by J B Cantwell
I struggled to imagine what would be expected from me in exchange for the doctor’s silence. My mind thought of the easiest options, crass as they were. But I didn’t have the feeling that the old man was looking for female companionship. There was something more important that he wanted. Something that he wanted to use me for in some way.
I entered the room and moved to the woman sitting behind the desk. This one was in full military uniform, and took one appraising look at me as she spoke.
“Riley Taylor?” she asked, her voice curt.
“Yes,” I said.
“You have been approved for basic Service training,” she said. “Please sit down among the other recruits for tracker insertion.”
I paused, still unsure.
“Please take your seat, recruit,” she snapped.
Only one other person sat in the room, a boy who read Green on my lens. I let out a deep breath and walked nervously to the closest chair.
Several others slowly joined us in the waiting area, and soon the first boy’s name was called.
My foot tapped nervously as I waited. Over half of the people who had entered the room while I waited were designated Orange, but I barely noticed them. The doctor was right, I did have a choice to make now. Could I really manage to build a life for myself if I gave up now? If I decided not to be a player in his game, I couldn’t see any way forward for me.
I was lost in my thoughts when the heavy door that had led from the examination rooms was suddenly pulled wide. A long line of Red designates were entering the room, and my breath caught. Their legs and arms were shackled, a sickening chain gang. On both sides of the line, several armed guards accompanied the recruits. The Reds were mostly men, but the women mixed in with the group looked just as deadly.
Reds were able to work off their sentences in the Service. Mom had told me that when she was a kid, there were prisons where the criminals would simply sit isolated, waiting for their time to pass. But there was no money for that now. The food the government was able to provide us seemed difficult enough to maintain. Most of us lived off the nutritional squares, those items cheap enough to pay for with our rations.
I suppose that the government had come to the realization that if they were going to pay to feed the Reds as they waited out their sentences, the country should get something in return.
The Reds’ time in the Service correlated with the severity of their sentences. Criminals were no longer sentenced to years in jail. Instead, they were sentenced to years in the Service, a death sentence for many, no matter what their crime had been. It seemed that this group had passed through the physical examination phase altogether, and I wondered if they had even completed the solitary testing that I had gone through a few hours ago.
About half of them looked down at their feet, dejected, clearly wishing to be somewhere other than here. Did they feel sorry for the crimes they had committed? Maybe not sorry. Maybe just regretful of getting caught? The other half strutted into the place, owning it as if they’d been through this process a hundred times already. Maybe some of them had been here before and survived, only to get caught again at some other crime. One of the recruits, a man in his thirties who was covered neck to foot in tattoos, looked me up and down and gave a wink, wetting his lips with his tongue as if he were preparing to sink his teeth into my flesh.
I quickly averted my eyes, staring down at my hands. I struggled to decide which choice would be the least deadly for me. To follow behind this group of criminals and be under the examiner’s thumb? Or to make my way slowly back down the streets of Manhattan and catch the train back to my flooded home?
Soon, the entire line of Reds, eleven in all, were taken through the entrance to the next phase of our initiation.
The entryway door stayed closed for a long time, and by the time it opened again, several more of the Orange and Green recruits had joined me in the wait. Finally, after what seemed like hours, a smiling woman called my name.
“Riley Taylor?” she called, her voice light.
For a moment I sat frozen in my seat, staring at her, still trying to figure out what I was going to do next.
She scanned the room, and I knew her lens would find me any second. This was it.
“Oh, there you are, Miss Taylor,” she said brightly.
I rose, feeling ready to bolt.
“This way,” the woman sang.
The time had come. I could either follow the woman, or turn for the exit.
Move.
I rose to my feet and, still uncertain, followed her into the hall.
Chapter Ten
I knew I couldn’t leave. There was nowhere left for me to go. And the choice, really, had been made that morning when I had walked out the front door of our dingy apartment.
I took a deep breath and blew it out.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
She had no idea.
“Don’t be,” she went on. “The tracker barely hurts a bit, and the payoff is quite worth it.”
“You mean the payoff of certain death?” I whispered to myself.
The woman had long, blond hair that bounced around her shoulders when she walked.
Mae Oliver
Designation: Green
Green as a maple leaf in the spring.
“Sorry for the wait,” she said as we walked. “Sometimes we get those groups of reds, and it can take … longer than usual.”
I wondered how she was able to speak about them so casually. Didn’t she get scared working around criminals? Surely her own lens flashed in front of her vision, warning her of the danger she willingly put herself in.
“What’s it like?” I asked.
“Oh, the tracking insertion?” she asked. “It’s nothing. It’s just an adjustment to the headpiece you already have.”
My hand automatically rose and touched the tiny chip implant that was set behind my left ear.
But she had misunderstood my question.
“No, I mean what’s it like being around so many … so many dangerous people all the time? Doesn’t it bother you?”
