Creators (A Contributor Trilogy prequel novella)

by Nicole Ciacchella

  "Now, if there aren't any further interruptions, maybe we can actually get down to business," Sylvie said, her tone back to its normal bland neutrality. She grabbed the hem of her jacket and tugged it with one quick, vicious yank before sinking down into her chair and beginning the business of deciding who was to live and who was to die.

  Evening

  For the first time in his life, Liang truly paid attention to what he was eating for dinner. Even though food had occupied his thoughts night and day for years, he had always taken the food on his own table for granted. Once upon a time, he had even believed the variety and quality was merited, that his family was performing such an important service for humankind that they surely deserved to enjoy some of the fruits of their labors. Now, every bite he took tasted like dust.

  "What's wrong, Li?" his sister Mei asked. Their dinner had been largely silent; typical, ever since the death of their father. So typical that Liang had been certain his little sister wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

  Pushing his bowl aside with a sigh, Liang rubbed his forehead and considered what he would say to her. His first instinct was to lie. Mei was only sixteen years old. Surely that was too young to burden her with the knowledge of what was to come.

  But, then again, she was hardly a child. Mei was already being groomed for a leadership position with Zhang Agritech. If Liang was to die before he could marry and have children, Mei would be expected to replace him, which meant she would need to understand the business as well as he did.

  Still, he hated having to be the one to strip the last vestiges of innocence from her. He wanted so desperately for her to have the sort of carefree youth he had never experienced, and his instinct was to cling to his utterly futile wishful thinking.

  "Things are…they're getting worse," he began. His fatigue was evident in his voice, and he fell silent, unsure how to continue.

  "Do you mean the decreasing crop yields?" Mei asked, and he looked up at her in surprise, causing her to make a face at him. "Did you think I didn't know about that?"

  "I had hoped that maybe you didn't."

  Now she looked angry. "Why do you insist on treating me like a baby? If something happens to you, I have to be prepared to—"

  "I know, I know," he said, holding his hands up in surrender. "Trust me, Mei Mei, I'm very aware of the responsibilities heaped on you."

  "I didn't mean that," she sighed. She pushed her own bowl aside and folded her hands on the table, looking up at him with knit brows. "What I meant was, don't you think I have a right to know?"

  "Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't want you to know." Liang stood, pushing his chair back so abruptly it fell over with a clatter. He nudged it carelessly out of his way and began pacing. "I don't want to know it myself."

  "There isn't enough food, is there?" Mei asked quietly. The angry expression had faded, replaced by one of concern, and Liang knew she was worried not just about the decrease in the food supply, but also about him.

  "No, there isn't," he admitted. In a way, it was a relief to unburden himself at last. He felt lighter for not having to conceal the knowledge any longer, but rather than making him feel better, this made him feel worse. How could he be relieved to know that his sister would now have to be as burdened by the awful knowledge as he was?

  Mei picked up her napkin and toyed with it, winding it around her fingers. "I suspected as much. I've been doing calculations, and I knew the numbers weren't adding up."

  Liang paused in his pacing and smiled ruefully at his sister. "I should have known you'd start calculating."

  "I've also been calculating the yield from the hydroponics, and I know those numbers don't add up either. So what next?"

  Righting his chair, Liang dropped into it, suddenly exhausted. "We step up production on the domes and activate them ahead of schedule."

  He sat quietly, watching the emotions play over his sister's face as she worked out what this meant. It seemed she, like him, was trying to reject what was becoming apparent.

  "So, that means…" she began, but her voice faltered. She bit her lower lip, and tears welled in her eyes.

  "It means that the leadership team has to do an evaluation of all our Contributors. It means we have to place every last one of them on a scale, from necessary to dispensable," he said, the words bitter on his tongue.

  His sister stifled a sob and turned her head away from him. He looked away as well, unable to bear her pain. It reminded him too much of his own.

  "But…but how… What are you going to say to people?" she finally asked, breaking the heavy silence.

  "Nothing. Nothing at all. There will be no announcement to the public of what we're doing. Instead, people will be moved into the domes in stages, and after the last stage, the domes will be sealed. And I'll have to live with the knowledge that I condemned thousands of people to death without saying a word to them."

  "You can't be serious! The Job Creators can't just keep people in the dark like that!" Mei cried, rising from her seat.

  "Think about what would happen if we told them." He softened his voice, trying to get her to calm down. Her shoulders tensed and then collapsed, and she sank into her chair.

  "But it's not fair." Her protest was a mere whisper, and Liang responded to it with a bitter laugh.

  "Not fair? It's cruel, is what you mean. We're leading people to believe we're conducting more dome tests and then, when the doors are permanently sealed and the realization of what's happening to them sinks in, those of us who were lucky enough to have a ticket to the inside will go about our business as if millions of people aren't dying right outside our doors."

  Mei sobbed, and Liang was stricken that he'd spoken so baldly. He had desperately wanted to protect his sister, then he had given her the truth in such harsh terms. But was there any gentle way of delivering such news?

