Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (4 page)

“Check out the total count now,” Eric said, looking over Natasha's shoulder.

Natasha scrolled down. The total count, the number of human beings on the North American continent granted mercy since the Storm, was 8,300,019.

“That's something, isn't it?” Eric said. “We're the ones to push it over 8.3 million. Mother,” he said in a hushed voice, “all those people.”

There was something in Eric's tone that Natasha had detected before, a note of giddy self-satisfaction that Jeffrey would have reprimanded him for, had he been here.

“I saw Jeffrey this morning,” Natasha said, reminded of her earlier conversation. “He's meeting with the Alphas right now about putting together a Recovery team. It's supposed to go out as soon as we sweep the Pines. Or at least as soon as the Pines are out of the field.”

“I wouldn't mind being a part of that. Too bad we're Epsilons.”

“Actually, Jeffrey said he'd bring my name up to the Alphas.”

“What?” Eric cried. A few people glanced over from nearby cubicles, though when they saw it was only Eric talking, they quickly lost interest. “I logged just as many hours as you this quarter,” he continued. “Plus I was the one to correct the count to 437 when that female gave birth. If you're getting on that team, then so am I.”

“The Alphas probably won't clear it. Like you said, we're Epsilons.” Natasha was backtracking quickly, but Eric waved her off, shaking his head. “Take it up with Jeffrey then,” Natasha said, very sorry that she had confided in him. She should have known better. Eric was quick and smart at his work, but famously immature.

“You bet I will. And Arthur too. How come you were on Wave One Defense last night and I got supplies? Playing favorites.”

“Eric,” she snapped. “We rotate through those positions. Next alarm, I'll probably be four levels underground—”

A new shape on the screen caught Natasha's eye while, at the same time, Eric's face widened from an expression of self-absorbed petulance to one of genuine shock.

“Oh, no,” Natasha moaned.

The IR map burned with a fourth orb of radiating life, one much larger than the men. Natasha knew at once what she was seeing: bear. So that's what the three Pines had been after. Natasha switched to visual. The men stood on a rocky patch of ground, partly walled off by a sharp rise of stone. They looked terrified, taut and still to the point of being inhuman. Their shoulders tilted toward the same shadowy place, and then the bear came into view—its big round body half obscured by a leafy tree in the foreground. The beast got up on its two hind legs, snapped its jaw, and fell heavily down again with a soundless bellow. The tallest of the men, the beautiful one, stood before the animal, his spear raised and his sandaled feet shuffling as if searching out some magical position that would give him the strength to make his kill. To his right was a round-faced curly-haired man and, to his left, a man with narrow features and spiraling black tattoos up each arm. Natasha fumbled for the switch on her audioset. She inhaled a breath. The Wall rose up in her mind, blocking interfering feelings of Misplaced Empathy behind it.

“What is it?” sounded Arthur's voice in her ear. “They're nearing the Crane sweep site?”

“No. Bring up sensor MC30.”

“Ah,” said Arthur, with dawning understanding. “They must have gotten desperate. Or arrogant. They're hard to understand, these guys.”

“Look!” Natasha interrupted.

The beautiful man had launched himself forward and pierced the bear through the thick fur of its shoulder. Soundlessly, the beast roared, rolling its head on its muscular neck. “Poor bear,” whispered Natasha, recognizing the perversity of the kill-or-be-killed Outside in a distant sort of way. But then—two seconds later—it was not “poor bear” at all. The blow did not have enough force behind it; the spear unstuck from the flesh as the bear lashed out, enraged. With one sudden swipe, the bear caught the tattooed man in the chest. The man's face turned to the side and he staggered. His legs crossed over themselves and he fell.

“Arthur!” Natasha said. She could feel Eric breathing hard at her side. She was already drawing up the command box for launching a nova. Her thoughts from that morning, her doubt about the goodness of sweeps, dissolved in the face of this singular instance of terrible suffering. “We have to do something. A G4. They're twenty miles from camp. No one would see.”