She looked down at me and practically giggled.
“Oh, no,” she said. “They are well managed, as you could see when they walked through the waiting room, right?”
I stared at her with horror.
“And besides, they’re just people. Just like you and me,” she went on. “Their designations won’t be visible once the tracking is initiated, at least not to the rest of you. In a way it’s like joining the Service is giving them a second chance. Nobody can hold their past crimes against them any longer.”
No designations in the Service. The idea made my stomach flip, and I tried to imagine what it was going to be like to not be able to see what sort of people I would be serving beside.
The woman opened a small door halfway down the hallway. Inside I saw it was another examination room, only this one was well lit, and the man who turned toward me wore a smile instead of a grimace.
Dr. James Thomas
Designation: Green
“Hello, Recruit …” he looked down at his tablet, “Taylor. I’m doctor Thomas. I will be installing your new hardware today.”
The woman led me to the examination table and indicated I should sit. I did, and as Dr. Thomas approached me with several sharp looking instruments, I found myself wishing I had asked her more questions about the actual procedure.
I tried to stay still as he brushed my hair away from my ear, draping it to one side with a barber’s clip.
“Not so often we see young recruits in here with hair colored like yours,” he said, smiling.
I didn’t respond.
I had received my first implant when I was very young, just five. At that time, it was still sort of debatable as to whether children so young should be implanted, but now when a baby was born, a lens was inserted into their retina within days of birth. From the very beginning, they could read all the information that any adult could see. Status. Name. Ne
ws. Entertainment. It was all accessible to them, age appropriately of course. But there were those who knew how to get around such basic restrictions. Hacking was a pastime lots of kids were into; over the years it had become a sort of game to see how fast they could breach the protections that the system automatically tried to put into place.
I had never fallen in with those kids, though. My software had never been altered aside from the usual updates that would automatically install.
Dr. Thomas and Mae approached me.
“Lie back now, and on your right side, please,” Dr. Thomas said.
As I did so, Mae looked down on me with a smile so genuine I started to wonder if there was something wrong with her, if maybe an act of torture were about to be performed and she had a front row seat.
The doctor snapped a pair of gloves onto his hands and carefully examined the chip where it was lodged into my scalp tissue. It didn’t hurt. The chips were coated with a special metal that reacted with flesh to produce a pain free attachment of the chip within the housing at all times. As he took the first instrument from Mae’s outstretched hand and stuck it into the center of the chip, all I felt was a tugging around the area. It was like he was working on a part of my body that was completely numb.
He reached for the next instrument she held out, sharp and pointed. My breath caught.
“Don’t worry,” Mae said. “He’s just opening up the mechanism. It won’t hurt at all.”
And she was right, it didn’t hurt, not exactly. But I did get the feeling that he was pressing deeply into my skin, and I wondered if his instrument was hitting bone on the other side.
He stepped back from his work and handed Mae the instruments he had been using.
“Halfway there now,” he said.
Mae replaced the instruments she was holding with a single wand of shining metal. On the pointed edge a tiny, green chip glowed.
Dr. Thomas reached for the wand, and I watched the little glowing square as it moved across my vision. More tugging, then trading out the instruments for different ones, then done.
“That’s it,” the doctor said.
I sat up, aware that something was wrong, but not quite able to put my finger on it. The place where the new chip had been inserted didn’t hurt at all, and I touched where it was connected tentatively with one hand. I looked up at Mae for confirmation that the procedure was complete.
And then I realized.
Mae, who had read on my lens as Green, now had no status at all. I looked at Dr. Thomas and saw that the same thing had happened with him. Only a name flashed where once I might’ve read much more.
Dr. Jason Edward Thomas
Designation: Unknown
And nothing, no blip of any color but gray.
I felt suddenly lost. And in terrible trouble. My head swam with panic.
“Take it easy,” Dr. Thomas said, putting both hands on my shoulders. “This reaction happens to many people. I know it’s unsettling to lose your ability to designate people by color. But you must understand that this is necessary to do while in the Service.”
I was breathing hard, unsure of whether I wanted to bolt from the room or yell at him to remove the device.
“I don’t want it,” I complained between breaths. “Take it out again. I don’t want it.”
“You must have the auto-chip if you are going to be in the Service,” he explained.
The room whirled around me as I tried to get used to the new interface of my lens.
“But I—” I began. “I can’t live like that. Take it out!”
Suddenly, I had realized the massive mistake I had just made. I didn’t know what I was hoping for in that moment. For someone to listen to me. For someone to notice and respect the level of fear in my voice.
They were listening. But it became clear that the new chip wasn’t going anywhere.
It was too late.
Dr. Thomas removed his hands from my shoulders, and suddenly his face grew stoic, cold.
