 
# Atmospheric Pressure

# By

# Aaron Frale

#

Copyright 2016 - Aaron Frale

# Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

TwentyOne

TwentyTwo

TwentyThree

TwentyFour

TwentyFive

TwentySix

TwentySeven

TwentyEight

TwentyNine

Thirty

ThirtyOne

ThirtyTwo

ThirtyThree

ThirtyFour

ThirtyFive

ThirtySix

Notes

TimeBurritoOne

TimeBurritoTwo

# 1

A fluorescent bulb wheezed and flickered during its dying breaths. Because of the power emergency, the lights were not at full capacity. Every third dimly glowing panel offered little to illuminate the dark hallway where Olson waited. He sank lower into his seat, imagining the OPS authorities dragging him away like the boy who had disappeared. He banished the thought and tried to delude himself. Maybe Instructor Duncan would take away his touchlite privileges or something simple.

Olson knew he was lying to himself. Violence was an inexcusable act regardless of circumstance. He shouldn't have punched Eckelston, but the guy had deserved it. He'd been picking on Hanson, and Olson didn't really know what had come over him. He'd felt this urge to protect her like she was more than just a classmate.

Olson had never infracted on the rules before today. He woke up after the allotted sleep hours. He reported to the classroom floor every morning. He only played in designated areas, installed designated apps on his touchlite, and only downloaded books for his designated grade level. The worst Olson had done was ask too many questions during class. Most of the teachers would scold Olson for not reading the book, but not Instructor Duncan. He'd actually answer the questions. When they got started, the whole class would roll their eyes, as the session usually ended up getting out late.

An office down the hall opened, and a female figure stepped into the hallway. Because she was located in the shadow between lights, he couldn't see her face. However, he could see a pencil skirt and frilly collar outlined in the dark. The figure was his Two Year teacher, Instructor Simone. Olson gulped as she walked towards him. He brushed his ginger hair out of his eyes, so his baby blues would show. She was the nicest teacher and would always help him when he struggled with his studies. He didn't want her to see him in here. Only the really bad ones ended up in the hallway after school hours. He tried to shift so she wouldn't notice him but was unsuccessful.

"Olson?" Instructor Simone said. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know, Instructor," he mumbled.

"Instructor? I haven't been your instructor for nine years. You can call me Simone."

"Ok."

"Cheer up. Whatever it is, it can't be that bad. Let me let you in on a little secret. We all infract sometimes... I infracted last year."

"You have rules?"

"We all have rules. You just can't let that credit rating slip."

"Credit rating?"

"You'll find out after Twelve Year. Don't let Duncan keep you much later. It'll be Dinner Hour soon."

"Yes, Instruct... Simone."

Her shoes thumped on the carpet as she walked away. Once she turned the corner, the hallway felt even lonelier. Olson was pretty sure all the instructors had gone home except for his.

Simone was right about one thing: he was getting hungry. Dinner Hour was close. He pulled his touchlite from his backpack, and it gave him a "connect to your charger" symbol. So much for passing the time. He had nothing to do but wait.

After what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, his instructor's door opened.

"Come in," Duncan said from beyond Olson's sight.

Olson stepped into the office. His heart pounded. Not only was he unsure of what punishment awaited, but he was also about to go into a personal space with a door. All of his life, he had never been in a personal space closed off by a door. He slept in the Nine through Twelve Year Hall on floor ten in a small cubicle space that didn't give him much privacy. Before the cubicle, he was in a bunk in the Six through Eight Year Hall. In the One through Five Year Hall, it was a room full of cots packed together. His friends would call him a liar if he made memory claims before One Year. He did remember a lot of One Year though. Most boys would cry themselves to sleep.

Sometimes he would dream about a bed that felt safe. It had white bars around the side. A woman in a white coat would sing to him. Sometimes she would pull him out of the bed with the bars and walk him around. He could sometimes hear her voice if he concentrated during his waking hours. The dreams would always end in the same way. Another man and woman would come into the room. The woman was short, with a pear-shaped figure and brown hair. The man was tall and stern. She would cry over Olson's bed. The man would pull her away, and she would scream. Olson would wake from the screaming, not quite sure if it was his or the woman's.

Olson never wanted to ask those in the cubes next door because it was rude to confront people about their sleeping habits. They were all in a big room together. The cube walls were only about five feet high, so people's heads would poke out if they were standing up. There were also only three walls to each cubical unit. If someone snored, everyone had to deal with it. Olson was just glad he wasn't near one of the snorers. He would hear them at night in the distance though.

Olson sat in a large brown chair Instructor Duncan offered him. He had never seen a private space enclosed by walls before. His version of privacy was a few locking drawers and the code that prevented unauthorized use of his touchlite. The room was dimly lit, as only a small reading lamp on the desk was allocated for personal electricity usage during the power emergency. There was a couch that no doubt folded out to a bed, a luxury few could afford. There was a bookshelf with lots of antique paperback books Olson had never seen before. He would have to ask Instructor Duncan what a "Harry Potter" was sometime in class, as seven large dusty tomes took up a lot of space on the shelf. Other than the books, there were many knickknacks and even a gold trophy. Olson was amazed at the amount of personal objects just out on the desk. He couldn't leave a half-eaten bagel unlocked from his drawer without it going missing.

"It's not gold." Instructor Duncan's eyes followed Olson's to the trophy. It was very peculiar. It featured a golden guy on top of a pedestal swinging some sort of stick.

"What is it made out of?" Olson asked, temporarily forgetting that he was supposed to be in trouble.

"Plastic, I suppose." He tossed the trophy to Olson and pulled a bottle of brown liquid from his desk. He poured it into a coffee mug and then put the bottle back in the drawer.

The golden part was surprisingly light. The base was made out of a white stone material. On closer inspection, the plastic paint was chipped in places. Why would someone put cheap plastic on an expensive exotic stone? There were words engraved at the bottom, but they had long since faded.

"What's the guy holding?" Olson thumbed over the odd stick above the person's head.

"It's called a baseball bat. It's a sport the people before used to play. They would hit a ball with the bat." His instructor cradled the mug and turned toward his window. The shades were drawn, but Duncan seemed more interested in the liquid than opening the blinds.

Olson imagined swinging a large stick above his head. It would poke holes in the ceiling tile. The game seemed ungainly at best and dangerous at worst. The only possible way to swing a stick that high would be to do it in a public space. There were too many windows in the public areas to risk hitting a ball. All the sporting floors were reinforced and nowhere near a window.

"You can have it," Instructor Duncan said. Olson's heart skipped a beat.

"You'd give this to me?" The stone alone was worth more citcreds than his school-sponsored graduation gift.

"On one condition." Duncan smirked.

The smile made Olson uncomfortable. The conversation with his teacher was not going as expected. He felt like he was talking with some lowlife G-Town dealer from a stream than a teacher. However, citcreds were citcreds. An Instructor couldn't want anything that bad. "What's the condition?"

"I need you to get me something from the Leamington lockdown," Duncan said. He pulled a CitID from his pocket and slid it across the desk. Olson looked hesitantly at the piece of white rectangular plastic. It was blank. There was no name and picture printed on the front.

"What about Dinner Hour?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to skip it."

Olson looked at the card and back at Instructor Duncan. Citcreds were citcreds. He took the card, and his instructor grabbed his hand. The grip hurt Olson.

"You know why I picked you for this opportunity?" His teacher leaned really close. His breath stank. It was a rancid smell Olson had never smelled before. He almost gagged. "I picked you because you've never broken the rules. Not a single infraction. When you hit Eckelston, I knew. I knew you'd be the one. And one more thing: that CitID. You can keep it, and all the Citcreds on it."

Olson nodded, and Instructor Duncan let go. Olson scrambled out of the office with the card tucked into his pocket, relieved that he had somehow avoided punishment.

# 2

The elevator shook as it roared down to the second floor. The noises and lurch of his gut made him nervous. He had only ridden an elevator a handful of times in his life.

When he'd first entered the rectangular box, he'd hesitated. It was natural because elevator rides cost so much in comparison to his biweekly allowance from the school. He didn't want to use all the citcreds on the card, but he didn't want to be stopped by anyone on the stairs either. While he descended, he thought of all the apps, snacks, and meals out he could have bought instead of one lousy elevator ride.

In hindsight, the elevator was well worth it. If he had taken the stairs, his friend Xiong would have waylaid him on his way down the steps. Xiong would have been curious about what happened in the teacher's office. He also would have questioned why Olson wasn't going to Dinner Hour.

While it wasn't unusual for students with some extra citcreds to splurge on skyway fare during Dinner Hour, Olson rarely earned extra citcreds. He never did more than was necessary to pass a class because it was all so boring. He was also not the most athletic. He had learned how to scrape by with his citcreds and not fight for the scraps handed out by the teachers for extra homework. Most apps had a way to unlock the better items if he played them enough anyway. He saw no reason to waste his time with extra homework when he could unlock a level with the same amount of time playing an app.

As a student, he didn't really need citcred to survive. He decided to enjoy the last two years of school-provided housing before he'd have to pay for his own cubicle. Most of his post-student job prospects would probably only get him a tiny three-walled space just a step up from the hovels in G-Town. Maybe with the citcreds Instructor Duncan promised, he could buy his own business. Since Olson didn't really have any skills, he thought that maybe he would buy a pop machine. He figured it would be easy to keep stocked and would give him daily citcred flow. Maybe he could buy an elevator when he had enough income from the pop business.

Olson stepped out of the elevator waiting room into the skyway. His touchlite would have displayed coupons and deals for the nearby restaurants had he remembered to charge it. Not that it mattered because Olson knew he wouldn't have enough citcreds to buy dinner anyway, and he wasn't going to spend any more of Instructor Duncan's money than he needed.

He walked away from a set of glass doors leading to the McGladery School elevators. To the right, there was a tiny sitting area and the public library entrance. He turned left toward an enclosed bridge. Through the triple-reinforced windows of the skyway bridge, he could see the dim power emergency lighting of the IDS Tower reaching to the heavens. McGladery was a tiny building by comparison, only about one third of the size of the IDS, which was the tallest building in the city.

The skyway was crowded with people going about their business. Most adults never looked up while they walked through the skyway bridges. They had seen the massive buildings touching the sky too many times in their life to care. Olson never got sick of it. There was a team in full hazard gear replacing one of the windows on the upper floors of the McGladery School. Their puffy white suits made them look like marshmallows with breathing apparatuses.

The skyway was a series of indoor bridges that connected the city. For the most part, it was located on the second floor of all the buildings. Some were designed in an odd way, though, and he would have to walk down to the first floor for a while and find an escalator to the second. Either way, the skyway was the vein system that connected the city. A person could walk from one end to the other without putting on a hazard suit.

Olson walked across the bridge toward the IDS Commons while keeping his eyes fixed on the tower. He saw outlines of the people in the floors above. With the power emergency lighting, they looked like phantoms. Olson often wondered how many people were looking right back at him.

Below the skyway bridge, the cracked jumble of asphalt spread out where streets used to be. Olson remembered something about carts using the streets a long time ago. Now there was nothing but rubble.

Olson stepped from the skyway bridge into the IDS Commons area. The first couple floors of the IDS Commons were open. It was such a large open space that Olson felt dizzy the first time he entered it. There were people dashing through on their way to one of the four connecting bridges on each side of the massive space. Food carts, restaurants, and shops dominated almost every part of the floor that wasn't a walkway. There were open seating areas in the middle of the first floor. A fountain in the center would have a waterfall cascading from the ceiling if the pumps didn't take energy. The ceiling and some of the walls were made up mostly of the reinforced windows.

Olson saw Bauer coming up the escalator from the first floor. He ducked behind a taco cart before his friend made it to the top. The short order cook was too busy with the dinner rush to notice him. The smell made him hungry. His stomach growled. Olson wasn't used to skipping meals. In fact, no one in the McGladery School ever had to miss eating. There was a free cafeteria that served basic meals. Food carts were there for those who could afford the luxury. Restaurants with tables and waiters were the domain of the wealthy. Most students ate at the cafeterias, except Bauer, who blew all his citcreds on food.

"Olson? What are you doing?" Bauer poked his head around the corner. He held a sushi box. Olson didn't understand how he could like that stuff. It tasted funny, and Olson didn't like the way it felt in his mouth. Bauer seemed to like it though. He would spend almost every citcred he earned on that stuff.

"I... lost my touchlite." Olson stood up, and the short order cook glanced at them. They moved back into the walkway before the cook gave them any trouble.

"I could have pinged it for you."

"Out of batteries."

"Somebody forgot to charge," Bauer said and went toward McGladery. When Olson didn't follow, he turned around. "Where you going?"

"I thought I'd eat out this Dinner Hour," Olson said. He didn't really want Bauer to know what he was doing. It was already weird enough, and he also knew that Bauer wasn't so good with secrets. He once found the rarest weapon on a fantasy app and told everyone how to get it for themselves. It wasn't so rare after that.

"Living large! Where we going?"

"I'm not sure yet. I thought I'd wander the skyway until I found a place."

"I got time," Bauer said and followed Olson through the walkway. "There's this great sushi place in Cappella Tower."

"You already have sushi."

"You can never have enough sushi."

Olson huffed and moved forward. He could swear that Bauer was just a mouth and a stomach. He ate everything and was always just a skinny pole. Olson wracked his brain for ways to get rid of Bauer. There weren't any food places at Leamington, since it was locked down.

Everyone had heard the rumors. There were ghosts wandering the halls in Leamington, so they'd decided to close it up. Others would say the drug dealers worked there. He'd even heard a story that children who were taken back to the ECC were really going to Leamington instead. The truth was nobody knew what'd happened there.

Olson dashed through the skyway. His unwanted partner's chatter bounced off of Olson's mind, as he was preoccupied with finding the easiest way to ditch the guy. The skyway was crowded with people walking various directions. There were people in business suits, workers in jumpsuits, OPS Officers on patrol, and even people in their off duty clothes. OPS Officers always looked like spacemen with their black helmets and black body armor. Olson tried losing Bauer in the crowd, but it didn't work so well. Every time Olson slipped away, Bauer would catch up and say, "Slow down, man! We have a whole hour!"

By the time the crowds began to thin as they crossed to the other side of the city, Bauer was becoming suspicious. They'd passed plenty of good food places, including the way toward the Capella Tower. Olson was about to cross the bridge toward the Hilton Farms when Bauer finally said, "Where are you going?"

"Leamington," Olson said.

"Leamington? Why would you want to go to Leamington? Unless... the Hilton Farm Store is opening again! Tell me everything! Do they have sushi?"

Olson looked around and finally decided to lie. He had never lied much before, at least not with anything important. It wasn't that he was morally opposed to lying. It was that he never had the occasion to lie. Most of his fellow schoolmates lied to get out of trouble, or to make themselves seem better than they were. However, lies were easily deflated. Bragging could be tested. There really was no benefit to lying since the truth didn't seem to take much investigation. So it felt really weird for Olson to tell a lie. There was also a good chance that Bauer would discover the lie.

"Yeah," Olson said. "I heard they were opening the store again."

The store had closed a couple of years ago because people could get their groceries closer to where they lived, but that was life in the city. The kids at the school had loved the shop, because they'd had good hot food for cheap. He could pile it on the plate and go out and eat on the park floor.

"But it's only open to Beta Testers," Olson said.

"Beta Testers?" Bauer said. "For a grocery store?"

"Yeah, they want to make sure it's perfect before they open it to the general public. Sure, you can get Hilton crops at any store, but there is only one Hilton Farms grocery store."

The Hilton Farms were one of several skyscrapers almost entirely dedicated to farming. Mirrors bounced natural light from the upper levels to each floor. Soil was packed on the ground, and crops were planted floor after floor. It wasn't the only farm in the city, but it was the largest. The second floor at the skyway level was a park with a ceiling large enough to support trees. Only the farm laborers got to see more than the park.

As for Leamington, aside from the rumors, he did know that it was a parking garage. He could see that much out the windows. However, it was unsealed and half finished. There were parts exposed to the atmosphere.

Most of the garages were used as storage. They were designed to easily move forklifts from level to level. There was even a storage facility at the McGladery School. It was small compared to Leamington.

Olson leaned into Bauer. "I'd love to take you, but I'm not sure they'd let us both go."

"Do you think I can sign up for the Beta Test?"

"A Twelve Year told me about it when there was only an hour left for signup, but I imagine they'll need more testers closer to opening."

"Can I give you some citcreds, and you'll get me something?"

"You already have sushi!"

"But this is cool. It's like being on the inside of a secret."

"Ok, sure." Olson figured he could buy him something on the way back. Bauer would never know the difference. Olson pulled out the blank Citizen Identification Card his teacher had given him without thinking.

"What's this?" Bauer said as he inserted it into his touchlite. A normal CitID would be printed with information about the person.

"Um," Olson said. "It's the store owner's card. He dropped it the other day when I saw him in the IDS Commons. "

"Holy crap!" Bauer said. "Did you see the balance on this one?"

Bauer tilted the screen and Olson gulped. He had never seen so many citcreds in his life. It was enough to get him an apartment after school for sure. Olson swiped it back.

"Don't pry. It's rude."

Bauer inserted Olson's actual CitID into his touchlite and transferred the citcreds. He handed the CitID back, and Olson pocketed it.

"I know. I know. At least I know what I'm getting into when I get out of school. I'm going to own my own store. See you back in the bed cubicles." Bauer turned back, and Olson was relieved that he was gone.

Olson walked toward the Hilton Farm. The skyway bridge opened to the park. It was one of the few green spaces accessible by the public. It consisted of a forest with winding paths interrupted by large concrete support pillars. There were no walls in the park other than the thick outer walls. The trees were cut and trimmed at the top so they wouldn't poke into the ceiling. Mirrors would have bounced natural light throughout the park. However, the natural light was gone and various path lights were flickering to life as Olson made his way through the park to a set of double doors marked LEAMINGTON – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

There was a pad next to the door with a red light on it. Olson held the unmarked badge his instructor had given him to the pad. The light switched from red to green. Olson looked back to see if anyone was watching him. There were a few people on an after-dinner stroll, but for the most part, the park was deserted. He pushed the door open.

As soon as he left the humidity of the garden, he coughed from the cold dry air in the skyway tunnel beyond. Apparently, maintenance had forgotten to turn on the heat and neglected its upkeep. The windows were smudged and dirty, and the carpet was stained. At least Leamington was still sealed. There didn't seem to be any cracks in the windows or evidence that the outside air was leaking into the bridge.

"Hello?" Olson called out and was greeted with silence.

It was a strange feeling to be alone. He had never been alone his entire life. There were very few places in the McGladery School where Olson even could be alone. If he stood up in his sleeping cubicle, he could peek over the walls and see the rows of his fellow classmates sleeping. The hallways and stairs always seemed to be bustling with people. Outside the school, the skyways were never empty, except for late at night. The city shut down, and the skyway closed. It wasn't worth sneaking around after lights out. He had never seen an empty skyway bridge.

To add to the eeriness, the buildings around Leamington were also decayed, like they were on the fringes of the city. Olson was used to seeing well-kept buildings and cleared streets. The streets below were piled with rubble. There was a long vehicle rusting on the sidewalk with chipped yellow paint, small windows lining the side, and no tires. The buildings around Leamington were crumbling and missing windows. Nothing had lived in them for years. They were derelicts of a forgotten era.

Olson couldn't make it to the end of the skyway fast enough. He didn't like the emptiness. There was something comforting about knowing other people were around. There was a door at the end of the bridge, which was odd, because most of the skyway didn't have doors on the bridges, aside from the thick emergency ones that could seal an area in case of a breach.

Olson grabbed the handle. It was heavy and old. He grunted as he opened the door and was hit by a blast of stale air.

Olson entered a large waiting area. The space immediately around the door looked like a security checkpoint. Olson remembered reading about the equipment from one of his history textbooks. People had walked through these porticos that scanned for weapons while their belongings were scanned in a small tunnel with a conveyor belt. It was a very paranoid world, where enemies were seen in common people.

There was a share of crime in the city too. Apartments and unlocked drawers in cubicles were burglarized. There always seemed to be drug busts down in G-Town. There was even the occasional murder. But, overall, the Office of Public Safety kept people safe.

Beyond the checkpoint were several lined-up desks. Past the desks were rows and rows of benches and other seating arrangements. A vast majority of the room seemed like a waiting area where people would sit on the benches. From the layout, Olson guessed that the people on the benches went to the desks then had to go through the checkpoint before they could enter the skyway. However, whatever had happened in this room happened long ago. Everything was covered with dust.

"Hello?" Olson's voice echoed in the empty room.

There were broken escalators off to one side that led both to the upper and lower levels. Olson decided to explore. There had to be someone around, or else why would his instructor send him to some distant part of the city? Duncan couldn't possibly expect him to find anything here.

On the level below, there was another security checkpoint. This one looked as if it was meant to take people from the outside of the building, which was an absurd notion. People didn't live outside, yet the room was clearly designed as some sort of intake area. After the checkpoint, there were desks and other various stations, some medical examination beds surrounded by curtains, and other components of some sort of process that happened ages ago. Olson imagined a massive amount of people being shuffled through the process, but he couldn't imagine what it was for.

There was a door leading deeper into the building, but it was locked and there was no electronic sensor for his badge. Olson decided to climb the escalators to the upper levels. He couldn't figure out why Leamington was in such a state of disrepair. Space was a precious commodity in the city. There was so little of it that so much wasted space seemed like a bad idea. If the city cleaned up this place, they could add hundreds of sleeping cubicles and turn it into an apartment complex. Who wouldn't want to live one bridge away from the garden?

The upper levels were full of cots and other makeshift sleeping arrangements. The amount of people coming through this place had been much bigger than Olson initially expected. He suspected that people must have been waiting for days, and from the arrangement of the security systems, Olson had to assume that the people here were attempting to get into the city. If what he was observing was true, then Leamington must have processed massive amounts of people into the city from the outside, but Olson couldn't wrap his head around this observation. His teachers said that people didn't come from the outside. The ruins were failed cities that didn't follow the rules.

People came from the Early Childcare Center. Olson took a class trip and saw all the happy One Years being briefed for a trip to McGladery, where they would live until their Twelve Year. Olson had to conclude that there must have been some sort of ECC on the outside. He decided to ask Instructor Duncan when he returned. He liked Duncan. Most teachers would tell Olson it was a waste of time to think about the world from before. They would say that the ruins around the city had been explored as much as they could be, given the technological limitations, and there wasn't anything new to learn. Instructor Duncan would entertain Olson's ponderings even if they couldn't be tested.

"Hello?" Olson's voice echoed in the empty space. The silence was almost too much to bear. People were always around, and even during sleeping hours, he could hear the breathing and rustling of the fellow students in the neighboring cubicles. Olson was never alone, and now that he was alone, he didn't know what to make of it. He almost wished that someone would show up and break the silence.

He wanted to run, but then, just as the silence became overwhelming, a voice startled him.

"Please pay at the station before returning to your vehicle," the voice said. It sounded mechanical and inhuman.

"Hello?" Olson said.

There was a kiosk standing next to a doorway. There were large blue letters on the side that read, PAY STATION. There was a blue monitor on the front of the kiosk that read, PLEASE INSERT YOUR TICKET. Olson looked at the badge his teacher had given him. He attempted to put it into the machine, but it was too big for the slot.

Another voice, this one human and gruff, said, "You won't get anything from that machine. It's a relic of the old world."

Olson turned around to see a burly man with long brown hair. Large goggles drooped from his neck. He wore a shirt, a sturdy apron, and jeans. His mouth lacked several teeth, and scars ran up his arms. The smudges of dirt and grime suggested that he worked in the lower levels of the city. Though from the oddity of so much unused space, Olson wasn't quite sure what the man did for a living.

"Why are you keeping it running?" Olson nodded toward the kiosk. "We are on a power emergency."

"So when annoyances like you enter the building, I can hear you coming before you cause real damage," the man said.

Olson stammered, "I, um..."

"Look, you want to give me that badge, and I'll get your package," the man said.

With shaking hands, Olson extended the card. The man punched a few buttons on a device that hung from his belt. It was different than a touchlite. It was smaller, but it seemed to be similar in function. He scanned the card, and a readout appeared on his tiny screen. He pushed the card back into Olson's hand. He grumbled and lumbered down the stairs. The toothless man returned a few moments later in a full hazard suit. He trounced over past the kiosk. It asked him to pay before returning to his vehicle. He gripped the handle of the exit door and turned toward Olson.

"You better cover your eyes and mouth," the man said and pulled open the door. A blast of noxious air flooded the room. Olson gagged and coughed. His eyes stung. The man was out the door in seconds, but the burn lingered. Olson was beginning to understand why there wasn't an apartment complex.

Right after the air settled and Olson's eyes were no longer burning, the door opened again. The man stepped through in a puff of red smoke. Olson was ready this time, and as soon as he heard the twist of the handle, he closed his eyes and held his breath. He could hear the man's boots clomping closer until he was in front of Olson's face.

In a surprisingly soft tone, the man said, "You can open your eyes now."

Olson's eyes fluttered open, half expecting a blast of the burning air. However, there was nothing. The cloud had dissipated as quickly as it entered. The man had a stuffed toy in his hand and walked back to the door where he had first gotten the hazard suit. It was some sort of animal. The toy was dilapidated and shabby from years of neglect. Olson thought it was a cat, but he couldn't be sure without looking at his history book, which was locked away on a touchlite with no power.

The people from the world before had animals. They would grow them for food instead of growing the meat in vats. While Olson had eaten chicken, cow, fish, and on one occasion duck, it hadn't come from animals. Resources were too scarce in the city to waste them on animals when protein could be manufactured so much cheaper. He'd heard that the city's chicken tasted the same as real chicken, but since no one had a real chicken as far as Olson knew, they couldn't be sure.

The craziest part to Olson was that people used to live with certain animals they didn't use for food. Things like cats and dogs would eat the human's food and share the human's bed. It was a hard concept to understand because the animals had fangs and claws. He didn't know how the people didn't get bitten by the animals, like he had seen on countless horror streams where some scientist decided to resurrect the tiger, and it would rampage through the city. Of course, if the animals looked anything like the stuffed one, they were completely harmless.

The man returned after a considerably longer period of time. He was back in the apron, goggles, and jeans. He held out the stuffed toy and shoved it into Olson's hands. The animal was surprisingly heavy. Olson didn't remember stuffed animals being this heavy. "There you go. One Sylvester for you. Now run along."

"A what?" Olson said, but before he knew it, the man was gone, and Olson stood in an empty room, dumbly holding a mangy stuffed cat.

# 3

Olson stopped by his cubicle on the way back to Instructor Duncan's office. The space was large enough for a cot, one chair, a desk area, and a few locking drawers for personal possessions. There was a workstation at the desk for school tasks, though most students used their touchlites. He plugged his touchlite into the charging station at his desk.

The monitor of his workstation blinked to life. The government logo appeared on the screen. It was the three large towers, the Capella, the IDS, and the Red Carriage Bank, bound together with laurels. It was supposed to symbolize peace and unity. Olson knew that it just happened to be where the richest people in the city lived. His touchlite would have been displaying the same message had it been turned on. The city government often took over all the screens in the city when it had important announcements, much to the dismay of people when they were watching sporting events such as the annual Puck Grind championship.

After the logo, a woman appeared on the screen. Her black hair was tied back, and she was wearing the suit of a woman who held power. COHEN – DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RESOURCES appeared under her bust.

"You make your own fate," she said and paused.

Olson mumbled out of habit, "You make your own fate," even though there were no teachers around to scold him if he didn't respond.

"I'm happy to announce that, due to the power-saving vigilance of every citizen, we are no longer in a power emergency. The city will now return to full power mode. You are the ones who made this possible. You make your own fate."

Olson mumbled again as he pulled out a box of personal effects from a locked drawer. It was mostly trinkets he bought at market when he had a spare citcred or two. Olson liked collecting statues of the various buildings in the city. He planned to have every building one day. He wanted to make a model of the city, complete with skyway system. He wedged the badge with the crazy citcred balance in the bundle of collectible info cards of the buildings. No one really cared about the info cards. Most people recycled them. Olson liked reading the stats of the buildings.

Olson was about to leave when he had second thoughts. If someone were to break into his drawer, they'd steal the entire box. He decided to hide the badge elsewhere. He bent down under his cot and wedged it in between the cubicle wall and the siding. It fit perfectly. Someone could dig through his entire space and not find it. Satisfied, he crawled out of his cot and saw Eckelston standing there.

