“I didn’t forget. But they aren’t going to erase me like they did him.” I turn and start moving out of the small space between the chairs. I’m too close to Marcus here, and the cameras are always watching.
“You don’t know that.”
Turning back, I snap. “First of all, they haven’t been successful at taking your memories of your predecessor yet. And because of these,” I wave my hand at the streaming chairs, “I remember him too. As long as you keep streaming with me like this, I won’t forget.”
Marcus, ever the patient one, pushes out a loud sigh. “Don’t get angry. I just don’t want you to end up like him, with a brain like scrambled eggs. And if we forget what they did to him, we’re more likely to get careless.”
“Say you’ll keep streaming with me and it won’t happen. This is what keeps me from losing it, Marcus.” I’ve never actually stated my reason so plainly before, and I fear it is too much.
As he looks down at me in this dark room, his face is cast entirely in shadow, but surging in his expression is a hunger that makes my stomach cinch like a cell in a hypertonic solution.
“All right. Let me know when you need another round. Let’s go eat.”
Two
Attention all Orders. Convene in the Senate Chamber at 8:00.
Marcus, slouching in one of the grey armchairs across from me, moans at the conclusion of this announcement in our ears. “I was about to head back to the lab,” he says to the room.
Hardly any of us have slept since we got our lab assignments yesterday.
“We were all just in the Caf. What couldn’t they tell us in there?” Maxima V, who had been completing a number puzzle on her tablet, raises her hand outward at the last word.
Maxima sits beside me on the couch in our domus living room. The people who designed this Research Center created room for thirty Orders, each Order containing sixteen people. Thirty identical sets of dormitories with identical neutral color schemes intended to soothe our busy minds.
“All right, let’s go.” The silky voice of our head domus nurse, Dr. Yamaguchi, spills into the room as she exits her office, which doubles as her sleeping quarters and lies adjacent to our living room. We’ve grown up here, like all the Order members, and this woman has been the closest thing to a mother we’ve ever known. We all stand and follow her like ducklings.
Her long, black hair snaps toward the door as she shoos us out of our domus. The staff are the only people who actually have hair around here. And I can never stop staring at hers, the way it peels softly away from her face like the curtains on our windows when they’re open in the spring.
Our domus is the only place with soft things like couches and curtains—all ivory and grey and beige—and actual wooden floors. Every time my feet step from the endless tile of the hallways and labs onto the wood, a breath escapes. Home. This is what home feels like, we are told.
These quarters, the living area and our sixteen identical bedrooms, stay the same as we age. All Orders start and continue in the same domus—our lives are a product of science and a sacrifice to it. We were born here; we will die here. We have been given an advantage over every other human being—super intelligence. Our lives are payment.
They call this a fair exchange. Much is expected, after all.
For a brief moment, I wonder what will happen, years from now, when some of our Order members die. Will this domus remain occupied until the last one drops? As of now, the First Order is twenty-eight years old. They still have a long time to go before natural death becomes a threat.
“Why an evening Senate? Why all of us? What is it that they can’t tell us in domus?” asks Flavius, a blond who works in the agriculture lab—ag lab to them—with test animals.
“We don’t have domus meetings on Mondays,” injects Marinus with his idiotic monotone. His square head is always bent over his tablet, which he folds reluctantly now.
Aware that Yamaguchi is near the door, I mutter, “Thank you, Mari, we know.” I think they forgot to connect some of his genetic material when they were crafting him. His genes cannot be as beautiful as mine. Or Prudentia’s. She is a work of art.
Pru’s ebony skin reflects the light in a way mine never will. My skin, just dark enough to make it impossible to guess what heritage the creators sourced for my looks, is still not dark enough to be shiny like Prudentia’s. For some reason, they still let us look different. Big mistake, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be such a code breaker if Marcus didn’t have those eyes or that jaw. My bet is that a few Orders from now, you won’t be able to tell the girls from the boys—which I think is the intention with the shaved heads. I pull my stare from Pru’s polished arm and stretch as I stand. Marcus is beside me.
