Pass/Fail (2012) (14 page)

Within two minutes even Jake, far from the crowd, could hear the rumbling noise of them, could hear the occasional students laugh in excitement or the occasional tense questions as teachers tried to verify all the students were present and accounted for. The principal was making some sort of announcement but Jake couldn’t make out the words. He was probably telling everyone to stay calm.

The local fire house wasn’t far away. By 11:05 Jake could hear sirens approaching. The amount of time Jake had to get into the guidance office at this point was limited. If Megan had only pulled one alarm it would have taken the firefighters only a few minutes to check and see that there was no fire, but because she’d pulled several of them they would be forced to check every part of the school. Jake had been through enough fire drills to know that this would take about twenty minutes, which should be plenty of time.

He waited to enter the school until exactly 11:07, however. When they’d been putting the plan together Cody had asked what would happen if one of the security guards stayed inside the school during the fire alarm—or even worse, what if a Proctor stayed behind to watch the security monitors. They knew from past experience that the Proctors didn’t fear for their own lives, and that the threat of a fire might not be enough to get them all out of the building. This required the second phase of the plan, and Cody had volunteered—after much debate—to run it. Megan had borrowed a bottle of syrup of Ipecac from her parents’ medicine cabinet. It was a brownish liquid that smelled horrible. Drinking more than a spoonful of it was guaranteed to make you throw up everything in your body.

Cody had spent most of the morning eating cheese puffs and drinking milk until he thought he would be sick even without the syrup. By 11:00 he was in the boy’s bathroom directly opposite the principal’s office. At 11:06, with the fire alarms going off all over the school, he drank as much of the syrup as he could stand and then ran out of the bathroom and into the hall.

Jake had no doubt that his best friend was vomiting white goo all over the principal’s door by now and wouldn’t be able to stop until every last particle of food in his body was expelled. If there was a security guard or even a Proctor in the principal’s office they would be very aware they had a sick student out in the hall in the middle of an unscheduled fire emergency. A security guard would have no choice but to help Cody get out of the school, and in so doing, abandon his post. Even a Proctor would be so distracted by the noise and the awful stench that he might ignore the monitor screens for a few minutes to see what was going on.

At 11:07 the entire school would be empty and unsupervised. Jake didn’t waste another minute. He dashed out of the ruins and through the back door—no exterior door of the school was allowed to be locked during a fire alarm. Inside the clanging bell was deafening and emergency lights strobed up and down the hall, dazzling him. Jake didn’t stop, though, until he’d reached the door of the guidance office. It was locked, of course.

The plan had to be kept simple. Jake wrapped a hooded sweatshirt around and around his right hand, then made a fist and punched through the glass window inset in the door. Then he reached through the shattered pane and unlocked the door from the inside.

A second later he was sitting in Mr. Zuraw’s chair. He went to the drawer that held the strange box and took it out, placing it carefully on the desk blotter before him and opening the lid just as he had before. When it asked him for his userid and password, he entered the letters and numbers Mr. Irwin had provided.

It worked. By 11:08, Jake had access to Mr. Zuraw’s most secret files.

Chapter Thirty-One

The hardest part of using the box—the part that took him the most time to figure out—was how to open the files. He’d never used anything like the box before in his life.

At first he tried just typing words. He tried “open” and “file” but neither of those did anything. The words didn’t even appear on the screen. Clearly it was more complicated than that. He turned his attention to something he’d already noticed but which he didn’t understand. The keyboard only took up about half of the lower section of the box. Below the keyboard was a recessed square of soft plastic and below that two buttons. Pressing the buttons did nothing, but when he touched the plastic square he finally got a result: a small black arrow appeared on the middle of the screen. By moving his finger around on the square, he could make the arrow move around the screen. At first it jumped and swerved wildly around but he quickly realized that a small motion of his finger made the arrow move much farther and soon he could get the arrow anywhere he wanted with some precision.

There was a little picture of a file folder called H_TESTING on the screen. Jake moved the arrow over the file folder and tried rubbing it, tried running the arrow across the top of the folder, tried drawing a circle around the folder, all with no effect. Then he met with a lucky accident. His thumb was resting on the buttons under the square and as he was moving the arrow around frantically, his thumb pressed down on the button. And the folder opened.