"That cat is not in regulation," Eckelston said and pointed to the stuffed cat on his cot. Younger students could have stuffed toys, but older students had to give them up by a certain year. Eckelston was an obnoxious Eleven Year that always had it out for him. Olson couldn't understand why. Eckelston was a cubicle monitor, so he got to sleep in a larger one right next to the window at the end of the row. He treated Olson like a thief who was out to get his cube. That could not be further from the truth. Olson had no ambitions to become a cubicle monitor. He didn't like bullying people, and that seemed to be a prerequisite for cubicle monitors.

Olson picked up the cat and said, "Instructor Duncan told me to bring it to him."

"But that's a child's toy."

"I don't question. I just do what I'm told."

"Well, you better move along then."

Even though Olson had hit Eckelston earlier, the jerk knew it would be foolish to retaliate, at least not right away. He knew that Eckelston was planning something. The question was for when.

This encounter was good for one thing though. Olson's touchlite had a bit of a charge now, at least enough to take a video of Instructor Duncan. He would sometimes edit together funny videos for his friends on his social network, so he was always recording, which was partially why he was always out of battery.

Olson took the stairs up toward the faculty offices. He wandered back into the hallway. It was dark at first, but then the sensors went off. All the lights turned on as Olson walked past instead of just every third.

All the offices were dark except for his teacher's. The door was ajar.

"Instructor Duncan," Olson said.

Duncan was looking out the window. Since they were in the center of the city, the view revealed the glow of city lights and the empty streets. The ruins of the society from before were safely tucked away at the edge of the city. McGladery wasn't tall enough to see through to the end. Only the people at the top could truly see the world as it was. Down here, they could only see life. The city was alive with people, all indoors.

"I have your... cat," Olson said, feeling foolish.

"Do you have a daughter?" Duncan said as he took the cat and held it gently, like it would break at his touch. Olson noticed the bottle of the brown liquid was almost completely empty now. Duncan's eyes were bloodshot, and he had a sway in his step, as if he couldn't keep his footing. Olson had gotten good at recording with his touchlite without people knowing they were being recorded. He pressed the record button, though Duncan seemed floors away.

"Sir?" Olson didn't really know how to react. He had never heard the word daughter before. Duncan was scaring him, and he didn't want to be there longer than he had to. But he also didn't want to miss good footage. However, his mind was mostly on the pile of citcreds attached to a card hidden in his cubicle. When he graduated, he would finally have the space for his model of the city, instead of a desk not much bigger than his touchlite.

"I used to read my daughter Alice in Wonderland."

"Sir... what's a daughter?"

"It's a word from the old world."

Instructor Duncan looked Olson in the eyes. For a brief moment, Olson thought his teacher was looking at him. In reality, his teacher was looking through him. His mind was somewhere far away. He drank the rest of the brown liquid directly from the bottle. He tore the head from the cat and pulled the stuffing from the body. The animal deflated, and the husk was tossed aside. Olson didn't know if Duncan had dismissed him or not, but it was like an accident in the IDS Commons. He couldn't stop watching. His teacher shredded the cat and dug through the remains.

Inside the stuffing was a tool with a laser cutting edge. Duncan let Olson hold the tool.

"What is it?" Olson said, flipping it over in his hands.

"Let me show you," Duncan said and retrieved the item. He placed it on the window and cut a circle in the glass. He punched the center with his fist and pulled it back bloodied. Olson began to move out of the room. Duncan slammed against the window again, and it buckled. Olson turned to the door and ran, but it was too late. One more hit and the circle of glass popped out.

Everything seemed to happen at once. The breach alarms sounded. Noxious gas from the outside began to flood the room. Olson felt his eyes burn, and he began to choke. His teacher climbed out of the hole he had made, ignoring the burning. While Olson couldn't be sure, as he was choking and gasping for breath, he could have sworn that he saw his teacher jump from the window. After a few moments of contact with the outside air, he felt his skin begin to fry. He used his remaining strength to crawl into the hallway and close the office door. He lost consciousness just as the breach patrol ran down the corridor, wearing full hazard gear.

# 4

Olson woke days later in a hospital bed. A breathing machine helped him take in breath. It wheezed rhythmically in the dark, sterile room. There were cutouts of flowers and various origami projects surrounding his bed from his fellow students and teachers. Since flowers were expensive and paper was a cheaper alternative, most people used origami as get well soon presents.

Even paper had its price. Olson was surprised by how much paper he'd received from the people at McGladery. He didn't think he was that well liked. He wasn't the most popular boy in school. It must have been because he breathed the outside air and lived to tell about it. Surviving contact with the atmosphere was a feat in itself. Most Washers wouldn't survive a tear in their suit. They wouldn't get to an airlock in time. Olson had survived full contact, even if it was only for a few seconds.

He felt a bandage around his head. His skin felt numb, like some sort of drug had been used to deaden the pain. He could feel the tube in his throat, and he was unable to move. A doctor walked into the room.

"He's awake now, but I don't think he'll be of much help," the doctor said to a man and a woman waiting in the hallway. "Olson. I have someone special who would like to speak with you."

The doctor and a couple of nurses came in and removed the tube. Olson gagged and felt a burn inside his throat. The pain was distant, like he was watching it on a stream. The visitors then walked into the room and dismissed the doctor and nurses. The man shut the door. He was wearing a suit and sunglasses. He had buzz-cut hair and a stern expression. Olson averted his eyes from the man because he couldn't bear to look at him without discomfort.

The woman sat down on the bed next to Olson. When she was close enough, Olson recognized her at once. She was Human Resources Director Cohen. Olson felt his stomach flutter. A few years ago, Cohen had awarded the City Medal of Honor to two OPS Officers that prevented a shootout in G-Town. Even though citizens couldn't own weapons, a person had gotten a hold of an OPS laser rifle and went around shooting at random civilians until the quick-thinking officers brought him down.

"Olson." Cohen smiled. "On behalf of the city, I want to personally thank you. By closing the office door, you prevented the breach from being worse than it was. Your quick thinking saved everybody on that floor."

"It was nothing, Cohen, ma'am," Olson croaked. His throat was sore and each breath felt labored.

"Please, call me Shelia," Cohen said.

Shelia was a strange nickname. Olson had never heard it before. Students gave each other nicknames all the time, but they were never appropriate to share with adults. He'd also never heard of adults using nicknames. Of course, he'd also never been in the same room, much less spoken to, the Director of Human Resources before.

Shelia continued, "I know it was pretty hard watching your teacher go like that, but there are a few things we need to clear up."

Whatever excitement he felt by meeting the HR Director herself was gone when he thought of Instructor Duncan. If Olson had said something different, would his teacher still be alive? He felt like he had failed his teacher. He had just stood there watching, like an idiot. Doing nothing felt almost like he had pushed his teacher himself.

"I'm sorry I couldn't save him," Olson rasped.

"You couldn't have done anything. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, if it's not too much trouble, I do have some questions for you. When you were in the hallway waiting for him—we know this because the building logs indicate you never left—did you notice anyone delivering anything to his room? A stuffed animal, perhaps?"

Olson was about to tell her. But then he hesitated. It didn't seem too unnatural because he was in a lot of pain. He knew that if he told her about the cat, he would have to tell her about the CitID with a large stash of citcreds on the account. He'd seen enough streams to know they would take it away from him. She hadn't asked about the card, so maybe they weren't looking for it.

"No," Olson said.

She frowned and then pulled out the tool Duncan had used to cut the glass. "Do you know what this is?"

"No."

"It's called a glass cutter. It's a powerful laser that can cut through even the thick windows protecting us from the outside air."

Olson continued to maintain his silence.

"It's a dangerous item and highly regulated. Only very specialized maintenance personnel are allowed to have them. Do you know why we regulate them?"

"I don't know," Olson said truthfully.

"Imagine if a tool like this got into the hands of a person who intended to cause the city harm. What if your teacher had used this on one of the IDS windows in the great common room?"

Olson imagined a horrific scene. People choking while their skinned burned. The toxic atmosphere would fill the common room while people scrambled to leave. The environmental breach doors would drop. They were thick and heavy. People would attempt to claw their way from the room and would die choking, burning, in massive heaps by the doors blocking the skyway. One glass cutter could kill hundreds of people. The thought was so intense that Olson unconsciously touched his wounds.

"Whoever used it... would kill himself," Olson theorized.

"I think we both knew someone who killed himself." She let the statement hang in the air.

"But," Olson stammered, "Instructor Duncan, he would never."

"How well did you know your teacher?"

"I..."

"Did you know he came from the upper floors?"

"But a teacher's salary can't buy a..."

"Exactly... how do you think he came about getting a glass cutter?" Shelia said with a sneer in her smile. The man near the doorway folded his arms. Olson could see his muscles bulge through the suit.

Olson didn't know what to say. He had already lied. He could fess up and lose his only chance at becoming more than a faceless worker, or if he held out long enough, maybe he could keep the citcreds. Either way, Olson didn't really know anything. The man in Leamington had given him a stuffed toy. Had he not stayed, he wouldn't have known there was something deadly inside.

The whole business about using the glass cutter to kill people in the city was probably an exaggeration. Adults blew things out of proportion all the time. If everything he saw on the news were true, he would have been murdered for walking into G-Town. In reality, the people of G-Town were just poor and like everyone else. Olson knew his prospects weren't so good after leaving school. He was one of the trackless after all.

He was trackless because what he was good at wasn't a career path for a person down below. He was good at making streams. He loved doing it and would happily edit video for hours. However, everyone knew that if a job opened up in the stream business, it would go to someone up top, someone they knew. It was like riding an elevator to infinity. No matter how many floors he climbed, there would always be more floors above.

Olson decided he didn't want to be a part of that system. He didn't want his school deciding his career path, so he lied. "I don't know."

The Director of HR stared at Olson for an uncomfortable moment. "You take care of yourself. I'll leave my contact information in your touchlite. If you think of anything else, please contact me. I don't need to let you know that it's an honor to have a personal connection to HR."

Olson nodded, and the two left the room. The other man said nothing the entire time, but his presence was scary enough.

# 5

Olson stood in a line leading to a train platform. There were white tiles that were called "subway tiles" lining the wall of the cavernous room. Olson didn't know what a subway even was. He guessed it was one of those fancy names people gave different shades of the same color.

He had been released from the hospital. Discharge from the Father Hennepin Healing Commune was a lengthy process because it was the only part of the world that wasn't in the skyway system. There were skyways to connect people to various buildings within the medical center, but they didn't connect to the city blocks away. There were shambles of derelict buildings in between the hospital and the city on the surface. However, underground, there had been two large tunnels dug to connect the hospital with the city. The citizen train line came from the Holy Thrivent Church, and the other came from the Office of Public Safety military complex.

Average citizens were only allowed through the Thrivent tunnel. The other tunnel was for official use only. Since the only means of transportation was an underground rail system that went back and forth all day, nonemergency transportation was a waiting game. Priority was given to inbound emergencies, so if a train had to zoom back to the city without picking up outbound passengers, then they would shut the gates regardless of the load. Anyone who didn't make it on would have to wait.

Since Olson had been released from the hospital during visiting hours, he was in a long line of people waiting to get on the next train to the city. Since there seemed to be a higher need for emergency medical care, Olson found himself waiting longer than usual. The others in line were restless as well. He wondered how many of them were in actual pain. Breathing was an arduous process. His chest felt like it was being compressed, and the drugs made him dizzy.

By comparison, the gentleman in front of Olson complained about missing a Puck Grind game on the TV, even though he could get updates from his touchlite. Olson didn't complain though. He was lucky to be alive. Very few people survived direct contact with the atmosphere.

One of the most dangerous jobs in the city was Washer. They would scrub the outside of the windows of every building clean. A tear in their hazard suits was a death sentence. It was no wonder they all could afford their own apartments. They lived dangerous and had plenty of citcreds to show for it.

Olson had heard stories that anything could be bought and sold at Washer gathering halls. He'd also heard that the criminal elements of the city were always at the Washer halls, though Olson wasn't really sure what crime there was in the city. He'd certainly never witnessed any crime himself. However, the news was full of crime, so the students always talked about it.

In the rumor mill, criminals were like they had seen in the streams. They were these mob bosses who always found a loophole in the system. They would exploit the loophole and make tons of citcreds without a care about how it affected the community as a whole. Then there would be a young OPS officer that would crack the case and save the day. Olson didn't watch those streams that much because they were always the same. Somebody threatened the city. Some OPS official saved it.

Olson always liked stories with something more to them. He would sometimes tell them through the streams he cooked up on his touchlite. However, the only person who seemed to appreciate Olson's storytelling was Instructor Duncan. No one really cared about his creative ability. His value, like every other person's value, was based on his career. But Olson always knew that there was something more to life than just a career.

He wanted to dig deeper into his teacher's death. He wanted to know why. Even though it was plainly suicide, there was something more to the story of his teacher than he knew. Olson had only known a teacher who was tough on him, but also seemed to care, nothing like the man he met the night of his suicide. Most other teachers didn't give a crap about Olson. They were just going through the motions of pumping out more workers for the city. Instructor Duncan seemed to be the only one who cared that Olson was more than a skill set.

The light could be seen through the tunnel before the rumble of the train was heard. Olson's group was next. The brakes squealed as the train came to a halt. He didn't notice anybody onboard, but that wasn't unusual. Emergency transports wouldn't even let a single passenger load from the other side. Although backlogs of passengers rarely happened on the incoming platform because most visitors would give up and try another day if the wait was too long. On the hospital side, there was nowhere to go but out, so there was nothing to do but wait.

The strange part was that a single man had gotten off the train. He wasn't injured, or at least had no visible signs of damage. Olson recognized the man. It was the man with sunglasses who had accompanied Shelia on her visit to his hospital room about a week ago. Another man in line in front of Olson grumbled louder. The crowd would have begun to riot had the green light not flashed and the gates not opened once the man with shades cleared the platform.

Most people probably forgot the unusual passenger as soon as they began filtering onto the platform and into the train. There had been no more emergencies that day, and the train was completely full for the first time since Olson had begun waiting in line earlier that morning.

A lady gave up her seat to Olson when she saw the bandages. He thanked her and pulled out his touchlite. There was a video of the man on his screen. He had snuck the photo as the man had walked by the restless crowd. While the identity of the seemingly healthy man who got an entire train transport to himself would be a mystery low on the priority list, Olson knew that he needed to collect any clue, no matter how insignificant.

Olson cycled through his videos. He didn't want to look at the footage of his teacher's suicide, but he knew that he had to do it. He swiped through the various photos of his friends who had come to visit him at the hospital, but once he got to the date of the incident, there was nothing there. The photos and videos he had taken the day before Instructor Duncan had died were there, but the footage he had taken of his teacher's suicide was gone.

Before he could investigate further, the message, "UPDATING SOFTWARE – THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE" and the city logo appeared on the screen. There was a collective groan from all the passengers on the train, but for most of them, it was a minor annoyance. Olson, on the other hand, knew it was something much more.

Later that night, when he went back to look at the photo he had taken of the man from the train, it was gone too.

# 6

Olson was still wearing a bandage when he arrived at Instructor Duncan's funeral service. He had only been to one other funeral in his life, and the two were about as different as they could be. They both happened in a large white room in the Medical Arts Consortium basement. The room was large enough to fit two hundred chairs. However, on the day of Duncan's funeral, there were very few people. Only some teachers, the undertaker, and Olson attended the event.

By contrast, when the administrator of the McGladery School died during Seven Year, the funeral room had been packed, with standing room only. Not only had the entire school gone, but there had been people from different parts of the city. They had all worn black.

Olson had heard that she had fallen on a set of stairs and broken her back. Certain types of injuries were fatal. According to his teachers, she was unable to move her legs, and when people are unable to move their legs, they die.

The affair had been emotionally charged because most people who died in the city died when they reached retirement age. His teachers explained that retirement withered people away, and most of them died in their first or second year. Not that people could retire. Rent was expensive, and it was hard to keep up the payments even with a life savings of citcreds. People worked until they keeled over, and that's exactly what the school administrator had done, though she'd been a good ten years away from the age that most people retired.

The support for her had been overwhelming because she'd always produced a solid workforce. There'd been so many people to see her pass on. One particular person stood out in Olson's mind. There'd been a little girl at the funeral not much younger than him, but he had never seen her at the school before. It wasn't unusual that there would be a girl at the school he didn't know. The boys and girls were kept separate from each other for the most part. He only saw them in class, during meals, and at Leisure Time. So he had mostly interacted with girls his age because Leisure Time and meals were separated by year.

The unusual part that stuck out in Olson's mind was that people had kept walking up to her and saying, "I'm sorry for your loss." It was a strange thing to say to the little girl. Loss implied that she had misplaced the McGladery School administrator somehow. But it wasn't that she was lost. Everyone knew where she was. She was just dead.

Duncan's funeral by contrast had virtually no one in the room. The lack of people made the event even more somber. Every shuffle of feet or clearing of throat could be heard echoing off the walls. Since Duncan's body was beyond retrieval, the metal plank designed to move the body into the incinerator was a pile of his possessions with a picture of the smiling Instructor Duncan.

The entire life of a person was burned away at their death. Unless friends claimed the deceased's personal possessions, they turned everything the person owned into ashes. There was not enough space in the city to keep an object that held sentimental value from a deceased person. Duncan's funeral passed without note. A couple of the teachers asked Olson how he was doing and squeezed his shoulder in a show of support. It was a sad affair. The empty room only seemed to magnify the loneliness Olson felt.

# 7

Olson stood in the cafeteria line for Lunch Hour while the lunch lady put a slice of sad deflated lasagna on his plate. The cafeteria food didn't cost the students anything. However, it was bland, perpetually looked like it was always a day old, and was only half eaten by most students. They used the Lunch Hour to socialize and form groups, one for boys and one for girls. The groups were then subdivided by future profession: the maintenance crews, the service industry, the farmers, the OPS military, the manufacturers, the Washers and other custodians, and finally Olson's small and ostracized category, the trackless.

The teachers repeatedly told the students that the purpose of school was to figure out where everyone fit. Olson and a couple of the rejects didn't seem to fit with anybody. He wasn't good with his hands, so he couldn't be a maintenance crewmember or manufacturer. Custodian was the destiny of those who failed to get into the highly competitive Washer program. People also made Olson feel awkward, so service was right out the window. Farming required a special love of nature, and while he enjoyed a walk through one of the park buildings, he didn't particularly like digging in the soil or climbing ladders to get to the upper levels of the farm.

Olson remembered a field trip where the rest of the students had climbed to a cabbage farm above an orchard. Trees needed several floors' worth of open space to grow properly, so the cabbage farm on the floor above had a ladder that was the equivalent of several stories. Olson had refused to go because of the dizzying prospect of being so high in such an open space. Had there been an escalator, Olson would have been fine, but the escalators had been torn out of all the farm buildings to make more space, as space was a precious commodity.

While the rest of his classmates had gone further up, Olson had stayed among the apples. It was fitting that his last class trip to a farm involved sitting in an apple orchard. Apples and other tree fruits were the most expensive food around because they required so much space to grow. Food like steak and cabbages were cheap because they could be grown in batches. The meat farms had incubation chambers where beef, chicken, and pork grew. Food like apples, oranges, and bananas were the food of the wealthy. Olson assumed that the blank CitID hidden in his cube would get him an apple whenever he wanted one, as there seemed to be no limit on the citcreds contained within.

The OPS military didn't seem right either because he wasn't that much of a bully. At least in Olson's class, all the OPS kids enjoyed pushing around the other kids. It wasn't a surprise that Eckelston was OPS bound, even if he was the lowest member of his clique. Eckelston seemed to be the punching bag of his friends, and in turn made Olson the punching bag for him.

He had no clear career choices ahead of him. He was stuck in the undecided category of the trackless that would be selected to fill any missing slots for each post-school workforce training center that needed a few extra people. Olson hoped he would figure out if his new badge was clear to use or not by then. Maybe Olson wouldn't have to do a job he wasn't good at and could make independent streams on his touchlite all the time. Olson liked filmmaking, but art wasn't an option. It didn't keep society going.

Olson sat down at his table of rejects. There were seven of them including Olson, from all different age groups. One of them was a girl because she had no other female rejects to sit with. All the other girls seemed to have some skills. Her name was Hanson, and she had blond hair that always fell in front of her face. The others were Bauer, Pickett, Jaramillo, Richards, and Xiong.

Pickett, a kid about three years younger than Olson with a dark skin tone, said in a dry sarcastic voice, "Welcome back."

Olson poked at the plate of deflated lasagna. "I guess it wouldn't be too much to ask for some welcome back citcreds."

Bauer spoke up, "Didn't you earn some citcreds when you went to Leamington?"

"It paid my hospital bill," Olson said, only half joking. While health care was free for all students, people in the hospital ended up spending citcreds to keep themselves entertained. They would buy games and books for their touchlites, spend some money to get a snack rather than eat the same hospital food, which was one step below the cafeteria food from the school. The hospital was a race against boredom.

Hanson tapped Olson's bandage and asked, "Does it hurt?"

"A little," Olson said while he winced from the pain from her tap.

"So what is it like outside?" Xiong asked.

"I didn't go outside."

"But you breathed the air. Isn't that the same thing?"

"I wouldn't call it breathing—more like choking—but yeah, all the stories you heard are true. It's like someone set your lungs on fire."

They were all mesmerized by Olson's account. Most of them didn't eat much of what was on their trays the entire time. Olson was so involved with the story that he also forgot to eat anything on his plate. He stuck to the same account that he told the HR Director. He didn't want them double-checking with his friends or any more information to get out. Bauer would be a problem because he'd witnessed Olson's errand. Olson made sure to make it sound like he had gotten back to the McGladery School with enough time to be sitting in the hallway for a while.

Not that it mattered much what Bauer had seen. If OPS officers had come through interviewing his classmates at school, Olson was sure that someone would have mentioned it by now. Instead, they were all engaged in the story.

Near the end, Olson was cut short when Eckelston and his cronies from the OPS track forced their way into the group, just when Olson was telling them about how he'd crawled into the hallway with barely enough time to make it out.

"Lunch hour is over," Eckelston said.

Olson looked at his unfinished plate. Despite the blandness of the food, he was still hungry. "But I haven't finished my lunch yet."

"You should have thought about that before you blathered on to your reject squad."

"Relax, I'll take my tray in a moment. We still have five minutes."

"You will take your tray now. Five minutes is cleanup time, and that's what we are going to do."

Olson ignored Eckelston and began eating his food. The bully would not get the satisfaction of seeing Olson go hungry, so he ignored the subsequent threats. The others watched nervously while the incident occurred. But he felt different after the accident. After surviving death, he no longer felt intimidated by petty people like Eckelston. Before, he would have followed the orders and dumped his fully loaded tray. Now, he enjoyed the bland food a lot more when it upset the grand jerk himself.

"You better take your tray before you end up wearing it," Eckelston barked.

Olson ate his food slowly and deliberately. He taunted Eckelston and dared him to make good on his threats. Eckelston stepped back and forth, unsure of what to do. Discipline wasn't much of an issue for the McGladery School. Most students did what they were told. They reported to their classes on time. They cleaned up after themselves. Most disputes were verbal and settled by teachers. Flagrant insubordination was unheard of, so Eckelston didn't know what to do. He was used to pushing people around and having them comply.

Perhaps fear kept the school orderly. There was a rumor of a boy who had disappeared because he fought with other students. Students said the OPS authorities dragged him away in the middle of the night. Others said he was banished from the city, which of course would be a death sentence. Olson didn't really believe the rumor because every year had a rumor. The children years below told the same story. It was a rumor that was passed down from child to child.

Olson chewed slowly. At first, his group of friends laughed. Eckelston barked more orders, which made them laugh harder. Then, after a moment or two, his friends stopped laughing and began to look at the time. Most of Eckelston's peer group took off when they noticed the time getting close to the end of lunch hour. Olson's friends left too.

Hanson tugged on Olson's sleeve. "Come on. It's time to go."

Eckelston looked at the time and said, "I'm going to report you."

"Good," Olson said. "Report me then!"

Eckelston stormed away. Only Hanson and Xiong remained, and they had already disposed of their trash and put away their trays.

"That was awesome!" Xiong said.

"Come on!" Hanson said. "We only have a minute."

"You both go ahead. I'll see you in class." Olson waved his hand, and they both took off running. Olson stood up in the empty cafeteria and walked over to the trash bins. He carefully sorted his garbage between organic, recyclables, and trash. Then he walked over to the drinks, grabbed another synthesized milk, and strolled out of the cafeteria at a leisurely pace.

# 8

The intervention specialist was a squat, plump lady with big curls and big glasses. She wore a dress that was more like drapery fabric than fashion and held her touchlite close like it would jump out of her hands at any moment. Olson sat with her in a tiny room with two chairs and blank walls. He was sitting close enough to smell her breakfast.

"You have been late on three different instances in the last week alone, and that doesn't include the dorm incident last night," she said with concern.

The dorm incident was pretty funny. Olson had smuggled his slice of banana-flavored pie from the cafeteria the night before. He had stuck it under Eckelston's sheets, so he wouldn't notice until he climbed into bed. The scream echoing through the cubicles was priceless.

Olson hadn't worked up the nerve to use the blank CitID badge he had gotten from Duncan. After his meeting with the HR Director, he'd decided it would be better if he waited. He needed to figure out how to print his information on the card. He knew that the Department of Human Resources could print on the badges, but he wouldn't know where to start. Fake CitIDs seemed so easy in the streams. Olson decided he would have to work up the nerve to ask around in G-Town one day if he really wanted to use the funds on the blank card.

"I know that the death of your teacher was a hard thing to witness," the intervention specialist said, and Olson continued to ignore her. She thought he was feeling loss when it was really freedom. Knowing how easy it was to die had taught him to not hold back because his life could end at any moment. The part that seemed to affect him the most was choking on the atmosphere. It hurt weeks after he'd left the painkilling embrace of the hospital. The pills he was given during breakfast and dinner didn't work at all.

Olson often woke up from nightmares about choking to death. He would look at the blank CitID until he was ready to sleep again. The doctors weren't doing anything for him. He would tell them his symptoms and how he was progressing. If he expressed any pain or any sort of discomfort at all, they would send him more required medication that didn't really work. Olson eventually just started telling the doctors that he was fully recovered and dealt with the pain on his own. At least his doctor visits were done via video chat on his touchlite, so he never had to go back to the hospital and wait in the horrendous line.

"So if you want to talk about anything, you know I'm here to listen." She was still talking. Olson wished she would shut up and leave him alone. After the incident, people couldn't seem to leave him alone. He used to be able to disappear in class, and no one would interact with him. Now the bullies wanted to prove they were tougher than him, and his friends would go out of their way to support him. In some ways, Olson wished that it could go back to the way it was before he got all this attention. In others, he felt like the incident had been for the better.

"Daughter," Olson blurted out. He vividly remembered how much emotion Duncan had when using the word.

"Excuse me?"

"Daughter. Instructor Duncan said something about his daughter before he... jumped."

"Do you know why he would talk about that?"

"I don't know. You're the expert. You want to help me figure out his death. Then help me figure out what that word means."

"There are some topics that are better left unsaid."

"Such as?"

"I think this session is over."

"But we still have..."

"If you aren't going to take this seriously, then we are not going to be able to continue these sessions."

"Good. I didn't ask for your help. My teachers made me come here."

She looked hurt. She pressed a few buttons on her touchlite and stood up. She directed him to the door. "I hope you don't mean that, for your sake."

Olson didn't bother saying goodbye. He walked from the room out into the hallway. Since there was still time left in his session, the teachers in his class wouldn't be expecting him for another twenty minutes. Olson decided to do a little research himself. Instead of going back to class, he went to the library.

The school library was on the third floor, while the public library was on the first and second. The public library was a large two-story open-air building with giant soft reading chairs. There were both public and semi-private reading spaces. There were even three private reading rooms, if you could afford the rental charge. The hourly rate of the reading rooms was more than Olson earned from his student allowance in a year.

By contrast, the student library was nothing more than three-walled cubicle desks, barely big enough to fit the students. However, they did have terminals at each desk because the space doubled as a testing facility. No touchlites were allowed during testing.

Olson's hand trembled while he typed the word. He knew how serious security of the city was taken. His social science teacher had been taken away by security when he was younger. Olson couldn't be sure, but the rumor was that he had taught forbidden knowledge. The school claimed he was switching professions. The student rumor mill had darker theories. Either way, they never saw him again.

