Extras, you know.”
That made me feel a bit better. I thanked her and went to sit down. A few minutes after, the elevator opened and it made me jump. It was only the other man from the lobby stepping inside. He was told to take a seat and he did, a few seats away from me. I felt a sort of bond with him, and we smiled as best we could at each other.
A few minutes more, and one of the doors down a hall similar to the last two floors but decorated warmly like the first, opened. The man who stepped out was middle-aged, had brown hair and an oddly tanned face for a doctor.
“Ms. Grady, I'm Dr. Foster, please come this way, I have someone who'd like to meet you.”
I glanced at the receptionist and she gave me an excited smile.
His office was the same tan as the hallway. He had a large desk covered with pictures of his family, and there was a real flower in a pot i n the corner. I had never seen a real flower before and it held my attention for a moment so that I didn't even notice the man standing there, on the far side of the desk. I didn't notice him until he came around it and offered his hand to me, while Dr. Foster made the introduction.
“Stella Grady, Mr. Jericho Sullivan, head designer and co-founder of the Four Quarters of Imagination.”
He was handsome, to say the least, though maybe a bit too pretty and too clean and too rich -I could feel the richness exuding off of him- and he was just too much of everything for me to let my imagination run away with me. Pale and blonde, and lovely full lips that made him seem cherubic. I knew him immediately because he was the one you always saw regarding Four Quarters; he was the face of the company, and no wonder.
I should have said that it was nice to meet him, but I was too busy thinking about sparing the three kids from taxes for the rest of their lives; of maybe even paying to send them all to college. “Did I get an 'A'?” I blurted out.
Both men laughed at that, and I was left blushing.
Dr. Foster answered, “You got a 'B', Stella.”
“Damn.”
Mr. Sullivan was smiling at me. “I'm here because you pinged something in our system, Ms. Grady.” He had a posh, English voice. “I have a job offer for you. And it's not a role in the Four Quarters. -Although, if that's what you want, we have all your information, and you can proceed with that if you don't like what I have to offer. Will you come up to my office so we can discuss it in private?”
I looked at Dr. Foster, who had what must be my file in front of him at his desk. Then I nodded, though my heart was pounding and my mind was racing. I was sure I had never done anything that should have put me on the radar of one of the most powerful men in the world.
“Alright then. Come with me.”
Mr. Sullivan put a hand on my back, and I was surprised to find I didn't shrink away or cringe at all. Maybe my entire body was too tense. He led me to the elevator, and the pretty receptionist was watching us with interest until the doors closed. Then he passed a card over a panel at the top of the buttons which had previously only displayed the name, Four Quarters of Imagination . It flashed green. He pressed the button for the very top floor.
Chapter Three
The elevator opened into a vast room made almost entirely of glass. Three offices identical in size on either side of the tiny entryway led to a window the size of the wall. While the center office and west-facing office had blinds partly and completely closed along the inner walls, disrupting my view, the east-facing office that Mr. Sullivan led me into featured the largest wooden desk I had ever seen in my life, pristinely polished. On the solid back wall there were full bookshelves. In every corner was a different colored flower; all the same type as the one from the doctor's office, that were climbing high, wrapping themselves around sticks planted in their soil. It made me realize how clean and filtered the air was in the building; that was surely one of the factors in getting those things to grow.
I took a seat he indicated across from him. He noticed me looking at the flowers. “You like those? I grow a lot of them, at home, but these are my favorites. Orchids.”
Mr. Sullivan folded his hands in front of him on the desk. “We have need of a private investigator in the Four Quarters.”
His words calmed me; the frankness of them. But it was still surreal. “Why?”
“We have our own security and law enforcement, yes, but they've failed so far, and we're beginning to worry. My partners and I agreed, we should start looking at other options. Someone who wouldn't draw the attention of the press. An amateur. We've been turned down by several others already. Like all applicants, and as soon as you went into our system, we found everything about you. The article about you in your local paper came up. -We weren't sure it was you, at first, Stella Gracy-.”
“-That's me,” I managed with a smile.
He smiled back. “Right. It's all here, in your file. -I haven't looked, in case we do end up working together. But Dr. Foster thought your profile was promising. He called me. You came looking for a job. I can offer you a better one. If you manage to do what we need, we'll pay you very well.”
“What's the job?”
“I need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I can tell you.”
He produced a paper and I grabbed the pen from him, scribbling my name without reading. Mr. Sullivan smiled.
“Bit risky,” he murmured. “Not knowing what you're signing. You could have asked for a lawyer-.”
I knew just what that meant, and maybe he was right. The place dealt in human lives. But I had a feeling that Mr. Sullivan spoke sincerely and at least as far as our meeting went he would not lead me astray. When it came to people, my hunches were often right. “No. I'm in. Tell me.”
He looked at me for a long moment. I could tell he was as interested in me as I was in what he was offering. “We have a story-jumper in the Four Quarters. It's happened before, we've dealt with it before. This is different. He isn't an Extra going rogue, he's someone who managed to enter the Four Quarters illegally. As a trespasser in a sovereign state, I can authorize you to apprehend him by any means necessary. Although if you could only find him, and alert us to his whereabouts, we could handle the apprehension ourselves.”