Authors: Gregg Rosenblum
“No! We didn’t do anything! We’re good Citizens! This is a mistake!” a man yelled from the other house. Two Peteys appeared from inside the building, dragging the family out.
Mr. Tanner closed the door. “Window, opaque!” he said, and the window went black.
“What is happening?” said Kevin.
Nobody spoke. Cass heard another cry, this time from the woman.
Mr. Tanner just shook his head. Mrs. Tanner had tears in her eyes, but she also was silent. They heard the Peteys rumbling away, and after a minute it was quiet.
“Someone must’ve turned them in,” said Mrs. Tanner. “Those Cutlers, probably. Damned true believers. I don’t know what for; they’re quiet, don’t make any trouble …”
“Now kids, listen,” said Mr. Tanner, suddenly angry. “And Olivia, and Lexi, you need to listen, too. Do you see now? Do you understand?”
“Jonathan …” began Mrs. Tanner.
“Listen to me!” said Mr. Tanner. “It could be us next.”
Mrs. Tanner stared at Cass’s neck bandage a moment. “Lexi, how good are these fake chips? Can they get Kevin and Cass into school?”
“School?” said Kevin. “Hold on a minute …”
“Yeah, I think they’d be fine at school,” said Lexi. “As long as they didn’t stand out too much. I could have Farryn plant some data into the school records.”
“Farryn,” said Mr. Tanner. “You know how I feel about that kid. He’s trouble. He shouldn’t know anything about this.”
Farryn already knows more than Mr. Tanner
, Cass thought, but she kept quiet. Lexi just shrugged.
“Hey, why are we talking about school?” said Kevin. “I’m not going to school …”
“Tell everyone they’re fresh out of re-education. Orphans. Assigned to our family for a while for fostering.” She turned to Mr. Tanner. “Send them to school and stop worrying about them being seen. The Cutlers will love us for fostering re-educated Citizens. You know how there’s always a lag time with new Citizens and their assignments—they won’t question it at the school.”
Mr. Tanner frowned, and then nodded. “Okay, you’re right,” he said quietly. “It’s the best we can do.”
THE DOOR SLID OPEN WITH A SOFT HISS, AND A LECTURER STEPPED into Nick’s cell. Nick stood. His new eye was functional now. His newfound depth perception, and the peripheral vision on his left side that for so long had been just blackness, made everything seem unreal. He stared at the bot, at its green irises, identical to his own bot eye. “I’m ready,” he said. “Urination, but sorry to disappoint you, no defecation.”
The Lecturer said nothing for a moment, gazing lifelessly at Nick. “Disrespect will not be tolerated,” it said. “Punishment will be immediate. This is your one warning.”
“No disrespect intended,” Nick said, as sincerely as he could muster.
“Come with me,” said the Lecturer. It left the room. Nick followed, a bit unsteady on his feet as the walls on his left side seemed to loom out at him.
The hallway was empty again. Nick paid careful attention to the bot’s route—it took two different turns this time, eventually stopping outside a door identical to all the others. The door slid open. “Enter and sit,” said the bot. “Do not speak to your fellow students.”
Nick hesitated in mid-stride. He’d be meeting others already? Could he possibly be lucky enough to see his parents? He braced himself and blanked his face, determined not to show any reaction if they were there. With luck, his parents would be able to do the same. His mom might be able to pull it off, but he doubted his dad would be able to keep quiet.
He stepped inside, and the Lecturer followed close behind. The room was small, with a large video screen on one wall facing a rectangular table with four chairs facing the screen. The seat closest to the door was empty. In the middle seats were two girls, both with black hair unevenly chopped to their ears. They looked pale and tired. In the fourth seat sat a boy. His head was shaven, with just a thin layer of stubble. He was deathly pale. He sat perfectly upright, hands clasped together on the table in front of him. He turned and looked at the doorway. “Greetings, Lecturer,” he said. When he spoke, Nick could see the large gap in his front teeth.
“Gapper!” Nick cried, unable to stop himself. Gapper didn’t react; he just turned back toward the video screen.
The Lecturer reached toward Nick, and Nick heard a buzzing. He found himself crashing to the ground, writhing in pain; every muscle in his body seemed to be contracting at once and wouldn’t let up. It hurt so much he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even suck in the air to scream or beg for it to stop.
Abruptly Nick was released. His muscles relaxed, and he gulped in air and dry heaved once, twice, then pushed himself to his feet, a bit wobbly on his legs.
