Chapter Fourteen In Which Nothing Is Fine #2
Zada groped around the wall, finding nothing.
There was no obvious sign, no brick out of place or candelabra to pull on.
There was no ornamentation on the wall at all, other than an old-timey framed oil painting of Orion Fallow, gazing benevolently at the viewer.
The thought of lifting it off the wall felt outrageous, a clear act of disrespect against New Ionia’s most important Founder. On the other hand—
“Can you reach that and take it down?” Zada asked.
“With pleasure,” said Daphne. She unhooked the painting. On the wall behind it, built into the stone, was a lever. “What in the hell,” she said almost reverently.
“What do we—” Zada started. Daphne was already pulling the lever.
A door-sized section of wall swung open. The cracks had been absolutely imperceptible before.
Zada and Daphne exchanged a look. For once, Daphne had no clever remark. Neither did Zada. Again, she felt a powerful sense of gratitude that Daphne was here with her, that Zada had a witness to the moment, that whatever they were about to see, they would see it together.
Zada swallowed and stepped inside.
The ceiling was lower in here, the light dimmer.
Still, it looked almost precisely like the room they had come from—bookshelves packed close together, crammed haphazardly with volumes of all shapes, sizes, and conditions.
The far wall, which must have marked the exterior of the basement, was strangely colored in mottled splotches of green, blue, and brown.
But besides the hidden nature of the room itself, at a glance there was no clear sign of illegality.
What had Zada been expecting, secret messages inked on the walls in blood?
“More books,” said Daphne, eyeing the shelves. “Where do you think they’re getting all these? And why keep them hidden away?”
Zada tilted her head, reading the titles on the book spines closest to her.
“The collected works of—” Zada stepped back as realization dawned on her in a cold wash.
“Hm?” Daphne came over to join Zada. “Shakespeare? That was curated ages ago.”
“Yes, that would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?” Zada said, scanning the shelves around her. Hamlet. The Tale of Genji. The Bluest Eye. “I think everything here has been curated.”
Daphne let out a low whistle. “A library full of curated books, all in paper. These nuns know how to have a good time.”
Aside from the lights, there was no sign of anything electronic here.
Even the dividers were handwritten. No wonder this room was deep underground and tucked away behind a false wall.
The shelves here were packed with curated reading materials that were no doubt unregistered and entirely illegal.
If the city council got wind of this, anyone linked to the library would be Extricated.
This was dangerous, more dangerous than Zada had imagined. The Sisters of Perpetual Reflection had seemed so unassuming, but all along, they’d been keeping a secret.
“Who do you think Sappho was?” Daphne was reaching for a volume in the poetry section.
“Daphne, focus!” Zada snapped. With only the slightest beat of hesitation, Zada pressed her hands against Daphne’s back and gently steered her away from the distractions of forbidden poetry.
They made their way deeper into the library, passing through GENERALITIES, PHILOSOPHY & PSYCHOLOGY, RELIGION, and SOCIAL SCIENCES, then WORLD LANGUAGES, NATURAL SCIENCES & MATHEMATICS, and finally MUSIC.
The last one made her fingertips itch with want.
In another life, she would have given everything to sit down on the floor of this strange, hidden library and spend an eternity paging through these books.
“Ah, here we go,” Daphne breathed. They’d arrived at the GEOGRAPHY & HISTORY section.
“Keep an eye out for anything relating to Heartsong or—”
“Found it.” Daphne darted forward to pose beside a small divider. NEW IONIA was written on the divider in a cramped cursive. The section spanned several shelves. Unlike the yellowed and carefully preserved tomes elsewhere in the library, these books seemed relatively new.
Zada pulled a volume off the shelf at random. The cover was blank, perhaps to obscure what lay within. There was only one way to find out. She opened the book.
The title page claimed that it had been published by the University of Chicago, which was absurd.
The city of Chicago was underwater, everyone knew that.
Zada flipped through a couple of pages. This book was a first edition, crisp enough to be new—and there it was again.
Published in Chicago. What a strange error to make twice.
