Authors: Gregg Rosenblum
CASS WAS IMMEDIATELY OVERWHELMED WHEN SHE STEPPED INSIDE THE cafeteria. The room was as large as the gym, loudly filled with kids talking, arguing, laughing, lining up for food. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and calmed down, and just then she saw Lexi waving at her from a table near the back. Amanda and Farryn sat waiting for her, but Kevin was missing. She felt a rush of anxiety. Where was her brother?
Cass quickly crossed the room. “Where’s Kevin?” she said.
“Bathroom,” said Farryn. “He got here ten minutes ago. Already powered through about ten slices of pizza, and he’s been grilling me about the resolution on the 3D classroom vid screens.”
Cass sighed with relief and sat down.
“He’s right, actually,” said Farryn. “The school vids have a crazy high refresh rate. Some really impressive nano-soldering, too. I told Kevin I’d show him a few that I’ve taken apart back at my place …”
“Enough already!” said Lexi. “This tech talk is going to make me lase myself in the head.”
Farryn smiled but didn’t say anything.
“Any word on what happened with Ms. Hawken?” Cass said.
“Well, she’s still at the school,” said Lexi, pointing to a far table at which Ms. Hawken and a few other teachers sat. “So that’s good.”
Amanda, picking at a plate of french fries, leaned forward. “So I still don’t understand what you’re doing here. And how you’re here. And how come Farryn knows more than I do?”
“Amanda,” said Lexi quietly. “Come on—obviously we can’t talk about this stuff now. Two more class periods, then find us out front and walk home with us. I’ll fill you in.”
Amanda opened her mouth to say more but changed her mind and sullenly returned to her fries.
Two more classes and I’ll have survived the day,
thought Cass. “Lexi, thanks for helping me today.”
“No problem,” said Lexi, smiling. Her smile suddenly died, and she grabbed Cass’s forearm, hard enough to hurt.
“Hey!” Cass said, but then she saw it, too. The sphere bot had appeared at the other end of the cafeteria.
The bot began flashing red, and everyone in the room froze. “STUDENTS, STAND UP FROM YOUR SEATS AND DO NOT MOVE,” said the bot. “YOUR CHIPS WILL BE SCANNED.”
Cass instinctively jumped to her feet and took a step backward, then stopped. She couldn’t sneak out the back door; the bot would see. And it was blocking the main entrance. Not that she was going anywhere without her brother, anyway. But she couldn’t just stand there and wait for her dummy chip to be scanned. She gathered herself. Maybe if she bolted fast enough, she could get past the bot, and somehow find Kevin and get out of the school before Peteys arrived.
Suddenly Ms. Hawken appeared from behind Cass, walking briskly toward the bot. As she brushed past Cass, she slowed down for just a moment and whispered, “Get out of here! While you still can.”
Ms. Hawken walked right up to the bot. “Can I help you?” she said loudly.
“CITIZEN TEACHER, STEP ASIDE. DO NOT INTERFERE.”
“I’d be happy to assist,” said Ms. Hawken, still standing in the bot’s way. “Would you like me to gather names?”
“STEP ASIDE OR YOU WILL RECEIVE AN INFRACTION, OR IF NECESSARY, YOU WILL BE DETAINED,” said the bot.
“Let’s go,” whispered Lexi, tugging on Cass, who was still watching the tiny Ms. Hawken, hands on her hips, holding her ground against the sphere that bobbed above her, flashing angry red. “Amanda, Farryn, stay here.” Amanda nodded.
“I can help,” said Farryn.
Cass, Farryn, and Lexi moved quickly but quietly to the back door, crouching low behind the other students, who stared at them, shocked, but didn’t say anything. Farryn opened the door, still crouching, and motioned for Cass and Lexi to go through. Cass started to let herself think that they might actually get out of the cafeteria, but then the bot blared, “STUDENTS IN THE BACK! STEP AWAY FROM THE DOOR! NOBODY WILL EXIT UNTIL ALL STUDENTS HAVE BEEN SCANNED!” It glided over Ms. Hawken’s head and floated quickly toward them.
Farryn stood up from his crouch and yanked the door open wide. “Go!” he said. Lexi and Cass hurried through the doorway, and Farryn followed, slamming the door shut behind him.
Kevin stood in the hallway, wiping his hands on his pants. “Hey, guys,” he said. “What’s up?”