“You have already made your decision to join the Service, recruit,” he said. “You must wear the chip for the next three years. You can spend those years fighting for your country in the Service, or you may instead elect to serve the remainder of your Service at the Nassau burning plant. Either way, you will keep the chip in your head until the time of your commitment has elapsed. If you try to run, we will find you. Your chip serves to block the information about your fellow recruits, to enlighten you to different information not usually available to the general public, and to track your whereabouts at all times.”
I looked desperately between the doctor and Mae, but she only stared down at me. Her smile barely faltered, but I thought I caught a glimpse of pity in her eyes. Still, she seemed resolved to show all the world nothing less than her shining mask.
“You’ll be fine, honey,” she said, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Besides, it wouldn’t be fair if all the Greens could see all the Reds. Would they fight as hard to keep their fellow recruits out of harm’s way?”
I thought about the brawl that morning, about how Lydia’s spit had felt as it sprayed across my face. What if she hadn’t known I was a Green? What if no one could tell designations at all?
Dr. Thomas seemed to soften slightly.
“You may have the chip removed after three years of service,” he said. “But if you choose to remove the chip now, the pain will be great, and I will have no choice but to send you to the Burn to work out your commitment. Look at it as a sort of bonus, an adventure. You will now be forced to use your own mind and skills to choose those you trust. Doesn’t that sound like an interesting challenge?”
He sounded insane.
“Off you go now, recruit,” Mae said, pulling me by one arm off the table and steering me toward the door.
I moved blindly beside her as the fight between fear and logic raged within me.
The burning plants. I couldn’t.
Mae deposited me into a line of people waiting to see the barber. I cringed as I recognized the men and women in this line as the group of Reds who had walked through the waiting room earlier. Only now their shackles had been removed. My breath caught as I struggled to move closer to the last one in the line, not wanting to attract any attention.
One by one, both the men and the women moved to sit before an older man in fatigues who wielded ancient looking clippers in his hand. There was no choice left. And, I thought, it wouldn’t suit me to have this stupid pink hair in a burning plant, either. I tried to understand how I had come so far away from the life I had known just yesterday. I shuddered at the thought of spending my days at a plant. The stench in the air. The acid that gently dripped down the walls from the humidity. How many days would my eyes have before I could no longer focus them, and then no longer see at all?
As we waited, a menacing voice sounded from behind me.
“Looks like little Pink won’t be so pink anymore, eh?”
I turned. Five people behind me, Lydia made up the end of the line. She must have completed her test just as quickly as I had.
I quickly pulled my hair into a ponytail at the nape of my neck and made sure it was covered by my hood.
She shoved her way to the space behind me in line. I watched the faces of the recruits she cut in front of, and I could tell that nobody was willing to stand up to her without knowing her designation first. She could be a convicted felon for all they knew. She could be straight from holding.
“Hey there honey,” she whispered, moving in close to me.
“Leave me alone,” I said, trying hard not to sound as scared as I felt.
“What will we call you now?” she asked no one in particular.
My hands balled into fists at my sides. I felt exposed facing her, and my head still throbbed from earlier in the day.
“What’s your real name, anyway, recruit?” she asked, sneering.
“You already know my real name,” I said quietly. “Just like I know yours, Lydia.”
He
r sneer faltered for a moment, and then she smiled.
“Clever,” she said, and she put one arm around my shoulders as if we were good friends. “So tell me, Riley, how do I look? Without all that orange lighting up my face. Am I prettier?”
Her face was so close to mine I could feel her hot breath on my cheek.
I didn’t answer.
“I think I’ll be fighting them off once we get onto the field,” she went on. “But you,” she turned and cupped my chin in one hand, “you are definitely the prettiest at the ball.”
“Riley Taylor,” droned the bored voice of the barber.
I jerked away from her and made my way to the man’s chair. Hair littered the floor, and the man made a half-hearted attempt at clearing off the seat before I sat down. When I did, his quiet demeanor changed.
“Pink?” he asked, chuckling as he removed my hair band. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
He spun me around in the chair until I faced a long mirror.
I tried to watch him cut as if it were someone else’s hair being lopped off in sheets. My eyes stung with tears, so vain, as I watched the hair fall away, leaving a buzzed, slightly lumpy skull behind.
I no longer wanted to stand out from everyone like I had wanted to at school, and shedding this one last piece of evidence, proof of my vanity, I could now pretend to be anybody I wanted. I could even act like a Red if it suited me.
When he was finished, and the last of my childhood frivolity lay on the floor at his feet, I thanked the man and rose.
“Where to?” I asked, trying to sound, and feel, bright.
“Through there,” he said, pointing to a door.
Another door today. Behind it could be anything. Death, even. Today. Right now.
“Don’t forget this, girl,” he said.
He held out a small metal token with a hole at the top. Dog tags.
“Put this on with the rest,” he said, pointing to the tags I already wore.
I paused, staring at the words that were laser-engraved onto the metal.
Taylor,