When Olson had misbehaved in class, or caused trouble for his teachers, it was nothing like he was doing now. He had been acting up in low stakes situations with very minor consequences. He had to see an intervention specialist once a week. He spent even more time missing his Leisure and Dinner Hours waiting to speak with a teacher.

This time was different. He was doing something that could land him in serious trouble. Olson typed the word "daughter" into the search box. Another window popped up on the screen that asked for a username and password. Olson had a username and password for his touchlite and another for his school. He almost typed his username and password into the prompt, but then he thought better of it.

Typing his username was a surefire way of alerting the authorities about his activities, if they were even paying attention. Olson was also pretty sure that his level of access would be restricted as a student. He decided to try a different tactic. He would figure out the username and password of one of his teachers and come back. Luckily for him, his recent lifestyle changes would land him in exactly the right office to watch a teacher type in her password.

# 9

A few days later, Olson sat in the hallway of the teachers' offices once again during the Dinner Hour. Instructor Duncan's door was boarded up with long pieces of plywood. The words DANGER: QUARANTINE and OPS CRIME SCENE were plastered all over the door. The broken window of the office would have been suctioned with a large plastic cup and sealed with a temporary measure. There was a batch of sealing plastic at the ready in case they needed to plug another hole. Since a death was involved, the repair crews could not finish the job until the case was closed. The office was stuck in a state of disarray.

Earlier, Olson had stood in one of the elevator lobbies for the residential floor of the IDS building. It was worth the citcreds to see the temporary sealing from the outside. He had spent his own meager savings because he was still nervous about using the other card. The window looked like the inside of a suction cup sealed with glue. The distance from the window to the decayed street below was far enough that the fall had probably killed Instructor Duncan before the atmosphere. Most Washers would rather die by fall than by a suit tear any day of the week.

Instructor Palczewski invited Olson into her office. She was grey-haired and hunched. She had replaced Duncan after he took the dive. Her class was a well-oiled machine compared to Duncan's. She had very little time for misbehaving and would organize everything down to the tasks for the day on a spreadsheet that she kept on her touchlite. However, she was very slow when using the device. She would type in her username and password with a painful steady tap... tap... tap...

Olson needed to position himself in the room to see what she was typing in order to take advantage of her password. He already knew her username because it appeared on the projector in class every time she pulled up one of her spreadsheets. The password would be easy to figure out if he was standing when she typed it. She would also lay the touchlite flat on a table to type on it. Most people zipped through words with their fingers or thumbs connecting the letters. Instructor Palczewski was one of the only people he knew who would tap each letter like she savored each moment of writing.

Her office was full of pictures of children learning or teachers teaching. There were empty platitudes and clichés with each picture. Almost none of the pictures were like reality. They were of orderly classrooms with engaged students who raised their hands. The real classrooms had bored students struggling to stay awake and thinking about music, streams, and apps. It was like she had an alternate reality displayed on her wall, where students loved to learn and she was the center of the world.

She spoke to Olson about his behavior and suggested mind apps to keep him occupied without getting into trouble. The gum he had flung into Eckelston's hair was much more amusing than a number game for solving math problems in his head. She just didn't get that more learning made the misbehavior more fun. It was a fairly standard scolding though. There was neither hope nor distain in her voice. It felt like she was going through the motions.

Right about the time the conversation would lead into an action plan for behavioral incidents in the future, Olson stood up and looked at a picture near her desk with a bunch of kids. They were Two Years at the most. They were sitting with many different giant crayons and pencils. They diligently worked on activities like coloring, drawing, letters, numbers, and other basic skills.

"Do you think these children remember when this photo was taken?" Olson said.

Instructor Palczewski didn't really know what to say, as Olson had been saying nothing but yes ma'am and no ma'am before now. She furrowed her brows and said, "I don't know. Do you remember anything from One Year?"

"I remember making a tree from a hand sanitizer bottle. It stood at my cubicle for several years before I got rid of it."

"That's nice. Now you best get back here to finish up your action plan, so you don't miss the rest of your Dinner Hour."

She turned to the touchlite and began to type. Tap... Tap... Tap... Olson lingered by the picture for a moment and looked over her shoulder. When she was finished, and the screen said "LOGGING IN," he diverted his eyes back to the picture. She looked up at him and said, "Well? Aren't you coming?"

Olson nodded and sat back down. He leaned toward the desk while she pulled up a spreadsheet on a monitor from her workstation that she had linked to her touchlite. The rest of her words were lost on him as he repeated her password over and over until it was etched in his memory.

# 10

Olson was on his way back to the library during Leisure Hour when Eckelston and a group of his friends stopped him in the stairwell. The stairwells were probably the most private areas of the entire school. Teachers and staff got an all-access pass to the McGladery elevators as a perk for working at the school, so they were never in the stairways much. When students wanted to seriously misbehave, they did it on the stairs. One time Bauer had found an unopened adult beverage in the trash. They shared it in the stairwell. The beverage tasted awful. Olson didn't understand why they were so popular with the adults.

Eckelston's hair was shaved bald on one side but not the other. He pushed Olson against the wall. Olson's injury hadn't bothered him in a while, but it erupted in pain from the compression on his chest. The others held his arms and legs, so he couldn't struggle free.

"They had to shave my head to get rid of the gum," Eckelston barked and pushed harder.

Olson winced. He could feel the bruises in his sternum. "You should consider being less of a jerk. Then maybe people wouldn't throw gum in your hair."

Eckelston punched Olson in the gut. Olson slid to the ground. He could feel the pain erupt again from his wounds. He felt a kick and then another. The others joined the beating, and he heard the crack of feet on his body. Olson was about to pass out from the pain when a loud "Hey!" from a female voice interrupted the gang.

The boys scattered and bolted down the stairs.

A pair of female hands patted his shoulder. His savior lifted Olson up to his haunches, and he opened his eyes. The person who had saved him was not a teacher but a girl not much older than him. She had a red streak in her black hair and brilliant hazel eyes. She wasn't wearing school attire, which led Olson to believe that she must have graduated recently.

The McGladery School had a strict dress code. They were only allowed black slacks and white polo shirts. The girls had skirts. Red hair dye was out of the question.

The girl offered her hand to help him to his feet, and he accepted. She was a good six inches taller than him, and he could not stop looking at her, though he couldn't understand why.

"You shouldn't let them bully you like that," she offered.

"I don't think I have much of a choice." Olson attempted to grin and then frowned from the pain. "Besides, I did put gum in his hair."

"You put gum in his hair?"

"Only because he was hitting my friend Hanson with a ruler."

"Well, I guess he deserved it. Let this be a lesson about bulldogs. They bite."

"Bulldogs? What's a bulldog?"

The girl rolled her eyes. "That's right. I forgot. You're from the other school."

"Other school? There is only one school in the whole city!"

"Look, I've probably said too much. Just forget it," she said as she darted down the stairs.

"But..." Olson called out and tried to pursue her.

She was much faster than Olson, and she was already a couple floors down when he heard a door slam. As fast as she'd appeared, she was gone. Olson opened the door that he thought she had used to exit. It was just the skyway with its blue-patterned carpet and various people walking to and fro.

# 11

Since Olson was unable to find the mystery girl, he went back to the library on his original mission. There were a couple of students completing their studies. Instructor Simone was helping students with various tasks. She smiled when Olson entered the room.

"Olson," she said in a bright and cheery voice. "I'm glad you are here. Please let me know if there is anything you need."

"I will, Instructor Simone," Olson said. He had always liked her. She was very nice and never badgered or made him feel inadequate. Most of the teachers would ask Olson questions like "Do you want to be a failure in life?" or repeat city propaganda like "You make your own fate." Students didn't seem to be able to make their own fate, as adults were making all the decisions for them. Simone didn't try to push anything on him, so he actually wanted to work hard for her. The other teachers always seemed to focus on his mistakes rather than anything he did right, which made him not want to do anything at all.

He felt bad that he wasn't really here for studying, but he knew there was something more than what they were being told in school. If there was another school in the city, then maybe they learned words like daughter. Olson had always felt like there was something more than finding a career and getting an apartment. The reality for most of his peers was that they would probably never own apartments. They would grow up in cubicles and die in cubicles. Only people with the fancy jobs or those who were super successful owned their own room. Those jobs didn't really open up all that often. When they did, everyone in the city applied for them.

The words "make your own fate" appeared on the announcement screen in the corner of the classroom. Shelia, the head of HR, appeared with some announcements. "Good afternoon, citizens..."

Olson ignored the propaganda, turned on the computer, and typed into the search box. The request for a username and password came on when he typed "daughter," and he tapped Instructor Palczewski's password faster than she ever would. Once the browser was logged into her name, the dictionary definition appeared on the screen: "A girl or woman in relation to her parents."

The definition didn't really make any sense to him, so he decided to go deeper in the search and found a wiki about daughters. The information astounded him. A daughter came from two adults called "parents." There were pictures of these tiny humans that looked bulbous and bald. A mother "cradled" the tiny human in her arms. The entire thought was discomforting.

It wasn't that he had never thought about where people came from. It was more that he knew where people came from. They came from the Early Childcare Center. Once they were ready to start life, they were put in One Year of the McGladery School. Some students claimed to remember the ECC, but the teachers said no one ever could remember. Memory began in One Year, so there really wasn't existence before memory. Although Olson often had memories that he suspected were from the ECC, his teachers would insist that they were dreams from watching streams right before bed.

However, according to the wiki, he was getting a very different account of the origin of humans. He was about to switch over to actually doing homework and study because he felt a little guilty about abusing Instructor Simone's time, but then he found a wiki article about the act of two humans creating another human. His mind couldn't even wrap around the concept. There was kissing, dating, and many things he couldn't comprehend. The implication that a male and a female would do these strange rituals to produce daughters made him uncomfortable.

He hit the power switch on his workstation and stared at the blank screen. He needed time for his mind to catch up. He understood why Instructor Duncan had used the term daughter in such an emotionally charged way. Did Duncan have a daughter? The thought seemed impossible. He had never seen a woman's belly swell like in the pictures he had seen. Duncan didn't even have any woman in his life, as far as Olson knew.

In fact, no one had anybody in their lives. Classmates were the only people who knew you throughout your life. People didn't have mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters. The idea that people would form these units was absurd. It didn't make sense that people would form these bonds over some non-concrete form of identity called a family.

The part that was most confounding was that families stuck together for life. The only real bonding in the city was friendship, and that would come and go. Olson's friends would go on their career paths, they would see less and less of each other, as he would see more and more of his coworkers. Friends were nothing like this family unit. But as much as the idea was confusing, the thought of being close enough to someone that he could trust them with anything or go to no matter what happened was intriguing. There was a missing part of himself, and he hadn't known about it until today.

That's when the realization hit Olson like a weight on his chest. Instructor Duncan was like a "father" to Olson. He told Duncan thoughts he would never utter to anyone else, and his teacher cared about him. Duncan took an interest in Olson's activities and cared about what Olson did. Even when Olson acted out, Instructor Duncan would still treat Olson with respect and love.

Olson understood families. The love he had felt for Duncan was like a son for his father. He needed to understand why Instructor Duncan had killed himself.

If Duncan had a daughter, then there must have been a woman out there who was the mother of the child. There were at least two people in Instructor Duncan's life who should have come and asked questions about his death. Instead, he would have almost been entirely forgotten by now, if it weren't for the mess made of his office. It was possible that his family didn't care or didn't know about the incident. However, Olson found that hard to believe. News traveled fast in the city, and rumor traveled even faster. There should have been someone poking around the school, looking for more information, other than the OPS.

But no one even came to his funeral services.

Families had a special bond, and they should have come to his services. Olson was starting to understand that bond more and more. If Duncan had been like a father, then Simone was like a mother. She was the best teacher around. She never yelled at him or made him feel insignificant. She was never dismissive of his feelings. Olson couldn't bear to think about what school would be like without her.

Olson wasn't really sure what was happening with his teacher's family. If what Olson had read about families was true, then someone should have come to his funeral. The fact that no one had come, except for a few staff and faculty of the school, made Olson believe that his family didn't know he had died. There had to be someone else in the city connected to Duncan.

Olson could not forget the emotion in his teacher's voice. He spoke of his daughter with such passion that it was hard to think the girl wouldn't have come, trying to figure out what had happened. Instructor Duncan's death took over Olson's thoughts. He couldn't stop thinking about the suicide or if he could have done something different. He needed to know why. Olson decided that he would find Duncan's daughter, as she would most likely have the same thoughts. He stood up from his desk and left the lab without a word.

As he stepped out of the classroom, he formulated a plan. The girl he had met on the staircase had to be Duncan's daughter. Olson was sure of it. He had never seen her before today, and why else would she come poking around his school? Olson was sure that she was here to investigate Duncan's death. All he needed to do was be there when she came back.

# 12

Olson was well behaved for the next few weeks, considering his recent disciplinary patterns. He spent a lot of time reading forbidden wikis in the library, so he wasn't entirely a saint. The girl on the stairs had not shown up, despite the long hours he would wait for her. Despite his many attempts to locate her school, he was unable to find it, even after reading the directory listings in the lobby of every building.

During school, he would sit in class and pretend to listen to Instructor Palczewski while she droned about the citcred economy or the city council. None of the teachers except Simone and Duncan even noticed when Olson's mind had checked out of the classroom, which reinforced his surrogate mother and father idea. Life was back to usual. Eckelston returned to bullying a wider variety of students over just Olson. The routine was much like before the incident, where Olson wasn't the most memorable person in class and people ignored him.

While there was some comfort in his old life, he couldn't ever go back. He possessed knowledge that would eat away at him. It made everything that happened at school feel like he was just going through the motions. What seemed important before was quite trivial. There was an entire world beyond his that had families. There were people who called themselves fathers and daughters rather than students, faculty, workers, and so forth.

Everything Olson had been told his entire life was a lie. The worst part of the lie was that his teachers knew about the lie yet perpetuated it in class. In Duncan's humanology class, he'd shown them a video. It had been right before the big Puck Grind match of the season, so the students had been ready to get out of class. Olson had sat in the back of the classroom.

Instructor Duncan's classroom had been always cluttered. He'd had posters of famous people supporting science with rock music. Sir Isaac Newton had held up his hands like he was at a rock concert and said "Science Rocks!" There had been a picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out. The famous engineer, Lofgren, who first figured out how to make the city air-tight, was depicted playing a guitar shaped like a beaker.

After Duncan had settled the class down, he'd put a stream on the screen. It depicted a student lost in thought staring up at his teacher. Olson always thought educational videos were funny. As a quieter student, he spent a lot of his time watching the other students. A person lost in thought never actually looked like they were gazing with a sense of wonder. Lost in thought people looked like they were mildly uncomfortable. The student on the stream looked ridiculous.

A deep male announcer voice said, "Have you ever wondered where humans come from?" The screen then changed to the entrance of the Early Childcare Center from the skyway, and the announcer continued, "Here at the ECC, we are dedicated to making sure every human has a quality life. Our scientists work around the clock, creating humans just like you."

The next scenes involved scientists in crisp white lab coats doing science with various test tubes, microscopes, and other equipment. Olson wondered if the science was as fake as the child with a sense of wonder.

The scene switched to a line of happy One Years marching from the ECC into the skyway.

"In partnership with the McGladery School, we make sure that every child receives the best education to ensure the highest quality of life. Students will be provided the knowledge necessary to make their own fate."

The next scene was very familiar. It was the skyway that connected the McGladery school with the IDS Commons. The group of children were now all Twelve Years, and they were all smiling. They each wore a uniform of a different profession. They marched in unison through the Skyway.

"Every graduate of the McGladery School becomes a productive member of the workforce. A happy worker is a successful worker. Are you ready to make your own fate?"

When the stream was over, something didn't seem right at the time about the video. Had Olson known then what he knew now, he would have asked better questions. "If humans create other humans, then who created the first human?"

Instructor Duncan had said, "It's pretty complex science. Only those with a Genetics degree really understand it, but suffice to say that the ECC has been operating since the city's inception. Before that, we are not quite sure what they did in the world from before."

"But... why do I look like me? Why don't I have eyes like Xiong, or dark skin like Syeda?"

Syeda had blushed and buried her head. She had always been conscious of her appearance. The other children had rolled their eyes and groaned. They were steps away from being released to go to the Puck Grind game. Olson had broken the unwritten rule of students to not ask questions, especially when Puck Grind was on the line.

"They do it for a variety of reasons. If we all had fair skin and blue eyes like you, the world would be boring. Variety makes us interesting."

Olson hadn't known if he quite believed what he was being told. If variety was desirable, then why was most of the city white skinned people like him? If humans were in control of making other humans, then why not green or blue skinned people? Cubicle decoration, clothes, and other forms of self-expression seemed to be dominated by variety and colors. Olson had known there was more to it than he was being told back then.

When Duncan had finally answered Olson's stream of inquiry, Olson had left with the understanding that there must be something in the actual science that made it difficult to produce more variety than what was represented in the classroom. Olson had never felt satisfied by the answer, and now he knew why.

If new humans were created through mothers and fathers, then the variety question that had plagued him when he was younger made perfect sense. If two people were needed to create another person, then they would only have a limited number of ways a person could look. Two people like Syeda had created her.

If Syeda had parents, then Olson wondered if he had parents too, at least biological ones. Duncan and Simone were the only parents Olson had ever needed. Seeing as how much Duncan had loved his daughter, Olson couldn't quite understand how his parents, if he had them, would have given him up. Everyone in school must have had parents who were forced to give up their children in order to perpetuate the myth that they all appeared from the ECC as functional humans. From the research, Olson had discovered that tiny humans called babies couldn't take care of themselves without another person.

That's where Olson was stuck. People out in the workforce didn't have kids. They didn't even talk about wanting kids. There weren't even any examples of this coupling that parents needed in order to make kids. People in the workforce had friends, and socialized with friends, but no one lived with another person. Space was in so much demand that the thought of sharing a personal area with someone was absurd. Society didn't match the information he had gleaned from the wikis.

The buzzer sounded, and the students flooded from the classroom. All the groups formed in the hallway. Olson decided to head in the opposite direction, toward the stairs. He figured that, if the mystery girl was Duncan's daughter, she would show up at his office sooner or later to find out what had happened. Olson would wait in the teachers' hallway, where he had waited so many times before. If a teacher approached him, he could always tell him or her that he was waiting for a different one.

Bauer called out to him and said, "Where are you going?"

"I have to meet with a teacher."

"You never got in trouble today."

"I'm missing a lot of my assignments."

"There is a new app on the network today. We were all going to play it during Leisure Hour."

"You go ahead."

"It looks like it'll be really fun."

"Really, I can't."

"Look at you, being all studious. What's wrong?"

"I have to catch up."

"The old Olson would never miss out on an app launch."

"I can't. I have to go!"

Bauer scrunched his face and snorted. He turned around without another word and stomped away. Olson didn't want to upset him, but he couldn't play mindless games while there was something bigger happening. Now that Olson knew about the lie, it was much harder to live in the world where everyone else believed it.

Even though he was willfully pushing away his friends, Olson had never felt lonelier. He couldn't talk to anyone from his group about what was really happening. They wouldn't understand. They hadn't heard Duncan before he died. He couldn't bring them down the path he was walking. His friends seemed much better off maintaining their ignorance.

Duncan's daughter would be a different story. If she knew that she had a father, then there would be at least one other person in the city to talk to about what was happening. Olson was also inclined to trust her because she was a fellow student. She must have understood what he was going through, but was also one step ahead of him, as she'd figured out the identity of her father.

Olson opened the door for the stairwell leading up to the teachers' offices. He climbed the stairs and was about to exit on the office floor when he caught a whiff of something. It was a horrid smell. It kind of reminded him of the air outside, and he gagged.

There was a cough from a female on the stair above him. Olson walked up the steps. There was a haze in the air that smelled. He coughed and continued. His eyes watered as memories of the air returned. But whatever was polluting the air in the stairwell was different from the air outside. This was a very distinct smell. Olson climbed to the very top of the stairs, where there was an airlock with an access code security panel.

On the landing at the top, the girl with the red streak in her hair was blowing smoke from her lungs into a vent. She had a white stick in between her fingers with a tan butt and a glowing tip. She saw that it was Olson and made no effort to hide her activities. The glowing tip burned brightly as she sucked in and blew more smoke into the vent. She coughed, and the rest of the smoke missed its target, wafting toward the ceiling.

She finally acknowledged Olson. "What? You act like you've never seen a cigarette in your life."

"Is that what that is?" Olson said, curious about the endeavor.

"Oh boy, are you serious?" The girl rolled her eyes. She looked at Olson's expression. "My god, you are serious. Come here, kid. Let me show you how it works."

She extended her hand with the cigarette, and he almost grabbed it by the tip. She pulled the cigarette back and said, "Wow, that's the hot part. You've never seen a fire before."

"Only in streams. They are illegal outside of designated areas, and there are no designated fire zones in our school."

"What are they teaching you down here? Here, grab it from this end."

She handed him the cigarette. He took the object. It was light, like it was made of paper, and he could feel the warmth when he put his finger close to the flame. The girl had a look of incredulousness as he inspected the cigarette.

"Put this end in your mouth," she said. "Now suck it in. No, suck it into your lungs."

A blast of smoke hit Olson's lungs. It burned, and he coughed, almost dropping the cigarette down the stairwell. His head spun, and he felt dizzy. When he dropped to one knee, the girl laughed at him.

"How could anyone like these things?" Olson spat. "That was disgusting."

She laughed even harder. "You know, kid, I guess you are all right."

While Olson cleared his head, they talked about their schools and their teachers. From what Olson could glean, her school was a lot like his. The teachers were uninterested and sometimes mean. The students were bored. That seemed to be a theme among the schools of the city.

The girl's name was Natalie. It was a peculiar name that Olson had never heard before. She really was from a different part of the city.

While they were talking, he kept looking into her eyes. He felt an emotion come from deep inside, but he didn't know exactly what it was. He wanted to listen to her talk. There was also something about her lips.

When he'd researched parents, he had found out about kissing. He felt that he wanted to kiss her, but he didn't dare act on his desire. Why was he feeling this way about her? The more confusing question was why weren't any of the other boys his age feeling the same way about other girls?

Instead of acting on his impulse, he just asked questions about her. When Olson asked where her school was located, he was confused by the answer.

"It's in the Cappella Tower," she said.

"There is no school in the Cappella Tower."

"Not on the floors you can access."

Without saying it, Olson knew that she was rich. The city's wealthy and elite lived on the top floors of the highest buildings. Unless you had money and power, you couldn't even go up to those floors. The elevators to the top were expensive and cost a couple months' wages for most people. Some crazy people would save their whole lives to take a walk on the upper levels.

"So you must be from up top."

"My mom has citcreds, yeah."

She'd said one of the words that had been forbidden to him. He could not hold back anymore. The questions and the knowledge had been burning within him ever since he'd learned about what was really happening. He began telling her everything.

The information came gushing forth, even though he didn't know if he could trust her. He told her about Duncan saying the word daughter. He talked about stealing the password to look it up on the locked wikis. While he was talking, he realized that the more he said, the more upset she looked.

He reached out to comfort her, but she pushed his hand away. Before he could get another word out, she ran down the stairwell and left him alone. As she went, she dropped her cigarette on the ground. It had formed a long head of ash while it burned.

At first, he was confused by her actions, but then he realized that Duncan might have been her father. He might have been the first one to break the news about her father's death. If she felt the same love that Olson sensed Duncan had for her, then she had every right to be upset. Olson scolded himself for acting so callously.

He swept the ashes from the landing and grabbed the cigarette butt. There was no reason she should get in trouble for his stupidity. He at least knew where he could find her again, so he did the best he could to cover up the fact that she had been smoking in the stairwell. Once he was sure the place was clean, he stomped down the stairs.

# 13

The next few days, the girl with the red streak did not return to the stairwell. Olson had come many times at various points throughout the day in an effort to see her. He was beginning to think that he would never find her again when he finally found someone on the landing at the top of the stairs. However, that person was someone who he least expected to see. The head of Human Resources, Shelia, stood at the top. Her goon stood behind her, and she wore a large, fake smile.

Olson didn't know why he blurted it out. Most people would treat her with a sense of decorum reserved for those who had the power to end their lives as they knew it. He did it without thinking, perhaps because he'd gotten used to speaking out in class even if it would get him in trouble. "Why are you here?"

"Olson," Shelia said in a singsong voice. "we are here for you. For your protection."

"I don't need any."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that. You met a woman up here the other day."

"I..."

"Before you try to deny it, I want to make it perfectly clear that Human Resources knows about everything that goes on in the city. And before you think about the sinister plots you would watch in a stream, trust me when I say it's for the benefit of society. Tell me, why do we work Olson?"

"I don't know... to get citcreds."

"That's just one of the benefits. It's to keep society going. Imagine if the Washers decided to stop washing the windows."

"We wouldn't be able to see outside?"

"My, you are a smart young man. You see, they wash the windows so they don't corrode and become brittle. All that atmosphere will come rushing into the city with even the slightest crack. Keeping them clean helps the city. Now, would it be fair to the Washers if, say, the cooks decided not to work while the Washers kept us all safe? We all do our part, Olson. And that is why Human Resources is so important. We reward those who do their part exceptionally well and let go of people who don't contribute. It's tough to make those decisions, so that's why I need to know about everything."

"Yeah... I guess." Olson looked away. If she was going to punish him, he wished she would get it over with. He hated how adults sometimes acted like they were giving him these important lessons, when in reality, they were justifying to themselves why they should punish him. They did it so they could sleep at night. Sometimes, he wished he could just be an adult, so he could make his own decisions. Of course, he had heard adults say they wished they could be a kid again, so they could sit around and watch streams and play apps all day. No one wins.

"HR always has to think about what's best for the city, my dear boy. If I let someone go, it's because we will all benefit from another person taking their job. I took an oath to put the city ahead of myself. So let's think about your friend, dear."

"Who?"

"Oh, don't be coy with me, dear," she said in the singsong voice. "I know you met a girl smoking on the stairs in this very spot."

"Yeah, ok, what of it? I didn't know talking to people was illegal."

"Yes, but open flames are illegal."

Olson thought about the cigarette. Sure, it was gross, but Olson couldn't see how it was harmful to anyone but Natalie herself.

As if she was reading his mind, Shelia responded, "An open flame puts us all at risk. What if there had been a gas leak? Or what if the smoke had built up and set off the fire suppression system? There are so many ways a tiny little flame could cause harm to the city. There are serious consequences for those who break the rules."

She wasn't lying about the consequences. If the OPS arrested a person for breaking any law that put people at risk, they were never seen again. His teachers said there was a prison at the OPS where the criminals lived, but Olson doubted it. They were always talking about the scarce city resources. His teachers said they were forced to do the jobs no one else wanted to do to earn their keep, but the reality was that there was no job in the city that no one wanted. Even the folks of G-Town had to pay the rent somehow.

Shelia leaned closer to Olson. "Now, I want you to understand that you are not in trouble. You did not break the open flame rule. However, you have a lot of years as a productive member of the workforce ahead of you. It would be a shame to have negligent behavior on your record. Do you understand me, Olson?"

"I think so."

"Let me be perfectly clear. I think it would be best for you and your career if you never speak to this Natalie again."

"But—"

"Olson." She smiled. "I know you think you didn't do anything wrong, but what if it had been an OPS officer who spotted you two with the flame instead of me? Would he have been as forgiving as me?"

"I guess I see your point." He did not see her point at all. Anger had been boiling inside since they'd started the conversation. However, Olson knew better than to lash out at her.

"Trust me, I know what's best." Shelia smiled. "You make your own fate."

"You make your own fate," he replied. Olson could fake being dutiful. He told Shelia that he'd focus on more important matters, which was a half-truth. They most likely differed on opinion as to what would be an important matter. Either way, Olson had become quite adept at telling adults what they wanted to hear. He decided to redirect his anger to a more important task. Natalie was an ally and probably the only one he had. If he couldn't wait around for her to come to him, he would have to find her.

# 14

Ditching class was easy in a school that had students for the entire day. All Olson needed to do was tell the teachers he felt sick, and they sent him to the nurse's office. Had he really been sick, he would have ended up in his cubicle all day. Touchlite and workplace access was cut off when students were sick to "help them recover." Olson knew that it was really to prevent students from faking sickness to play on their touchlites all day. Being sick was mind numbing and boring, so students really didn't fake it. Most students would say they were sick only when they were about to pass out. That's why, when Olson told the morning teacher he was sick, no one questioned him.