Cass sprinted down the hall, barely slowing as she grabbed Kevin’s shirt and dragged him along. He stumbled then awkwardly began running, too. Lexi and Farryn ran alongside them. “What …?” he managed to say.
“Sphere bot! Cafeteria!” said Cass.
The cafeteria door burst open, and the bot slid into the hallway. There was no way, trapped inside these hallways, that they would be able to get away from it, Cass thought. They were headed for re-education, or worse …
They turned a corner and left the bot behind momentarily. “In here!” Farryn said, opening a classroom door. They all rushed inside and closed the door quietly behind them. A roomful of students and a gray-haired teacher looked up at them as they stood by the doorway, panting.
“What is this about?” said the teacher.
Farryn pulled his comm from his pocket and held up his finger, as if asking for a moment.
The teacher stood. “I said, what in the world is going on here?”
Farryn tapped for a few moments on his comm, then held it up to his mouth and whispered, “Fire alarms on.”
The room was suddenly filled with a piercing alarm, blaring every few seconds. The students all stood, hands over their ears, and began rushing toward the door.
“Single line!” said the teacher. He pushed to the front of the students. Farryn opened the door, and the kids filed into the hallway, which was rapidly filling with students from all the classrooms. The alarm continued to blare.
“Window,” said Farryn, pointing at the back windows that looked out over a concrete courtyard. “Quick, before the bot makes it through the crowd.”
NICK AWOKE. HIS BODY WAS BRUISED ALL OVER, HE HAD A TERRIBLE headache, and he felt nauseous. He tried to sit up, but he was strapped down, and then as he woke more fully he saw the rows of empty benches and realized he was on the execution table. He thrashed against the restraints but couldn’t move.
A Lecturer leaned close over Nick’s face. “Student 3054, are you too intransigent to be educated?”
Nick stared at the bot’s dead eyes, just a foot from his own, and said nothing. He fought to control his breathing; he could feel himself panting. The Lecturer gazed down at Nick, then straightened up. “You are still considered a potentially viable Citizen,” it said. “You will be punished, but you will continue to be granted the privilege of our education. Remember today’s lesson. You will be executed if you fail to learn.”
They took him back to his cell and left him there. In the windowless room, he wasn’t sure exactly how much time passed without food or water, but the room lights cycled off for one long period, which meant sleeptime, so it must have been almost two days. He paced, stretched, and did a few pushups—all his battered body could manage—tried in vain to sleep; he sang every song he could think of; he tried to meditate; he even pounded on the door and screamed for the bots to come and let him out. The four walls of the small cell kept closing in on him. They weren’t leaving him to die, he told himself, over and over. The door would open.
He grew so thirsty that he drank from the toilet, cupping his hands into the bowl.
Finally they came for him, the door sliding open and waking him from where he had fallen into a fitful half-sleep on the floor. He struggled to his feet, weak and feverish, feeling relief at the sight of the open door and the Lecturer standing in the doorway, and disgust at his weakness.
The bot set a tray of food on the table. “Eat. Drink. Your education will resume shortly.”
The Lecturer returned ten minutes later and led Nick to the classroom, where one of the girls from his first lecture was already waiting quietly. The Lecturer left them alone for a few moments when it went back out into the hallway. She leaned toward him, and without looking at him, she whispered, “Thank you.”
Nick looked at her in surprise. She wouldn’t look at him; she kept her eyes facing the front. “For what?” he whispered back.
“For trying. At the execution. You tried. I just watched.”
The door slid open and the Lecturer returned, and that ended the conversation, but she had given Nick a jolt of hope, something to take back with him to his tiny cell, to keep him warm as he tried to fall asleep that night on the cold metal table.
CASS, KEVIN, FARRYN, AND LEXI MADE IT OUT OF THE SCHOOL AND began hurrying down the street, leaving behind the earsplitting alarm and the large clump of students and teachers waiting, confused, in the street. They decided against hopping a trans; it seemed too easy for them to be trapped. Cass’s heart was still pounding hard, more from the stress than the actual running. What if Kevin hadn’t been right there when they needed to run, and Farryn hadn’t stuck with them and been able to trigger the fire alarms.... And Ms. Hawken … she had helped. Would they re-educate her, too, now?
