Pass/Fail (2012) (23 page)

D put the pieces he’d been working on together and wrapped them with more electrical tape. Then he slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

“Next stop,” he said, and headed for the door. “The cloning vats.”

Chapter Fifty-One

This time D didn’t knock down the door. Instead he pulled his Proctor’s mask over his face and touched the door gently. It slid open and a wave of humid air washed out and over them.

They stepped inside into a dimly lit room full of what looked like refrigerators lying on their backs—long white boxes with hinged lids. One of the boxes was open and vapor was rising from its contents.

A pair of Proctors were working over the box. One reached down inside with a hypodermic needle. When it pulled its arm back, its sleeve was sopping wet. As the three kids entered the room both Proctors looked up, their masks hiding any surprise or anger they might feel at being disturbed.

D had said before that the Proctors were trained to trust implicitly anyone in a mask. D strode confidently toward them and said, “There’s a problem with the current test. Both of you are needed on the soccer field.”

The two Proctors filed out of the room without comment. When they were gone D peeled his mask off again. “You may not want to see this,” he said.

“But I have to, right?”

“No. You can choose to not look. That’s how you know you can trust me. I give you choices, alright? But I think you should see it. Come over here.” Jake came and stood where D showed him. He looked down at the lid of one of the large boxes. It had a letter I painted on it, near the top. There was also a digital readout that said RUNTIME REMAINING 65 DAYS, 7 HOURS, 31 MINUTES, and a yellow sticker that warned the contents were at risk of bacterial contamination if preventative measures were not followed.

“Open it up,” D said, and together they lifted the lid. It was heavy but once it was lifted it stayed up without anyone holding it. Mist boiled up out of the box and Jake waved it away. When he could finally see what lay inside he nearly gagged, though he had expected something much like it. Inside, floating in yellowish liquid, was a miniature version of himself, perhaps four and a half feet tall. It was curled in a ball, completely naked, and a cluster of thin tubes ran into its nose and mouth and the corner of one eye.

“They’re already growing my replacement,” Jake said.

“They have been for nearly a year. Take a look at this one,” D told him.

The next box over was labeled J. The remaining runtime on that one was 327 DAYS, 21 HOURS, 9 MINUTES. Jake pushed back the lid and when the steam cleared he saw an embryo floating in the liquid, just a curl of flesh that didn’t even have proper eyes yet. It was connected to its box by the same bundle of tubes in its face, but also had a thicker one attached to its belly button.

“It takes a little less than twelve months to grow a new Jake McCartney,” D explained. “They’re very patient people, the YSC, but they don’t want to have to wait seventeen years every time somebody fails the Curriculum. They want a new test subject every year, and one who
appears
to be seventeen is good enough. When these are done there won’t be a doctor in the world who can tell them apart from a real seventeen year old.”

“Wait—there’s something wrong here. You’re saying they grow a new one every year? But they can’t have grown me like this. I’m a lot more than a year old!”

D said nothing. He just watched Jake’s face.

“No, come on. I remember—I remember being sixteen. I remember being nine.”

“Really? Try.”

Jake closed his eyes and tried to call up a memory from when he was a kid. A birthday party—yes—he was surrounded by—by fifth graders. He was blowing out the candles on a cake. For some reason he was much taller than any of the other kids at the party. And he had stubble on his face. He tried again. A family vacation he’d taken when he was eight. Jake and his parents had gone to Hawaii and they’d taken Cody with them. The two of them had watched girls walking on the beach in their bikinis and—no. He couldn’t have been eight. No eight year old would think things like that about a girl in a bikini.

Every memory Jake had could have taken place in his seventeenth year of life. He could not remember a time when he was shorter, or before his voice had broken, or when he hadn’t worn size 32 pants.

D grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry. But I have to ask. What is your father’s first name?”

Jake shook him off. He didn’t know the answer. He couldn’t remember a time he’d ever heard his father called anything but Mr. McCartney.

“What are you saying?” Megan demanded. “Of course he knows his own father’s name!”

D ignored her. “You were never sixteen, Jake. You’ve been alive for only a few months. You were never conceived, never born, and all your memories are lies, fed to you in your vat through that cable going into your eye—”

“Stop!” Jake shouted. The word echoed in the windowless room.