In certain, very rare situations, when the suffering was especially awful, the Office of Mercy broke its own rules: it allowed for one group to be swept separately from the rest of their Tribe. In a case like this, it would only take a tiny, compact explosion. Four bodies, all within a radius of ten feet. The yellow box flashed before her, asking for the clearance code to access the nova launch program. She waited, wishing that Jeffrey were here to watch for mistakes, to make sure that their next moves proceeded correctly. She could do no more herself. Only Arthur and certain teamleaders had access to the nova controls. On the screen, the tattooed man twitched once, as if wanting to bring his knees to his chest. The curly-haired man was waving his arms and jumping, trying to scare the bear away. The beautiful man lurched forward ineffectually, reaching for his spear. It could not be allowed to continue, no, they must wipe it out now.

“Father of races, put them out of their misery,” whispered Eric.

The audioset crackled. “We can't sweep,” Arthur said, with an air of finality.

“But they're far enough from the camp!” Natasha cried. “I'm looking at the map right now!”

An echoing in her ear signaled to Natasha that their feed was now public. Likely her computer images were public too, up on the big screen. The Office of Mercy had become very quiet.

“It's not an issue of other Pines observing the blast,” Arthur said. “We believe that the curly-haired man is their chief. The other two men are leaders in the Tribe. If we sweep them, the rest of the Tribe will go nuts. They'll fan out looking for them, a worse scatter than what we observed with the Cranes.” He paused, breathing heavily into the speaker. “If you think the Pines are hard to sweep now, well, annihilating these three would make it impossible.”

A flash came in Natasha's mind: the Wall disappeared and in its place was a bright conflagration, her own dread and terror at the sight before her. This evil, this death. Her feelings for the tattooed man and the two hunters forced to witness his pain reached such a state of intensity that Natasha was no longer feeling
for
them but
with
them. Suffering what they suffered. Only another small but well-trained part of her mind comprehended that she was being unethical; that she must overcome this passionate burst of Misplaced Empathy in order to do what was right. Natasha was good at controlling her thoughts, when she chose to. She had turned on and off, at will, whole regions of her brain during the Office of Mercy entrance exam, and she had the bioscans that proved it. Natasha gripped the edge of the desk. She looked at the man again, only now with the tether of instinct-driven feeling cut off. Then the tattooed man was receding from her, and existing, now, at a faraway distance. Instead of seeing a reflection of her own fears and her own sadness in his image, Natasha saw a stark human figure, solitary and small in the universe. The Wall had returned, and Natasha's mind was clear to make the most rational decision. She would, as Arthur was urging, act in such a way as to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

“Got it,” she said. She closed the program, her hand trembling ever so slightly as she did.

Out in the forest, forty miles from the Office of Mercy, the Pines fought for their lives. The beautiful man retrieved his spear, and they battled the bear over the body of the tattooed man until their legs moved sluggishly and their weapons circled in tired arcs. The bear was injured, but angry too. The tattooed man lay still. His lacerations were not visible to them in the settlement, but a pool of dark blood was thickening beneath his body, seeping slowly into the earth.

“It's horrible,” said Eric.

Natasha understood his revulsion but understood better the necessity of their restraint. Her mind remained focused; her years of training were serving her well. Instead of wishing for Jeffrey's help, she thought now that he would be proud of her for keeping so calm.

Arthur was addressing the group: “This is one of those unfortunate cases in which deferring the present suffering would lead to more pain in the future. . . .”

With a click, Natasha switched from visible to IR feed. The red streak of life that had once marked the tattooed man had lightened to pink. The other two men began creeping away from the bear, into the forest. Twice they made quick changes of direction, last-ditch efforts to retrieve their third, but soon they retreated and took off at a jog. Meanwhile the pink gave way to orangey-yellow and the fringes softened. By the time the bear returned to inspect and gnaw at its kill, the smear of life was a warm tan. Then the only color was the burning red orb of the bear; the tattooed man had faded into the grayscale shapes of the forest.

“He's dead,” said Natasha, aware that everyone in the Office and maybe even the Alphas could hear her. “Permission to change the count?”