The rush of blood to my head at the sudden movement sparks a brain flash.
“Crap,” is all I manage to utter before I’m lost in it.
The air in my lungs hisses out, and I grab onto Marcus to keep from falling over as images begin to sail past my open eyes in rapid succession. Ten seconds. Twenty. Finally, the images recede and I’m left panting, blood hot and head heavy.
Marcus stands beside me, frowning.
Blinking at him in confusion, reality zooms back into focus. I jerk my hand away from his shoulder, nodding toward the camera over the doorframe. “Don’t want to make Daddy mad.”
His mouth turns down even further. “No, and neither do you.” He always reprimands me when I use that little epithet for the Director. “That was a long one,” he says, referring to the brain flash.
The Center does so much meddling in our brains that we are left at the mercy of this unexplained side effect: brain flashes. We call them flashes because that’s what they feel like. The technical term just doesn’t do them justice: simple partial seizures. They aren’t all that simple—they’re a result of sharing a brain with other humans—and they feel pretty all-encompassing, not partial, though we don’t lose consciousness like in a grand mal. So, I guess there’s that.
We are America’s most expensive, most observed long-term science experiment. All this science and brilliance in one building yet no one can fix the flashes. Nothing the Director or his minions can do can make them stop. They are the unforeseen, incurable curse of our brilliance.
When the outsiders see us have these—on screen or in person—they have little panic attacks of their own. Call us gen-eng freaks, or other delightful things.
“They’re always worse after streaming,” I say. The swimming nausea that accompanies brain flashes makes me press and curl my fingers across my middle.
“So, it didn’t help?” Marcus asks, referring to our simul stream from before dinner.
“It did help—I’m not forgetting what I look like as easily now. But you know nothing helps the flashes.”
Pru still lingers in the room, at the end of the line filing out of the door. Her tablet is stuffed into her lab coat pocket, a coat she seems wedded to now that she’s official up in nanotech, a branch of the microtech lab.
Marcus jerks his head at me. His lifted eyebrows and tilted chin seem to be asking if I’m okay to walk yet. For a moment my eyes hang on his muscular chest, pushing out against his regulation black shirt. His extra hours in the Rat have been less helpful for my obliging Order code. Then I nod and follow.
“Let’s see what this is all about.” His words are innocuous enough, but in them is the warning that he cannot say to me out loud: the warning that our days of rebellion against the Codex are ending.
Staring at him out of the corner of my eye, I hope I say everything that’s on my mind right now, but I’ve never been as good at nonverbal communication as he is.
The entire Fifth Order heads for the elevator bay, but I instinctively turn toward the stairs, nearly crashing into Felicia V, who stands hunched up in the middle of the hallway with an apparent brain flash of her own—we always get more of them early in the week, after our Sunday stream. Pru and Maxima head for the stairs with me. I like to think they take the stai
rs for the same reason I do: to prove I am capable of acting on my own. Marcus elects to take the elevator, but his eye contact lasts a second longer than it should as I walk away.
In the stairwell, Pru whispers behind me, “I see you.”
The muscles in my neck quiver like I’ve smelled formaldehyde. This is not the first time Pru has dropped a hint that what’s going on with Marcus and me is getting a little too obvious. She sees it in my head, of course, and his, during our streams. But those are so confusing that it’s hard to pin down where emotion is coming from and where it is directed. But to see our code-breaking in person—that’s different.
Thankfully, Maxima doesn’t hear Pru’s comment over the echoes of our footsteps. I nod, knowing Pru registers this from behind me. At Level Seven, we peel off through a heavy door that clinks as it opens and clanks as it shuts. Cautious, I look at Pru, and my heart sinks at the stony reprimand written on her face.
“Watch it,” she says.
She frowns and edges past me to where the Senate doors are propped open. With a huff, I step up to follow her.
From behind her shoulder, I whisper, “They can’t have all of me, I won’t let them. You can’t tell me you don’t have secrets, too.”
Appearing not to have heard me, she waits as the bottlenecked crowd inches through the open doors.