He went to the nurse. He complained about a queasy stomach. She gave him some meds and cut his touchlite access. He went back to his cubicle and locked away his touchlite. After a quick scan of the floor, he didn't see any heads sticking up from the other cubicles. He crawled under his cot and retrieved the blank CitID.

He considered putting pillows under his blankets to approximate his sleeping form, but didn't bother. Students hated being sick so much they wouldn't bother him. Even Eckelston would steer clear of him. He'd only get in trouble if an adult came looking for him, which was always possible. Sometimes they'd check up on a sick student. Other times they wouldn't. Either way, a couple of pillows wouldn't fool a teacher.

Olson checked to see if anyone was watching and headed straight for the elevator. He needed to get out of the area where people would recognize him as soon as possible. It was worth the citcreds for a ride. He wanted to warn Natalie about the HR director. She had let Olson off easy, but may not have been so forgiving to Natalie.

After he stepped out of the elevator, he made his way to the Capella Tower. He wasn't sure how he was going to find her. He did have the advantage of looking like a student, so he assumed he only needed to find her school.

The skyway was different during the day. It wasn't as crowded compared to the times when Olson was officially allowed to wander the halls. There were fewer people milling about. People were focused like they had a destination in mind. They all wore uniforms or suits. There was no one loitering in casual clothing. It was the middle of a workday.

Olson entered the IDS common room. The waterfall that cascaded from the ceiling into the fountain below was in full effect. The red sunlight from the atmosphere was shining through the windows. It looked rather breathtaking during the day. It was a giant room that almost made Olson dizzy because he spent most of his life under the regulation ceiling height.

On one of the white benches around the fountain, there was a man sleeping. The man looked dirty and grimy. He wore a tattered brown coat and torn jeans. He was missing his right hand. It was a stump where a hand used to be. The man's face was bright red, and Olson could smell him from a distance.

Two OPS officers pushed past Olson. They were wearing the standard black uniforms that looked like suits of body armor. Their faces were obscured by their black helmets with tinted visors. OPS officers looked intimidating, but then again, they were supposed to be fearsome. Eckelston would always talk about their presence being a crime deterrent.

"No sleeping in public spaces," one of the officers said and poked the man with a stun stick rather violently.

"Huh?" The man was startled awake.

"Where's your home?" the other said. "G-Town? Why don't you make your way back to G-Town?"

"I don't have a home," the man said. "I couldn't make the rent."

The officers glanced at each other. One of them pressed a button on his helmet. "Control, this is officer 110B. We have a 1040."

"Please, mister," the man said. "Give me a few days. All I need to do is find a job, and I can get the money."

"You're going to find a job?" the other one said. "With this?"

The officer lifted the man's missing hand with his stun stick.

"Please," the man begged. "There has to be something in this city I can do. I can be useful."

The officer turned to Olson, and Olson continued walking. Behind him, an OPS cart rolled into the commons area. The homeless man with the stump hand was rounded up by the officers and stuffed into the cart. The cart drove away and was gone before there could be anymore disturbance.

Olson continued toward his destination. He went through skyway bridges and buildings, past shops, lunch carts, and restaurants. He walked by people on their daily routine. He made it to an escalator to the first floor. At the bottom of the escalator was an empty food court.

Since Olson had never really walked from McGladery to Capella before, he had never known the food court existed. At first glance, he could see why. There was old tile and no windows. Half of the food establishments were empty, while the other half were caged up. There was a clutter of tables and cheap chairs strewn throughout the place. There wasn't a single soul in sight. It was rather unnerving.

He was surprised by the empty business units. People who wanted to open up a business had to wait for years to get a space. They would only get a spot if the previous business had failed or the owner died. However, along the path to the Capella Tower, there were several vacant storefronts.

It was another mystery to add to the list of growing questions Olson had about his city. He left the food court through a hallway on the other side. On either side of the walkway, there were large floor-to-ceiling windows looking into an art gallery. There were statues created from pieces of trash. Some were metal. Others were food containers and household cleaning products. There was even a man in a glass case made from food waste. They were creepy and stood in unnatural poses.

Olson looked at the price tag on one of the art pieces and almost gagged. It was more citcreds than he would see in a lifetime for a woman with a swelling belly made entirely from soap. Who would have the citcreds to afford such a thing?

That's when Olson remembered his research. The woman depicted by the statue was pregnant. It was a condition where a child would grow inside another human.

If someone was selling statues of pregnant women, then that meant there must be other people who knew about parenting. Why didn't school cover such an important topic? Why were all the students made to believe they were the work of scientists? Olson wanted to know if he had a mother, and why she had never contacted him.

Olson had no one in his life to celebrate his school triumphs, like the day when he passed the math for the Seven Years after failing three times. There was no one to support him when he fell down. No one would listen to him complain about Eckelston, or would tell him what to do about the bully. When Olson cried, he cried alone in his cubicle at night. Even though the concept of parents was an abstract idea, the more he thought about it, the more he understood the emotion behind it.

A bushy-eyed cleaner pushed his cart through the hallway. It had various cleaning supplies and a large trash can. He set out a wet floor sign, and turned back to his mop bucket. He noticed Olson.

"You can't afford anything here, kid," the man said as he sloshed the mop on the floor.

"Do you have a mother?" Olson asked the man.

"A what?"

"Never mind," Olson said and hopped over the wet spot. The man didn't even look twice. Olson rounded the corner and saw an escalator in the distance. He wanted to get out of the creepy hallway as soon as possible.

# 15

Olson walked through a narrow skyway bridge into the Capella Tower. He had to step sideways to avoid a large group of men and women dressed in business professional clothing. They were very loud and could be heard well after he entered the building.

The lobby was large and circular, like the exterior. There were large slanted pillars connecting to the ceiling. The space was painted various shades of white.

There were chairs in the lobby next to enormous angled windows. They were designed so a person in the chair could look up and see all the way to the top of the building. It was a mesmerizing sight, but Olson had no time for sightseeing. He would have to sit in the lobby chairs another time.

The elevators for the various parts of the tower were sectioned off. The first twelve common floors were open to the public. The elevators to the higher floors were progressively more secure, until finally the highest floors were guarded by a checkpoint with two bored security guards. Olson walked up to one of the guards.

"CitID?" the guard said when Olson stood there, unable to think of what to say. The guard nodded at a badge reader. It was red. Olson fumbled for the card and pulled it from his pocket. He made sure to cover it with his palm as he held it to the reader, so the guard didn't notice it was blank. The red LED changed to green.

"Welcome back, sir," the guard said and waved him through.

Olson mumbled a response and pocketed the card. He walked through an arch with a green light. It buzzed, and the light turned red. The man told him that he forgot to empty his pockets and indicated a plastic bowl. Olson pulled out the keys to his cubicle and stuck them in the bowl. The other guard waved Olson through. The arch buzzed again.

Olson was afraid he would have to take the badge from his pocket when the guard asked Olson to stick his hands out. The man waived a wand up and down Olson's body. It hummed when the man ran it over his belt. He was asked to lift his shirt, and the man scanned his belt buckle. Then he gave Olson his keys back. Olson stood there, and the man said, "Go on."

Olson walked up to the last set of elevators. The numbers 48-56 were labeled on each one. There was only an up button. He pressed the button, and the nearest door opened. The elevator was very clean inside. There was no evidence of it being used very often. The buttons were new, unlike the McGladery School ones, which were worn and old. The elevators of the only place he had ever known as home had scratches on the walls. There wasn't a single mark in this entire elevator.

He knew the observatory was on the forty-seventh floor. The trip would cost a worker far too much in wages. Most people decided on cheap observatory vacations, like the Foshay dome.

Olson wondered how much this was going to cost. Not wanting to overdo it, he pressed 48. He figured he would play it safe and only go up higher if he had to. The elevator asked for his badge.

Olson was shocked that it didn't cost anything. The machine read, "Thank you." Normally, it would have told him the price it had deducted from his account and the remaining balance. Instead, the elevator accepted his card, and it began the ascent to the top.

At first, the ride was jarring. He felt his stomach lurch. It was like he was being compressed. After the feeling passed, he heard the rumble of the elevator. He imagined the second floor receding into the distance of a long shaft. Before he knew it, the ride was over. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. A wonderland was on the other side.

# 16

Olson's earliest memory was from when he was in the Early Childcare Center. He was sure of it. When he had told Duncan about the memory during Six Year, his teacher had dismissed the notion and said, "It's probably a stream or a dream you're remembering. People don't remember the ECC. Life begins at One Year."

He had always believed his teacher and didn't really think anything about the memory. Now, he was sure the memory had been real. He remembered a room with medical machines and being in the bed with white bars. Two faces were looking at him from above. One was the woman. She was sad and forlorn. Her chin-length brown hair drooped in front of her face. A tear ran down her cheek. There was the taller man in the background. He was stern and haggard, and towered over her. He had brown hair and black, dim eyes. He squeezed the hand of the woman while she wept.

The memory was brief and dreamlike. It was like the vinstreams that Olson made from his touchlite, five-second clips endlessly repeating a single moment in time. He was sure that his parents were the people he saw in the memory. Olson pushed the memory back into the place where he locked the secrets not meant for anyone but himself.

He stepped out of the elevator and into what could only be described as a paradise. It was a garden like the Hilton Farming Complex, but much different. There were trees, plants, and all sorts of flowers. Oranges, apples, bananas, and other rare food grew from the trees. Tiny little robots flew from flower to flower, rubbing a yellow and black striped tail inside.

There were benches and lots of natural light coming through filtered windows that changed the red color of the atmospheric light to a brilliant white. There were waiters handing out ice cream, pizza, snacks, and anything a person could want. There were men, women, and children milling about. Some read from a touchlite. Kids played games in a patch of grass. Adults were walking. Olson noticed immediately that some people were gathered in groupings of two adults and two children. It was like the pictures of families he had seen on the wikis.

Olson wandered through in amazement. It was nothing like the city had on the lower levels. Everything was pristine, ornate, and well designed. Everyone looked immaculate and wore expensive clothes. Olson wandered toward the outer wall. He had never been so high up before. He wanted to look out of a window. After finding one, he noticed the decayed rubble that used to be a city stretched further than he could imagine. There were countless buildings, decrepit and old. There was a thick haze that looked grey from the filtered window that limited visibility. It seemed to encircle the city, keeping it trapped.

"The haze is actually red," a woman said and startled Olson. She was wearing a fancy gown. Her hair was grey and brown and pulled back in a bun. "The filters up here change the light from red to white."

"What is it?" Olson said.

"The end of the world," she said and laughed. "What year are you?"

"An Eleven Year, ma'am."

"Didn't they teach you about the fog in school?"

"Instructor Palczewski..." Olson said and knew he made a mistake. He realized too late that the woman must have thought he went to Natalie's school.

"Palczewski..." the woman said. "They demoted her to the lower school with that wretched Duncan. No wonder you've had your head filled up with ignorance. I'm going to have a talk with the school board. We'll have to make up for your education. Don't let any of this workers' rights nonsense get into your head. They like working for us. They have fulfilling careers."

"Who?"

"The people from down below, my boy." She gestured to the waiters walking around with trays.

A man walked up to them with a smile and held up a tray of blue and pink puffs. "Cotton Candy?"

"I'll let you enjoy your Sealing Day," the woman said. "You probably weren't thinking about politics anyway. Please, eat up. Eat up."

The woman waved Olson toward the tray. Olson took one, and she walked away. She went to join a conversation with adults.

Olson turned toward the waiter and said, "How much do I owe?"

"Owe? It's Sealing Day. The celebration is paid for by the city."

Olson had never heard of Sealing Day. In addition, the idea that the city paid for a holiday celebration struck Olson as odd. The city never paid for holiday celebrations. Even the school wouldn't pay for anything. Sure, they'd get the day off of school, but if they wanted to do any celebrating, they'd have to spend their own citcreds. The idea that people who had enough citcreds to afford to pay didn't have to pay and those who couldn't afford it did was absurd.

Olson took a bite of the cotton candy, and he cringed. A cloud of sugar dissolved in his mouth. It was too sweet. But the kids around him were devouring it greedily.

"You're not from around here?" the waiter said.

"I'm from the Red Carriage Bank building," Olson lied.

"The son of citcreds. You never stop to have any fun. I take it that your mother and father are working?"

"Of course. Finance never sleeps."

"Rightly so. Well, enjoy the celebration."

The man continued down the path. One boy dressed in a baby blue suit and a girl in a large white floral dress ran up to the cotton candy man. The boy looked to be a Three Year and the girl a One Year. Their mother leaned over and told them to take one each. The kids grabbed the cotton candy and ate it with smiles and laughter.

The celebration made Olson's life in the McGladery School look dismal. He went to class endlessly. Aside from the occasional holiday, there was only one free day every week, but most of his fellow students didn't really have anything exciting to do on the free days. Olson spent most of his life being bored in class or bored in his cubicle. The most exciting thing to happen was when a stream premiered that he wanted to see and he had the money to watch it, or a new app came out that he enjoyed playing. But once again, those activities took citcreds, and there were so few of them.

The city officials claimed that hard work would make someone better off. However, most adults lived like the students, unable to afford anything but the barest essentials to survive. Hard work only created more hard work. The cycle was endless. The adult world was one of continuous labor, and Olson was in no rush to join it. Adults never found jobs that they liked, so they settled for ones that they didn't hate. There was a myth that working hard would give a person anything they could ever want. In reality, working hard involved paying more bills.

Everything cost citcreds. Living space cost the most. Premium services for exclusive Puck Grind streams. Eating from restaurants and food trucks. Touchlite coins could be earned through endless hours of play or bypassed with enough citcreds. Watching streams on release day instead of watching them years later was another expense. Adults paid into the endless cycle of living for the moment instead of the future.

The top floors, where all the elite lived, were expensive. The elevator ride for a day cost more than an average citizen made in three months. People who could resist the temptation of unlocking the next level for a small fee or paying for tacos five times a week could save for a trip to the observation deck. For one day, they could live on the top. Getting to the top was a different story. People were clamped to their station in life. The pressure of maintaining the citcreds to sustain prevented them from really moving up or improving their quality of life.

Olson did not look forward to adult life. He felt like he was one of the few students who looked toward the future instead of living in the present. The teachers reinforced the idea that the present was the only thing that mattered. Olson remembered when he'd asked a teacher about planning for the future. The question was squelched, and he felt foolish for even asking.

The classroom had been warm that day. Maintenance was working on the cooling system. They were all sweating and waiting for recess. They wanted to run upstairs to the gymnasium. Instead, Instructor Montoya talked about the air processing plant. It was a major operation that converted the atmosphere from the outside to breathable air inside.

"Here, the scrubbers pull out all the toxins in the air. After the air is cleaned and tested for any contaminates, it's sent to the... Yes, Olson."

"Why don't we use those scrubbers to clean the air outside?" Olson's hand was sore from being raised so long.

"The atmosphere is really big, way bigger than the city," the teacher had said. The class laughed at the question, and Olson felt silly. The instructor quieted the class down and continued to lecture. The response was very typical from his teachers. He would ask a question, and they would crush him with the impossibility of the solution. It seemed futile to dream of a better world. Adult life was even more futile because life at the top was an impossible distance for the people below. Often he wished he was like his peers and content living for the day, but he thought too much.

Olson was pulled from his thoughts by a microphone thump. A female voice filled the air. "Ladies and gentlemen, please make your way to the stage."

Olson followed the crowd as they meandered to the center of the park. The stage was a large white platform. There was a bust of a man on a pillar in the center of where the crowd gathered. There were white folding chairs across the stage. Various middle-aged and elderly men stood on the platform. A young woman who looked to be the same age as Instructor Simone was at the microphone. Everyone on the stage was wearing white.

The woman spoke, "Thank you. Thank you. It looks like we have quite a crowd gathered here today. Are you all having fun?"

There were cheers and some hoots of agreement from the audience.

"Splendid, splendid," she continued. "I'm glad you could all be here for Sealing Day. Let me make some introductions for our distinguished guests. We have Jacques from the IDS Commons. He is the President of the City Council and distinguished Chairman of the IDS Preservation Fund."

Olson watched as she made the introductions. There were people from all the tallest buildings with various titles that Olson had never heard. They all waved as the crowd clapped for each person. There was something strange about the names of all the people she mentioned. They were all like the name Natalie, names that Olson had never heard before. They were names like Peter, Sarah, Mason, and John. Olson wondered why the wealthy had different names than everyone else. Perhaps they were a symbol of power.

After the introductions were done, the speaker addressed the crowd. "Finally, I bring you the distinguished guest of the hour and the sponsor of today's Sealing Day. He is Councilman of the Capella Tower and a business leader in Staffing Solutions for the city. Please welcome Marius to the stage."

The crowd cheered and clapped. A man walked up from off stage. He was wearing a crisp white suit. He was stern looking. Olson remembered the man. This was the man from his memory, the one he remembered from the ECC. Olson walked toward the stage. His vision clouded. He had never been angry before. Not like he felt now. He wanted to scream at the man and find out why he had abandoned Olson. Every lousy moment of his life could be blamed on the man. He'd been left to rot on the lower levels. No amount of hard work could get anyone to this level.

Before Olson could do anything stupid, a hand prevented him from climbing the stage. It was Natalie's. She dragged him into the bushes. "What are you doing here?" she whispered.

"I came here looking for you," Olson said. "Now let me go. I want to get up there before I miss him."

"Who?"

"Marius! I think he's my father."

Natalie laughed. "Trust me when I say that he is not your father."

"You wouldn't understand because you were born up here, but I remember him. I swear that I saw him when I was at the ECC."

"No one remembers the childcare center."

"I do." Olson told her about the memory. She listened with a different expression than most of his teachers and his peers. Olson's friends and teachers alike never truly seemed to listen. They would nod, but would really only be thinking about what they were going to say next. Everyone in his life seemed to only be concerned with themselves. Natalie was different. She let him finish the tale. Afterwards, she thought about what he had said before formulating a response. It wasn't like everyone else, who only wanted to talk about themselves.

"OK, I believe you," Natalie said after processing the information. "But that still doesn't make him your father. He could have been there for many reasons. He runs one of the city's most powerful staffing firms. They connect people to employers even before they graduate from McGladery. Maybe they are so effective because they start at birth?"

"But what about the woman crying? She could be my mother!"

"Maybe. But going up there and causing a scene isn't going to help you. People here respect their parents."

"Like you respected your father by not going to his funeral?" Olson regretted the statement as soon as he made it. Losing Instructor Duncan had been tough for him. He couldn't imagine what it would be like for a daughter. However, to his surprise, she wasn't hurt at all.

"What do you mean? My father isn't dead."

"But I thought you were..."

"Investigating Duncan's death? Yes, he was a neighbor."

"Instructor Duncan is from up here?"

"Yeah, before he was disgraced."

"What happened?"

"His daughter. She was investigating the ECC."

"Why? What's going on at the ECC?"

"That's exactly it. I don't know. I was a Five Year at the time. I overheard talking in the hallway. She said she was onto something big. The next day, she was found dead. The window in her room failed, and the atmosphere leaked in during her sleep. She choked to death. Duncan wasn't the same after that. He started ranting in class. They demoted him to the McGladery School. When I heard he'd died under just as mysterious circumstances, I knew something was happening. There is no way he would kill himself."

"Trust me, he killed himself."

"But how do you know?"

"I was there!"

"Oh," Natalie said and fell quiet. They sat silently for a moment. Olson couldn't help but notice her. He noticed her lips. They were beautiful and inviting. When he saw her, there was something primal that awakened in himself.

Olson was new to the idea of romantic relationships. His society had made him deliberately clueless. The adults in the real world outside of school lived solitary lives. They had friends they would see often, but they just wouldn't share a cubicle or an apartment with someone. Adults didn't kiss each other or even have physical contact with each other. The physicality of a relationship was hard to understand, but he was beginning to get it. When Natalie had grabbed his arm, he felt a tingling sensation. It made him giddy, uncomfortable, but overall happy.

What confused Olson was why the adults or even other students like him didn't have these feelings that he was experiencing. There was a definitive attraction toward Natalie, yet it was hard to believe he was the first person to ever have the feelings he was experiencing. Maybe people had the feelings but had no idea how to act on them because they were prevented from learning about them?

No. He knew deep down that it was more than just learning about it in school. Whether he had learned about it in school or not, he had impulses like the one to kiss her lips. If he hadn't been terrified to act, he would have kissed her.

He looked into Natalie's eyes. They were like cracked crystal with endless reflecting light. Her hand was still holding his. He wondered if Natalie had the same impulses too. He couldn't be sure, but the touch did linger. Then her hand let go like she was all too aware of the situation. The impulse was gone.

"Look, I'm not arguing with your memory. If you remember him at the ECC, then fine. I'm not going to argue that," Natalie said. "But think it through. Birth control is good up here. I mean really, really good. People need permission from the city council to have a child. We have to be careful. If there are more people than the city can sustain, everyone suffers. We wouldn't be able to process the air. There would be food shortages. There wouldn't be enough space. So when a person from up top is pregnant, everyone knows about it. There are no unwanted pregnancies. There are no mistakes. The thought of a person giving their child away is unthinkable."

"But it could happen."

"Sure, but everyone up here would know about it, and that's all they would talk about."

"How do you know that the birth control didn't fail? Mistakes happen."

She rolled her eyes and said, "Fine, I can't be one hundred percent certain. But stomping up on stage and screaming at a man who may not know you exist isn't the way to go about things."

"I can't just sit back and do nothing. Duncan was as close to a father as I ever had. I have to know why he did it."

"I don't know if Marius even knows. There is something going on here much bigger than you or me."

"Tell me about it. The Human Resources Director herself told me not to talk with you."

Olson saw Natalie's face flush. She became very angry. "Don't listen to her."

"Why?"

"Because, ok... look, I know a way to get out past curfew."

"But all the doors."

"Don't worry. I got it. I have an uncle who's a bit of a tech wizard. He used to work on the city systems before he went to Leamington."

"Leamington. You mean that crazy guy is your uncle?"

"I see you've met. Yes, he is my uncle. Here, I have a package I was going to deliver to him, but with HR watching, I'll never be able to do it. Deliver it, and he'll make you a badge. We can sneak out after curfew and see if we can find some answers."

Olson nodded in agreement, though he wasn't sure about wandering around the city at night. He'd heard rumors that the city was haunted, and the ghosts would take care of anyone who snuck out. It was all rumor though. The teachers said people were not allowed in the skyways at night because it helped reduce crime, save on energy, and all the other standard reasons. For whatever reason, it was strictly enforced. OPS officers would escort people back to their homes if they were caught outside at night. If they were from G-Town, it was almost never as friendly as an escort.

"What do I need to do?" Olson said.

Natalie produced a stuffed rabbit that was missing an eye and had fur spotted with grime. It was like the cat he'd brought to Duncan's office in that it was too heavy for what was supposed to be inside.

"What's inside?" Olson said as he inspected the rabbit.

"Careful with that!" she said and yanked the toy back.

"Why? What's inside?"

"I'm just the middle man."

Olson took the bunny and looked at Natalie. The impulse came back. He wanted to kiss her. Instead, he walked away but didn't leave the garden yet. He needed to clear his head. Natalie had a way of muddling his thinking. He felt that he could do nothing but fixate on her.

He wandered toward the elevator, where he found himself engulfed by a crowd. They were all converging to speak with Marius. Olson was swept into the middle of the pack, and before he knew what happened, he was face to face with Marius.

Marius stopped and looked down at Olson. There was a long uncomfortable pause. Even the chatter of questions that were directed toward him died down. Olson hunted for recognition from the man's eyes. However, there was nothing. The man was a blank slate.

Marius smiled and took the rabbit from Olson's hand. With a flick of a marker, the signed rabbit came back. The crowd enveloped the man again, and Marius eventually made it onto the elevator. A henchman prevented anyone else from getting on with him. Olson waited with the crowd clutching the damned bunny.

# 17

Once Olson was back at the skyway level, he dodged the security checkpoint and went straight for Leamington. He was tempted by the rabbit. From his experience the last time, he knew that he was most likely facilitating an illegal transaction and transporting a dangerous object. While he liked Natalie, he was worried that he was making a mistake. When he was around her, it was like he couldn't think about anything else but her. Now that she was no longer present, he could feel a seed of doubt growing in his mind.

Olson didn't quite know who to trust at this point. The HR director had warned him away, and she probably had the safety of the city at heart, whereas there was something comforting about Natalie, like he wanted to know everything about her. However, he didn't want to make a stupid mistake because he liked a girl.

He had two options. He could go back to his cubicle, grab his touchlite, dial HR, and give up the rabbit, selling out Natalie. Or, he could deliver the rabbit to Leamington. Each option seemed unsettling. There were two devils on his shoulders. The HR director defended a system that left a majority of the people unable to truly experience life. Natalie was the unknown factor. He liked her but didn't know if she was using him.

He put the attraction part aside and thought logically. If she lived on the top in the elite part of society, then transporting glass cutters, which could end up in the hands of terrorists, was probably low on her list. People with nothing to lose committed acts of violence. She would have a long way to fall by aiding the transport of dangerous objects.

Olson needed to answer a question to really know what option he would pursue: what was hidden inside the rabbit?

Olson decided that he needed to find out, so he could at least make the decision himself. All of his life, he hadn't been able to make decisions on his own. The teachers told him how to spend his time. The school told him where to sleep and what to eat. They were given small freedoms to maintain the illusion that they had control over their lives. Olson had a chance to decide his own destiny. All it would take was a peek inside the rabbit.

There was a sewing supply store and tailor on the way to Leamington. He decided to drop in to make a few purchases with the blank CitID. He was careful to hide it under his palm. Luckily, no one had asked him to see it yet. Even though he wanted to figure out the contents of the rabbit, he did not want to let them know he had done it. He planned to open the rabbit and then sew it back up, like nothing had happened. Once he saw inside, he could contact the HR director or make the delivery, and no party would be any wiser.

He ducked into a public bathroom. He used the back of a toilet as a table for his makeshift surgery. He felt along the side of the bunny until he found a seam. He carefully snipped the thread and dug inside the stuffing of the rabbit. He found some blank cards like the one he had in his wallet. They were wrapped in plastic, like they had never been used.

Blank badges were powerful objects. The CitID was everything. It governed where a person could go, was linked to all their personal finances, and was used in almost any transaction. If Olson wanted to see a stream outside his age range, he would have to get a fake. However, there were no fake CitIDs, except in streams. HR controlled the badges, and if a citizen lost theirs, they could deactivate the card. A pickpocket couldn't get very far on a stolen CitID, as most people called HR the moment they discovered theirs was missing. Since every locked door, cup of coffee, and anything else was tied to the card, most people headed straight to HR the moment they lost one. A rabbit full of blank ones was powerful, but not dangerous like the glass cutter.

Olson shoved the pack of blank badges back into the place where he'd found it. He returned the stuffing, stitched up the seam, and the animal was back to normal. His sewing job wasn't as good as the device that had created the rabbit in the first place, but considering the shabby condition of the critter, Olson assumed it would pass. He flushed the toilet and exited the stall. A man was using one of the urinals. Olson left without washing his hands and started his way back to Leamington.

He'd made his way to the Hilton Farming Complex when he noticed the man from the urinal walking behind him. It wasn't unusual to see the same person on the skyway. It was the only way to get from one building to the next. The unusual part was the fact that, during Olson's entire surgery procedure on the rabbit, he hadn't heard the door open. The man must have slipped in behind Olson. Either he'd taken the longest pee ever, or he was following Olson.

In an effort to ascertain the tail, Olson turned around and walked the opposite direction. The man was smooth and walked right on by. Since Olson was rather hungry, he ducked into the first restaurant he saw. It was an order-at-the-counter barbecue place called Famous Al's. He ordered a brisket sandwich. He took a number and sat down at a table in the center of the room.

There were various workers at the other tables, some alone, some in groups. The place wasn't crowded, as it was an hour before Lunch Hour, but some people liked going early. A woman with a round face and a big smile dropped off the brisket sandwich and took the number. The food was quite good. After eating half of it, Olson scanned the room for the man. Sure enough, he was a few tables away, eating a plate of fries.

After waiting for the man to look away, Olson left the table in a hurry. The sandwich was only half eaten, and Olson really wished he could have had the rest of it. He would have to come back to this place when he wasn't involved in intrigue.