He walked to the next vat. It was labeled K. There was no runtime listed. Presumably they hadn’t even begun to grow that one, yet. “Who was he?” Jake asked, finally, in a very quiet voice.

“Who?” D asked.

“Jake McCartney. The original Jake McCartney. You said that wasn’t his real name. Do you know what it was? He was my father, I guess.”

“No. He made you from nail clippings, or maybe a strand of your hair. A father’s something different,” D said. “Are you sure you want to know this? He’s never acted like a father toward you and he never will. Be sure. This is not like an adopted kid finding his birth father.”

“I’m sure,” Jake said. He tensed up every muscle in his body, as if he expected to be struck.

“His name was Jonathon Zuraw. His name
is
Jonathon Zuraw.”

Jake grabbed the side of one of the vats so that he didn’t collapse on the floor.

“Zuraw knew that he thought best when he was in danger. So he reasoned that if he was close to passing the tests just by having Proctors threaten and abuse him, then if he put himself under threat of death then he would do even better. But it had to be a real threat, you understand? He had to believe it was real. The biggest problem was that he couldn’t be sure he would pass, anyway. If something went wrong, if some small part of the Curriculum broke down, he could fail easily and there would be no way to repeat the experiment, because he would be dead. Unless there were more of him.”

“So he cloned himself. Except it still didn’t work,” Jake said, imagining how it must have gone. “Jake McCartney A failed. So did B. And all the rest, including me.”

“Imagine what it must be like to pass judgment on yourself like that,” D said, sounding almost as if he pitied Mr. Zuraw. “To have to finally put yourself down so many times, over and over again. Is it any surprise he’s gone insane?”

“And the Youth Steering Committee—”

“Has no problem with what he’s doing,” D finished. “He isn’t hurting anyone but himself—technically—and in the process, he might just give them what they want. A seventeen year-old who can pass every test they can think of.”

D closed the lids of the two vats and headed for the door again. “I know it’s a lot to process, but we don’t have time for you to try to make sense of it right now. We’ve got maybe five minutes left before this place is swarming with armed Proctors. One last stop and then we head upstairs.”

He led the two of them to another corridor. All the doors looked alike but somehow D knew exactly where to go. He busted down a door and inside was an armory. The walls were lined with pistols, hung up carefully with their clips ejected. Boxes of bullets were stacked neatly on the floor.

“Gear up,” D said. “I don’t know what kind of resistance we’ll meet up top, so choose the gun that looks best to you.”

“No,” Jake said. His brain was starting to hurt, but he was sure he was making the right decision. “No guns. Going up there with a gun would make me just like him. That’s my choice.”

D studied Jake’s face for a while before shrugging in acceptance. “Fine. Then take this instead,” he said, and handed Jake his stun gun. “There’s one, maybe two charges left. Listen,” he said, when Jake hesitated before taking the weapon, “I guarantee you won’t kill anybody with it.”

Jake took it and shoved it in his back pocket. He planned on throwing it away as soon as that was safely possible. He turned to go when he saw Megan taking a gun down from the wall.

“Unh-uh,” D said, grabbing it away from her. “I don’t trust you. You don’t get a choice.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

The three of them emerged through the secret door in the school. The lockers swung back and closed automatically behind them once they were out of the maze. D grabbed Jake’s arm and pointed at the lockers across the hall from the secret door. “Listen,” he said. “What I have planned may not work. If it doesn’t—go to my old locker. It’s number 1337, right there.”

Jake nodded.

“The combination is the same as on your locker.”

“How do you know his combination?” Megan asked, in a whisper.

D shrugged. “I know all the combinations. There are only about five different ones. I’ve been coming back here at night, sometimes. I’ve been coming back for years. It’s taken me that long to get together the stuff I need. This way, if you’re with me. Or you can just head off on your own, if you think your chances are better that way.”

Another choice. Jake looked up and down the hallway. Clusters of sleeping bodies lay before the classroom doors. Half the wrestling team was in an unconscious heap before Mr. Brosnahan’s metal shop. At the far end of the hall he could just see Mr. Dzama, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

Jake followed D, and Megan followed him.