“Permission granted,” said Arthur.

She pulled up the Pines' profile and deleted the count of the living. Then she reentered the number: 436.

3

N
ight settled over America-Five, tumbling in its quiet way to those dark, inscrutable hours deep within the nebulous middle between lights out and the underground dawn. The morning and afternoonshift workers from all five departments (only the Alphas in Government kept to their own mysterious schedules) had long retired from their dinnerhour in the Dining Hall—baked apples and sausages tonight, a special treat; they had enjoyed their evening recreation in the Pretends or socializing in the Garden, and had filtered down the elephant in groups of fifteen or twenty to their respective sleeprooms. The current group of nightshift workers were now in the Department of Health, monitoring those citizens who had recently undergone bioreplacement. Two or three agriculture workers lethargically patrolled the cow pastures and pigpens in the Farms, sweeping dim spotlights across the chicken coops and net-enclosed beehives, their steps soft on the dirt and grass ground. There were at least a dozen scientists propped on high stools in the circuitous labs of the Department of Research, attending to the vats of replacement cells and the molecular splicing experiments. Yasmine Gulsvig (a bland but agreeable woman, and the fourth member of Jeffrey, Eric, and Natasha's four-person team) was working tonight in the back cubicle of the Office of Mercy and, at other workstations, Rachael Kaminski and Vincent St. Peter with her. One door down the hall, a lone citizen operated the panel of blue and yellow controls in the Office of Air and Energy, while outside, beyond the honeycomb, polycarbonate-enforced windows, the half orb of America-Five was shining in the black forest like a star that had fallen and lodged itself there.

Below all this, in the calm, cool depths of the settlement, Natasha lay fitfully in her narrow bed, in the ten-by-ten-foot room that she shared with Min-he. Her face burrowed into the pillow and she clutched a synthetic-protein wool (or prote-wool) blanket close to her neck. For several minutes now a panic had been growing within her and forcing her, against her will, awake. Her heart bumped loudly in her chest, rebelliously even, as if it were being squeezed between the fingers of a ghostly hand.

She opened her eyes with a sharp gasp and rolled onto her back. But vision could not pull her out of her head. The dark consumed every detail of the room, save for the two dim squares of the wallcomputers, hovering on either side of the black gulf where the door would be. A soft hiss of air whirled through the ceiling vent and, shivering, Natasha grabbed a pair of thick socks from under her pillow and pulled them over her feet. She huddled under the blanket again and scooted closer into the corner. She could hear Min-he's gentle snores two arm-lengths away and feel the low vibrations of the level-nine generator traveling up through the floor.

If she wanted to, Natasha could build a Wall right now; she could barricade her mind against her present feelings and try again for dull, easy, thoughtless sleep. Earlier today that had been right; but not now, not when she had the luxury of open, empty night before her. Hadn't she promised herself standing in line yesterday morning that she would confront these terrors? That she would face them head-on?

Natasha squeezed her eyes shut, giving herself back to the horrific landscape of her semisubconscious. Then she was here but she was not here; the concrete column of underground levels could not contain her; her thoughts burst out in all directions, expanding like a supernova through time and space. She allowed it to be so. More, her release was a testament to her faith in the Ethical Code. For Natasha knew, in the Office of Mercy, in the blacked-out Dome during the alarm, that she had acted rightly only because she had forcibly used the Wall to block out her true feelings. That was okay for a child, for an Epsilon, but a mature, enlightened citizen of the world should not require such crude techniques. Faced with the merciful destruction of life, an enlightened person would be capable of perceiving all the goodness in that annihilation, and afterward, after a sweep for example, would feel only the firm satisfaction of having, by the power of human action, increased the pleasure and lessened the pain in the universe. If Natasha ever grew to be as wise as an Alpha, she would not need to correct her mind to fit the Ethical Code at all, because living ethically would be as obvious to her as putting one foot in front of the other in order to walk across the room.

