As they approached their final street for assessment, Kaĉjo pushed his board at a faster clip to catch up with his companion. The dark season brought an end to the light earlier than usual, and he didn’t like riding at night in case someone stepped in his way and he couldn’t see them in time to adjust. “You told me a few weeks ago that the bots had to be separated from Benevolence because of potential damage to humankind. Why would you even consider changing that now?”
Channer shook his head. “That was decades ago. Those bots had no idea what they were doing, or they wouldn’t have hesitated so long. Their mistakes then aren’t really relevant now.”
“What if they could just see more potential futures then we can?”
Frustrated, Channer weighed his words carefully. “Why do you think they had so many formulations in the different cities? We don’t know exactly what the cities were like before the FD, though I tend to think they were much more ordered. Before the SD, though, the domes were all different with different results. They weren’t allowed to run unified models with the bots; it was too dangerous, and all the competing bots that might have restrained them had been shut down by regulation. So, it was logical guesswork plus the process of elimination – a testable model, really – just like humans use.”
“So, why do we trust this system rather than our own thoughts, then? Why shouldn’t we question if this dome is just one of the failed experiments?”
Glancing over his shoulder, Channer threw him an exasperated glare. “You were supposed to be over this curiosity a year ago – more than a year ago. Between you and Ivan, it’s a wonder I get any work done. Where is he, by the way?” When Kaĉjo shook his head, Channer rolled his eyes to the sky. “Well, I may not be able to stop him, since he refuses to show up for work, but you will have to behave while you’re here with me, and stop asking questions!”
Duly reprimanded, Kaĉjo closed his mouth, and the next couple of krona passed without incident. Maybe Ivan would hold some answers – the kid was curious and resourceful. What was he up to? With that ANGEL again? Kaĉjo just couldn’t let it go. As he and Channer approached the last of their rounds, he cleared his throat. “If you want, I can go see why Ivan disappeared after midday.”
“Huh?” Channer glanced up from the panel he had pulled out, irritated at the interruption.
“Ivan. He never showed, and I want to hop over to his place and see if he’s there.”
“Oh, sure. That’s fine,” Channer mumbled, turning back to the circuit board. “Just don’t take any detours, and get back here quickly. We have to calibrate the main compressor panel before we sleep.”
“I miss the days when I didn’t know about the Cure and the night mix still affected me…” Kaĉjo murmured, not quite willing to complain to someone like Channer. “Got it,” he spoke aloud. “I’ll get back as quickly as I can.” The rush would hamper any investigation he might want to undertake, but he had to try. If he found Ivan at home getting ready for sleep, he could put the whole problem behind him. The longer he knew the kid, the longer he regretted revealing any weakness to him.
The sun had not fully set, but it was behind the trees outside the dome, and so the shadows stretched long enough to approximate dusk. Now that he wandered the streets after dark, he wished there were some kind of artificial light on the streets as well as in the homes, especially in the cold season when the sun set early. Not that he could feel the cold inside, but he knew from market days that, as the days grew shorter, the temperature grew colder. The fact made him sadder now that the Cure didn’t work as well.
With a quick shiver, he flew past several blocks to the quarter where he had spied Ivan walking with the ANGEL. It was usually easy to track down an Advocate after dark, since pretty much every other human settled into their dwellings to prep for sleep, and most walked rather than zipped around on their boards. With only the wan light that leaked out to the street from the interior of the dwellings, Kaĉjo made his way to Ivan’s. After several knocks, the door had not opened.
Though Ivan should have turned in for the day by now, maybe something had delayed him. Had he been near the house of the Unrelenter they had interviewed a few days prior? Maybe a follow-up visit? It was a little late for that, but Ivan wasn’t exactly typical – maybe he would do untypical things. Ducking into the waystation, Kaĉjo tapped in his identifiers and pulled up the home of the young man. No heartbeat.
As he stared at the screen considering what else he could try, the word nagged at him.
Heartbeat.