  They sat silently for a long time, their food untouched—which only served to make Liang feel even guiltier. Here they were, the world on the brink of a famine that would kill billions, and he was wasting food because he didn't feel like eating. The thought made him sick to his stomach and he doubled over, wrapping his arms around his midsection.

  "You know, I used to be so jealous of you," Mei said softly, her voice startling him out of his miserable reverie. "I used to wish that I was the oldest, that I could be the CEO of Zhang Agritech. But now…now that I know what's going on, Li, I…I don't even know what to say. I wouldn't want anyone to be in the position you're in, least of all you."

  "Someone has to make the decisions," Liang said, clutching his stomach.

  "That's the really horrible part, isn't it?"

  Ranking

  Three months: that was how much time Liang had to get everything in order before the domes were sealed for good. He was operating on zero sleep. Even if he'd wanted to go to bed, there was too much urgent information to wade through, too many last-minutes conversations with the heads of other Creators, for him to have any time for rest. Now, he had to go before Zhang's leadership team and announce the terrible news to them.

  "Are you all right, sir?" his assistant, Morris, asked. Liang felt strange about Morris calling him sir; after all, Morris was older than Liang. A vivid picture of Bao's disapproving sneer flickered through Liang's mind, and he could practically hear his father berating him for questioning Zhang's protocol.

  "I'm just a little tired," Liang said, glancing at his assistant. Morris would be moving, though he did not yet know. Liang was profoundly uncomfortable to find himself thinking like this, and he wondered if from now on he'd view each person he came across as having a sort of sign over their head that said either "in" or "out". He had already started making a mental list of who would move, and he knew he would have to include the assistants of each member of the leadership team. Fortunately, Morris, unlike some of the assistants, was single and had no children, which meant he would only require one slot on the list.

  Have I seriously been reduced to tr
ying to calculate the number of people the way I'd calculate inventory?

  The thought made him sick. He didn't doubt that some Creators would have far less of a problem with this than him. For them, everything was about numbers, and they wouldn't lose any sleep over treating people the same way they treated equipment.

  "Should I get you a latte?" Morris asked, breaking into Liang's thoughts.

  Grimacing, Liang shook his head. A latte was his usual meeting accessory, but now he calculated the cost of such an extravagant beverage. Coffee was so rare that the cost of one pound was enough to supply a family of four with food for at least a week. Then there was the milk, which could be given to one of the starving children he often saw roaming the streets, the children who weren't fortunate enough to be born into a Contributor family—or even into a family of laborers, who could at least scrape by. The children who would be locked outside of the domes. He wanted to open his mouth and scream until his throat was raw, but instead he stood, adjusted his suit, and accepted the reader Morris handed him before heading to the conference room.

  As he approached, Liang heard the low buzz of chatter but, as soon as he entered, all conversation ceased, and everyone stared at him intently. Chances were they had already figured out what was going on. These were men and women who had access to almost all the same data he did. They knew what a sudden meeting between the heads of the Creators meant.

  Liang nodded to them, murmuring their names as he passed. Once he had taken his seat, he nodded to Morris, who locked the door. Startled, the team exchanged alarmed looks before taking their seats as well.

  "I'm sure yesterday's meeting was the source of much speculation," Liang began. He was too exhausted, too heartsick to dissemble, and he decided to cut directly to the chase. "And I have no doubt that some of you may already have an idea of what I am about to tell you, but for those of you who are about to be blindsided, I apologize.

  "As you all know, we have continuously lost ground when it comes to our yields. I regret to tell you that, despite our best efforts, we've reached the point of systemic collapse. We will have to retreat to the domes, and we will have to do it in the next three months."

  It was as if a bomb went off in the room. Everyone began talking and shouting at once, and a shell-shocked looking Morris hastily lowered the blinds, blocking the soundproofed room from any idly curious eyes.

  "No! You can't do this! Our R&D team is on the brink of something, and—" Sheila, his director of research and development began, but she was interrupted by Ali, the Chief Operations Officer.

  "You've been saying that for months."

  "Are you accusing me of something? We've been working night and day…" Her voice rose as she half-stood. Her expression suggested she was about to leap over the table and begin throttling Ali.

  "We're not going to do this," Liang said icily. Though he spoke at his usual volume, all conversation immediately ceased, and for the first time he felt like maybe the others were taking him entirely seriously. "We will not be at one another's throats. We are going to do this as a team. We will not waste time flinging blame around, and it's pointless to do so because we are all at fault here, every one of us in this room, as is everyone in every conference room in every Creator headquarters."

  "But, Liang, please, I know we can do this. Give me just a little more time. My team will come up with something, I swear," Sheila pleaded, her expression anguished.

  "We don't have any more time," he told her, as gently as he could. "Of course we need to continue with our research, but if we don't act now, we jeopardize our ability to feed even a limited number of people. We can't risk that."