“Don’t be a fool, Valeria. You’re putting us all at risk with your little game.”
Entering the funnel-shaped chamber, the buzz of unmonitored conversation rises around me. With so many of us in one place, the microphones can’t distinguish all of our words. Bliss is written in the cadence of the voices. The children from the younger Orders laugh so freely.
Prudentia has slipped ahead of me by a few steps and is now entering the row for our Order. I guess I won’t get the last word in.
My seat is far from Marcus on our row, but because of the curve, I can still see him. He glances at me as I take my seat. I’m not sure why Pru thinks my actions have any ramifications for her. I pointedly glare at her, but she is staring at the stage below with a cold indifference. The stage is already darkened. It is 7:59.
Someone shuts the chamber doors and the lights above us dim. A man in a charcoal suit emerges from beneath us into a shaft of light on the stage. The Director. Daddy, as I like to call him. My teeth grind against each other.
“Thank you, Order members, for coming to this impromptu meeting.”
Like we had a choice.
“I have called you here to relate some crucial new information. The faculty Senate met during dinner, as you know, and we have made an amendment to our Codex, which we will send to your tablets after the conclusion of this meeting.” A noticeable ruffle in the audience. “It is now no longer appropriate to stream simultaneously with anyone outside of full-Order streams. We see that this creates room for an imbalance in memory representation among Order members. To whom much is given …”
“… Much is expected.” Each voice lifts the phrase into the air. The meeting is over, just like that.
I steal a glance at Marcus. His elbows rest on his knees, his eyes study the floor. Inside of me, things are bursting and flaming and whizzing and churning. I want to scratch something, rip something, or bite something. So they have found a way to bleach me bland again, suck the color out of me that Marcus adds. I snap my teeth together a few times, the noise lost in the general hum of whispered reactions. Daddy is gone, disappeared again beneath us.
Maxima is moving beside me, standing. I rise and follow, clenching my fists and biting my lips, an addict who knows her drug has just been stolen.
Three
The sea of people is maddening. So slow! They are pushing me toward the open double doors, but with all the speed of molasses. I can’t even bring myself to turn around and look at Marcus. I know he must be there, only a few steps away, but he’s forever lost to me now. They don’t know what they’ve just done.
Finally, surging through the double doors and back into the wide central hallway of the Center, I sprint for the stairs while the elevators cram full of Order members. I need air! The gardens are only a few floors up. I take two stairs at a time, breaths bursting.
The Center’s garden straddles the entire fifteenth through eighteenth floors. Though it is nature in a can, as I constantly remind myself, it is the one place I can go that the cameras can’t see me. And I need to be invisible right now. Jogging through the vast arched entry into the green space, I run straight to my spot, dead center of this manmade sanctuary.
The air in here smells mossy, damp, and sweet. Typically, this smell comforts me, but today it makes my nostrils flare in annoyance. Slowly, I close my eyes, breathing deeply, then flick them open again. Looking ahead, I cannot see walls, only trees and a trickling stream and dim moonlight, and if I don’t think about it, I almost do feel like I’m outside. The city outside has less nature than this room, but at least there are no walls.
As part of our ever-programmed life, the Fifth Order has two hours in here once a month. No nurses with us, no cameras, and no requirements. Two hours to run my hands over the grass that never wilts, to touch the flowers that always hold dew, to climb the trees that are big enough to hold my weight, to close my eyes and breathe the air and dream that I am free.
That is why I came here now, to have that dream again.
I reach my favorite place in the garden, a small flat patch underneath an oak. This tree was no doubt brought in from some forest miles away. My mentor in the Fourth Order, Valerius IV, loves big trees. That’s his entire line of work here. He works in the ag labs and has started a rescue operation for big trees. There aren’t that many left, and he has people all over the country on the hunt for the last of the big trees, the old trees, before people chop them down for butcher blocks or kitchen cabinets. He has brought many of them, thanks to his ingenious way of moving them complete with their roots and the earth around them, to a sanctuary he established a few miles from the Center. People pay a fine sum to walk among the oldest living things on earth. But the trees, too, are touched by our science, and so the haters, the ones who think of us as devil spawn, have tried to burn down the sanctuary, just out of spite.