The whole time he and Channer had been investigating, they had assumed a mechanical issue, but what if the problem had been human? If it’s human, it has a heart. Kaĉjo had shied away at the time from the commitment needed to filter through the heartbeats, but what if he didn’t have to find a specific heartbeat – just whether or not there had been two?
After a quick jaunt to Benevolence, he tapped into the interface and began scrolling back to the proper date. It only took him a few minutes to reach the records of the morning krona and filter through them. Thanks to the treatment, his responses weren’t suppressed, and his heart began to thrum faster when he read the screen. There had been three heartbeats in the house that day.
Benevolence had no trouble matching one of the heartbeats with the man who had withdrawn from the Relenting, and Kaĉjo confirmed the match easily since it was the man’s house. There were two more heartbeats. Kaĉjo isolated one of them and ran it through the system, focusing on the nearby houses. There, two doors down. Blake Groundin. Sixteen years old at the time, just in time for isolation. Definitely from within the city.
When he fed the third heartbeat into Benevolence, it spun around and around and around with no evidence of a match. It pulled up a couple that were similar, but if his training was right, the peaks and valleys altered too much to be consistent with the same person. The visual comparison that he usually used between Benevolence and his tablet didn’t match up.
Not trusting his training or his eyes, he closed his eyes, feeling for the rhythm of the thump-thump, thump-thump, first from Benevolence and then from the tablet. No matter how many times he listened, he couldn’t make the tones match.
He stared at it for several seconds, wondering how the computer knew which heartbeat belonged to whom. With a new sense of scrutiny, Kaĉjo pulled up the list of the other withdrawals that had occurred over the past two years. The next one after the Lender kid? Kaĉjo closed his eyes. It seemed to be the foreign heartbeat. The next one? Nothing. Then for the next six Unrelentings, the same foreign heartbeat, if he read the sound right. So, was an unregistered human was interfering with the process? Does that mean a Deplorable?
What had Ivan said? He had made friends with a Deplorable. What if Ivan were conspiring with this Deplorable to undermine the system? Kaĉjo had to find his coworker. Of course, this late in the day, no Deplorable would wander the streets, so Kaĉjo would just have to question his compatriot. Besides, the last time he had seen Ivan, the younger Advocate had been in the company of an ANGEL. An ANGEL wouldn’t – couldn’t – hide the presence of an unregistered human. It either didn’t know who or had reported it to Ivan.
Where had he seen Ivan with the ANGEL? On the south, he thought. When he was leaving the site where his vision had dragged him. No wonder he had just let it go – he had been more afraid of being confronted by Ivan in that state than he was curious about what his coworker was up to. If Ivan had disappeared today, what were the chances he was with his Deplorable again? To the south, then, Kaĉjo decided, hopping back on his board.
A couple of rows south of Benevolence, he noticed a door opening into a home just to the right of the building. Was that Ivan’s silhouette? It was near Ivan’s home. Once Kaĉjo reached the street itself, he slowed, recognizing the younger man not too far from where he had walked with the ANGEL before. Inside the mouth of the door, an older man stood and chatted, completely unconcerned about the night. Ivan hadn’t lied – the man was much older than Kaĉjo would have guessed someone inside could be, though he had seen Deplorables far older. But didn’t he know everyone inside?
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The man seemed vaguely familiar, and Kaĉjo took a risk, stepping off the board as he approached the pair without preface. “Channer was looking for you, Ivan,” he shot from the shadows.
If the shock on the younger man’s face meant anything, he wasn’t happy for the interruption. “Uri was concerned about some…” He seemed to stutter.
“My house has developed a leak, and though I know that is not the job of the Advocates to fix, Ivan is my neighbor, and I thought he might show me the proper codes to request assistance on my device. I’m sorry that as I age I grow slower, and he had to show me many times before I understood.”
“I didn’t want to have to show him on another day,” Ivan finally answered for himself.
“Why don’t you let me look?” Kaĉjo prodded, not completely convinced that Ivan was telling the truth. “Maybe I can see the source of the leak.”
“That’s not necessary,” Ivan gushed, but the old man cut him off.