He sprinted from the restaurant and ran toward the garden. People took notice of him now that he was running. It was unusual for people to be dashing through the skyway. Every part of life was so regulated that people didn't have the need to rush. The lights turned on in his dorm at the same time every morning. It went from dark to light in a matter of seconds. Even if he wanted to sleep in, he couldn't. He'd heard the adult world was the same. For those that lived in cubicles, the morning came with the fluorescent light.

Those who could actually afford apartments with their own light regulators were responsible enough to rarely sleep in. They usually made it to work on time. Even if someone did sleep in, work was never far away. The entire world was eleven miles.

Since running was such a rare occurrence, people turned to gawk. Olson ran as fast as he could. When he was exiting the skyway bridge to the garden, he saw the man entering behind him. Olson pushed himself to the limit through the winding paths to the door to Leamington. He tapped the badge on the door, and the light turned green. Olson dashed inside and pulled the door shut.

He didn't even have time to catch his breath before he heard a gruff voice behind him say, "What are you doing here?"

It was the man who had given him the cat with the glass cutter.

Olson held out his bunny and said, "I'm here to make a delivery."

The man swiped the animal from Olson and turned toward the skyway bridge to Leamington. Olson wasn't quite sure what to do, when the man turned back around and said, "Come along. I've got to get your payment."

Olson ran up alongside the man. He had so many questions but wasn't sure how forthcoming the man would be with answers. Since the man wasn't really up for small talk, Olson decided on the blunt approach. "Did you know there was a glass cutter in the cat you gave me earlier?"

"I don't ask questions, and neither should you."

"Please, it's important. A man died!"

"People die all the time."

"I'll make it worth your while," Olson blurted without really thinking it through. The man stopped. They were halfway through the skyway bridge. The husk of what used to be the city was stretched out around them.

"Will you? How?"

"I... ah... have lots of citcreds."

The man turned back toward Leamington, and they continued walking. "I'm not interested in money."

"Then what? There has to be something. I can get you anything."

"How about my freedom?"

"You were right there when I came in. Why didn't you push past me while the door was open?"

"I've thought about it plenty of times, but I've got this." The man lifted his pants leg. There was a black bracelet around his ankle. The skin looked chafed and scarred. The bracelet looked like it had been on for a very long time. "They can track all of my movements with this. So long as I stay in Leamington, I'm ok."

"Why were you near the door?"

The man was leading him down some escalators that weren't functioning.

"Sometimes I fantasize about leaving. But if I do, my freedom will be even more restricted than it is now. You don't know what it's like living by yourself. A deliveryman drops off my food every day. He doesn't say a word. The meals are the same crap every day. What I wouldn't do for a burger."

"I can get you one."

"Oh? You'd do that for me?"

"All I need is information and a CitID. Natalie said you could make one for going out at night."

"Night's not a time for a kid like you to be roaming around."

"You made Natalie a badge."

"Yeah, she's my niece."

"Well, I'm a nobody to you. If it's so dangerous, why does it matter if I go out at night?"

"A burger first, and then we'll talk. Bring your touchlite."

They finally arrived at an office in the basement of the building. There was a workbench in the middle and a tiny desk that looked like it had been chewed by a dinosaur. The bench was strewn with gadgets and devices that Olson had never seen before. The desk had stacks of paper. A touchlite was buried underneath one of the stacks. From the dust on the touchlite and papers, it looked like the man's true passion was electronics. There were also lots of posters on the wall. They looked like streams that Olson had never heard of before, with names like "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings."

The man tossed the bunny on the workbench, went to a filing cabinet, and pulled open a drawer. He pulled a rectangular box from the cabinet and handed it to Olson. "Tell Natalie that it's from my private stash. It's Paul's finest."

The man lit a cigarette and turned to tinker around with a device.

"Oh, and Olson," he said as Olson was leaving the room, "you may want to open that carton and hide the packs. Smoking's not exactly legal in the city."

Olson opened the box and saw ten packs of cigarettes inside. He began to stuff them in various pockets and parts of his clothing. While he stashed the goods, he asked the man, "I haven't gotten your name. Could you at least tell me that?"

"My name's Erik. Now get out and remember to bring that touchlite when you come back."

# 18

After Leamington, Olson went back to his cubicle, stashed the cigarettes, and grabbed his touchlite. He didn't know what good it would be. The school nurse had the code, and she would only reactivate it when he was declared healthy. Olson did as instructed anyway. He hid all ten packs of cigarettes and went back to Leamington with a Famous Al's burger and fries. This time, there was no one following him.

Once he got back to Erik, he learned that he knew there was a glass cutter in the cat because he had sewn it into the stuffed animal. When Olson asked why, Erik said, "Look. I'm a warehouse man. People tell me what to pack, and who to give it to. In your case, I got an anonymous message, a large citcred payment, and instructions that Duncan would be sending a kid to pick it up."

Olson didn't believe it had been anonymous. In the city, there were no anonymous messages. Everyone had a touchlite, and all their accounts were public record. Sure, they could create wild handles, as Bauer's was SwordMasterExemplar, but somewhere in the HR computers, they had his real name. HR would tell OPS the sender of the email, and any kingpin dealing glass cutters over the network would be arrested.

That was when Erik took Olson's touchlite away. He plugged a memory stick into the port and jumped past the nurse's lock like it was nothing. Erik explained that he was installing software that disconnected the touchpad from the network. He said that it could run anonymously, send emails from fake names, and best of all, the location service was ghosting while it was in anonymous mode.

The location service was the way HR knew where everybody in the city was at any given time, or at least where they had left their touchlite. Since most people carried their touchlite everywhere, it was a good way to track people down. It was also why they didn't have cameras in the city. It was easy to track a touchlite, and they could tap into the camera on the device at any time.

The thought was unsettling to Olson. The idea that some HR goon could be watching Olson was disturbing. He also realized how many times he had lucked out. Had his touchlite been charged, HR would have seen through his lie about Duncan. If the nurse hadn't disabled it, he would have brought it to meet Natalie. But now he knew how the HR director had known he spoke with Natalie. Their touchlites must have been recording the entire conversation.

After some tweaks and screens Olson had never seen before, Erik tossed the touchlite back. He told Olson to make up a swiping code. He swiped in a bunch of different directions at the prompts. Erik said that Olson could swipe the code in any screen, and the touchlite would go into anonymous mode. He also warned Olson not to stay in it too long because it would send a fake signal to location services of the last area that it had been located when anonymous mode was activated.

If Olson turned on anonymous mode when he was in his cubicle, anyone watching in HR would see that he was still in the cubicle until he turned it off again. That was when Erik grinned and said it was a good idea to turn it on and off again in the same place in case anyone was looking. He shoved a fake CitID into Olson's hand, complete with his picture, and pushed him out the door.

The real trouble came not because of the modifications to his touchlite but because the nurse decided to check on Olson during her afternoon break and found he wasn't in his cubicle. The nurse, the intervention specialist, and the Eleven Year Headmaster were waiting for him on his return. The teachers had scolded him for lying about being sick. They'd removed all his free time privileges indefinitely. He would now have to see the intervention specialist daily. His touchlite was restricted to school use only, but the modifications from Erik helped him circumvent any electronic form of punishment. He was lucky they didn't search the drawers of his cubicle.

_______

During the first day of punishment, Natalie expressed her concern via messages. She wanted to meet with him as soon as possible. He kept telling her that he was all right and that he couldn't meet with her. Olson knew he couldn't sneak out any time soon. The teachers would be watching him all day.

He decided to pass the morning by doing more research. He used his stolen login and password to read about all sorts of forbidden topics: love, marriage, dating. He even started learning about the world from before. The biggest shock was the fact that the sky used to be blue, and that people could go outside.

The ruins of the world around him were always explained away as failed experiments before the city. The teachers' version of history was different from real history. Olson was taught that people had always lived indoors. The ruins around him were proof that buildings could not sustain themselves without other buildings to help. They had to trade and form a society to survive. IDS provided manufacturing. Capella provided workforce and service. OPS provided safety. Hilton provided food. Each building played a vital role in society. The ruins of the past didn't have skyways, trading, or citcreds. They had no way to facilitate business without a skyway system, so the buildings with no skyways had died off.

The truth was that there was no need for a skyway system. People could walk freely in the open air and go to any building they wanted. The revelation was as powerful as knowing that humans came from other humans. Olson tried to imagine an outside where he could breathe air and feel the warmth of the sun, or the bite of snow, and he couldn't do it. The temperature had been controlled his entire life. There was no need for any other clothes than what his school provided.

_______

"You haven't touched your food," Hanson said later that day during Lunch Hour.

"I've being thinking about a lot lately," Olson said.

"About what?"

"Can I ask you something personal?"

"Sure," she said, not really knowing where his line of questioning was going.

"Do you ever think about boys?"

"I think about you guys all the time."

"No, I mean...Stanton, for example. Do you ever think about him?" Olson thought of the best-looking boy in the school, but he had no real gauge or understanding of what good-looking really meant for boys. His best approximation for a good-looking male was someone who looked like all the boys he had seen during his research about romance. They all seemed to have smooth skin, large, bright eyes, and a certain build. Stanton fit that description. But Olson wasn't sure if what he'd read in the articles was even accurate. He'd never met a girl who was attracted to anyone before.

"Stanton? Why would I think about Stanton?" she said, taken aback.

Olson felt foolish for even suggesting it. He should have known, based on his own experience with attraction, that it wasn't easily defined by a textbook. The case in point was Natalie. She didn't look like any of the pictures he had seen, yet he couldn't stop thinking about her. If he wasn't confined to McGladery, he would have gone to her already.

"Is there anyone you think about? I mean, like a whole lot?" Olson said.

The others had taken interest in the conversation now. Hanson's level of discomfort was felt by the whole group. She looked around and said, "Why, is there someone you think about a lot?"

"I... I'm just curious."

"Why would you think about a particular person?" Xiong asked.

"I..." Olson didn't know what to say. There were feelings he had that could only be described by forbidden knowledge. His friends, the people he had grown to trust, who didn't question him when he began to act out, were very concerned.

Bauer decided to say what they all were thinking. "You are walking a thin line. Talking out of turn. Getting back at Eckelston. Who hasn't wanted to do the things you've had the courage to do? But now you are talking about mental instability... we know what happens to the mentally unstable..."

They all nodded in agreement. There were rumors about kids who had disappeared. The stories were told at night. Everyone crowded in a cubicle when no adults were watching. There were stories about kids who couldn't make it, stories about the ones who had "mental stability issues," as the adults would call it. The adults made it seem cut and dry. The unstable children would go back to the ECC for repairs, like a touchlite would be turned in to fix a cracked screen. But unlike the touchlite, the kids who disappeared from the school never came back.

"You don't want to end up like Lanzig," Jaramillo added.

Lanzig was the real life case that embodied the rumors. Lanzig was always the odd person out. He was the last picked for sports teams, didn't have any friends, and his mood always seemed to change. He would go through cycles. Some days he wouldn't leave his cubicle. Others, he would have so much energy the teachers had trouble controlling his chattering. His rollercoaster of emotion exploded one day when he bit Instructor Palczewski. The students laughed at first, but when they saw the blood, the class got really quiet.

Lanzig was locked away in the same room where Olson met his intervention specialist for a day. Afterwards, he was gone. The teachers told the students Lanzig went somewhere to get well, and that there were places to treat mental instability. The students created their own versions of the story. There were rumors he was shipped back to the ECC. Other more sinister rumors involved his banishment, which was guaranteed death. The reality was that no one knew what happened to Lanzig or what was wrong with him. He became a ghost story passed down to the previous Years. Much like the ghost stories of the Years before that were passed to them.

"It's nothing," Olson said, and lunch continued without further incident. The tension never really went away. He felt that each day he read about more forbidden knowledge, the further away he would be from his friends. The only people that used to care about him were now unsure of Olson. He needed to talk with Natalie.

# 19

The first night of his punishment, Olson committed an even more serious infraction of the rules. He waited until he heard snoring, occasional shifting, and other signs that everyone was asleep. He hid the packs of cigarettes on his person, much like when he smuggled them into the dorm in the first place. The next step was the easy part. He walked from his cubicle toward the bathroom and glanced around the room to see if any heads were poking out of their cubes. There was no one watching as he stepped into the stairwell instead of the bathroom.

Natalie waited for him in the stairwell. He put his finger to his mouth. She nodded, and he motioned for her to go down the stairs. There were some service areas in the basement. They were mostly for laundry, janitorial staff, and some access ways for electrical equipment. Olson only knew about it because the bathrooms on the dorm floor went through a two-month remodeling when the school received some extra resources from city allocation. The toilets all got motion sensors, fancy tile, and good finishing. During the remodeling, the students were told to use the toilet in the basement.

Once they were in the basement, they walked down a long, grey hallway, using the glow from their touchlites. Olson motioned her through an unmarked door. It was the bathroom. Natalie flipped the light switch.

"What are you doing?" Olson said and turned the lights off.

Natalie flipped it again and said, "Everyone's asleep. If anyone was down here, they would have seen us using our touchlites. Besides, it would look more suspicious if they caught people in a dark bathroom than a lighted one." Natalie lit up a smoke and sat on the sink.

"You shouldn't have those. I read that they are bad for you."

"And I thought you were cool."

Olson didn't have a response. He wanted her to like him. He questioned how far that desire would go. She offered him a cigarette, and he passed. He had to have some boundaries.

"So..." Natalie blew a ring out. "What do you know about Richard?"

"Who?"

"Duncan, Instructor Duncan."

"I never heard him called...what did you say? Ri-card?"

"Richard. It's a name. A name from up top. Richard Duncan."

"You have two names?"

"Sometimes three names. I'm Natalie Germundshire."

Olson didn't even think that anyone would need more than one name. Everyone he had known only had the one. It was a question Olson wouldn't think to ask. In fact, when he had asked his teachers about their names, Instructor Duncan had said they were all assigned by the ECC. When Olson wanted to know why, he was told that it was because his name was the perfect fit.

The answer had irritated Olson, as many of the answers from his teachers did. Now that he was unraveling the truth about their society, he began to understand some of his frustration in school. How could anyone be expected to learn if they were withholding the truth? He also didn't see why the truth was dangerous enough to hide. Who cared if the people at the top had two names and bottom dwellers only had one? Being rich had its privileges, and if two names was one of them, Olson didn't care. Two names sounded like a hassle anyway.

"So you get two names. What's the big deal?" Olson said.

"That's exactly it. Natalie Germundshire, Erik Cohen, and you, Olson. Everyone from below only gets one name, but they are all last names. Family names. Don't you think it's kind of odd that the people below get family names when they have no family?"

"But I do have a family. I'm sure my parents are out there. All we have to do is look for Olsons."

"There are no top side Olsons. I don't claim to know everyone, but there is a directory for contact information. When you said Marius was your father, I checked. He's not an Olson. He's a Molken. So I decided maybe you were right. Maybe in the highly unlikely scenario of an unwanted pregnancy, an Olson family dropped you off at the ECC, but there were none. Not a single person up top has a family name like yours."

"So they changed my name. Paid off an ECC caretaker. Maybe I should be called Molken."

"Why would they do that? People up top can afford anything, including making an unwanted pregnancy disappear."

"If you can afford anything, why are you exchanging favors for cigarettes?"

"They aren't for me! I'm selling them!"

"Why are you smoking them?"

"It was a mistake. I tried the product. I wanted to see what the hype was about. Then I got addicted. There's a reason people pay top citcreds for a pack of these."

"But you're from up top. Why do you need citcreds?"

"It's not for me! It's for my father. My mom and dad got divorced a while ago. She's the one with all the citcreds. She won't let him see a dime of it. Meanwhile, he's about to get evicted from his shitty cubicle over in the G-Town slum."

The G-Town slum was only a few buildings away from McGladery. It was a large, open plan building. There were many stories with an oval space in the center as the focal point. There was a series of broken escalators at the tip of each end of the oval. The center was an open area. Drying laundry hung on wires from the railings. Each floor was cubicles stacked on cubicles. There was only one pay per use bathroom for the whole building, so the entire slum stank. It was the worst place in the city to live.

It had a reputation for housing all the city's lazy residents. The people who didn't want to work at all, or didn't want to work enough, lived in G-Town. It was the end of the line for citizens. Olson knew their reputation, so he had to ask, "Why doesn't he just get a job?"

"He's already got two. You don't know what it's like out there. Prices keep going up, and wages keep going down. When my father was young, a kitchen staff at a food joint could support himself. Now, he can barely afford a shithole with three walls and a tattered curtain. He wants to work. But they either don't pay him enough, or he can't get enough hours to survive. I'm helping him out because my mom won't. If I don't help him, he'll be evicted in the next couple of days."

"I didn't know."

"Well, now you do."

"What'll happen to him if he gets evicted?"

"Have you ever seen a homeless person?"

"I saw a guy get picked up by OPS the other day."

"Have you seen any others?"

Olson didn't have anything to say. He had not really thought about it, but he had assumed they lived in G-Town. However, if Natalie's father could be evicted from G-Town, then where would people go if they couldn't afford a place to live? If there wasn't a way to make a rent payment? Olson had never seen anyone sleep on public benches, aside from the occasional napping businessman, with the exception of the guy he'd seen in the IDS Commons. "What happens to them? The people taken away by OPS."

"I don't know," Natalie said. "But ask anyone in G-Town. They all have a story about someone who's disappeared."

Olson couldn't believe what he was hearing. "They have to go somewhere. OPS can't just throw them outside."

Natalie took a long drag off her cigarette. "Now you see why I smoke."

"I'm serious. There are windows in every building. You think someone somewhere would have seen it by now."

"Let me show you something," Natalie said.

"Now? But it's after..."

"Yes, now," she said as she flicked the butt into the toilet and flushed the cigarette. She pulled him from the bathroom. Her touch made his skin feel electric. It sent tingles down his spine. She could drag him anywhere, even outside, and he would follow.

# 20

Natalie took Olson through the skyway. She told Olson that under no circumstances should he use any light source. Before he could ask why, she shushed him, and they snuck out into the night. It was spooky seeing the place deserted. For a city of so many people, it was hard to believe that everything shut down. All of the businesses were closed. Stores were locked inside cages. Food carts and kiosks were packed away. The metal shutters were closed. Even the fountain in the center of the IDS Commons was shut down. The silence was unnerving.

They made their way in the soft blue glow of the nighttime lighting. Natalie was vigilant at every skyway bridge. She would have Olson hide and then signal when it was ok to cross. He almost didn't notice it at first, but after they were a few buildings away from the IDS Commons, he saw that some of the windows on the upper floors were lit up. He could even see outlines of humans in one of the larger windows.

"What's happening up there?" Olson pointed to the top.

"It's a bar," Natalie whispered, and Olson adjusted his volume to match hers.

"What's a bar?"

"Do you think we have the same restrictions as you?" Natalie paused and looked up. There were two glows marching across the skyway up ahead. "Hide!"

Olson didn't think twice and ducked under a black belt that marked the barrier of the clothing market. Each rack was owned by different companies and vendors. There was a security cable that kept people from walking off with clothes after market hours because it would make noise if a person walked over it, and no one had removed the security tag. He was able to shove himself into the center of a rack of dresses. He peeked through a hole between some of the clothes.

Two men in tactical OPS police armor patrolled the walkway. The glow was created by the tips of two large weapons they held in their hands. Olson had only seen laser rifles in streams. He wondered if they created big blue bolts of lightning and made loud cracking noises like in the apps he would play. Olson was beginning to understand the strict rules behind leaving at night. If he didn't have an illicit badge, the McGladery building would never let him out, as the door to the outside was locked.

After the guards passed and Olson was sure they were out of earshot, he climbed from his hiding spot. Natalie tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped. She nodded for him to follow her. They ducked under the barrier and continued through the skyway.

When they finally reached their destination, it was a distant part of the city past the Target Markets and the St. Thomas Higher Learning Facility. It was a long, winding stretch of skyway bridge that seemed to serve no other function than to connect two rather distant buildings.

Natalie stood near a window on the side of one stretch and said, "Come on and take a look."

Olson pressed his head against the glass and saw a courtyard for an old brick building below. The area had been enclosed by a dome. The flooring of the courtyard was comprised of white brick tiles. There were splotches on the ground. Olson couldn't be sure what they were because it was dark, and he and Natalie were on the second floor. The courtyard was on the ground level.

"I don't see—" Olson began.

"Keep watching," she whispered.

People were taken out of the building and into the courtyard. They were all wearing grey. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Sacks were over their heads. They were lined up in a row. Olson noticed one of them had a stump for a hand. He was the man Olson had seen the OPS round up earlier. Olson pulled out his touchlite and pressed the record button.

"What are you doing?" Natalie hissed.

"I'm documenting it. Don't worry. I'm in anonymous mode."

Uniformed OPS officers lined up behind the people. There were a few seconds where Olson couldn't tell what was happening. Then the OPS men pulled out weapons like the ones Olson had seen earlier. A bolt of energy erupted from each of the weapons. The people dropped, killed by the blasts.

Olson stumbled backward. Before he could say anything, two OPS officers rounded one of the skyway corners. They seemed surprised for a moment that anyone was there.

"Halt!" one of them yelled.

"Run!" Natalie screamed.

Olson took off, trailing after Natalie. A bolt of blue lighting crackled and hit the wall next to him as they were rounding a turn. It wasn't the lethal energy bolt he had seen from the weapons in the courtyard, but being captured by the police after witnessing executions seemed like something he would want to avoid. The officers must have radioed for assistance because the large, reinforced atmosphere breach doors ahead of them on the skyway began to close.

They would be trapped on the bridge if they didn't make it in time. Natalie picked up her pace, and Olson struggled to keep up. Another bolt of energy skimmed his shoulder. Natalie made it past the lowering doors and turned around. Olson didn't look like he was going to make it.

He pushed harder than he ever had. He slid underneath the door a second before it closed and narrowly avoided having his face crushed. But he didn't have time to breathe in relief. He could hear more guards coming.

They sprinted through the clothing market. It had multiple exits, so their pursuers couldn't be sure of which ones to close. All of the thick doors began dropping.

Natalie was quick to react. She took off her backpack that was full of the cigarette packs. She tossed it, and it got stuck under one door. They ran toward another. They both made it through, and right before the behemoth barriers closed, Olson saw the backpack get crushed.

They had no time to mourn the loss of income for her father. They took off running again. Olson heard the distant rumble of more doors coming down and more OPS officers running through the hallways. The backpack had worked. The trail went cold.

# 21

The next morning, Olson woke up a different person. He had witnessed death, and not just the suicide of one lonely old man but also the brutal slaughter of dozens of people. The entire world had changed in an instant. The city where a person could make their own fate was a mirage. It was designed to keep the people complacent and unaware.

The lack of families for people of his class made more and more sense. If no one had any families, there would be no one to look for you after you were dead. Friends would come and go. They would assume you had moved on with your life. Olson felt that he was falling further away from his friends at McGladery. He had seen a world they would never know. App releases didn't seem to hold any interest to Olson now.

He went through the morning classes in despondency. He used the minimum amount of words to get by. No one asked him how he was feeling. They only looked at him as if he was being very weird. Olson realized the lack of family was deeper than he had known. He had no one to talk to about what had happened last night except for Natalie.

Right before Lunch Hour, he thought about the footage he had taken the night before. The world deserved to know what was happening. He posted the footage of the mass murder on a false social networking account he created in anonymous mode. However, something odd happened.

When he made it to the cafeteria, he didn't notice anything unusual, which was absurd. Everyone should have been talking about his video. He had used enough tags in his post to ensure someone would see it. But everyone was acting like nothing was wrong. He found it hard to believe he had no views.

So he searched for the video with his legit accounts. It was gone. He tried to log back in to the fake account he had created in anonymous mode, but it was gone too. Someone was controlling the flow of information to the public.

That's when he realized how big the conspiracy was. It was at every level of society. There were government spies and people who all ensured the system would keep going. Olson probably wasn't the first person to witness the executions, and since everyone had a touchlite, they probably knew someone would try to leak the footage.

He realized that HR had probably deleted the footage he had taken of Instructor Duncan. It explained why it was missing from his touchlite the next day. Luckily enough, the footage of the mass murder was still there since he had gathered it in anonymous mode. Olson knew he had to be more careful, so he decided to begin collecting evidence against HR. He would save it on a data stick just in case something happened to his touchlite. There were so many nooks and crannies where he could hide a tiny stick.

Later that day, he sat down with the intervention specialist. "Why don't you tell me what you're feeling?" she said with mock sincerity.

Despite the fact that she looked harmless and genuinely helpful, Olson knew that she was a crony for the government. He knew that if he told her the wrong thing, he would end up with a sack over his head under the weapons of the firing squad. Olson knew that all of these people that were meant to take care of him were nothing like a family. Olson hated Marius even more. If Olson was his son, then willfully resigning his kin to the life below was the most awful fate Olson could imagine.

Olson placated her with a false account of his feelings. Even though Olson wanted nothing more than to hide in his cubicle, he knew that he couldn't do it. He thought of Lanzig. They took him away because he had mental problems. All the other stories of children being taken away also came to mind. They weren't taken to a clinic for treatment. An unproductive member would be a waste of space. A person who couldn't make payments on the place they lived would be a waste of space. They would all end up at the wrong end of the firing squad.

Come to think of it, Olson had not seen many elderly people either. The few he had ever seen had elaborate devices to aid their lives and a nurse always following them around the city, a sign that the people up top retired in luxury. The people from below went to the retirement building, where they would never leave. It was no wonder the people from below tried to retire as late as possible.

He thought about his behavior in class the last couple of months. He wondered how much he could push until his teachers deemed him unfit to join society and sent him to the firing squad. Olson hadn't realized he'd been playing with such a dangerous situation before. He resolved to make a full mental recovery and be on his best behavior in school. It wasn't because he wanted to be a part of the system anymore. He knew the best way to fight the system was from the inside. If he rebelled too much, they would murder him.

"Thank you for these talks," Olson lied. "They really are helping me feel much better."

The shadow that seemed to always be over her face lifted. Olson wondered how much she knew about what she was doing. Did she know that with a single signature from her, she could sign the death warrant of one of her children?

"Good," she said, genuinely happy. "I'm glad we are making progress, but we still have a long way to go. You can't just heal overnight."

Olson decided that she didn't know about the fate of students who left her care. In fact, most of the lower level people probably didn't know about how their society functioned. If they did know, there would be a revolt. There were enough lower level people to shake the whole system. The OPS police could only shoot so many people before they would be overwhelmed. If anyone did know something or had a feeling about it, they buried it deep.

Olson didn't want to bury his knowledge and live in a fantasy. He wanted to know the truth about what was really happening in the city. He wanted everyone else to know the truth too.

"I know," Olson said with a false smile. "I look forward to having more talks."

The Intervention Specialist nodded, and the session continued.

# 22

After weeks of playing the good student, Olson's punishment was lifted, and he was allowed to have normal privileges again. This meant that after school, he could wander the city. Rather than play Puck Grind or network app games with his friends, he left the school. The first thing he did was buy Erik food. A burger and fries would do the trick.

Erik devoured the food in his office while Olson waited. The junk seemed to clutter every available spot. It was like Erik cared more for playing with broken-down machines than people. Olson wasn't sure how much loyalty the man had to the system, but from the current situation, he gathered that it wasn't much. Regardless, Olson had to be careful with his words. "So, you are from up top?"

Erik stuffed fries into his mouth and grunted with satisfaction. "Is Natalie my niece? Quit asking stupid questions."

"Yeah, so how did you end up down here?"

Erik stopped eating and looked at Olson. "Why do you want to know?"

"Just making conversation. It's not that important, if you don't want to tell me."

"I killed a man."

Olson's skin went pale. He stammered.

"It wasn't someone up top," Erik said. "It was one of you. That's why they exiled me down here. I suppose I would have been in front of the firing squad had it been one of the people up top."

Olson wasn't sure whether he was more disgusted by the murder or the fact that Erik received a lighter sentence because it was one of Olson's people. The inequity of his society infected every level. The only punishment for the below was death. The news reported the capture of a criminal, but that would be the end of the story. They would be sent to the OPS building for processing. However, Olson had never heard of anyone being released from OPS or really what happened after that. If a person tried to visit their friend who was sent to OPS, they would be sent away, told that criminals lost visitation rights, and maybe they would see them when they got out.

But Olson had never heard of anyone getting out. There were no people that served time at OPS, except in the streams. The leading cop would always have an ex-convict as a key source for information. In reality, there were no ex-convicts. Olson had never really thought about it until now. He wondered if there were any punishments besides death.