Black blood seeped through the crevices of her imagination, like creeks within the darkness, distinguishable for its stickiness and its heat. He must have died slowly, the man with the spiral tattoos up his arms, and known as he lay on the ground that he was dying. Was there some fantastical place he believed he was headed? Had his last thoughts blossomed with the expectation of some miraculous world of sweetness and light; a wondrous unreality constructed stone by stone by the labor of one generation after another, and perfected only finally in the last moments of the mind's eye? For his sake, Natasha wished that it was so, though she suspected a different end. Because there had been no peace in his movements and no calm resignation, no willingness to die, in that last twitch of his legs. More likely, his last thoughts had raged out against his fate: I will not fall like this, we will murder the beast, they will save me. . . . Until the fight had collapsed with his body into the dust. Impossible, impossible, I will stand up and walk home again, impossible. . . .

If only Arthur had allowed a partial-Tribe sweep. But how many more deaths would that have led to? Natasha closed her eyes tightly, thinking it through. The total suffering must be kept to a minimum; that was the essence of the Ethical Code.

As her mind relaxed deeper into these dreams, her fingers uncurling from the edge of the blanket, Natasha's thoughts reached back to the Cranes, and how it had made her sick to see their empty, obliterated camp on the Office of Mercy's overhead screen. But hadn't it been just as bad, she asked herself—no, worse—watching them suffer? Even before the Crane men had taken off from the camp on their final hunt, the members of the Tribe had been starving. Residual weather patterns from the Storm, the citizens knew from the satellite feeds, had made the ocean temperatures inconsistent, leading to an instability of fish populations all along the eastern coastline. Recently the fluctuations had been so pronounced that Tribes like the Cranes could not adapt quickly enough to the changes. In fact, just days after the Cranes had crossed the perimeter, Natasha had watched from the Office of Mercy as they launched their final boat into the waves. The boat was a flimsy thing, a skeleton of rounded riblike wood, with a flesh of stretched, dried hide. Two lanky, thin-faced boys sat at the bow, holding paddles over their laps (brothers, maybe, they looked so alike), while two men with fishing nets draped over their shoulders shot the vessel powerfully out from the shore.

In the wild, Jeffrey had told her once, hunger is an inexhaustible source of illogical choices.

Is that why, when the sky closed over with dense, silver clouds, the four Cranes had not returned to land? Did they think the first drops of rain would bait the nonexistent fish to the surface? And did they hang on to this hope even while sprays of chilly water filled their boat and turned their limbs to ice? They capsized at 1512 hours, in the high corner of sensor W13: four dark heads disappearing and reappearing, their bodies breaking over the water clean through to the waist, then melding into the waves again. The black silhouettes of their twiglike arms thrashed and tried to climb above the ocean's plane, but there was nothing to call brave, as Pre-Storm fairy tales about heroes battling the natural elements would have one believe. There was nothing permanent or noble, no shining of the human soul. And when the water sucked them down at last (they were so weak and diminished already), they must have clawed against their death until the very last current of thought had drowned too.

A muffled sob broke from Natasha's chest into the hard mattress. Poor people. Poor creatures of Earth. It was terrible. A terrible design that would allow suffering to flourish, and make pain and dying essential gears in the machine of life. To imagine that a benevolent God had made such a world! (Because for centuries their ancestors had all thought so.) Once Natasha had asked Jeffrey about it, about religion, and according to Jeffrey, the pervasive belief in God actually revealed a great deal about Pre-Storm times. The religions of that era, Jeffrey had said, were almost always concessions that pointed directly to the violent nature of living itself; and concessions that exposed more than anything else the defeat that once had lived in every human heart. Their poor ancestors, much like the Tribes, had not wielded a power even remotely comparable to the power of the settlements to put an end to suffering and death. And so, Jeffrey had explained (he explained now, his voice soft and soporific in Natasha's mind), their ancestors had done the next best thing, they had colored their doom with a sense of purpose. They gave to suffering the aura of the divine; they gave it a witness and a reward; and to death, they granted a nature inverse of truth—calling the end a beginning.