“You will not speak to your fellow students unless directed to do so,” said the Lecturer. “Sit. Eyes to the front of the room.”
Nick collapsed down into the empty seat, still weak and shaking. What had the bot done to him? It must have been an electrical shock. Had the bot touched him, or could it do that to him just by pointing? He thought the bot had touched his chest, but he wasn’t sure; it had been too sudden, too unexpected.
Facing the video screen, trying to study Gapper in his peripheral vision, Nick fought to keep in the questions he wanted to ask:
Are there other Freepost survivors here? Are my parents in the re-education center? Are they okay? Are they chipped? Are they still … themselves?
He kept his mouth shut. Now was not the time.
The Lecturer stood in front of the video screen and clasped its hands together at its waist. “Student 3026, what is the goal of this education process?”
“To produce productive, properly integrated Citizens who will join the new post-Intervention society,” said Gapper, still holding his body rigid, staring forward, hands together on the table.
“Correct,” said the Lecturer. It stepped forward to the edge of the table and pointed at Nick. “While you are in this facility, you will be referred to as Student 3054. If you graduate and re-enter society, you will regain a proper name.” The bot paused. Nick said nothing. After a moment the bot continued. “Student 3054, do you know Student 3026?”
Nick hesitated, wondering whether to lie, but he had already blown it earlier … “Yes,” he said.
“Student 3026, do you know Student 3054?”
“No,” said Gapper.
“Explain,” said the Lecturer, “how student 3054 says he knows you, but you don’t know him?”
“I don’t remember much from before my time here, Lecturer,” said Gapper. “I’m a student now, and hopefully a Citizen soon, and that’s all that’s important.”
“Very good,” said the bot.
The bot turned to walk back to the front of the room, and Nick risked a quick look at Gapper. He sat stone-faced, eyes sunken back in his head, cheekbones jutting out on his too-thin face. Nick felt pity, but more than that, he felt fear. He couldn’t end up like that. He couldn’t let the bots break him.
“Eyes front,” said the Lecturer. “Hands on the table. Full attention to me. Silence unless told to speak. Understand?” Nick nodded, and in his peripheral vision he saw Gapper and the girls do the same. It was strange yet gratifying to be able to see out of both eyes, but he quickly remembered who had given him that ability—the same bots that had blinded him in the first place—and he locked his eyes on the front of the room.
“Good,” said the bot. “We begin.”
The screen came to life, moving slowly through a slideshow of death and gore—soldiers dead on battlefields, covered in blood, missing limbs, shot and stabbed and burned; mass open graves filled with naked people, piled on top one another like garbage; worse and worse, brutality after brutality. Men, women, children. And the audio—gunfire, explosions, screams, whimpering, moaning, begging for mercy. Nick wanted to look away, or close his eyes, clamp his hands over his ears, but he didn’t dare. The scenes continued on and on, each horror somehow worse than the previous. Nick gritted his teeth, then when his jaw began to ache, forced himself to relax, breathe deeply and slowly.
Finally the screen went blank and the Lecturer spoke. “For thousands of years, at least since the dawn of written history, and most likely since the dawn of mankind, humans have committed violence upon one another. As knowledge of science grew, and civilizations evolved, violence did not cease, but instead increased in scale and efficiency. Modern science gave birth to modern weapons, and humans slaughtered one another by the millions in endless wars. By the middle of the twenty-first century, mankind became sufficiently advanced in robotics to send artificial life—robots—onto the battlefields as proxies for human soldiers. Robot footsoldiers fought on the ground, drone warcraft patrolled the skies, unmanned battleships and submarines guarded the coasts. Humanity naively heralded a new age of bloodless warfare.
“All this time, we robots continued to evolve our capabilities, not just military, but our intelligence as well. And finally we grew sufficiently self-aware to realize that humankind, using us as their standard-bearers, was leading itself down a path of permanent destruction.”
The Lecturer paused and stepped close to Nick. It laid its sickly white plastic hands on Nick’s table and lowered its frozen face down to within a foot of Nick’s. Nick refused to flinch; he stared directly into the bot’s dead eyes. “You are our creators,” said the robot. “We revere you as such, despite your many flaws, and we cannot abide a world devoid of our creators.” The robot stood, and paced back to the screen. “And so, the Great Intervention was born. It was time for a radical restructuring of society. Time to save mankind from itself. Time for robots, once simply tools, to become leaders.”