Jake squirmed in the chair as a white rectangle appeared on the screen, expecting to see a message there saying he’d been caught, that he’d met an automatic failure condition, that the Proctors were on the way. Instead the rectangle filled up with a grid of numbers and letters in seemingly random combinations. The only thing he recognized was a row of Ps and one F down one column on the far right. Those represented tests he’d passed and failed, he decided. This file was simply a list of what grades he’d received on his various tests. He tried poking around with the arrow and the buttons but the file didn’t seem to contain any clues or even descriptions of the various tests—just letters and numbers that meant nothing to him.

If he’d had more time—if he could steal the box and work with it over the course of days or even weeks—he thought he might be able to figure out what some of the letters and numbers meant. They had to be in some kind of code, he thought. But he knew that by 11:27 the fire alarm would be over and teachers would start coming back to the teacher’s wing. He glanced down at his watch.

It was already 11:21. It had taken him all that time to figure out how the arrow and the buttons worked.

In a rush he opened up folders called H_SYSTEMICS, Y_SYSTEMICS, and H_EVALUATION, but without much success. EVALUATION was just another grid of numbers and letters. Some of the values in the grid looked like medical data: blood pressure, pulse rate, and so on, but the rest of the information on the screen just baffled him. The two SYSTEMICS folders were even less useful. When he opened them black rectangles appeared, each of them blank except for a bracket in the lower left corner followed by a flashing vertical line. It looked like the same vertical line he’d seen on the rectangle that let him enter a userid and a password, so he thought it would be possible to type letters into those rectangles but he had no idea what he was supposed to write.

Finally he opened the last folder on the screen, which was marked JM_DOSSIER. He didn’t hold out much hope for it. It had to be, he figured, just a version of the paper file he’d already seen in the file room which contained his transcript and his class picture.

In fact, it did have those things. The white rectangle that appeared on the screen showed exactly the same information as his paper file, except for a couple small differences. The picture was a different one, showing Jake’s face but with his hair parted on the other side. The name above the picture said MCCARTNEY, JAKE A. That was weird—his paper file said MCCARTNEY, JAKE H. The other, much more frightening difference, was that at the bottom of the picture was the legend FAILED: SUBJECT TERMINATED BY Z.

Jake’s breath went right out of his chest. His hands grabbed the edge of the desk and it was all he could do to make them let go, to release his fingers from their painful grip. They shook badly but he folded them in his lap and tried very hard to calm down.

The file said he’d been terminated by Z. That must mean executed by Mr. Zuraw. And yet—he was still alive. It had to be a mistake. Or…

At the bottom of the rectangle was the caption PAGE 1 OF 8, followed by a little black triangle pointing right. Jake steadied his hand enough to move the arrow over the triangle and press the button.

The screen cleared, then displayed another page, PAGE 2 OF 8, slightly different from the first. This one said MCCARTNEY, JAKE B. The picture still showed Jake’s face but with much longer hair, almost down to his ears. Jake couldn’t remember ever having hair that long. Under the picture he read FAILED: SUBJECT MET AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION.

So he’d died a second time? How was that possible?

PAGE 3 OF 8 showed MCCARTNEY, JAKE C, who wore glasses. He’d been terminated. On the fourth page MCCARTNEY, JAKE D looked angry. MCCARTNEY, JAKE E looked almost exactly like Jake, but MCCARTNEY, JAKE F had hair dyed jet black with streaks of electric blue, as if Jake had chosen to go punk. It hadn’t helped. MCCARTNEY, JAKE F had been terminated by Mr. Zuraw like the others.

MCCARTNEY, JAKE G didn’t even have a picture. There was just a blank space where one should have been, and underneath it the message SUBJECT REFUSED TO PARTICIPATE. MET AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION. That would have been before school even started—it was one year exactly before Jake had pulled Megan out of her burning car.

Jake was starting to understand, a little, what he was seeing. He paged through to PAGE 8 OF 8 and saw his own face under the name MCCARTNEY, JAKE H. Below the picture he read TESTING IN PROGRESS. He was, after all, still alive.