Natasha sat up, pushing her hair back from where it stuck to her cheeks. She wanted out of these thoughts; she could not lie still anymore. She groped for the switch of the small table lamp and turned it. For a second, she held her breath, looking at the other bed. But the sprawling black mop of Min-he's head was still, and her breathing did not falter. Natasha smiled. This was one of Min-he's many good qualities as a roommate: she was unfailingly an extremely sound sleeper. Natasha felt a little better in the light (no matter what they had learned as children, the light always helped), but not good enough to try sleeping again. Quietly, Natasha pulled out the drawer of the table between their beds and removed their copy of the book that was present in every sleeproom and office of America-Five, and present (though no one could verify this directly) in every room of every settlement across the whole continent and in the other Alpha-inhabited continents too: the Ethical Code.

Their copy, according to Min-he, was from the fifth printing, published thirty-one years ago in honor of the Deltas' birth and revised to fit the conclusions of both the Year 251 and the Year 267 debates. It was a heavy book with a navy cover that had frayed to white at its edges. Natasha ran her fingers over the simple black letters on the front and felt a kind of warmth travel up through her arms. She stood her pillow up against the wall and lay back again, propping the book open on her stomach, and allowing its comforting weight to forcibly slow her breathing. She was not in search of any one particular section; what she needed was a reminder that the chaos of questions that haunted her this night was not hers alone; that these were the same terrors that the Alphas had known since the Pre-Storm times, and the same that the Alphas had pledged to end and
would
have ended, had it not been for the extra-settlement survivors of the Storm. But one beautiful day—and this was the promise of the Ethical Code, of all labor within the settlement—they would make the world clean of horror Outside while, at the same time, their bioreplacement programs would absolutely guarantee eternal life, cell by cell with no end. Then, according to the Alphas, the Day of Expansion would come. And human beings all over the planet would break free from the self-created confines of the settlements, and live again in the open air. Only this time, in this society, human life would look much different than it had before. Because
this
civilization would not have come about by the haphazard forces of nature and Pre-Storm political history, but rather by the grace of reason, ethics, and science alone. That was the dream, the achievable paradise. Of course, for Natasha, especially in this moment, it felt a long way off.

Natasha turned to the chapter titled “The Last Unmade Generation,” the history of the Earth in the years before the Storm, and she began to read at random, near the middle of the second page of the chapter.

In the century leading up to the Storm, the human population had experienced an inflationary rate of growth. The rapid downfall of economic infrastructure across Western Europe, the unification and expansion of central African cities, as well as the organized rejection of fertility regulation policies, all contributed to this effect. In the Americas and eastern European countries, a steady average of 4.28 children per woman during the preceding New Jacobean Era resulted in a population boom concomitant with the first reported losses in worldwide food production, as well as the first criminal reconfigurations of the energy grid. The Era culminated in massive shortages of fresh water and energy, which in turn caused not the dip in population that one might expect, but instead ten years of unprecedented surge. In the year preceding the Storm, 39 percent of the population was under the age of twelve.

The effects were staggering: men, women, and children starving with no means of bettering their situation, women dying in childbirth at rates unheard of since the beginning of surgical and sterilized medicine, and vast living complexes so unsound in their construction that one in every one hundred deaths was thought to be the result of a building collapse. After millennia of slow improvement, sanitation conditions eroded. Sewage systems backed up and leaked into the already precarious soil and local water sources—leading to the return of many bacterial and viral diseases thought to have disappeared two centuries prior.

Natasha stopped. Min-he rolled over, still asleep. With a restless flick, Natasha jumped ahead several pages and began reading again.

A senseless, unethical jungle, that is what the inhabited Earth had become. As unrest and fighting spread, only the extremely resourceful were able to find isolated spots of refuge in what remained of the wild. (Eventually those hideaways would be compromised too, and what survived of them purged with the cities during the Storm.) The farming and ranching industries still produced enough to keep their ventures active, but the food did not travel far, and was heavily guarded. Every storehouse on the continent posted ten armed guards at each door. As for the cities, no outside food ever reached them, the tunnels, bridges, and major arteries having fallen to the power of highly sophisticated pirates.