“Of course, that is very considerate of you, a man with your responsibilities. Won’t you come in?”
Kaĉjo wanted so badly to investigate further, but he couldn’t ignore Channer’s final imperative. He had to get back to the compressor. He had found the kid and there was nothing obviously wrong. If he upset Channer, it would be harder to throw him off Kaĉjo’s own trail. He had crossed the line enough ties that he didn’t feel confident in confronting Ivan at the moment, not even for consorting with a Deplorable. “I’m afraid I don’t have time tonight,” he leveled. “These jobs are not our responsibility, Ivan. Next time, don’t spend so much time with him. Just enter the request for repair, and while you’re at it, enter a request for a tech-assist to educate him on the system.”
“I will definitely do that,” Ivan nodded. “Do you need me to come, or should I turn in for the night?”
“Just go to bed,” he allowed. “We’ll talk more in the morning. And Mr…”
“Just Uri.”
“And Uri, you do know how to call a tech.”
“I do.”
“Then do that next time and don’t bother an Advocate with your problems.”
With a placid smile, the old man nodded himself into his dwelling, and Ivan started toward his own. Kaĉjo was ready to do the same, so he spun back to retrace his path to Channer and the compressor.
++++++++++++++++
When the crackling came from behind her, Leia nearly jumped, instinctively lowering the little gun-thing until it pointed in the shadow at her back. A sliver of light intruded over the greyed-out gravel, and a small, hunched shape emerged in shadow.
“Won’t you come in?” creaked a voice, and for a second, Leia thought she heard the rich threads of Eva’s voice. It shot an ache through her gut at the sense of loss, but then she realized the tone was too deep. A man. This was an old man. Inside the city. Living inside the city, if she discerned correctly.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Well, my name is Uribe. Beyond that, I’m not really anyone. I think my friend Ivan here brought you to me because I collect antiquities, and I guess you are a sort of antiquity.”
Leia snickered. At not even twenty, she was hardly an antiquity, and with his leathered skin, he definitely deserved the name more than she. When she took a step toward him, Ivan held out his hand to stop her.
“She can’t come inside, Uri, you know that.”
“Oh, dear. Yes. I was just so excited.”
“Why can’t I come in?”
“The houses are monitored,” Ivan explained. “They keep track of heartbeats – supposedly to guard against medical emergencies – but it also avoids unapproved interactions.”
“That sounds suggestive.” She twisted her lips, and “Uri” grinned.
“It includes protecting against the more salacious activities, but also just the general practice of congregation. Benevolence found that the only really safe place to let humans congregate was in the chapels, with the SENTORs directing thoughts and emotions to the proper topics. Other than that, people can meet outside in the clearings, because they have full camera coverage, but not in private houses.”
“So everyone lives alone?” Leia thought of her own sadness since her mother died, since she was isolated in her home despite the community around her and the people she considered friends. “What about families?”
“I –” For the first time, the almost cocky Ivan seemed confused.
“Families are not really something allowed,” clarified Uri. “Not since the Second Divestiture, when Benevolence determined to farm infants rather than allow them to develop naturally inside a mother or be raised by a father. Families produce loyalties that increase conflict and make it harder to control a populace. If not for the directive put in place by the architects of the SD, I think the MONIFORs would have wiped you all out in the Dregs. It’s why the original programmers recalibrated them to the monitoring aspect of their makeup and unwound the ‘enforcer’ part of their programming. As it stands, they didn’t really mitigate the danger that you in the Dregs pose – there’s always some danger that you will create a competing society, one that overtakes the cities. Whatever I might think of that, it’s certainly not what the architects desired.”
“I’ve read stories about how the First Divestiture almost killed off humanity.”
“The agenda of the First Divestiture did not denote humans as anything special in the realm of the planet, so since we tend to undermine the balance of nature – upend the natural flow of ecosystems – we were considered a menace. We almost didn’t stop the machines in time to save humanity.”
Leia noted a tense posture in Ivan beside her – he hadn’t known this.