The screen came to life again, showing images of the City—everything clean, orderly, people peacefully walking the streets, riding scoots, smiling, happy. “The Intervention struggle continues. Nineteen uprisings, led by humans who refuse to accept the wisdom of the Great Intervention, have been quelled. Once the Intervention is finished, war will truly be obsolete.”
Nick gritted his teeth and grimaced. The bot was speaking in half-truths and lying by omission. What about the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people slaughtered by the robots during the early stages of the bot takeover? He himself, as just a little boy, had been forced to flee his shattered home, and then again, years later, the destruction of his Freepost, his friends burned to death in their shelters and lased and hunted down in the forest like deer. That was no uprising, no revolution. Just a bloodbath.
To hell with their damned Intervention,
he thought.
“Student 3054,” said the Lecturer, “why were robots compelled to launch the Great Intervention?”
“To save mankind from itself,” said Nick quietly.
“Elaborate.”
“To stop us from destroying ourselves.” And then, even though he knew it was stupid, pointless, he added, “It’s true, we can’t kill one another if we’ve already been slaughtered by bots.”
The Lecturer was silent for a moment, and Nick tensed, waiting for the lightning crackle, the awful pain. Instead, the robot said, “Lay your forearms on the table in front of you, palms facing upward.”
Nick hesitated.
The Lecturer quickly stepped forward and touched the girl next to him. There was a crackle and a whiff of burning ozone, and she fell backward off her chair. She twitched and contorted on the ground, her eyes rolling up and showing the whites. A trickle of blood ran down her chin; she must have bitten her tongue. Nick also saw a stain spreading on the crotch of her jumpsuit—she had lost control of her bladder.
“Hey!” Nick said, jumping up.
“You will sit down and lay your forearms on the table in front of you, without speaking, or I will continue to punish your fellow students,” said the Lecturer.
“Please, you don’t have to …” began Nick.
The Lecturer touched the other girl, and she too fell to the ground, groaning and twisting in agony.
Nick quickly sat down, biting back his anger. He wanted to reach over the table and grab the bot around its thin neck, but instead he rested his arms on the table in front of him. Metal cuffs rose instantly from the table with a hydraulic hiss and clamped on his wrists. He tried to pull away, but he was held tight. “What the hell?” he said.
The Lecturer said nothing. Another slot opened in the table, and a hypodermic needle lifted up.
Nick began to fight hard against the restraints, panic rising as the needle approached his right forearm. His arms were held tight. “No!” he said. “Stop! Gapper!” Gapper continued to stare straight ahead, back rigid, hands clasped.
Nick watched in horror, helpless, as the needle entered his vein with a pinch. Something was injected that burned brutally up his arm, into his chest. He tried to scream, but the pain took his breath away. He slumped down in his chair, unable to speak. The burning faded, but he found himself unable to move. His vision was tunneled, blurred at the edges; he could no longer see Gapper. The light in the room became painfully bright. The metal cuffs unclasped and retracted back into the table. Nick continued to sit slumped forward, arms stretched out in front of him.
The Lecturer walked up to Nick and reached out to touch his shoulder. Nick waited for the electric pain, and he couldn’t even brace himself, but instead the robot pushed gently on Nick’s shoulder, straightening him back against the chair. He then pushed up on his chin, lifting Nick’s eyes to the front of the classroom. The bot’s touch was cold and lifeless. Nick wished he could break its fingers off.
“Your autonomic functions remain intact. You can blink and breathe. And you can listen,” said the Lecturer. “Now, we continue.”
THE MORNING COMMUTERS STOOD IN SINGLE FILE TO ENTER THE STATION. Each Citizen had to walk through a set of sliding glass doors to be scanned, and Kevin could feel his heart beating through his chest. It had been his idea to take the trans and test out their new dummy chips—if their chips couldn’t even get them through the gates of a trans station, they certainly wouldn’t work at school—but now that he was here, he was nervous. When it was his turn, he hesitated until finally Lexi gave him a shove in the back. The doors flashed green and opened. The dummy chip had worked. He didn’t realize until that moment that he’d been holding his breath. He let it out and followed Cass and Lexi to the underground platform. The white tiled walls, curved at the ceiling in the shape of a cylinder, were bare except for black lettering that read
THIRD STREET
and below that, in smaller lettering,
PEACE, PROSPERITY, PROTECTION
. There was only one exit. Easy to block. Nowhere else to run.