That made Erik's situation even more disgusting. Erik had murdered someone, yet was given an entire building of the city for himself. Petty thieves and burglars were executed if they happened to be from Olson's social class. The city favored the birth of the elite and punished those that made society function. People like Olson fixed the broken atmosphere shielding, cleaned the city, and even put together Erik's burger and slid it under the heat lamp.

But Olson didn't voice any of his frustrations. Erik would not understand. "Why did you do it?"

"I wanted to see how he worked," Erik said without emotion. "Look at all the stuff around you, boy. I'm a tinkerer. That's what I do. People are like machines. They have entire systems functioning inside them."

"But they are still people!" Olson yelled. In hindsight, it was foolish to look a murderer in the eye and tell them that they were wrong. "You can't just take someone else's life to satisfy your own curiosity. What if someone took yours because they wanted to see how you worked?"

Olson expected Erik to end his life right then and there. He was unregulated and unchecked in this part of the city. He had killed once and probably would again. But when the deathblow didn't come, Olson looked back at Erik. The man was searching through an old pile of junk.

"You know, Olson, I've never met a person like you, at least not from your level. You do have a point. Killing is wrong, but you must understand. The people up top, they are the head of society. We are unique and irreplaceable. You're like a toenail. You cut it off, and it will grow back."

"But my people cut your hair, wash the shielding—we keep society going!"

"When we need another person to cut our hair, we just replace you. The ECC produces the same number of children every year. Why do you think that is?"

"To maintain population levels. The city can only sustain so many."

"Yet, did you know I have a sister?"

"I didn't know." Olson had read about siblings. He knew they carried a particular weight in a person's life, as most people knew their sibling longer than anyone else.

"Human Resources Director Shelia, of the Capella Tower, is my sister..."

"But that's impossible. Her last name is Cohen and Natalie's name is Germundshire," Olson said.

"Have you ever heard of maiden names?"

Olson couldn't remember. A lot of the research was a blur in his head. It was overwhelming, and he was only learning the simple information. Families seemed to be anything but simple. They were so complex that even people who had them could spend their whole lives trying to understand them.

"Suffice to say, Natalie has her father's last name and not her mother's."

The realization hit Olson pretty hard. The odd interest the head of HR had with Natalie was a mother trying to protect her daughter. It also explained how Natalie was able to get blank CitID badges for Erik.

"Do you think they let all of us from up top move down here when we are bad? I used family connections to get here. I was lucky my crime wasn't disseminating propaganda, or else I would be on the wrong end of the death squads. There is no way they would want a dissident handling their dark—"

Erik stopped mid-sentence. He pulled a device from the pile and blew the dust off. "There it is. I haven't needed one of these in a good five years. I wonder if they've changed the protocol. Hand me the badge your teacher gave you."

Olson dug around for the badge and handed it to Erik.

Erik continued, "You know, your classmates are the closest thing you have to brothers and sisters. You get all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks. You don't have to see your classmates on holidays. You can tell them to piss off if you never want to see them again. I envy you."

Olson felt the exact opposite. It was lonely not having people that he was required to see. He'd enjoyed his classmates' visits at the hospital. However, school wouldn't last forever, and people would go their separate ways. When Olson walked the halls of the city, there was always something hanging over everyone. He always thought people were exhausted from working, or they'd had a stressful day. Olson understood now that it was loneliness. The people of the city didn't have anyone.

That's when Olson understood that it wasn't freedom or burgers Erik craved. He was like anyone in the city. He was lonely. He wanted the company of another person. Olson would do in the short term, but it wasn't a real solution. Olson didn't understand Erik, and Erik didn't understand Olson. The only people who understood Erik were his family. Those were the people he wanted to talk to.

Even though Olson didn't really understand what it meant to have a family, he did understand what it must be like living alone. Even if Erik deserved his punishment, his family should have come to visit once in a while. Loneliness was the worst punishment anyone could have. Olson and others of his class were predetermined to be lonely, even before they were born.

The card was spit out from the machine that Erik had dusted off. The card now had a picture of Olson on the front and the name Erik Olson under the photo. Erik handed the card back to Olson.

"Here you go," he said. "This will get you into the ECC. If you want to know the truth about your class of people, find your answers there."

"But—"

"And you might want to bring Natalie." He shoved Olson out the door and slammed it shut. Olson tried to knock a couple of times, but there was no answer. Eventually, he pocketed the badge and turned around. He walked toward the Hilton Gardens, with a new mission on his mind.

# 23

Olson went to meet with Natalie the next night. They decided to meet in the basement of McGladery. The stairs made a hollow metal clang as he spiraled all the way to the bottom.

Once he was on the basement floor, he walked through the hallway in the dark to the bathroom. He didn't need any light to navigate because he saw the glow under the bathroom door. Natalie must have already been there.

He opened the door and saw Shelia and her goon.

Natalie was there, too, confronting her mother.

Shelia turned to Olson and smiled. "Olson, how nice of you to join us."

"Mom, leave him out of this!" Natalie said. "He didn't see anything. I swear."

Olson stepped into the bathroom. The goon closed the door behind him.

"Natalie, my dear," Shelia said. "We both know that's not true. You don't know what you are saying. I can protect you, but there are limits to my power. I can't protect you if you go too deep." She pulled out a touchlite and tapped on the screen. She turned it toward both Natalie and Olson. It said, "Shocking footage of why we can't go out at night! #OPS #MakeYourOwnFate #Lies," and displayed the footage Olson had attempted to post with the fake account.

"Before you try to deny it," Shelia said, "it was easy to trace that it came from the McGladery School. Who else would be sneaking out at night with my daughter?"

"What are you going to do, murder us? Murder your own daughter?" Olson said. He didn't want to die, but if he had to die, at least it would be while fighting for something he believed in.

"Oh no, no," Shelia said. "I have no intention of harming either of you. We were able to intercept your little prank before it caused any real damage to the city. Contrary to what you must believe, we only eliminate those who really can't be rehabilitated. Those who use resources but don't give back to the city. Why do you think we make all this effort to hire an Intervention Specialist? We are not monsters. We just make tough decisions."

"Erik seems to take up resources."

"Erik serves a vital and important function to the city. At any rate, I know now it was pretty foolish for me to believe you were a typical member of your class. You display traits well beyond your station. I think your talents will be wasted if you stay at McGladery."

"Only because you set up a system to waste everybody's talents."

"Do you think Eckelston can really do anything else in life other than bully people? He'll be an OPS officer and always an OPS officer. What about your friend Hanson? Do you think her app skills will get her any further than a touchlite technical support specialist?"

"Whatever happened to making your own fate?"

"That's what makes you different. Most people can't see anything past what is right in front of them, but you... you see the big picture. That's why you should join us at the top. I can give you a job, in HR to begin with, but with access to our education system, you can choose anything you want."

The offer was tempting. Olson knew that people from down below would have the choice of one endless, thankless job after another. The very few who managed to step on others on their way up would only end up in the middle. No one would make it further than that. It didn't matter how many customers Hanson pleased or the immaculate arrest record of Eckelston. They could only hope to manage a few people of their own one day. Certain people were not allowed in the higher positions, as it threatened those at the top.

Olson was now being given a chance to be one of the few people to shatter that class barrier. But he knew that it would come with strings attached. He might have to sign his friend's death warrant. If Hanson suffered a break down and was unable to do her job, she would end up in front of the firing squad. If Eckelston crippled his leg in the course of action, he would no longer be useful either. The guy may be annoying, but he didn't deserve to die for it.

Olson did not want to be part of a system that didn't even give people a chance before they were born. He wanted to stand up, not only for himself, but for future generations. Generations that were born. Despite the myth that he'd walked out of the ECC fully formed, he knew that he'd been born. And for reasons he couldn't understand, he'd been abandoned by his parents to be part of a system that would only tolerate him if it could work him until he died. Olson had had enough. It was time to fight back.

"Olson," Shelia said, "we don't have all night."

"No," Olson said.

"What?"

"I said no." Olson turned his back, but the goon stood between him and the door.

The goon reached into his pocket and began to assemble a device. It was something Olson had never seen before. It was black, with a barrel on one side and a trigger and handle on the other. The goon screwed a long cylinder onto the tip of the barrel.

"I had such high hopes for you. After all the work we put into your birth. I thought you'd be the one, but you've disappointed me," Shelia said. She nodded to her henchman. He brought up the device and pointed it at Olson's head. "I guess we'll have to try again."

The next few moments seemed to happen all at the same time. There was a concussion, and a projectile came from the device the goon had in his hand. Natalie rushed the man and knocked his aim off. The projectile hit Shelia in the arm. The goon then turned the gun toward Natalie, and Shelia yelled, "No!"

Olson didn't wait for the next round. He rushed the goon and knocked him to the ground. The man hit his head on a urinal with a loud crack. The weapon he used clattered to a halt near a toilet. Natalie ran to her mother, who had slumped to the ground from the blood loss. Shelia groaned and clutched her arm.

After Olson retrieved the weapon, he knelt beside Natalie.

"You should go," Natalie said.

"But—" Olson protested.

"I'm going to have to call Emergency Services," Natalie said. "They'd never touch me. I'm the HR Director's daughter. You, on the other hand..."

Olson turned to go, but then had a second thought. "What do you think she meant when she said they put so much work into my birth?"

"I don't know!"

"It's like she knew about me."

"Look, I really don't know. My mom never talks about work. I'm lucky if I even talk to her at all. You should go. The OPS will be here any minute. You should track down my Dad. He's in G-Town. He'll hide you and give you a place to stay."

"G-Town?" Olson said nervously.

"It's not as bad as you think. Now go!"

Olson wanted to hug Natalie. He wanted to tell her it would be all right, and be there for her. Instead, he just nodded and ran out the door. While he ran down the hallway, the thought occurred to him that he might never see Natalie again. That thought, above all else that had happened, made him feel an emptiness. It was an emptiness that had been there all his life that he had not felt until tonight.

# 24

The strangest part was that there were no news reports the next day. The head of HR had been shot, and it was just another day in the city. Olson had expected there to be news reports about a manhunt. He'd thought the police would be out in force searching the city. He'd expected his face to appear on every government-issued television, like the ones that made official announcements in his classroom. Instead, there was nothing. The day was as normal as any other.

Olson had made his way to G-Town the night before by avoiding the patrols. Despite the strict curfew in the rest of the city, G-Town was awake and alive at night. People would navigate by flashlight apps on their touchlites and congregate by the light of the moon and the stars shining through the domed ceiling. Because they were in direct defiance of the law, they were subdued and quiet. And the insurrection never left the limits of G-Town. People would not dare venture out into the skyway.

The residents even had a warning system in place for people coming into the slum. When Olson had come dashing down the skyway bridge, there'd been silence in the cubicles at first. But then Olson had heard whispers behind the walls of the makeshift housing. A man had confronted Olson, asking him to state his business. He'd said that he was a friend of Natalie and looking for Dale. After the considerable effort to convince the man he was indeed a friend of Natalie, they'd let him continue on his way. When Olson asked later, Natalie said that the only time she could visit her dad was at night. Her mother forbade all contact with her dad otherwise.

Her dad had welcomed Olson into his home. It was the cube of a man who had nothing and owned even less. Olson had told the tale of what happened in the basement of McGladery. A crowd had gathered, and faces peered into her father's cubicle from all angles.

Her father had listened to the story. He looked a lot like Natalie. They had the same forehead and cheeks. Their eyes were the same as well. He even imagined they would have the same color hair if Dale's wasn't silver.

After the story, Dale cobbled together an extra bed for Olson. He piled up a chair and a few other objects to hide his visitor. It was good because even though there was no news the next day, the authorities had poked around that night. But it seemed more like a routine inspection than a hunt for a fugitive.

Olson wondered why they didn't call a city-wide alert. He had seen the alerts a couple of times throughout his life. People had to return to their homes and let the OPS search through their property. During a real crisis, no one would even go to class. They would either wait in their cubicles or evacuate the school and gather in the IDS Commons. They had plenty of drills in school.

Since life seemed normal, Dale let Olson come out of his hiding spot. Olson decided that he would get breakfast at a vendor on the floor above which Natalie's dad had told him about. He dodged through the bustle of the morning crowd. Most of the traffic walked in a path near the railing that sectioned off the large oval space in the center. A woman hoisted up her drying laundry onto one of the large clothing lines that spanned the gap.

The people of G-Town seemed like any other people. They laughed and gathered in groups. Some were eating breakfast with their friends. A boy was playing apps on an old beat up touchlite. They didn't seem any different than the people he saw at the Sealing Day festival, with the exception that the people up top wore expensive clothing.

Although, the more he thought about it—there was something different. There was something hanging over everyone. The laughter and the gatherings he witnessed were subdued. It was like everyone suffered from a mild case of depression. Olson wondered if evictions had anything to do with it. If people in G-Town were under a constant threat of losing the tiny space they had left, then he could see why laughter would be brief, subdued, while reality grated away at the people.

When Olson stopped to look over the railing to get his bearings, he saw a man sitting near the edge of the oval hole on the other side of G-Town. The stranger was sitting in a makeshift coffee shop created from spare parts. Most G-Town businesses were crafted from junk and relied on the charity of others, since even junk had recycle value. Because most of the residents were wearing secondhand clothes, the man at the coffee shop was out of place. He was a little too put together for G-Town. He had to be a spy for HR. Olson scolded himself for being so stupid.

Olson ducked behind a passing group and went for one of the broken escalators. He hoped the man had not seen him as he climbed the steps to the floor above. There was a makeshift food place, where a woman was cooking homemade tortillas using a single hot plate. She stuffed them with all sorts of lab-grown meats, eggs, and potatoes. The few chairs and tables were up against the railing, where Olson could see the man.

Olson ordered a burrito, so that he would have a reason to sit in the chairs. The burrito was one of the best meals he'd had in a long while. As he ate, he watched the man in the coffee shop. The man didn't seem to have noticed Olson.

He kept nibbling on his food while he devised a plan. He decided to send Natalie a message. While his touchlite was in anonymous mode, he wasn't sure if hers was being monitored. Her mom had probably been intercepting their messages the entire time.

Since he knew that his communications were being intercepted, he had a distinct advantage. The problem was sending a message only Natalie would understand but that would also lead them to believe Olson didn't know what was happening.

He typed into the touchlite: "Hey, Natalie. Meet me at the place where we first kissed."

Olson hoped she wouldn't take the message the wrong way. HR would have no way of knowing that they had never kissed before. But the message was off enough that Natalie would know something was wrong. Shelia also wouldn't say anything to her daughter, lest she admit she had been spying on her. He could only hope that Natalie would understand the real message behind the innocuous one. It was a better plan than waiting for an agent to notice him. Since the city was the entirety of the world, he couldn't hide forever.

"Are you sure the waterfall is the best place to meet? It's out in the open," Natalie responded. She was thinking on the same level. Now he had to think of a way to convey an actual meeting place without letting them know.

"How about our first date?" Olson typed. "I'll never forget the view."

"Meet you there," Natalie answered.

Olson shoved the rest of the burrito in his mouth and flipped the protective cover over his touchlite. He turned to leave—and found Shelia's goon standing right behind him. The man had a bandage on his head from where he hit the urinal. Olson was amazed at how quickly the man had gotten in and out of the hospital. A person from below would have waited a day for a nonlethal injury.

The man grabbed Olson's wrist and squeezed hard. He pulled out a syringe from his pocket with his other hand and leaned closer.

Scalding grease splashed against the goon's face. He screamed and let go of Olson.

The Burrito Lady stood with an empty frying pan. "Oops," she said. "Must have been an accident."

Olson didn't look back. He ran through G-Town. A couple of HR lackeys attempted to intercept him, but the people of G-Town formed a bustling crowd. They hindered the advance of the henchmen and opened the path for Olson. The story he had told them last night must have spread. There were crowds of people in the streets.

Olson darted across a skyway bridge out of G-Town. He slowed down when he was sure that the goons weren't following. He didn't want to bring too much attention to himself. He zigged and zagged and took a circuitous route through the skyway. He doubled back, ducked into stores, and was always on the lookout for a suspicious person or any OPS officers.

Once he was sure that he wasn't being pursued, he made his way to the site of the massacre. In the daytime, it was a fairly empty skyway in a corner of the city. The courtyard where the murders occurred was a clean, white surface. There was no evidence of what went on during the night. If anyone stopped to look at the courtyard below, it would be unremarkable.

He did feel a little out of place when he stopped in the middle of a skyway bridge. He pretended to check his touchlite for updates while he waited for Natalie. Meanwhile, he was alert, watching every new face that came through the skyway.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of waiting, Natalie appeared. "Sorry, my mother wouldn't let me leave the hospital. She was telling me there was some trouble in G-Town. I finally had to slip away and take the common exit. Luckily, it wasn't too busy this morning."

"You have another exit? Never mind. How is your mom doing?" Olson said. The thought of the people from up top having their own entrance while he waited irritated him.

"She'll live. We have the best healthcare in the city, remember?"

"So what's going on here? What did Duncan's daughter find out?"

"I don't know. Look, just because I'm from up top doesn't mean I know anything more than you. Most people don't know what goes on in this city. Up top, people spend all their time at nightclubs or bars. It's because it keeps people numb to the reality going on around them. Feed people a diet of cigarettes and booze, and they won't question anything the people in charge do. The easiest way to control a population is to convince them not to think. Do the thinking for them."

"What are we going to do about it?"

"It's time to start finding answers. Do you have that badge?"

"The one Erik made? It's up in my cube."

"Are you serious? We're screwed! They've probably been through all your possessions by now."

"I don't keep it locked in my cabinet."

"You don't?"

"There is a space in the cubicle wall. I've been hiding it there."

Natalie took off down the skyway. "We need to get that badge."

# 25

HR agents were watching the McGladery School. They were harder to spot outside of G-Town because they blended in with the everyday city people, but Olson observed how there seemed to be several people milling about near the various entrances to the school building. From the Medical Arts Consortium, there was a gate with a hallway on the ground floor. No one usually stopped in that hallway, but now a man was leaning against the wall, tapping away on his touchlite.

The hallway on the first floor with a bakery, where his friends would buy breakfast treats every so often, was particularly full, with almost all of the tables taken. Someone sipping on a coffee and eating an artisan doughnut must be watching the people going to McGladery. The IDS entrance on the second floor skyway was even riskier. The IDS Commons was a large, open area where any number of people could have been planted. The skyway bridge connecting IDS to McGladery also had windows on all sides. A person didn't even need to be on either end of the bridge to watch it. They could be watching it through a window in one of the towers overlooking the connection from building to building.

The skyway bridge was the easiest point to watch, so they decided to use it to their advantage. Olson devised a plan using an idea he'd learned from a magician who had come to their school when he was a Three Year. The man had wowed them with card tricks and scarves coming from his ear. Olson, who always wanted to know the truth, pestered the man for his secrets. At the end of the session, when most had run off to a Puck Grind match, Olson was the last to leave the classroom. The man had pulled Olson aside and fanned out a deck of cards.

"Misdirection," the magician said as Olson picked one of the cards. "One hand does grand gestures and catches your eye while the other does the trick."

To accent his point, the man flourished one of his hands, making the cards seem to explode in every direction while he shuffled. With the other, he slowed down his movements so Olson could watch him. He slipped Olson's card to the top of the pile. Olson was so amazed with the idea that he could force a card to be the first one in the deck, he used what few citcreds he owned to buy a deck of cards. He was untrained and clunky, and Bauer pointed it out right away. The cards had gone unused ever since.

However, the concept of misdirection was the same here. He would send Natalie on an endless errand and sneak in using another direction himself. They were both sure the HR spies would let Natalie roam freely in an effort to get to Olson. However, in order for the plan to work, they needed one more person.

Olson waited in a food alley a couple buildings away. There were several food trucks in addition to some fast food walk-in places. Bauer couldn't resist eating out, and Olson hoped that today wouldn't be the day he decided to eat in. As soon as it was Lunch Hour, the crowds began to pick up, so he didn't feel quite so vulnerable.

Bauer appeared in the line of a food vendor. Olson tapped him on the shoulder.

"Olson?" Bauer said. "What's going on? They said that you were taken back to the ECC for better care."

"Not yet." Olson smiled. "I will be, though, unless you help me."

"I don't know," Bauer said. "Don't you think it would be better...?"

"I have come into a line of credit. I'll buy you anything you want."

"Anything? Like 500 coins in the app store?"

"Consider it done," Olson said. 500 coins was nothing in comparison to what his new line of citcreds could get him, but Bauer was always shortsighted. Olson decided on 2,000 coins and to let it be a surprise. By the time HR realized he'd transferred a large sum of coins from his account to Bauer's, his use of Bauer would be over. Olson took his friend out of line and explained the plan.

When they got back to the bakery hallway, he nodded to Natalie, who had been watching the people eating their midday snack. She whispered to Olson, "The woman reading the touchlite with the empty cup. She's been here the longest."

Olson nodded and pointed her out to Bauer. They waited for Natalie to get in position. She circled around to the IDS entrance on the other side of the building. Once she sent a text in anonymous mode that she was ready, Bauer went into action. He bought a coffee with some extra citcreds that Olson had sent him. Olson had cleared out his personal savings buying the coins and the coffee. Olson had to assume they were watching his personal funds.

To confirm his suspicions, the lady with the empty cup perked up as soon as Bauer bought the drink. She shifted around to look at Bauer, and on cue, he ran into her with his coffee, spilling it all over her. She yelped from the heat, and Bauer apologized and attempted to wipe the mess up. Olson used the window of distraction to sneak past them.

_______

Meanwhile, Natalie breathed deeply and stepped off the skyway bridge from the Baker Industrial Complex to the IDS Commons. She didn't try to hide behind any vendor. She was out in the open. Any number of people could have worked for her mother. There was a man buying a hotdog. A woman in work clothes fiddled with her music app on her touchlite. Two men in business suits glanced at her as they walked by. She had no idea who was watching her, but she was sure that they were alerting the office by now.

She wondered how much her mother knew about her recent activity. They never really talked anymore. After the divorce, her mother had dedicated herself to her job. Instead of keeping normal hours and spending time with the family, she'd become obsessed with work. They would use the minimum amount of conversation to get by. Even when the teachers reported her for behavioral problems, her mom said nothing.

Natalie remembered when she'd sold her first pack of cigarettes. She was shaking because she was so nervous. It was a midlevel manager with an apartment on the Washington Ave Living Block. All the successful people from below dreamed of the Washington Ave apartments. They were the epitome of luxury for the people from below. For Natalie, they were small and claustrophobic.

The manager invited her for a smoke to help calm her down. He had a tube with a filter for the smell. He would blow the smoke into the tube, so it wouldn't set off the fire sensors. Burning anything was illegal for the people down below. For Natalie...they had a fireplace in their living room. This man's living area was his bedroom, and if he worked hard enough, maybe he could get a separate bedroom one day.

Natalie coughed and hacked into the tube, and she felt sick to her stomach. She threw up in the man's toilet, and he told her it'd get better next time. He was right; it did get better. Later that night, she was sure her mother would have OPS officers waiting at her door. Instead, her mother just sipped wine and said, "I hope you had a productive day."

Her mother had to have known about selling forbidden items. She should have screamed at her when she came in well past curfew after knowingly breaking the law. Instead, her mom said nothing. She fell asleep without a word. The next morning, when a fight should have happened, her mother said, "I'm going to work."

Had Natalie been anyone else, she was sure they would have stopped her the moment she headed towards the McGladery School. Instead, they watched.

Had Natalie lacked a moral center like her uncle, she would have abused her situation much more. Instead, she used it to cut class and sell illegal goods to support her father. Natalie wondered how much her mother knew. She pictured her mom sitting in her hospital bed watching a feed from an agent on her screen. Anything to show that her mom cared gave Natalie comfort in a twisted way.

She crossed the threshold of the IDS skyway bridge to McGladery. Since it was Lunch Hour, the bridge was crowded. She couldn't really get a good sense of who was following her versus who was on their lunch hour. She crossed in seconds and walked through a short landing, where there was a second-floor entrance to the public library, an escalator to the ground level, and the elevators to the school. She walked over to the elevators. There was a group of school employees with badges dangling from their necks waiting for the elevator. A woman with a handbag and a man in a suit also stepped into the elevator lobby right after her.

The elevator dinged, the door opened, and everyone swiped their CitID badge. She had used her own rather than the one given to her by her uncle for illegal transactions. She wanted them to be aware of every step she took. She was the hand that would flourish while Olson retrieved his badge. She would exit the elevator on the floor for the recreation area at the same time Olson would be going for the sleeping quarters.

_______

In the stairwell, near the elevator where Natalie was making her way to the top, Olson ran up the stairs two at a time. Once he was at floor ten, he stopped. Even though he was out of breath, he leaned over to listen through the exit door. There was no one that he could hear. He peeked out of the doorway. The hallway was empty.

He stepped into the hallway and walked toward the Nine to Twelve Year sleeping area. He watched and listened for signs of any other people. Once he was near the large, open area cubicle room, he poked his head around the corner. The sleeping area was empty, as far as he could tell. If someone was lying on their cot, he wouldn't see them. He tiptoed toward his cubicle.

At the cubicle, he was shocked to find out how quickly the school had moved on. None of his stuff was there. All of his personal items had been cleared away. The cot was made in the same way it had been when Olson had moved in. His entire existence had been erased.

Olson didn't waste time mourning his personal effects and crawled under the cot. He shoved his fingers in the space between the cubicle wall and the siding. The tip of his finger hit the card. He fidgeted for a moment and pulled it out. He shoved the badge in his pocket and turned to leave his cubicle. Eckelston stood between him and the exit.

"Olson." Eckelston smirked.

"I really need to be—" Olson attempted to walk around him.

Eckelston stuck out his arm to block Olson's path. "What's that card you were hiding under your cot?"

"It's none of your business."

"I think it's very much my business. You aren't even supposed to be here. You were taken back to the ECC."

"Eckelston, you have no idea what you are doing. Now let me go. You'll never have to see me again."

"I know more than you think."

"Oh, yeah?"

"I know you've been sneaking out at night. I've seen you running around with that girl."

"And that doesn't concern you."

"I've seen you go to Leamington and use that card. You're a drug runner."

"Keep your voice down." Olson made a show of looking around the room. He leaned over and whispered, "I'm investigating for Human Resources."

"What?"

"They are using me to uncover a drug ring. Everything you've seen has to remain secret, or else they will know we are on to them. It's a delicate operation."

"What are you talking about? Why would they pick you?"

"I didn't ask for this. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Remember when Instructor Duncan killed himself?"

"What does that have to do with it?"

"It wasn't a suicide. It was murder. He was involved. I was sworn to secrecy."

Olson could see the gears in Eckelston's brain turning. Eckelston would believe it because it followed the plot of every action stream. They all grew up on a diet of action streams. Drugs and lone wolf OPS officers were always the central theme of the pictures. Olson knew the streams were just another way to forget how miserable life in the city was for his class of people. The more distractions society had to offer, the less of a chance people would do anything about their situation.

"Quit lying! I know what's happening. You were transferred to St. Thomas. Just admit it." Eckelston said. The St. Thomas Higher Learning Facility was a place closed off to the people from below. Olson had learned that almost everybody from Natalie's level went there after Twelve Year. Students of McGladery were lucky if they were picked. It was so rare that no one really knew what happened to them after they went. People would lose touch with their school friends during career training.

Every Twelve Year class made a pact to be friends forever, but the reality of the situation was that manufacturers hung out with other manufactures, Washers hung out with Washers, and nurses hung out with nurses. No one ever kept in touch. Even if someone who went to St. Thomas wanted to see their old friends again, they would have nothing in common anymore. Society was divided by labor. Social groups were divided by labor. Without families, people isolated themselves.

"Just don't tell anyone," Olson said and pushed past him.

Eckelston ran after him. "Wait, I'm sorry for picking on you. I'm sorry for everything. I did it because you were smarter than me. I knew they would send you there one day."

Olson was completely taken aback by Eckelston's words. He didn't even know how to respond. If Olson had gone to St. Thomas, he would have been able to pursue careers Eckelston could never do. He could see why Eckelston had it out for him. What he couldn't see was why the change of heart. Maybe Eckelston really thought if Olson was going to St. Thomas, that buttering up someone he knew would have a good career one day would lead to a promotion.

However, the reality was that promotion in the city was rare. People were locked into one place for life. They could rarely go up because those on the higher floors wouldn't leave. If a McGladery alumni made it to a middle manager position, they would spend their life there, and all the people below who were fit for something greater would never even get the chance because there were no other positions open.