They came eventually to a place where two corridors intersected. Jake thought they must be near the center of the school, halfway between the front doors and the back of the school, where the guidance office lay. There was a janitor’s closet there—the same one he and Megan had hid inside after he passed the test with the black- and white-masked Proctors. Where he’d last asked her to kiss him, and where she’d refused.

D opened the door and revealed that the closet was stuffed with black trash bags, all of them stuffed full and tied at one end. They definitely hadn’t been there before. “This is what took me the most time. They don’t just sell this stuff in hardware stores. Give me a hand.”

Jake and Megan helped him remove the bags from the closet one by one and stack them in a rough pyramid. It was hard, sweaty work—the bags were extremely heavy and there were a lot of them—and after awhile Jake started getting tired. Rather than placing it neatly, he tried tossing one onto the top of the growing pile, but D called out, “Careful! This stuff isn’t exactly stable.”

“What is it?” Megan asked.

“It’s a mixture of fertilizer and a couple other ingredients, baked and then compressed into bricks. It’s got an extremely high reaction velocity and a low flashpoint, which makes it ideal for this kind of work.”

Jake got very little of that except the part about fertilizer. “What exactly is it supposed to achieve? Don’t tell me we’re starting a farm.”

“Of course not,” D said, placing the last bag at the top of the pyramid. Then he took out the complicated device he’d assembled down the maze’s machine shop. “It’s a bomb.”

Very carefully, he tore a hole in one of the sacks. For a second Jake smelled turpentine or maybe kerosene, and then D slid the pronged end of his device into the bag, a hair’s breadth at a time.

“We’re directly above the maze, here,” he told them. “Specifically, we’re above the cloning vats. If the explosion is big enough—and it had better be, after all the trouble I went through to get this stuff—it’ll wipe out the entire complex, including the school. Millions upon millions of dollars worth of equipment, files, and test results will go up in one quick flash. The Curriculum will never recover from a loss like that. And of course,” he said, “Zuraw will be right here in the middle of the blast.”

“How do you know that?” Jake asked.

“Because by now he’s figured out you’re not on the soccer field. Which means that in what, two minutes? He’ll be standing right here, probably pointing a gun at me. Know your enemy, Jake.”

D twisted a knob on the side of his device—a detonator, Jake realized—and the digital readout flashed 05:00. Immediately it began counting down: 04:59. 04:58.

“You two just have time to get out of here. Get as far away as you can—the other side of the football stadium should do it, if I’ve calculated everything just right.”

“Jake,” Megan whispered.

He ignored her. He was sure he’d heard wrong—

“You’re going to stay? You’re going to die like this?” he asked D. “After surviving for so long?” He couldn’t believe it.

“I want to see the look on his face. His face, which is my face, all grown up. I’ve made my choice. You don’t get to argue with it,” D told him.

“Jake!” Megan hissed.

Both D and Jake twisted around to look at her. Of course, Jake thought, D would still respond when he heard that name called—

“I’m not sure if you noticed,” she told them, “but every student in this school is lying on the floor here! If you set this bomb off right now, you’ll kill every single one of them.”

“She’s right. Turn it off,” Jake said.

“No.” D smiled. “I knew there would be some casualties. I’m willing to accept that.”

“I’m not,” Jake said. “Turn it off. Or show me how.” He took the stun gun out of his pocket. It had a simple trigger on one end, and a part you pointed at the person you wanted to stun. He pointed it at D.

The expression that crossed D’s face hurt Jake to see. It was a look of betrayal and anger. This other self—this older, wiser self who had taught Jake so much in so little time—was judging him and finding him a failure. It felt a lot worse than getting a FAIL.

Then D’s eyes narrowed and he started reaching for his pocket. “He got to you,” D said. “Zuraw put you up to this.”

“No,” Jake said. “Now, turn it off.”

D’s hand came out of his pocket with a pistol clutched in it. “I should have known. After all this time… he couldn’t just let me go. He’s been searching for me for years. I thought I was free—but you never get free. He knew I would come back for you, that I would risk exposure if it meant a chance to save you, even just one of you. He set me up. This is my last test, isn’t it? Except I can’t pass it. He’s going to show up now and kill me.”