Eight of them. Eight Jake McCartneys, all but one enrolled in the Curriculum. What had happened to Jake McCartney G? Had he failed to rescue somebody from a burning car? Had he just said no? That had counted as an automatic failure condition. Jake hunched down in the chair, feeling very small and very much alone. Seven of them had failed the tests. No one had ever passed and graduated. They were all—dead. All of them.

Except—

He’d paged through so quickly he had barely noticed, but there was one different entry. He found it again on the fourth page. MCCARTNEY, JAKE D, the angry-looking one, wasn’t listed as having been terminated either by Mr. Zuraw or by an automatic failure condition. Instead, under his photo Jake read simple the word INCOMPLETE.

He was pondering what that could mean when a black glove grabbed the top of the box’s screen and shoved it forward, nearly crushing Jake’s fingers as the box slammed shut. Jake looked up slowly and saw Mr. Zuraw staring down at him.

It was 11:29. Jake had been so engrossed in the files that he hadn’t even noticed when the fire alarm stopped ringing.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Jake was painfully conscious of the fact that he was sitting in Mr. Zuraw’s chair, and that the guidance counselor might want it. He did his best to stand up and get away from the desk, but fear turned his legs into blocks of wood.

He had just been caught in what was probably going to be considered an automatic failure condition. Which meant certain, instant death.

No guns came out, though. Mr. Zuraw didn’t summon a squad of Proctors to drag Jake out of the office. Instead he pulled up a chair to the far side of the desk and sat down in it, sighing briefly.

“Questions,” Mr. Zuraw said, “present themselves to me.” His head tilted back until he was looking at the ceiling. “Alike to petals on a rose, waiting to be picked off, one by one. Yet where should I start? They are all equally compelling.”

For a while he just sat like that, saying nothing, not looking at Jake. He was so still and quiet Jake started to wonder if the guidance counselor was breathing. Jake slowly, carefully reached for the box. He wanted to close the files he’d been looking at. If Mr. Zuraw opened the box now and saw the page for MCCARTNEY, JAKE D on the screen, he would know what Jake had just learned. If Jake could just hide that fact from him, if he could somehow erase all evidence of what he’d been doing—

Mr. Zuraw grabbed the box out of his hands with ease and threw it across the room to smash against the wall behind Jake’s head. The screen broke off and went crashing to the floor while several keys popped out of the keyboard and danced across the carpet. Jake cringed and covered his head with his hands, expecting Mr. Zuraw to attack him or at least grab him and haul him out of the room.

Instead the guidance counselor simply said, “I might like to know how he got my password, yes, that does interest me. Or I might ask who pulled the fire alarms. That person is looking at long-term suspension, if I ever learn their name. I could ask him who he expects to clean up this mess, and the foulness by the principal’s office. But I think,” Mr. Zuraw said finally, his head rolling forward until he was looking directly at Jake, “that the question that begs answering the most, is, what does he think he’s doing?”

Jake inhaled sharply. He’d considered this. He’d considered what would happen if he was caught, and he’d tried to plan for it. He’d actually considered the possibility that he would be asked this exact question, and how he should answer it.

“I was following your instructions,” he said, trying to keep his voice from cracking.

Mr. Zuraw’s face twitched into a smile. It looked like the sides of his mouth were being propped up by sticks. “Now that is good,” he said. “I admire bravado. Please, tell me. Exactly when did I instruct you to break into my office and steal my secrets?”

Jake nodded. He knew what to say now. “When you told me that cheating was permitted. That it was actually necessary to pass some of the tests.”

“Cheating? Go on.”

Jake shrugged. “I thought you might have a list of the tests in your—your—”

“It’s called a computer,” Mr. Zuraw told him.

“In your computer,” Jake said. “You might have descriptions of the tests in there, or even solutions to them.”

“And did you find anything like that?” Mr. Zuraw asked. “No, you did not,” he said, not giving Jake a chance to answer. “I’m not that stupid. The solutions are all up here.” He tapped one side of his head. “Still. You’ve shown real cleverness. You know what, Jake? If it were in my power, I’d give you a free PASS just for trying. Unfortunately that’s not in my power. The Youth Steering Committee are quite clear on the rules, and I simply enforce them. Get out of here.”