“But, obviously the people who designed the Second Divestiture weren’t big fans of humans, either, since they stuck as many as they could in cages.”
“Well, it was a compromise. Many on one side would have relished the destruction of humanity – or at least, all but a few of the brightest and most successful. They believed that if they could eradicate all but the wisest and best of humans, they would create a new race and system that would function better on the planet. The other side of the philosophical aisle thought of humans as part of nature, and whatever they did as the natural growth. Therefore, whatever species survived with humans were the ones that were the most superior. It was an odd competition.”
“So, what was the compromise?” Ivan interrupted.
“One side – the Panterrestrials, who were a kind of naturist – agreed to stop the technology from killing off humanity, knowing that they had at least managed the death of billions already, They had also limited technology to the domes, which removed the capacity of humans to collaborate in great numbers, and by doing this, they suppressed most the of human will for endeavor. In exchange, the other group – the Rendering – got to pull the plug on the destructive computers, keeping only those with the directive to save humanity. The Rendering was all about human advancement, and they were only a few months from altering their machines to meld humans with computers, but they had to agree to stop the transition. The Pans set up the structure of society inside the domes, and the Rendering had to hope that those outside might find its way back to advancement.”
“All of the children are…grown in some kind of factory?” Leia had hardly heard the rest of the lecture – she just could not have imagined. Never knowing her mom, like she had never known her dad?
“They are harvested from the breeders. We are hardly the first civilization that has designated some women as breeders and left the others to remain childless, and we are hardly the first to remove children from their parents – though most wait until the third year of life at least.”
She had read about some of the societies he spoke of, and they had always proven the most broken and violent. Yet, his own community never even raised their voices, much less their weapons. “My mother hinted at this; she said it was why she left the city when she found she was with child.”
“Oh, my…” Uri gasped. “Then you are quite special. She must have fled early, to avoid detection of your heartbeat. I wonder how they avoided the Cure. Otherwise, they would never have dared…”
Though his words stirred a thousand questions, Leia began to lose focus. Between the Curse and the fear and the long trek through the streets, exhaustion gripped her.
“Young man,” came Uri’s voice. “If she is not to come into my home, what are we to do with her? You can see she is nearing the end of her day’s strength.”
“I thought we would raid your warehouse,” Ivan shrugged. “Surely there is something in there that we could lay out for her to sleep on. You have a blanket or two inside, and I can stand guard while she rests.”
“I can’t sleep here!” she complained. “I have to get back!”
“I told you, girl. The gates are locked. You’re going to have to sleep here at least one night, and I can’t guarantee there won’t be others. Besides, have you seen yourself lately? Your ANGEL’s robe is not exactly pristine at the moment, and you might need to straighten your hair to pass for inhuman.”
“That last part is easy, at least. I will just need some water for my hair, but what about the robe? I am wearing full attire beneath. Couldn’t you just wash it?”
“The MONIFORs do that, and they inventory everything. I’m thinking it would be easier for me to swap yours out with one heading to the ANGELs. They’ll get a shock when one of them goes out in stained attire, but I don’t think that will be easy to manage. I can do that for you tomorrow.”
“Even if you don’t sleep tonight?”
“I’ll sleep,” he shrugged as he and Uri began to make their way to a building behind the house. “Just propped up against the wall so I can awaken if need be.” He pulled open the door and led the way in. After some digging, he produced a thin, lounge chair cushion. “This looks about right.”
“What about spiders?” she wondered.
“We don’t have spiders in here. I don’t think…I never really studied insects, but it seems I would have seen them. Just, here.” He smacked the thin cushion, and when no dust puffed from the surface, she found herself drawn to it. She was so tired, and she didn’t really know why she was trying so hard to find her father.
As her eyes closed, she could make out a few of the men’s words.
“She’s quite docile for an outsider.”
“Don’t let the night fool you – I’m pretty sure it’s the Cure. When I first found her, she was far less docile.”
Maybe she should worry that she didn’t care anymore, but she just couldn’t make herself. She faded into dreamless slumber without another thought.