She returned to the title page. A City Asleep, or the History of New Ionia.
“Did you find anything good?” Daphne called. She’d pulled several books off the shelf and was rapidly paging through them. “These are just stories about people’s lives here. A bit like the interviews Sister Patience and Sister Justice were gathering.”
The first several pages meant nothing to Zada. There was a lengthy introduction with a lot of precise and obtuse wording, peppered with references and thank-yous to various scholars. She flipped forward and felt her blood freeze.
“Daphne,” Zada called back, her eyes riveted to the page in front of her. “Daphne, come here.”
Daphne reshelved her books and came to hover by Zada’s shoulder.
“Look at this,” Zada said.
The mystery is not what is happening in New Ionia.
The few who have managed to escape or were forcibly removed have maintained remarkably similar stories of heavy social coercion and even outright brainwashing, with only the occasional underground “grotto rock” concert for release (and all of the risk that entails).
Neither is the mystery how this state of affairs came to pass.
Primary source documents have painted a clear picture of a utopian society that found its home within a biosphere built and backed by billionaires, which quickly transformed into a corporate-fascist oligarchy within less than two generations.
No, the primary mystery of New Ionia is simply this: How did we, safely ensconced in our own comparatively civilized and progressive worldview, allow such things to happen less than three hundred miles away? And what exactly do we owe the sleeping children of New Ionia should they wake up?
“Sleeping children of New Ionia,” Zada read aloud.
“I think they’re talking about us,” Daphne said.
“What does this mean? Why would someone say that about us?” Zada pinched the bridge of her nose as her head swam, the words blurring in front of her. Daphne gently pried the book out of her hands.
“Focus, Zada,” Daphne said, echoing her earlier words. “We’re here to look for information about Heartsong. Not whatever this is.”
Daphne slid the volume back onto the shelf.
“How about this one?” said Daphne, holding up a slim hardback titled New Ionia: People and Product. “Sounds promising.” The book had a crease in the spine, and it opened naturally to somewhere in the middle.
Together, the two of them skimmed through the middle section.
“Wait, go back,” Zada said, her eye catching on a mention of the Core. Finally, they were getting somewhere.
The sheer amount of consumer data gathered and stored by their primary processing hub, known by its citizens as the Core, is astonishing.
As children, citizens of this city surrender not only the kind of data scraped and stolen by corporations at the turn of the millennium, but also their innermost thoughts, feelings, and preferences.
This incredibly proprietary and personal intel is collected on the false promise of matching citizens with their soulmate, or their “Heartsong match.”
Advertisers with access to these insights are guaranteed a unique and uniquely complete look into the mind of the consumer.
Despite the enforced isolation of the city, this data is not restricted to within city limits, but is sold to the highest bidder.
A number of corporations operating within the remaining United States utilize this data to guide their own consumer models.
(Whether this is a particularly intelligent strategy, given the behavioral differences between the average person and a New Ionian citizen, can be seen by the dismal financial performance of a conglomerate that has recently dominated the news.
Still, corporations persist in finding new and innovative ways to exploit the people they purport to serve—a tale as old as time.)
New Ionians may insist on living in a sort of permanent historical cosplay, elevating their strict social restrictions into a carefully choreographed, almost fetishized display of bygone fashions and customs, but the lifeblood, the currency of the city, represents a very modern voluntary sacrifice of privacy and self-determination, on a scale that can be difficult to imagine.
Zada felt her legs fold under her before she made the conscious decision to collapse, and then she was on the floor, where nothing made any more sense than it had on her feet. The traitorous book was still in her hand. She very carefully placed it back on the shelf.
“Zada?” said Daphne, kneeling. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said faintly.
What did any of this mean? Why would anyone call the very foundation of the New Ionian marriage system a “false promise”? Was her own data—her own thoughts and feelings—really being sold to the highest bidder outside of New Ionia?
No, it simply wasn’t possible. It was a privilege to live in the city. New Ionia gave its citizens the perfect life partner, assigned its citizens a job perfectly suited to them, and provided them everything they would ever need. All thanks to the Core.