People of the city felt like someone had to die in order for another person to move up. It was a terrible thought and pitted people against each other. People were so busy attempting to make themselves look good, they didn't spend any time thinking about anyone else. Every career could only go up to a certain floor, and there was always another floor higher.

It was no wonder that there were so many distractions built into the system. Drugs, streams, apps, and everything else was devised to get people not to think too hard about their situation. If drinking and drugs didn't numb people's thought processes, then television and streams would do the trick. If streams wouldn't do it, then people could numb themselves through an app.

The apps were elaborate and took hours to complete. People would unlock new levels, go on quests, and spend weeks of their time dedicated to one app. There were multiplayer apps, where people would get their characters into triple-digit levels and complete dungeons together. There were apps that required daily attention or people would lose their place. If people were focused on their games, they wouldn't think about what was wrong with the city.

People were complacent. They were fed a diet of whatever the system wanted them to believe, and they just went along with it. Except Eckelston. He wanted something more. Olson understood Eckelston more now than he ever had before. It wasn't that he had been thinking of new ways to be mean to Olson all day. It was that he didn't waste his time on apps for all hours of the day. Eckelston was seeking to improve himself while others wasted time.

Olson could not believe it, but he sympathized with the bastard that had made growing up miserable.

"I appreciate it. I really do." Olson said. "But I really have to go."

"They didn't give you any time to say goodbye to your friends. Let me call the headmaster and sort this all out for you." Eckelston said as he pulled out his touchlite.

Olson knew the time for words was over. Anything he said now would only make Eckelston more suspicious. Olson smacked the touchlite away and punched with is other hand. His target went down with a look of surprise. Normally, Olson would have rejoiced in his triumph. Today, he felt bad for the guy. The class bully was a tool like everyone else from this school.

"Hello?" Olson heard a voice. He looked down and could see the headmasters face on the screen of Eckelston's touchlite. "Olson? What's going on?"

Olson dashed towards the stairs.

# 26

Natalie and Olson waited outside the doors of the ECC. A few lab technicians entered the building here and there. There were no signs that the same agents who were monitoring McGladery were also keeping tabs on the ECC.

Olson had dodged pursuit from the HR goons with the help of Bauer, who was still fussing with the lady from the bakery when Olson emerged from the stairwell. Olson had made a clean getaway.

Natalie, on the other hand, had spent a great deal of time losing the people who'd followed her at the school. She had wandered into the sports floor of McGladery and watched the students practicing for the game while Olson had retrieved his badge. A lady from the elevator had made her way into the sports floor as well. Natalie had been sure she was the tail. After she'd allotted enough time for Olson to gather the CitID, she decided to make her exit. She waited for a group of students to leave the sports floor. Then she made a dash for the staircase. However, rather than going down the stairs like they thought she would do, she ran up the stairs instead. On the floor above, she used a trick her uncle had taught her about prying the elevator door open. She hopped on the roof of an elevator going down and got off again when it stopped.

She then took another set of stairs to the first floor, where the coffee shop was located. She took her chances and left McGladery. She wove a couple times through the skyway and even ducked into a few stores. She was sure no one had followed her by the time she met up with Olson.

They both watched the entrance to the ECC. There were two large glass doors at the end of the skyway bridge. There was only one way into the ECC, and if agents had followed them from McGladery, they would be walking into a trap. There would be no escape for Olson.

They were also not sure how much Olson's face had propagated into the alert system. The general public had not been notified yet, or else his face would have been on every screen in every public place, and their chances of hiding out would have been next to zero. However, most of the front desk personnel had access to a less public alert system that gave people information on a need-to-know basis.

With the push of a button, Human Resources could have Olson's picture on the front desk of every building in seconds. The front desk would only need to press a panic button to alert the authorities. Natalie knew that armed OPS troopers would be there in minutes if the front desk person was suspicious.

The man at the front desk of the ECC had a very loud purple shirt and a pompadour. He filed his already manicured nails. He only looked up when the occasional lab worker walked through and showed their badge.

Olson shrugged and said, "We don't have much of a choice. We might as well go inside."

Olson stood up, but Natalie pulled him back down. "Wait. We don't know if they've circulated your face on the threat network."

"Can you distract him? While I walk by?" Olson suggested.

"That could work, but what if he asks you to stop?"

"So what do we do?"

"Come on, I have an idea."

# 27

Natalie and Olson made their way to the Capella tower. They hid behind carts, stands, crowds of people, and anything else they could find when they saw an OPS officer. They were careful to only enter the exposed skyway bridges when they were sure they would not encounter a uniformed officer in an area where they couldn't hide.

They made it to a set of elevators that weren't as secure as those that went to the very top floors. Most of the floors at the top would be inaccessible to them. However, they took the elevator to the near top. There was a mall in between the last living spaces of those who had crawled to the highest ranks of the people down below and those at the top.

The mall was three floors and full of stores that were out of the price range for most people from below. While the lucky few who spent their lives near the top could get the occasional item or two if they saved their citcreds, Natalie could afford to shop there every day. The gap between the most successful people from below and those up top was staggering. Natalie could afford to buy a different outfit every day and toss it into recycling after one use. Even the most successful person from below needed to save. Natalie could afford to rent out an entire floor of one bedroom apartments and not feel a strain.

Citcreds didn't hold much weight for her. She had so many of them. She didn't really see them passing or even count them. Her home was larger than anyone could ever imagine. She hadn't understood that until her father left the house. Before her father's downward spiral, she would spend all of her time in this mall. She would buy things she didn't need. She had so many clothes that she sent full trash bags to recycling every month just to keep up with the closet space. When a new app came out, she would buy her way into the upper ranks. Her characters had the best equipment. She had unlimited lives. She never had to wait to unlock another level. Natalie could do whatever she wanted.

Then her father and mother had split. When her father had been cut off from the family bank, she'd begun to understand how the other half lived. Natalie could have paid his rent with plenty to spare from her weekly allowance, but her mother had blocked Natalie's ability to transfer citcreds to his account. She could not give him a single citcred, but that didn't prevent her from buying goods with her account and selling them with his. The only problem with the scheme was that illegal goods were the only moneymakers.

Before they had trafficked goods for his survival, he had moved down to a two-bedroom apartment. He found work, but there were two major flaws. The first was that work would not sustain his lifestyle. The second flaw was that he had never really worked a day in his life. People in Natalie's class only worked if they wanted to work. They typically had so many citcreds packed away in accounts and investments that they couldn't possibly spend them all. Natalie's father was one of the few exceptions. When a person was used to certain comforts in life, it was hard for them to give those up. The income coming into his account was not proportional to the citcreds coming out.

Her grandfather had been a landlord. He'd owned an entire building near Washington Ave, where most of the apartment buildings were located. When the entire world was a collection of buildings, owning one was like owning a large chunk of the world. When her grandfather died, her father had to make a decision about the property, as he was the only child and Natalie's grandmother had passed when Dale was a boy. Dale didn't want to be a landlord, so the building had been sold. That was the last money her father had made, when he was sixteen years old.

Most of the elite who wandered through life spending their family's fortune ended up turning out fine. They either had enough citcreds to buy a business when the funds got low or had enough education and connections to step into a well-paid role when they decided to stop wandering. If they didn't do either of those, then they married into a family without a dwindling supply. Since Dale had chosen the latter, he'd ended up spending most of his own money by the time he was twenty-seven.

It wasn't that her father had planned on getting married so he didn't have to work. It was more that it just turned out that way. He'd had plans to go into business for himself. Coffee and social drinking were his pastimes, so he'd been planning on starting a coffee house by day, bar by night business. Then he'd met Natalie's mother. It was easy to put plans on hold when people first started dating.

She'd been a young Human Resources assistant, and he'd been a playboy who had a bit of a reputation. Despite Shelia's friends' warnings about Dale, they really had loved each other in the beginning. He'd showed her a good time, and she'd kept him on track and straightened him out. They'd seemed like a perfect match, and Shelia had been the one to finally settle Dale down. The coffee shop bar plans had been replaced by wedding plans.

Dale had kept pushing his plans further and further out. He'd focused on his family. When Natalie came, it was an easy decision to have Dale stay at home. Shelia was moving up the ranks. She was making plenty of citcreds.

Despite his wife's endless coffers, Dale still enjoyed treating his family. He bought his wife expensive gifts, but since she would ruin the surprise by seeing the transaction on her statement, he used his own account. He bought his daughter gifts. He paid for vacations. Dale's family money dwindled and dwindled.

It would be easy to turn Natalie's mom into a villain. However, she was far from it. Dale was the one who cheated. He was the one who stepped out on the marriage. Her father tried to justify his actions: Shelia was too focused on work and didn't have enough time for him. Her father told her he was just doing what any man would do when he wasn't satisfied at home. However, Natalie knew that her father was good at bullshit.

If he was really feeling lonely, he could have attempted to work it out with her, or if he felt the need to be with other people, he could have left her. Instead, he chose to try and maintain a girlfriend and a marriage. His justifications were actually his weakness. Her mom's reaction to cut him off wasn't easy for her.

In the beginning, when faced with dwindling funds, he was forced to find work. However, since he had never really worked a day in his life, he wasn't good at it. He went from job to job. He fell lower and lower. The citcreds dwindled.

It wasn't until the third eviction when Natalie realized her father needed serious help. Since her mother refused, she had to take matters into her own hands. She hatched schemes with him. She would buy stuff with her citcreds, and he would sell the items. It was all legal in the beginning. She would buy a new item at the mall. He'd sell it for less.

But eventually, they both came to the realization that legal goods didn't make much profit. People didn't pay that much for something they could get in every store. Collectibles were even harder to come by because most objects in the city eventually made it to the recycler. People from below had no families, so most of their belongings went to the recycler when they died. People up top had objects important to their family but junk to anyone else. Most objects held such little value that a person made more of a profit when they received the bounty for recycling.

The buying and selling of items not found on the shelf of any store was the only way to make serious citcreds. At first, her father refused to have Natalie help him with any illegal activity. She knew he was doing it, and he would pretend otherwise. Finally, after the fourth eviction and landing in a tiny cubicle in G-Town, she finally had to intervene. She became part of the scheme. She would bring him the goods; he would sell them off.

By the time she found herself in the shopping mall with Olson, she already had extensive experience with illegal activity. She already knew a few tricks. Natalie also had a bankroll to pay for such endeavors, so she brought Olson into one of her favorite stores. A black man with bright purple eye shadow, a shaved head on one side, and long curly locks on the other smiled brightly when she entered. The sound of pop music pulsed over the speakers.

"Natalie." The man grinned. "My favorite lady with a red streak in her hair."

"Hi, Jackson," she said. Olson knew the man was one of his people. He had no idea that she was a daughter. He probably served plenty of families but didn't really know what they were. Before Olson had been in the knowledge loop, if he'd seen two adults and two children walking down the skyway, he would have assumed teachers, tutors, mentors, or some other form of schooling. He'd had no way of knowing how the other half lived.

"Who is your friend?" Jackson's voice went low, as if he disapproved of the sight of Olson. Even though Jackson had probably worn the same school uniform back when he was at McGladery, he had spent most of his life serving the city's elite. It was easy to forget his roots when the citcreds began flowing.

"Olson," Natalie said.

"Oh." It was like the mention of a down below name was disgusting. He had probably become accustomed to hearing the names of the people up top, and it was obvious that he treated the people from below differently when they came into his store. A person from up top would buy several items. Even the most successful from down below would mostly browse. They weren't worth his time. Olson was irritated by the guy already and didn't like him.

"I'm here because you are the master of makeovers. I want you to make us look older than we are."

"Older?" Jackson said.

"There'll be extra for not asking questions."

"Let me take you to our new suit line," Jackson said. "It's what every working professional is wearing these days. Send your old suit to the recycler because you are walking out of here in style."

They picked out clothes. Natalie found a grey blazer and matching skirt much like her mother would wear. Olson was given a black suit worth more than he could make in his first year in the workforce. They looked like children wearing their parents' clothes. They didn't look right in them. However, the magic of the disguise wasn't in the clothes. It was what happened next.

Jackson led them to a hair salon after telling a coworker to "mind the store." There wasn't really much to mind. The mall was fairly empty. Very few people had time to shop during work hours, except for the occasional bored housewife or husband.

A peppy lady with equally fashionable clothes and hair greeted them in a salon a few stores down. "Jackson! What a lovely young couple you've brought me today!"

"Only the best for you, Ismail." Jackson smiled. "Allow me to present Natalie and friend."

"Hello Nats and um... friend," Ismail said. "What are we attempting to accomplish today?"

"These fine folks would like to look older."

"You trying to enter the workforce early or just sick of adults treating you like you're a Five Year?"

"Never mind that," Jackson said. "They are paying for a question-free experience, so let's get to work."

"Sure, the customer is always right."

She ushered them to the back and then began to work on their appearances.

When Olson asked Jackson about the introduction as a friend, he said, "You'll get better service if they don't think you're from below." The statement irritated Olson, and he liked these people even less. Society was warped. Even people who obviously came from the same class as Olson were willing to turn on their own for the scraps from the people above.

Ismail went to work on their hair and faces. It was amazing what makeup and a skilled hand could accomplish. Natalie's red streak disappeared as her hair was dyed blond and pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail. Olson's ginger disappeared beneath a brown, sophisticated man's haircut. Ismail penciled in some creases on Olson's face, making him look much older than he was. Natalie was given a pair of glasses and some professional-looking makeup.

The difference when the job was done was astounding. Olson looked years beyond his age and so did Natalie. They could pass for adults. They could probably even pass by a security official on the hunt for them. They didn't want to test that theory though. It was one thing to sneak by a bored secretary waiting for the clock to reach five. It was another to trick a trained professional who probably had to see Olson's face ten times a day.

Once they were finished with their makeovers, Natalie tipped extra citcreds for both Ismail and Jackson. It was a little more than she'd bargained for, but the results were excellent. They looked like different people. It was like they'd jumped twenty years into the future and were already on the path to wasting their lives in careers they mildly disliked.

They left Capella and headed back to the ECC. This time, they didn't have to weave through the crowds and dodge OPS officers. They blended into the background of people much better than before. Even so, they still attempted to walk in large groups whenever possible and to not get too close to the OPS officers.

_______

They arrived at the ECC and walked up to the front desk. The man with the pompadour didn't look up at them. He continued to file his nails. His desk screen was tilted, and they could see Olson's face in the corner with the words "SECURITY ALERT" and instructions about what to do if a person spotted the fugitive.

The pompadour man looked directly at Olson and didn't seem to react. "Can I help you?" he said.

"Yes, we are interested in..." Natalie said. They hadn't really planned out any further than using the badge. Erik had coded visitor credentials into their CitIDs, but didn't give any clear instruction about what to say when they got there.

Olson took a guess as it was the Early Childcare Center after all and jumped into the conversation before Natalie floundered, "We are thinking about having a baby."

There was a chance that the man behind the counter didn't know the word baby, but Olson doubted it. People from the bottom still needed to perform roles in vital areas. The ECC needed the bottom to check in visitors and janitors to clean after everyone went home. If a single man with a pompadour needed to know about babies in order to do his job, it was only a piece of a much greater puzzle.

"Congratulations!" the pompadour man said with a half smile. "I'll punch up the doctor. Could I see your CitID?"

Natalie and Olson handed over their fake CitIDs that Erik had made. The man swiped both of them. Olson leaned over the desk and watched. They read Mattie and Cedric with a fake address and false information of a couple from the top. Erik had been kind enough to give them a perfect cover as a married couple. However, there were no pictures associated with the IDs.

"Huh," the man said. "The photos must be corrupted. You might want to go to city services to get that sorted out. I guess we'll have to verify the old-fashioned way."

The pompadour man asked them a few questions, like name, citnumber, and address. They had spent time memorizing the information on their cards during the good hour they were sitting in the makeover chairs. Luckily, Natalie knew a lot about the bureaucracy for people up top. She knew about CitIDs and verification procedures when no photo identification was possible. The people below were given one card for everything in their life. The people up top had an identity that couldn't fit on just one card.

After verification was complete, the man directed them over to a small area of chairs off to the side. Olson wondered why the secret hadn't been leaked earlier if this man who was most likely a McGladery graduate knew about babies. Although, who knew how much the man had really been told? He'd most likely never held one himself, so an infant could be part of a new entertainment system for all he knew. The pompadour man had picked up enough to know people were excited about them, but he probably wasn't taught any more than what he needed to know to do his job.

Each person from below only had a tiny piece of the puzzle. This man knew people would come to the desk and ask for babies. A caregiver on the inside could hold them, but most likely had no idea people would come and take them home to raise them. Partial information was the key to any conspiracy. The curious like Olson were eliminated. It was no wonder distractions were abundant. Apps were used instead of human interaction. Streams and television replaced friendship. Alcohol limited real conversation.

The less people talked about what was really going on, the less people could piece together the complete picture with their individual parts. Even the members of the death squad had a partial picture. They were probably told stories about how their victims deserved their fate. It was easy to keep the wheel turning when everyone could only see a really small part.

"Mattie, Cedric," a young woman in a lab coat said. She was holding a touchlite.

Natalie and Olson stood up and shook the lady's hand. She led them through a series of offices in a long, bright hallway. Most of the rooms held various pieces of medical equipment. Some looked like doctors' offices at the hospital. There was even one room with an ultrasound machine. Olson knew because they had used one on him after his accident.

He was amazed to see medical equipment outside the hospital that was going unused. The amazement turned to irritation when he realized that people from below had to make appointments far in advance and wait for hours when they got to their appointment because the doctors were always out on some emergency or another.

Olson had heard horror stories of people dying in the waiting room because they couldn't see a doctor in time. He'd always dismissed them as stories. But after seeing all the unused medical equipment, Olson wondered if there was some truth to the stories. The worst part was that, more than likely, the people up top were the reason for the long waits for the people down below. The people up top had priority.

Later, when he asked Natalie about going to the doctor, she confirmed that she never had to wait and was confused by the question. He didn't bother explaining it to her. There was no sense in making her feel guilty about something she couldn't control, like her birth.

They were ushered into an office. There was a nameplate on the desk that said Dr. LeeAnn. The owner of the nameplate sat in a large chair. She was an older woman, with raven black hair, a pinched face, and a sloped forehead. She smiled and docked her touchlite with her desk monitor; the touchlite screen went blank and the monitor lit up. A full-sized keyboard and mouse sat in a rollout piece under the desk. She clicked a few screens and tapped a few keys. The assistant who let them into the room left them to converse in private.

"Cedric and Mattie, how can I help you?" she said.

Natalie and Olson looked at each other, and Olson began, "Dr. LeeAnn—"

"Most people call me Dr. Lee."

"Sorry, Dr. Lee. We decided to have a baby."

"Most people only come to us when they've exhausted the natural way."

"My husband studied math at the Higher Learning Fac," Natalie said. "English was never his strong suit. What he means to say is that we've been trying for the better part of a year now."

"Why didn't you come to us sooner?"

"Work," Olson said. "You know how it goes."

"Of course, of course. We have several options. There are fertility treatments. We can also do artificial insemination. If you don't want to carry the child, or you can't carry the child, there is the maturation womb. We really only recommend the womb for mothers who've had miscarriage issues in the past. There are studies that prove important bonding happens inside the womb. With that being said, if you need the artificial womb, we've equipped them so you can speak to the developing fetus inside. We recommend daily trips, but we can also record samples of your voice too."

"The maturation womb," Natalie was quick to say. "That sounds like the one we want."

"Whoa." Dr. Lee held up her hands. "There are tests we have to do. We'll need samples from both of you to make sure they are viable. We should also explore other options too. Mothers who carry their children—"

"I'm a busy woman, Dr. Lee." Natalie channeled her mother. It was eerie how much she sounded like her when she needed to. "I can't afford to spend my mornings sick and puking."

The reality was that most of the people from her social class could afford to spend their time doing anything they wanted. Most of them had so much wealth that they could do anything in life, including nothing at all. However, most people got bored with nothing at all. There were only so many nightclubs in the city and only so many bars. Few people were content with staying at home, so most of the elite worked long hours. They rarely enjoyed their wealth and privilege, not like a person from below would, had they been given access to the top.

"Well, let me email you some literature to read over before you make your decision. We'll have to do testing regardless of which option you decide. So we are going to need some samples—k"

"Could we get a tour first?" Olson said.

"Of course, I'll have my assistant show you around."

Dr. Lee dialed a few buttons on her touchlite. The young woman came back into the room.

"Brooks will give you a tour of the facilities," Dr. Lee introduced her assistant.

Brooks smiled and opened the door for them. They left Dr. Lee behind and followed Brooks down the hallway. After weaving through a few corridors and walking up a couple flights of stairs, they made it to a medical testing facility. They walked down a bright white hallway with large glass windows. There were rooms with lots of complicated medical equipment inside and people in suits that looked a lot like the suits the Washers used to work on the exterior windows.

Some of the people were manipulating large robotic arms inside a box. The arms held needles and dishes. On a screen, there was a scene. It was an egg from the female reproductive system. Olson had read about it in books. A needle poked the egg, and it began to divide into multiple cells.

"Our technicians are highly trained at insemination," Brooks began. "We have very strict safety standards. You can see that the embryos are kept in sterile environments. We use a process called Crisper 3 to ensure..."

They continued down the hallway, and the assistant went into technical specs. Most of the information went over Olson's head. He didn't really grasp the science behind it, but he understood they would combine sperm and egg to create an embryo, and that would be inserted into the mother to develop.

"What about the chambers?" Olson asked.

"The maturation womb?" the assistant said. "Yes, let me show you."

They left the facility that created the fertilized eggs behind. Olson was sure there was more than what the assistant had been told. One of the rooms had a large freezer with lots of different eggs. There were so many samples going into and out of the freezer. It had to be more than just couples looking for new babies. Another thing that Olson noticed was that they were fertilizing a lot of eggs. In the short time they were there, the technicians did at least four. There was no way there were four couples all wanting a baby in one day. Four new babies a day would overwhelm the city. Olson had to assume they were making new people for down below.

"The maturation wombs are an artificial environment that simulates the mother," the assistant said as they climbed more stairs.

They exited the stairwell and went into a room with four chambers. They were large, metal cylinders. There were all sorts of gauges and instruments on the cylinders. Two of the cylinders were not in use. However, another two had developing babies inside. They were at different stages. One looked more like a mass, and the other was almost baby shaped. They both had different sound devices near the glass window. One was playing classical music, and the other some sort of math lecture.

"There is a lot of evidence that supports speaking to your baby while it develops will help it later in life," the assistant said.

"It's never too early for education," Olson joked. He was playing the role quite well, considering he had only learned about parents by reading. Though there was something more that the assistant wasn't telling them. They were only seeing the tour for the people up top. They weren't seeing the complete picture. Olson needed to know more. "What about the people down below?"

"I beg your pardon?" Brooks said, confused.

"Do they have their own maturation wombs?"

"Oh, they are the same as the people up top."

"How so?"

"They come from another part of the ECC."

"Like, what part?"

"It's nothing for you to worry about. The people from below do not mix with the people from up top."

"I'm curious. Could we see the other part of the facility? The one for the people down below?"

"You know, I'm not sure. I've never been asked that question before. I'll have to ask, but in the meantime...the wombs are fully equipped with the latest monitoring gear to ensure your child's welfare—"

While Brooks was speaking, Natalie had made a show of walking up to the womb to look at it. She circled around behind Brooks and pulled a square object from her purse. With one swift movement, she jammed it into the assistant's side. There was a blue spark, and the assistant dropped to the ground, unconscious. Natalie dragged her off to the side.

"Don't just stand there! Help me out!" Natalie yelled to the dumbfounded Olson.

"What'd you do that for?" Olson cried out.

"We aren't here to get the tour. She isn't going to tell us anything that isn't on the approved propaganda list."

"What was that thing anyway?" Olson said as they dragged the assistant to the corner of the room, where the unconscious body would be out of sight. He had never seen a weapon held by a citizen. They were illegal. The inequity in his society led him to believe that it was yet another privilege of being on top.

"My mother gave it to me. It renders people unconscious."

"But why would you need it?"

"My mother is worried about all the crime in the city. Now come on."

They burst through the door and then walked casually down the hall like they were supposed to be there.

Natalie's mother had always been overprotective. Her mom acted like even stepping into G-Town would get her daughter murdered. However, Natalie found that most of the people in G-Town were friendly. Most people up top thought all poor people were criminals because they were poor and didn't want to work. The reality was that they were just poor and, like everyone else, trying to make their way in the world. Natalie felt that it wasn't their fault that the jobs that happened to fit their qualifications were so low paying. Most of them would only go to crime when they didn't have any other options.

Natalie was always irritated that her mom had this perception that the people of G-Town were a den of drug addicts like the streams depicted. Natalie's mother assumed that people would be lying around, high and drooling at the ceiling, and her daughter would have to crawl through this cesspool of humanity to get to her father. Admittedly, the first time Natalie went to G-Town, her mother's perceptions of the neighborhood spoke in the corner of her mind.

She had brought several self-defense objects with her, and her hands were trembling. It was a normal day in G-Town. People just went about their business. A man walked by her, and she nearly jumped out of her own skin. The man huffed. He was probably used to folks treating him like he was a murderer, Natalie thought in hindsight. She tiptoed all the way to her father's hovel. No one accosted her. People either ignored her or gave her "the look," like the man she first encountered. "Poor doesn't mean criminal," she could hear people saying without words.

The reality was that there were some addicts and people who fit the stereotypes, but they were dealt with by the community of G-Town because of the distrust of the authority figures. Addicts caught by the OPS disappeared and were never seen again. G-Town residents would hide them and try to get them clean before they got themselves caught. It was hard, though, because OPS would do raids.

They would storm G-Town every so often, looking for addicts, drugs, and stolen goods. If any of them appeared in someone's cubicle, they would round up anyone who lived there. Sometimes drugs would appear in someone's cubicle if they gave the OPS an attitude. There was even a rumor that they'd carted off an old lady because she was attempting to nurse her addict son back to health. The news reports of these raids were spun to make them look like they were keeping the city safe.

Before Natalie found out the truth, she believed what she saw on television. Based on the news coverage, it was easy to see why people from up top thought that G-town was a place one step away from complete chaos.

Natalie didn't understand why her mother didn't know the truth for herself. She was the head of Human Resources. Even though the power structure was diffused into several different branches, HR was the most powerful. The town council made the executive and policy decisions. OPS focused on safety. The Red Carriage Bank made the finance decisions. HR controlled all of them.

HR decided what people could be. Each job in the city was allocated by HR. The pay rates were designed to keep those on top at the top and those below at the bottom. The gap between the classes of people was vast. People would not be able to cross the gap no matter how hard they tried. HR ensured this system would continue.

Natalie's mom had more blood on her hands than any person in G-Town. As the HR director, she would have the final say on all matters relating to the workforce. Her mother had probably fired many people during her career. How many of those people were rounded up by the OPS when they couldn't afford their payments? Even though her mother wasn't pulling the trigger, she was part of the system that had strict punishments for those who had trouble being a part of it.

Natalie's mother told herself the same lie everyone else did. The people who were executed dug their own grave, and her mom was just doing her job. The reality was that bad people got away with terrible acts because good people did nothing. Maybe her mom could have offered more training, rehab, or something to prevent people from ending up on the wrong end of a firing squad.

Natalie didn't blame her mother, even when her father lost job after job and sunk lower and lower. A lower level HR agent probably did the actual firing. However, she had the power to look out for him, maybe cut him a break. He had never worked in his life and needed some time to learn good work habits. No one had punished him for being late when he was on top, so he didn't really have any concept of the consequences for a person down below. It took him a while to figure out how to be on time. It wasn't that he could just turn a corner and be on time. He had to break bad habits and establish new good ones. It had cost him two jobs to learn that lesson.

Then there were a myriad of other skills her father lacked. He never had to pack a lunch, so he always forgot. He'd have too much indulgence or not enough nutrition and fall asleep on the job. He didn't know how to do tasks that everyone else seemed to know how to do because people had waited on him his entire life. The learning curve was steep, and everyone just expected him to know. It was like when a person from Olson's class was sent to college. They mostly failed out and were sent back to trade training. No one told them how to study but expected them to study and have good homework habits all the same.

