The Fourth Sage (The Circularity Saga) (2 page)

The other two try to contain their laughter. His name tag says SETH. He’s easily a foot taller than her, his eyes and demeanor telling her that he is going to push it today, push it to the limit of what the software considers appropriate social conduct. She's been called names before. Many times. Her father had made enough money to pay for the four operations to join her upper lip and close the cleft. As a result, the tip of her nose is now slightly pushed inward and there's a small scar below it in the space between her nose and her upper lip. She doesn’t see it when she looks at herself. She never did. It was always normal for her. She remembers her mom telling her that she was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. And Aries believed her. She doesn’t really feel hurt when someone says something about it. She did in the beginning. Now it’s just annoying.

She glances over at Kiire. He is involved in his own battle with the boy across from him. The boy stares at him relentlessly while repeating, “I will crush you,” without moving his lips. She can’t read his name tag except the first four letters. TERR. For a second she thinks about what could possibly drive someone to perfect the art of belittling someone to that extent. What inner demons he must be fighting each night when he lays in his two-foot-wide bunk bed in the darkness. Does he think about his parents? Does he think about his future and that he will probably never get anywhere, never see the sun, never stand in the rain or smell the earth under him? That he'll most likely die fifty or sixty years from now within two hundred meters of where he sits? That he'll work in Rodent Control for the rest of his life? She pities him. Until Kiire lets out a gasp. His hand goes to his knee under the table. He tries to swallow the pain. The tears come out of sheer reflex.

“Make a sound and you’re dead,” Terr whispers. “Cry and you'll spend two weeks in medical and afterward you’ll eat what she’s drinking.” Kiire lowers his head, looks down at his food, tries to pretend he’s eating. A few tears drip down onto his plate.

“Hey, Scarlip, tell me, do you know this boy?” Seth says with a smile, as if Aries has just told a joke and he’s showing his amusement. “Is he a friend of yours? 'Cause if he is, if he’s a friend of yours, what're you gonna do to help him out? Or are you just going to sit there and do nothing? You have to ask yourself what kind of a friend you are if that’s the case, huh? If you don’t know him, that’s a different story. Then we’re all just sitting here, talking. Right?”

Aries registers that she is frozen. Her mind draws a complete blank, unable to form an answer, a response of any kind. That always seems to happen in situations like this. Afterward, she usually comes up with a long list of things that she could have said and done. But at this moment, right now, there is nothing. All she can think of is "Rodent Control" and how strange it is that the corners of his mouth move downward each time he smiles.

She looks above his head at one of the oversized flat screens mounted on each wall of the dining room. They usually have advertisements on them. Right now, it shows a blonde woman in a bathing suit talking about how, for only fifteen units a month, you could become a member of the beach club. This gives you access to an hour per day on fine sand, a milky pool, and a huge wall screen with an ocean view on it. It’s pixilated and the quality stinks, but many people in Tier One use it. Aries has been there only once.

“Are you listening to me?” Seth’s grin disappears.

“Yes,” is all she can muster. It comes out with a squeak, like a rusty faucet sputtering water.

“Are you?”

“Yes.” This time it’s clearer, albeit still with a hint of fear.

“Good. 'Cause if you don’t... if you don’t listen to me, this will not end well for you. I've been watching you, Scarlip Egan. For a while. There's something about you, you know. Something irritating. Like you’re proud of something. Like you’re better than the rest of us. Like you’ve got something the rest of us don’t have. But now that I look at you a little closer, I don’t know what it was I even saw in you. You’re just pathetic. You look pathetic.”

The other two boys nod reassuringly. Kiire eats, or better, moves tiny little portions of wheat paste to his mouth so he doesn’t have to do anything else. The knot in Aries's stomach is a small planet rotating around its own axis. She thinks she is going to be sick. Maybe if she said something, anything, he would be satisfied and leave her alone. Maybe she should apologize and tell him he's right and that she’d seriously consider the points he had made. She has no clue what to say, so she opens her mouth and starts talking.

“Did you know that cockroaches leave chemical trails in their feces, as well as emitting airborne pheromones for swarming and mating?” She has no idea where this is coming from but decides to go with it. “These chemical trails transmit bacteria on surfaces.” She lifts her hands off the table, wipes them on her jumpsuit and puts them in her lap. “Other cockroaches will follow these trails”—she looks at the other two boys who don’t quite get what’s going on yet—“to discover sources of food and water. They feed on scraps of human food and usually leave an offensive odor.”

All eyes are on Aries. She can see the anger well up in Seth, but there is no more backing down for her. She has to rise to meet his challenge or leave, leave right now only to come back tomorrow and do this all over again. When she continues, she pronounces each word clearly, as if talking to a child.

"Cockroaches are attracted to warm, moist environments. They spend the daylight hours in dark, secluded areas under refrigerators, stoves, and in crevices under the floors. The presence of cockroaches during the day may indicate a large population. They have been linked with allergic reactions in humans."

For a few moments, there is silence at the table. Then Kiire sneezes. “Sorry,” he says, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his shirt. Aries can’t help but let out a giggle. Without warning, Seth jumps up, grabs Aries across the table by the collar, pulls her toward him and screams at her from the bottom of his lungs, “I AM NOT A COCKROACH!”

He pushes her; she loses her balance and falls to the floor. Pain shoots through her elbow. She looks up, realizing first that everyone in the room is staring at her and second, that there are absolutely no sounds. The monitors behind Seth’s red face go dark. That’s not a good sign. She gets up holding her elbow and flexes it to see if it’s broken.

