Chapter 1 #2
I brush my hands over my arms against the onslaught of arctic air as automatic lights ping on slowly with each step I take.
A blue light flares to life as I step into the blue circle painted into the center of the wood, in direct view of the camera,
and a voice sounds over the speakers: “Student 1904572, you have been sent to a labor rebooting module. Please approach mat
number four and prepare to begin.”
I give a solemn nod as I back up toward the blue mat that has a 4 marked on it in peeling duct tape, knowing the camera is locked in on my movement.
The mat isn’t thick anymore. I can feel the hardwood through it as I rock up on the balls of my feet and wait for instructions,
my eyes finding the empty chair. There used to be a proctor in detention: Mr. Avilas. But this year, he’s been replaced by
Alba.
I wonder where Mr. Avilas is now. Like there’s an option. He’s too old to be a soldier, must have served his seven years when
he was eighteen like everyone else. All that’s left is server maintenance. I don’t want to imagine him at a data farm.
Soldier or cog, both serving the machine of war. I have been looking for a third option my entire life. But I’m not ready
to give up yet. I’m hoping the impending deadline will inspire greatness.
“Commence push-ups,” the automated voice intones. “Ready, begin. Down. Up.”
I drop into a plank position and push into the mat as the voice drones. Just as my arms begin to burn, the motion detector
lights by the doorway click off. Darkness swallows up the gymnasium behind me. They painted over the windows this summer—either
to make the room more energy efficient or to prevent distractions during sparring classes—but never upgraded the pre-Streamlining
lights. Detention or a write-up. I may have just found a third option.
I hold myself frozen at the top of a push-up, muscles straining. I don’t dare breathe.
“Continue,” the computer orders. “Down.”
I don’t move.
“Down,” it repeats, as sweat trickles down my forehead. “Student 1904572, no movement detected. Continue labor rebooting module
or you will be reported—”
Finally, the lights over me click off too.
In the total blackness, Alba can’t see me.
As long as I don’t move and trigger the ancient motion sensors, I’m free. But I have no intention of wasting my freedom to
do a plank for the rest of the day. All I have in my pocket is Hux’s poker chip. Or ours. I’m not sure whose it was first,
this little golden disc. But I also have aim from almost eighteen years of being trained as a soldier.
And I have one shot.
I flick the poker chip at the motion sensor, banking that it’ll be too fast for the ancient lights to click on. After the
telltale crash of cracked glass, the plastic returns to my hand in the darkness.
I’m free.
I jump backward, smiling to myself. A small rebellion. A small freedom. I turn around, pulling a cartwheel before giving a
mock salute to the empty table. In the darkness, I can imagine that someone is there, watching. For some reason, I imagine
a pair of piercing green eyes, a wry but impressed smile.
With that, I take off down the hallways that all look the same before I stop at a nondescript door. With one look to make
sure no one is watching, I slip inside.
The server room is like an oven compared to the gym; I peel off my sweatshirt the second I slip into the dark alcove that holds the massive computing system. So much for being a trained killing machine—the hood gets stuck under my chin. I grunt in irritation, flailing against the fabric.
“The future, ladies and gentlemen,” a bored voice says, and I yank on the sweatshirt with renewed vigor, my ponytail half
falling out from the effort.
As the hood finally falls away, it reveals Hux sitting in the middle seat. My cheeks burn, but his gaze is fixed on the wide
expanse of monitors that stretches the length of the entire wall.
“How did you get here so fast?” I bite, making my way to his right hand. He’s man-spreading, so I pull the chair away from
his foot in order to sit down. Colored lights and blinking monitors dance in front of my vision, and it’s almost too much.
I blink a couple of times to try and force my eyes to get used to the onslaught of imagery.
“There are ways to leave class without getting detention, Hart,” Hux says darkly. I shift in my chair, unsettled by how his
eyes rove over the screen like he’s searching for something. I wish he’d look at me instead. I watch him for a beat too long
before I force myself to follow his gaze, annoyed that he distracted me.
The server room is the place where the raw information comes in for our sector before it’s interpreted by Alba.
It’s our only access to the unedited reality of life.
I don’t know what the punishment would be if we were caught in here, but anything short of death would be worth it.
Livestreams, photodumps, actual footage of real people that hasn’t been filtered and processed by AI to be so watered-down and inoffensive that it’s bland and unremarkable.
All the colors seem brighter, sharper. It’s real.
I discovered it in year nine, and, unfortunately, so did Hux. It’s a secret we reluctantly share and the source of our uneasy
alliance. It’s strange, how long we’ve been this way, something between rivals and allies. It almost makes it easy to forget
there was a time before, before he told me we couldn’t be friends.
Even though his presence is physically uncomfortable, like an itch on my shoulder blades I can’t quite reach, I sit back,
taking in the flickering images of our world: footage of active volcanoes, riots, and something that resembles a live feed
of a legal proceeding. It will all be distilled into a ten-minute sound bite, scrubbed of any offensive or upsetting imagery,
put into orderly sentences where the gray has been reduced into simpler black-and-white. No thinking necessary. Alba will
do that for us. All we have to do is open our eyes and absorb.
But here? Here, my brain whirs to make sense of the world. I listen to an older man in a black suit give a speech.
“In our time, we must focus all our effort, everything we have, into the next generation. The Streamlining saved our great country from destruction; now, we have a chance to protect our children from the dangers of unprocessed data. That is why I am happy to report that the courts have upheld our ban on unnecessary reading and writing—”
I look away at that, my chest pinching oddly. My computer wasn’t glitching. I got flagged for searching for books because
books are now illegal.
Hux makes a noise low in his throat and, unbidden, my eyes follow his to another screen where three women, one of whom is
in an all-white linen suit, pose in front of a hovercopter. A man in an orange safety suit hands them tinted goggles. The
women laugh as their acrylic nails fumble against the unwieldy plastic, as the straps cut into their perfectly coiffed hair.
It takes a moment of concentration to focus on the clip’s audio amidst the other noise, but I finally find it.
“Hi chat, Mona here. Quinnie and Nova and I are”—she breaks off to giggle as the goggles slip along her unnaturally perfect
button nose—“excited to get hot, hot, hot! There are two super-big tornadoes—”
“And the gas lines!” a sister chimes in gleefully.
“Ew,” the third remarks, tightening her eye protection.