They hate us because we are better than they will ever be. I don’t suppose I blame them.
My oak is broad and reaches all the way to the sky. I slip off my shoes and press my toes into the soft dirt beneath my tree, pretending that it isn’t hovering fifteen stories above the rest of the earth. Even though no camera watches me now, I know that the sensors on my skull are still active, always sending my thoughts and emotions to the server so they can be shared with my Order during our streams. Never am I truly alone, all by myself in my own head. I lean against the trunk of the oak and close my eyes. My palms flatten against the rough bark behind me, enjoying the feeling of a surface unlike any other in this Center full of smooth glass and plastic and metal.
In my mind, I am in a forest that does not grow within walls. I am younger, for some reason, wearing white instead of black, and laughing. And beside me is a dog. I always pick some kind of animal to accompany me in these daydreams. Today it is a dog. A pale yellow one with a permanent smile. Until now, I shared these daydreams with Marcus; but with this new rule, that will no longer be possible. And I’ll never feel his emotions again. Never see the person Valeria is to him. That is, unless I want to try to dig these thoughts out of a full-Order stream, which is impossible. I’ll never do that. It’d be like looking for one neuron in the human brain. Blast the Director and his Senate! They’ve taken everything! Frustrated, I open my eyes.
The Director stares at me from twenty feet away.
“You looked so peaceful,” he says, taking a few slow, carefree steps toward me, as if this is nothing, visiting me here, now.
My palms slip off the tree, and my chest jerks. I stare, unsure what to say.
I’ve seen this man every week in the Senate chamber as he gives us what he calls the State of Things address, and I’ve pas
sed him in the halls a few times over the past sixteen years, but never once have I spoken to him face to face.
“Let me guess, you’ve got a cat beside you, or a fox? Or is today the yellow dog?” He chuckles, spreading ripples of wrinkles around his eyes that make my insides seethe.
He is familiar with the thoughts I have here.
His dark hair is combed back in his usual way, his espresso eyes shining like wet stones above a trimmed beard. His hands disappear around his back, making his chest tilt forward slightly as he walks. A few feet in front of me, he stops, straightens, and surveys me with a crooked smile.
Fuming, I begin, “Sir, I—”
“Am surely wondering why I am here.”
“Yes.” Immediately I think that, somehow, he can read my mind as I’m thinking. What new evil is this that he has somehow managed to accomplish? And why has he come here?
“Valeria, or should I say V?”
How dare he! My eyes narrow, and blood floods my neck and cheeks.
“Oh, I see, I shouldn’t. Apologies. Valeria, then.” He angles his head. “I must ask you something and you must tell me the truth.” He laughs again, a short, single note. “I’ll know, after all, if you don’t.” A finger taps the side of his head.
Heat erupts between my shoulder blades. He steps closer.
“Are you happy here?”
“Sir?”
“Are you happy here?”
“Yes, of course, sir.” A lie.
His dark eyelids sink. “I have reason to believe otherwise. You see, I find your thoughts compelling, almost like a book I can’t put down.”
Hatred coils inside me, a snake ready to strike. “You read my thoughts like a book?” No point being polite now.
“Not daily, by any means.” His tone suggests this is a consolation. “Weekly, or nearly. Sundays seem to be my only time for it.” He continues, casually, “And I’ve realized something. I’ve realized that you have lost sight of who you are. Much like when you see a mirror after a stream, except your mind is that mirror.” He looks directly at me, through me, and pins me to my tree. Even though I don’t like him, this man commands attention. “Your thoughts are so clouded by another—you know the one—and I felt obliged to say this to you: What we love can often consume us, for the good or for the bad. What we must watch out for, Valeria, is what we let ourselves love.” Urgency enters his dark eyes, making him look weak. “Do not let yourself be consumed by another.”
The Veritas Project Page 2