Then the screens simultaneously come back on. After a few seconds of flickering, the image of a room appears. There are several bunk beds, all empty. One of them has someone sitting on it, arms wrapped around the legs, head down. Over the speakers drifts the sound of soft weeping. The camera zooms closer toward the bowed head. The hair is dark with spikes standing in all directions. Then the head lifts up from the knees and Seth’s oversized face comes into frame. His eyes swollen with tears, he stares into space while sobbing. A single “Mommy” escapes his mouth. Then the sobbing continues.

There is not a sound in the dining hall except for a couple of low laughs here and there that are instantly swallowed up by the silence. Aries faces Seth. Their eyes meet. She realizes that she is as shocked as he is. Gone is the anger, gone the boy who wanted to stir trouble with a girl today. All that’s left is reality and the never-absent and far-reaching presence of the A.I. monitors behind the walls, behind the screens, and behind it all.

The quiet that follows is almost eerie. When Aries looks at Kiire and the other two boys and from there into the faces of the other kids, there is a small moment when she feels it, feels it like electricity in the room. It’s palpable. It is the sense that all of them are trapped with no way out, with nowhere to go. And below that hopelessness, Aries can sense the small wish for something else. For a life outside of this, for something better. But that small instant of a wish—minuscule in size and overpowered by the sheer bleakness of their lives—disappears quickly, like the flicker of a firefly at night. Moments later, it is gone. What’s left is their shared knowledge that nothing can change their fate, nothing can reach down and lift them up and place them into a world of safety and of comfort.

Their eyes are lowered as they return to their tables, to their benches. Some sit, others collect their empty dishes and move them toward a small conveyor belt on one of the walls. Aries casts one more look toward Seth, as if to say, “Next time be more careful.” The screens turn back to normal, back to the blonde woman in the bathing suit who talks about the beach club. As she turns to leave, Aries can’t help but feel a sting of guilt over what she said to Seth. “No,” she decides, “he deserved it.” But as she leaves the dining room she isn’t even sure about that.

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Egan, Aries, D. ID#: 4746-POC-201-0017485
0001000 0101 01001
incident involving
Boras, Seth, S. ID#: 4746-POC-201-0015774
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tag 4.1
100001 1101001001
further action pending evaluation
1 1 11 0001 10001 1000 11000110 1011010 100011 00 1110100 001001 010101 010111 011000 010 0001101 01011101010 0101001

Chapter 2 — Ty

“For they hold our fates forever, in their hands both young and strong.”

[Part of a forbidden nursery rhyme]

Aries takes two steps at once, climbing up the steep narrow stairs while holding onto the railing. If her hands are free she can usually make it up in about five seconds. Fourteen steps. Back down is even quicker. Sliding on her hands and forearms and hooking her heels onto the railing she can be down in under three seconds.

She reaches the top and lands on a small platform, which leads into a narrow, slightly curved hallway. To her left is a metal door. Aries looks briefly up at the small camera in one of the corners of the doorframe. She punches in a code. After a moment, the clicking sound indicates that the door has been unlocked. A small LED next to a numeric pad goes from red to blue. She steps through the opening. The thick door closes behind her, hermetically sealing itself. In case of a leak of any of the chemicals used to heat and cool the massive high-rise, this section—Tier Zero—will be cut off and sealed from the rest of the building.

Aries is hit by a wave of heat coming off the rectangular container-sized transformers on either side of the narrow hallway. The heat exchange units convert chemical processes into either heat or cooling, depending on what is needed at the moment. She goes left, walks through the narrow passageway, which eventually spills her out into a storage room. She goes to her locker and opens it while glancing at yet another camera above.

“You’re late.” The voice behind her is deep and raspy, firm but not unkind. Stating a fact rather than making a judgment.

Aries grabs her tool belt from the hook on the door. “I am,” she answers. “Sorry 'bout that.”

She turns toward the man. He must be well into his seventies. His gray hair is held in a short ponytail, and a pencil is tucked into the space above his right ear. The wrinkles around his eyes are darkened from grease and metal dust. Aries can never really connect his voice to his slender build; whenever she hears him talking, she envisions a larger, taller man. Tybault Hennrichsen is half a foot shorter than herself.

“There was trouble in the cafeteria…” Aries continues.

“What kind?”

She looks at him while cinching on her belt and tucking her gloves into a side pocket.

“You’ll find your place eventually. I did.” Ty smiles at her. Aries doesn’t smile back. “You up for a climb? It’s not too high up.”

“Sure,” Aries answers, swallowing the slight sting of fear in her throat.

“We’ve got a burned-out motor in one of the cooling ducts in B-11X4. We need someone tall and thin.”

“I’m your girl.” She closes her locker, snaps the flashlight onto her hard hat, tests it on her hand, and moves one of the belt pockets to the back. When she reaches Ty, he turns and they both walk through the door into a much more expansive area. They pass a few large standup drills, a welding station and other workbenches, until they reach the middle of the room. Clusters of greased-over computer screens are mounted to the ceiling directly above an oversized table. Multiple layers of large blueprint drawings represent the guts of the electrical system down to every excruciating detail—every switch, junction box, and LED bulb.

About two dozen people, all in coveralls, are in various stages of preparing for the day. Wires are being rolled up and parts are being mounted together; the smell of the soldering iron hangs in the air. Several of the workers nod at Aries as she approaches. In here they are equals. In here they are all spokes in the large wheel that turns slowly but steadily around the axis known as Tybault Hennrichsen.

“The motor is in this section over here, reachable through the shaft right above the D-compressor line.” Ty traces the cooling duct with his grease-stained finger and stops at the top of a narrow shaft where a red dot on the clear plastic sheet indicates the broken motor. “My guess is that one of the brushes is gone, or maybe both. You can’t bring it down, it’s too big. You’ll have to repair it on site.”

“You got it, boss.” Aries looks at the blueprint while taking out her notepad. She writes, "220V-30A / 6-point hexagon."