After a few blocks they slowed down to a walk. Cass started to calm down, and then two men in red shirts came out of a doorway a block ahead and began walking toward them.
“Rust!” said Lexi. “What are they doing out in the middle of the day?”
The men, both tall, one with long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, the other bald but with a goatee, were both on their comms as they walked. Cass hoped that they would just pass on by, but as they got closer the bald man noticed them and frowned and whispered something to the other man. They stopped and spread out, blocking the sidewalk, and the bald man held his hand up. “Kids, why aren’t you in school? Cutting class?”
“No,” said Lexi. “We got out early. Optional study hall for our last class today, so we decided to work on our group project together at home.”
The ponytailed man took a step forward and looked directly at Farryn. “Walter Mitchell’s son, right?”
Farryn nodded.
The man turned to Cass. “So what is this so-called group project?”
“Report on the administrative structure of the City,” said Cass, surprising herself with how calm her voice sounded. “Focusing on the partnership between robotic and biological intelligence, and how it’s evolved since the beginning of the Intervention.”
The man studied Cass, then shrugged. “Sounds plausible,” he said. He turned back to Farryn and smiled grimly. “But I still think you’re just a group of kids skipping school. Looks like we’ll need to check in with the school admins. What school do you go to?”
Farryn cleared his throat. “Two cases of homebrew,” he said quietly. “One for each of you.”
Nobody spoke. Cass shifted from foot to foot, ready to run.
Finally the bald man nodded. “Good luck with the report, kids.”
They headed for Farryn’s, on the off chance Lexi’s parents might stop home for lunch. The mess in his house hadn’t improved—clothes and dishes lay everywhere. Farryn tossed his coat on the couch and went to the garage to dig up the 3D screens he had promised Kevin.
Cass cleared a section of the couch, tossing a T-shirt and pair of pants onto the living room floor. First the bot in the school, then the red shirts on the street … She took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. They couldn’t stay in the City much longer, she knew. They were already pushing their luck.
Lexi remained standing. “Well, I guess that pretty much ends your schooling,” she said.
“Breaks my heart,” said Kevin. “Although your parents won’t be happy about it, Lexi.”
Lexi shook her head. “They don’t need to know. My father would kick you out if he found out what happened today.”
“We shouldn’t stay at your place much longer, anyway,” said Cass. “It’s not safe.”
“You’ll stay as long as you need to,” said Lexi angrily. “We’ll find somewhere for you to go during school.”
Kevin pushed a dirty plate out of the way and rested his feet on the coffee table. “So what’s the deal with Farryn?” he said to Lexi, gesturing at the mess. “Doesn’t his father care?”
Lexi began to speak but stopped as Farryn walked into the room, holding two vid screens in one hand and a toolbox in the other. He cleared the rest of the clutter off the coffee table, set the screens and tools down, and then sat down next to Cass on the couch. Cass shifted a bit, to create more space between them. Farryn didn’t notice or at least pretended not to. He opened the toolbox and began taking out a few tools—a small soldering iron, screwdriver, circuit tracker—and without looking up from his tools, he said, “No, he doesn’t care. He hasn’t really cared about much of anything since my mother died.”
The room was silent, and then Cass said, quietly, “What happened?”
“Re-education, ten years ago,” he said, looking up and meeting Cass’s eyes. “We were good Citizens, doing nothing wrong, and then my father got in an argument with a true believer at his work, and a few days later the bots took us in.” Farryn hesitated, then continued, “The bots killed her in re-education. My father and I made it through. She didn’t.”
Cass wondered what Farryn remembered of re-education, but the look on his face kept her from asking. She had to look away from the anger and hurt in his eyes. She felt a sudden rush of horrible fear for Nick and her parents.
Killed in re-education
. What were they going through? God, would the bots kill them, too?
“We’re just sitting here thinking we could go to school like normal kids and doing nothing to help,” Kevin said, pulling his feet off the table and standing up. “And Mom and Dad and Nick are probably dead already.”
“They’re not dead,” said Cass weakly. “They’re not dead!” she said again, loudly, standing up and punching Kevin on the shoulder.
“Ow!” said Kevin, falling back a step and rubbing his shoulder. “Okay, fine. You’re right, they’re not dead!”
“Come on now,” said Farryn, flashing a weak approximation of his usual cocky grin. “No fighting in the house. You might mess up the place.”