  She dropped her head into her hands, and Liang looked away. "I don't need to tell you all that we have a lot to do. Morris has compiled graphs breaking overall staffing down into percentages by division, so our first step will be to determine if those proportions are on the mark. We'll then have to scale each department down, so that we don't exceed dome capacity."

  Liang nodded at Morris, who sent the graphs to the others' readers.

  "The first graph illustrates the total number of slots allocated to Contributors and their families. We will be ranking the performance of every Contributor to determine their priority for relocation. The second shows the number of slots reserved for the support staff that will keep the domes functional, broken down by number of environmental techs, shopkeepers, maintenance staff, et cetera."

  As soon as he'd finished speaking, the arguments began, growing louder with each minute that passed. After sixty completely unproductive minutes, Liang shoved his reader aside and growled, "We don't have time for you to be fighting to secure your own position. This isn't about vying for power, this is about determining the best possible combination in order to ensure that we will be equipped to carry on our vital work."

  "You're asking us to decide who lives and dies," Sheila said, staring at him with a piercing gaze. "It shouldn't surprise you that we're all eager to ensure it's our division that will have the fewest number of cuts."

  The others looked shocked, even though Liang suspected Sheila had said what several of them had been thinking.

  "If you need to make me the bad guy to get yourselves through this, then go ahead," Liang said, meeting Sheila's eyes. They stared at one another for several long seconds before she looked away.

  "I didn't mean—" she mumbled.

  "I don't care what you meant," he said. He looked around the room, meeting each pair of eyes. "What I care about is making sure that Zhang Agritech will be balanced enough to continue to innovate and support the populations inside the domes. We've already failed the world at large. I will not stand by and watch as we fail those who are fortunate enough to make it into the domes.

  "We now have slightly more than two thousand hours to get everything done. We will reach an agreement as to the numbers in the next hour, and then we will move on. The first wave of essential staff will move into the dome at the end of the week. They will be largely comprised of Sheila's staff, which will enable them to continue on with their projects and ensure they have everything they need before the dome is sealed. If anyone else has any objections they'd like to voice, now is the time."

  The others stared back at him with hollow, bewildered gazes. Swallowing against his suddenly bone-dry throat, Liang nodded.

  "Then let's get started."

  Numbers

  "Research and development is the backbone of our industry!" Sheila shouted, her face crimson.

  "Fat lot of good all that development will do you if you don't have the technicians around to do the actual fabrication!" the head of production shouted back.

  "And just how do you think you're going to do the fabrication if you don't have anyone around to maintain the machines?" Liang's maintenance chief asked them both.

  "I don't suppose anyone will be making anything without people to manage the supply chain," the head of procurements added sarcastically.

  "Enough!" Liang roared. He clamped both hands on his head and squeezed. His skull felt like it would split apart. "No one will be happy with the end results here. Move along."

  "If we don't find the right balance—" Sheila began, but Liang slashed a hand through the air.

  "If I have to, so help me, I will kick every single one of you out of this conference room and Ali and I will make the decisions without your input."

  That shut everyone up. They all stared at him, mouths agape. Though several looked skeptical, the look on his face must have convinced them because the skepticism was soon replaced by worry.

  "We're done arguing over the numbers," Liang announced. "We've been staring at these figures all day, and we all know by now that this is the best it's going to get."

  "Liang's right, we're done here," Ali interjected. "Sheila, you'll stay here with us so we can begin ranking your staff. The rest of you will go back to your divisions and start gathering data. I want complete and up-to-date records of every last person on your staff and th
eir family members. I also want numbers on the amount of machinery needed, as well as critical stocks for immediate transport. Each department will spend the next two days conducting a full inventory, and I want every number, down to the last stylus."

  There were no further protests as everyone gathered their things and began hurrying from the room. Liang knew it wouldn't be long before the rumors started flying, and he fervently hoped he could control the leaks as tightly as possible. There would be no way of keeping this entirely secret, but they could not afford mass hysteria.

  When everyone was gone and Ali had shut the door, Sheila laid her head on the conference table and began to sob. "I'm not sure I can do this," she gasped, the anguish in her voice causing tears to rise in Liang's own eyes.

  "You can. And you will," Ali said quietly, laying a hand on Sheila's shoulder. "We all will. We have no other choice."

  "Why us?" Sheila asked, raising her tear-streaked face to look at Ali and Liang. Her voice was pleading, small. Like a child railing against the injustice of life.

  "Because that's the way things worked out. This has become our burden to bear," Liang replied.

  Sheila wiped her tears away with the side of her hand. "Maybe…maybe I'll resign. You can find someone else, and I'll just…"

  Liang reached over and covered her hand with his. "You can't run from this, Sheila, any more than I can. What good will that do anyone?"

  "I just don't think I can live with it," she replied, forcefully grabbing her hair with her free hand. Liang winced. "Have you thought about that? Have you asked yourself how you'll sleep at night, once you're safe in that dome?"

  "I'm not thinking that far ahead," Liang said frankly. "Right now, I'm just taking things one step at a time. It's enough to deal with the present. I'm not ready to think about the future yet."