It was a game that was easy to fail, and when failure equaled death, there was no room for error. When society seemed rigged against people from below, it was easy to see how people went to crime. In order to be successful at a job, people had to have skills that no one ever taught. In addition, fees, charges, and other citcred drains would prevent them from getting further. If they got ahead, they would fall behind again by catching up on their utility payments, double fees for lapsed ID renewal, or late fees for their rent. They would then get further behind with overdraft fees and payday loans because the citcreds couldn't come fast enough. It was a vicious cycle. Her father was almost at the end of his cycle.

Olson and Natalie went through some double doors that were marked "RESTRICTED." Olson turned on the recording feed on his touchlite. He made sure to carry the device in a way that made for a good camera angle but didn't make it obvious he was recording.

Erik's visitor passes had given them a lot more access than where a visitor could go. They came into a hallway that looked a lot like the one the assistant had originally taken them through. There were rooms filled with workers in clean room suits and medical equipment. Some of it was the same equipment as before. Lab workers fertilized eggs. There was a big freezer unit and other pieces for genetic testing and cell development.

They arrived in a room full of maturation wombs. There were rows and rows of the baby machines. Each row had fetuses at different levels of development. A voice said to each developing child, "You make your own fate." "A happy worker is a productive worker," and other phrases. They were repeated over and over again.

One womb had a blinking red light. A lab worker walked over to it and pressed a few buttons. A screen said, "Defective gene detected. 64% chance of tenacity and questioning authority. Purge recommended." The worker hit a few more switches and pulled a lever. The fetus and all the liquid flushed from the system. Natalie and Olson moved from the room as quickly as they could. Olson had filmed everything.

They wandered up a flight of stairs. At the top, they entered another restricted area. The room was large, and there were rows and rows of plain metal cribs. The doctrine was being played into each one of the cribs. "You make your own fate. A happy worker is a productive worker."

The babies inside stirred and cried. There was only one worker on duty. She was wearing a nurse's uniform and turned to face Natalie and Olson. "Can I help you?" she said in an unsure tone.

Natalie responded with the confidence of a person who was supposed to be there while Olson tilted his touchlite to capture everything the technician was saying. "We are inspectors from the council."

"Oh, I didn't hear about any inspection."

"Of course not. It wouldn't be a surprise otherwise."

"Well, you'll find everything in order around here. The babies have the proper citizen training playing all day."

"Do you ever hold them? Or pay attention to them?" Olson asked. He remembered reading about caring for babies during his research. They needed lots of attention, according to the wiki articles he had read. He was fascinated by the fact that humans spent a portion of their life unable to take care of themselves. It was no wonder that life officially started at One Year. All the time before One Year was spent learning control. Life began when people had some control to sustain themselves.

"Only to feed them and rotate them," the nurse said without a hint of emotion. "They get sores if you don't flip them over to their stomachs once in a while."

"What about when they get old enough to walk or climb?" Natalie asked.

"There are other rooms. We have one for each stage of development. Of course, if some progress too quickly or too slowly, we dispose of them."

"Dispose?" Olson said.

"It's painless, or so I'm told. There is a prick, and the body goes off to organics recycling."

Both Olson and Natalie exchanged glances.

The nurse continued, "It's all standard procedure. I know you folks from up top think differently, but you must remember that us folks from down below don't start life until One Year. Making sure they all average out helps them have a productive life."

Both Natalie and Olson backed away. A pit formed in Olson's stomach. He wanted to scream at the lady, but she didn't know anything. She was a piece in one great machine. Its gears would grind her up and spit her out if she didn't comply. How could she know what she was doing? The nurse was only told one piece of the puzzle. These were half-formed humans to her, no more miraculous than the beef grown in vats to feed the population. Sure, some would be old enough to walk and talk before they could leave, but until they were old enough to leave the ECC, they weren't classified as human. Olson was disgusted by what people could do when they didn't think of other people as human.

The nurse smiled and said, "This is why they need to tell us about topside inspectors. You aren't prepared. This is First Room."

"First Room?" Olson said.

"Yeah, each room houses the pre-humans through the five developmental stages."

"Pre-humans?" Natalie asked.

"Yes. Pre-humans aren't like children from the topside. They are grown in batches rather than being born."

"Grown?" Olson thought of the rows and rows of maturation wombs. He shuddered to think that if they happened to be from down below, they were considered grown, and if from up top, they would be born. He couldn't see any difference between the maturation wombs for the topsiders and for the people down below. However, this woman only had a piece of the whole. She had most likely never seen a topside maturation womb. She only saw the factory down below, and not the happy parents singing to their children.

"Of course, they are grown without any sexual desire. You can't have any unwanted pregnancies causing population spikes. That would be bad for the system."

Olson now understood why his classmates didn't seem to have the same feelings as him. He was attracted to Natalie, but no other student at McGladery seemed to have any care for sex or dating. Either Olson had some undetected defect in his genetic programming, or he was abandoned by a topside family. From all the monitoring equipment around, it seemed like the former was a rare occurrence.

"The pre-humans' growth goes through five stages once they exit the womb," the nurse explained. "During Second Room, the pre-humans learn to walk, crawl, bladder control, and so forth. It goes all the way to Fifth Room, where they are taught basic language functions, math, shapes, colors, and so forth. If they pass all five stages, they are wiped and ready to become One Years."

"Wiped?"

"Memory wiped. Pre-human days can be traumatic on those in school. Anything they learn at the ECC should be automatic anyway. Do you remember when you learned to pee or do you just do it? They learn the basics here. They pass and move to the next room. However, if they excel at the basics, or can't learn them, well...we dispose of the children who don't work out."

"You'll dispose of a Five Year?" Olson cried out.

"That's why you are inadequately prepared. A Five Year is a child already in their fifth year of schooling. A Fifth Room is just a pre-human. Flesh waiting for a chance to become fully human."

Olson wanted to yell at the woman. He wanted her to understand the lie she had been told. He wanted to point out every bit of evidence that they were people she was hurting. However, he knew she wouldn't understand because she only saw a fraction of what was happening and had been told lies. Just like when he tried to explain to his friends about what happened to Duncan, or about his attraction to Natalie. They wouldn't understand because they'd been told lies, over and over, since they were too young to remember.

All the pieces fit together. But it was easy to deny the whole picture when you were only given one piece. If this woman had seen mothers cooing at their babies up top, she might think twice about what she was doing to the babies from her level.

Natalie and Olson left the room without even a goodbye or a show of appreciation for the lady's information. Natalie resisted the urge to slap her, and Olson resisted the urge to puke. Olson turned off the recording feed. He had captured everything on video. They headed straight for the door and left their innocence behind. Shelia's warning made more sense than it had before. They were in too deep. Her mom could no longer shield her from the truth.

# 28

After they left the ECC, Natalie and Olson decided to speak with Natalie's father. He had lots of connections in G-Town. They figured her father would know what to do next. Since her father's place was probably still being watched, Natalie paid a Five Year a couple of citcreds to find him and slip him a note. The kid was reluctant at first because of G-Town's reputation. However, once the citcred reward got high enough, the kid agreed.

They decided that they would meet her father in the IDS Commons. It was a little bit of a risk. The near three hundred and sixty degree floor to ceiling wall of windows gave a view to the inside of the Commons from neighboring towers. The only part without the view was because of the massive tower on one side. However, the fountain pouring from the ceiling looked as if the water was flowing from the IDS skyscraper itself and lookouts could peer into the commons via the windows in the ceiling. Natalie and Olson were pretty sure their disguise would hold up at a distance, and the IDS Commons had enough connecting skyway bridges to make a quick exit if they sensed they were being watched.

Natalie could see her dad waiting by the fountain. They were entering the IDS from the Baker center, when Olson noticed something peculiar. He clicked the record button on his touchlite because he knew something wasn't right. Olson noticed a Washer near one of the windows in the giant glass common room. A Washer was such a common occurrence that most people didn't even notice them. This one was odd because he wasn't on the outside of the windows but on the inside. People still cleaned the inside windows too, but they didn't do it in full protective clothing. Olson panned down with the camera to Natalie's father and back to the Washer.

"What are you doing?" Natalie asked.

That's when Olson noticed the Washer pull a tool from his belt. He had seen the tool before. It was a glass cutter.

"Get out of here." Olson stopped Natalie.

"What?" Natalie said.

"There isn't time..." Olson yelled.

As if to accent the point, the Washer punched out the circular hole he had cut from the window. The clean air of the city was sucked out, and the burning air from outside began to fill the space. The unknown man hit a quick release from his belt and was lowered to the ground by a rope. He walked calmly through the mass of screaming people. The giant shutters lowered, about to cut off the exit from the IDS Commons. Natalie and Olson sprinted toward the thick metal door.

People all over the commons were scrambling for freedom. Some of those closer to the breach were already on the ground choking. The other windows in the giant glass ceiling buckled. There was a shriek of metal on metal. Every window in the commons area shattered, raining shards of deadly glass onto the scattering people below. A man was cut in the cheek, another lady impaled. The deadly glass was followed by a billowing cloud of atmosphere that engulfed the crowd.

Olson could hear the screams as he ran. The worst part was the gagging noise. He'd heard his own throat make that noise the night Duncan died, and he still felt tingles in the back from the memories of the burn. The gurgling sound of people's last breath echoed in his mind long after the incident in the IDS Commons.

Once they were mere feet from the exit, the crowd ground to a standstill when all the people converged on the lowering door. Natalie and Olson were crushed under the weight of everyone trying to break free. A woman screamed as she fell, and the crowd trampled her. Olson pushed his way upward and outward. He could see the shutters coming down to seal the atmosphere breach. Olson broke free from the crowd, and Natalie followed seconds later. The door closed with a loud crunching sound, killing those unlucky enough to be in its path.

Natalie pounded her fist against the railing on the skyway bridge. "My father," she yelled. "He's still in there."

"Maybe he got to another exit or inside a store," Olson said. Natalie cried out in frustration. Olson pulled her to her feet and said, "We have to go. The OPS will be here any minute."

Natalie breathed and nodded. They pushed their way through the crowd gathering on the skyway bridge. There were people chattering and offering assistance to one another. A few people were gathered around a lady who had severe atmosphere injuries. Another man was covered in glass and blood. Olson glanced back to the commons when they got to the other side of the bridge. He could see the grid pattern of metal where the windows used to be. There were also bodies. They littered the entire area. Some were still twitching. There was a large mass near the door that nearly cost them their lives.

# 29

They sat in a coffee shop, trying to decide what to do next. Olson had bought a bagel sandwich so they could huddle at a table out of sight in the corner without raising eyebrows, but the morsel sat in front of him uneaten. Their once immaculate hair was disheveled, and their new clothes were stained with dust. No one seemed to notice because all the eyes were glued to a television hanging from the ceiling. The headline said, "TERRORISTS STRIKE IDS COMMONS!"

An anchorwoman with a flat expression and professional voice read the news. "Terrorists put the entire city at risk today when they blew out the windows in the IDS Commons."

The news displayed pictures of the chaos they had just experienced. A woman was gasping for breath, and Olson turned away from the news to stare at his sandwich. Two men that were at the table close to them were chatting.

"It was only a matter of time before something like this happened," the first one said.

"Yep."

"If you ask me, there should be no windows in the entire city. There isn't anything to see, and who cares about natural light anyway?"

Olson looked over to Natalie, and she gawked at the television. Olson turned to see what she saw. Her father was being wheeled on a stretcher into the hospital. He had burns that were all too familiar to Olson. He had survived after all. However, it was what the newswoman said that made Olson's mouth hang open like Natalie's.

"Authorities have the suspect in custody, but he is still in critical condition. To help expedite the investigation, all footage from personal touchlites in the IDS Commons has already been uploaded and wiped from the citizens' devices. This will help ensure a fair, safe trial and prevent tampering of evidence. All footage will be returned after the trial."

No doubt the HR public relations team was hard at work manipulating the photos and videos. They probably had slews of people erasing photos that proved Natalie's father's innocence and were replacing them with edited ones to show his guilt. Any eyewitnesses who happened to survive would have to question why their memory conflicted with the photographic evidence in their possession. That's where the therapists would spin some bullshit about traumatic events causing memory issues. Olson had been through it before.

"If you ask me," one of the guys said, "they ought to just shoot the bastard and free up some hospital space for people who deserve it."

Olson put his hand on Natalie's leg. She almost confronted the guys. But they didn't want to cause a scene, not with OPS on high alert. Olson knew the newscaster was being fed lies.

Dale had nothing to do with the incident. Olson had the proof that would exonerate him. With his touchlite in anonymous mode, HR could not get into the files on his system. Dale's only crime was having a daughter who knew too much.

The next screen that appeared was a picture of Olson in the disguise created by Jackson.

"The OPS would like to question this individual, who is thought to have a connection to the bombing. If you should see this person, remain calm and use the emergency function on your touchlite."

The man who always seemed to have an opinion on a better way to run the city looked up at Natalie, and then his gaze went to Olson. When recognition dawned on the man's face, they knew it was time to go. They both stood up and darted out of the coffee shop before the man was able to dial the OPS on his touchlite.

# 30

They sprinted through the maze of hallways. They weren't the only ones running. In the aftermath of the incident, people were scrambling all over the city. Some were running back to their apartments to hide in fear. Others were emergency personnel heading toward the IDS Commons to take care of the crisis. They even passed some OPS officers who had their hands full keeping a crowd of angry citizens calm.

Olson and Natalie eventually made it to the Hilton Garden on the way to Erik's forgotten part of the city. It was the only place they could think about going. Natalie's house was no longer safe. Her mother would be preventing her picture from appearing on the news as long as she could. However, it was only a matter of time before Natalie's appeared next to Olson's. Once they were both connected to one of the largest terrorist events the city had ever seen, there were slim options for safe places to hide out.

The IDS Tragedy, as the news reporters were starting to call it, had killed more people in minutes than had ever died in all the historical terrorist attacks in the city combined. Now that Olson knew that they were selectively breeding, he figured that terrorists should have been eradicated from the gene pool. Yet, the city had experienced multiple incidents, including a bomb in a trashcan of a crowded commons room and homemade nerve gas in a storefront.

The windows that protected the people from the outside air had always seemed off limits even to the most twisted people. They wouldn't dream of putting a bomb in a trashcan by a window to the outside. That could kill them all. However, the line had been crossed today.

They passed into Leamington, and there was an eerie silence. The emptiness of this area of the city was much more evident now. While the rest of the city was in chaos, the forgotten part of the world was silent. They walked through the skyway bridge to the decaying waiting room. The ghosts of the past seemed more apparent than before.

"It all started with the babies, you know," Erik said, startling both Natalie and Olson.

"Don't do that!" Natalie punched him. "Do you know what is going on out there?"

"Trust me. I've been watching the news." Erik walked through the long forgotten waiting room. His footsteps echoed off the concrete. Olson and Natalie followed.

"What do you mean it all started with babies?" Olson asked. "What started?"

"They knew the atmosphere was going to shit. They had enough time to reinforce the windows and make the whole city airtight. Oxygen can be manufactured from algae tanks, which can also purify water. We can grow meat in a lab, so we don't need livestock. Plants can grow in any skyscraper with enough mirrors to bounce the light to the floors below. What better place to do it than the hardworking state of Minnesota?"

"Minne-what? What are you talking about?" Olson said.

"I'm talking about Earth's last stand. This was the room where you had to wait if you wanted to be on the last life capsule."

The security checkpoints, the empty chairs—they all made sense now. Olson imagined the people packed into the room while their atmosphere was dying. Their only chance at life was through a pass to the city. Those who were turned away were sentenced to death. This was the final stop for the people. The lucky ones survived. The others died.

"So this was the area where the people who lived on the outside waited to gain access to the city?"

"That's right, my boy. Why do you think they keep it locked away? They don't want anyone to see its dark secrets."

They arrived at his tinkering office, and Erik opened a closet. There were several suits for going outdoors crammed inside with various other pieces of junk.

"Why don't they clean it up?" Olson said. "Turn this place into apartments?"

"The reinforced windows were hastily installed in this part of the city," To emphasize his point, Erik rolled up his sleeve. The skin underneath was burned and scarred. "I use stem cell therapy to regenerate my face. They, of course, don't want to give me more than the minimum because it's a waste of resources. I think they only give me enough for my face so they don't have to look at me.

"But anyway, the founders knew what was coming. The planet was dying, but the politicians did nothing about it. It reached the point of no return before people started to care. By then, it was too late. Lucky for us, the people of this city saw it coming and created an indoor oasis to act as a life pod. However, there were a finite number of resources. They could only grow so much meat in a lab and plant so many crops. There were billions of people on the planet. How did they decide who got to stay and who had to go?"

The thought of billions of people was staggering to Olson. The ruins at the perimeter of the city used to be homes, offices, restaurants, shops, and all manner of places. The idea that the world could sustain that many people was mind blowing. Even more unsettling was the idea of a vast sky over his head. There were rumors that some Washers got cut from their training because they would get sick the first time they stepped outside. It was called acrophobia, and everybody in the city had it to some extent. Even in the skyway bridges that were mostly windows, there was a grid pattern overhead, a crisscross of beams to reassure a person that they were safely inside the city.

It was Natalie who spoke next. "So they decided to let the babies stay?"

"That's right." Erik smiled. "You could justify turning away an adult for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they had a skill set you didn't need, or a health problem that made them a risk. Perhaps their criminal record wasn't sorted. Adults, they were easy, but children? How could you justify turning innocent kids away? But they still had to do it. The oxygen processors, the food stores—the entire system could only sustain so much. What could they do with all those children? They created the ECC."

"But it's just a front for some sort of genetic experiment," Olson said.

"Exactly. You see, they didn't have room to let everybody inside. Think about it. You know that the atmosphere is becoming toxic. You see the disaster on the horizon, and the plan to survive is constructed in plain view of the public. You're going to need a system for letting people inside. Those who are smart, have money, or possess some sort of skill needed in the new world—they get their tickets early, maybe even before the first window is installed. But then the public sees the construction, and there's hope. There is a way they might survive too.

"You could hire security forces to surround the city and guard the project, prevent people from getting in. But there are more people than security. Panic is a powerful force. Enough people could take out any security. Mobs of people afraid and knowing they are going to die could overwhelm any army. You could kill a lot of them, but that would only get them to fight harder. They would eventually flood through your city and destroy what you've been planning for years, perhaps decades.

"So you need to give these people the only real reason to remain calm and not to panic. You need to give them a reason to protect the city, even if it means their lives. The solution? All children are guaranteed entry. Even if the parents don't meet the entry requirements. At least their kids are safe. When there is talk of storming the city by a minority of those rejected from the system, the majority have a reason to protect it. Thus, not only do you have the hired security, but you also have parents protecting the only life pod for their children."

"I don't see how this connects to the ECC. What does growing children from machines have to do with it?" Olson said.

"Let me show you, boy," Erik said and dug through the closet. He pulled out several of the hazard suits like the ones he'd worn on the day they had first met. The suits were old and coated with dust. Olson wasn't sure they would even work but decided to put one on anyway. He had never been outside before.

Once they were suited and ready to go, Erik took them to the door that he had first exited through when he'd retrieved the cat loaded with a glass cutter. They passed the machine that asked for payment, and it chirped at them. Erik opened the door, and they were blasted with atmospheric pressure. The suit seemed to hold, but Olson still flinched, the memory of burning lungs still fresh in his mind.

They walked from the sealed part of Leamington into a parking garage that was covered in a thin layer of red dust. Unlike the parking garages of McGladery and other buildings, this one had concrete walls sealing off the garage from the outside. Leamington had some floors that were sealed, others that weren't, and some that were half done. It was as if the disaster that engulfed the planet won the race to finish Leamington.

Most parking garages were filled with soil for farming and had mirrors to bounce light from the top levels. Others, like McGladery, were used as storage, and there were rows and rows of things like extra beds, replacement cubicle walls, and just about anything a school could need. The parking garages were perfect for miscellaneous storage or farming because the forklifts and farming equipment were the only battery-powered vehicles left.

Leamington was different from most parking garages. Aside from its exposure to the outside air, most of the stuff was old and likely from the world before. There were piles and piles of personal items. There were dusty and old suitcases stacked in a large conical mound. Other piles were dedicated to shoes, glasses, shirts, and personal items. There was even a pile of stuffed animals. The stuffed animal pile looked as if it had been picked through, probably for Erik's smuggling operations.

They walked through rows and rows of personal items, all organized by type. They made their way through the switchbacks of the parking garage. The piles seemed endless. When they climbed high enough, there was no effort to shield the garage. It was completely exposed to the outside air. When Olson got near the edge, he saw the outside not through a window but through a gap in the wall. The city was dead. The remnants of the former society spread out in all directions. It was unnerving to know that a rip in his suit could mean his death. He didn't know how the Washers did it.

Natalie, on the other hand, was used to seeing vast open areas, as she lived at the top. So instead of staring at the haze of atmosphere that surrounded the dead city, she focused on the objects around her, the artifacts of the old world. There were piles of touchlite-like devices. Some were much smaller than the standard-issue touchlite. Others were much larger.

From the personal effects, it looked as if people had choices in the old world. Some aspects of her society had no choices. There was only one touchlite. While the software was updated all the time, upgrading the hardware required an act of the town council. Every person would need to turn in their old touchlite and get a new one, so it was easier to keep the same design. The old world seemed to have a design for every person. Their thumb control devices seemed abundant.

She had thought about what life would be like in a world of choices. The city had very few of them. She had a lot more than the people down below, but she was still limited. Just like everyone else, she could have only one touchlite. She could also realistically have only one career. She would have to pick her place in the top and stick with it for the rest of her life. She could see what it had done to her mother. Her mother was emotionally dead inside.

Choices were even worse for the people of Olson's class. They really only had one option. They took a series of assessments, and then everyone was relegated to a certain track based on their results. They didn't get to pick their career track like her. They could only do what the system wanted them to, regardless of if they wanted to do it.

With all the choices of personal items around her, she realized the people before the city were able to choose any path they wanted to walk. There were probably so many careers that they could move from one to the other. They could decide where they wanted to live. They could even decide if they wanted a lot of space or a little. It was a world of freedom. But that freedom came with a price. They could only be as free as Earth's resources would allow. The atmosphere was the price they had paid for life without boundaries.

The trio continued walking through the artifacts from the society that the people of the city had forgotten, and Erik turned back to them. "As you no doubt have already figured out, the city let in more people than it could possibly sustain."

Olson's throat tightened. He hadn't really figured it out. The landscape and open air had filled him with so much dread and awe that he hadn't really connected the piles of personal effects to the people from long ago. A lump formed when he realized that there were too many piles of items. People had brought all their worldly possessions with them because they thought they were going to live under the protection of the city. Every T-shirt and hairdryer was leftover from people who had hoped they—or their children, at the very least—would be in a better place. Olson imagined parents sending their kids off with a few suitcases of items to live in the new world, the last holdout of humanity.

Erik stopped before they were about to round another switchback. He looked at both of them. Darkness clouded over his vision. He spoke, "You have to think of it from their perspective. They had a plan they knew would work. Humanity could survive. However, people don't listen to reason. If the millions of people on the outside had stormed the city, then no one would have survived. The oxygen recyclers can only sustain so many people.

"So this was the only way. I've had plenty of time to think about it. I couldn't think of another solution either. You see, they didn't let the people into the city, at least not physically. The city project from idea to completion would have taken so long that every last slot for a living human would have been filled before the city even opened. There would be no extra space. Registered people couldn't even take their pets.

"Cats were more than just stuffed animals, you know? But that's where they got the idea. People would want pets later on. Maybe the atmosphere would get better. Perhaps they would invent a way to process out the contaminates. Maybe the earth would heal on its own. Maybe the cities would expand. Humans would build more safe cities and spread out across the globe.

"Either way, there would come a day in the future when resources wouldn't be quite so limited, and people would want their pets again. So they took DNA samples. That way, they could clone a few dogs and cats when there was enough space for them. The idea wasn't too hard to apply to humans.

"So they claimed they'd let all the children into the city, and even some adults too. Of course, there was just the simple matter of a health assessment first. A little blood was all they needed. A simple way to take samples of DNA. A person used resources, but a DNA sample only used freezer space, which they already had for the animal species they wanted to revive later. If you couldn't save their lives, why not save their genetic heritage? Isn't that the point of children? So your genes can live on?"

Olson had a feeling that having children was much more complicated than transferring genes from one generation to the next. However, it made sense that if the founders of the city couldn't save everybody, keeping their genetic records on file would be the next best thing. If humans could expand further one day, then it would be better to have the ability to create new generations.

The purpose behind the ECC seemed to make more sense now. They were reproducing clones of people who they had "accepted" into the city. The artifacts from the time before could have been the possessions of any one of his friends at McGladery. The person whose DNA was used to create Bauer, for example, probably had a suitcase somewhere in the pile of belongings.

The names of the people down below began to make sense as well. Bauer was a last name. More than likely, it was the last name of the person whose genetic material was used to make him. Natalie, however, also had a last name for different reasons. A family name identified her as being part of a unit. A first name designated her individual self. People from down below didn't need more than one name because they had no family unit.

The real question on Olson's mind was whether or not the people who were accepted into the city knew what they were getting into. From the slew of unclaimed personal effects, it seemed that the people didn't know what acceptance really meant. A person wouldn't pack a bag if they knew their DNA would be the only thing to make it into the city. Years later, when their DNA was used to create a replica of the person from before, they would share a likeness in face but not experience.

The idea hit Olson when he thought of Bauer. He pictured Bauer as a kid, maybe even a One Year. He imagined two adults. They held Bauer's hand, and he cried. He told them that he didn't want to go to the city, and his parents told him that everything would be all right. Maybe they even made up a story about how they would be in the next wave to enter the city. Olson pictured a nurse lifting Bauer's hand and taking a sample of the kid's blood. Then what? Olson had to know, yet he feared the truth.

"What happened to them?" Olson interrupted Erik's rant that had continued in the background, despite the fact that both Natalie and Olson were lost in thought.

"Who?" Erik seemed a little confused, like he'd woken up from the deep recesses of his mind.

"The people," Olson said. "The people who were accepted into the city."

"Let me show you, boy." He motioned for them to step forward. They rounded the parking garage corner.

Olson stared in shock.

Natalie gasped and doubled over.

Erik ran over to Natalie and rubbed her back. "Calm your breath, dear," he soothed. "You don't want to vomit in these suits. You could choke at the worst. It's an awful smell at best."

Natalie gagged and coughed. Olson walked forward, up the slope of the piles of bones beyond. There were countless remnants of the dead. They were organized by type. There were piles of femurs, mounds of ribs, and rows of skulls. The workers who'd completed the task also made art. Sometimes they'd constructed geometric patterns. Other times, words spelled macabre jokes. "GOODBYE WORLD" was written in skulls.

The bones had maintained their pale white color despite the red dust that seemed to cling to everything. The eyes of the skulls were like pits. The skulls seemed to stare at Olson. A black, shadowy confusion seemed to be on their faces. Their eyes seemed to ask, why? Why were we the ones to receive this fate? Their mouths were stuck open in deathly grins that would haunt Olson's dreams.

Despite the terrifying display of the dead, the scariest part was that many of the bones were small, like they were from a child. "They let all the children in," Erik's voice echoed in Olson's brain.

There was a small house constructed from tiny finger bones. Had the bones not been such a morbid concept, some of the art would have been well designed. However, as it was, Olson understood the horror that had awaited people who entered the city. Every single bone was from a person who'd hoped they would survive the end of the world. They'd thought they were going to be on the last life capsule of humanity. Instead, they were lost in an expanse of bones.

The piles appeared to rise up forever.

"How far does it go?" Olson asked.

"All the way to the top," Erik said, "Well, not the very top. They didn't want the people left on the outside seeing the bones."

Natalie had stopped choking but didn't walk any further into the room. She was still at the point where the corner rounded to the bone yard. She sat with her back toward the human remains. She was staring silently into the ruins of the city.

Erik picked up one of the femurs and tossed it over to Olson. "See those marks?" he said.

Olson saw nicks in the bone. They were uniform, like the bone had encountered a machine. The bones had been through a process. Olson picked up another femur, and it also had the same marks. Olson felt a little queasy.

"Nothing goes to waste in the city," Erik said. "They used the recycling machines to strip the bodies of leftover bio matter. You need the raw proteins to grow meats. We may not be eating the people, but any bio matter can be recycled. When the resources of the city are all you have, you waste nothing.

"Also, the people on the outside needed hope. They needed to see people walking that skyway bridge to the city. Parents would watch their children walk down the skyway to a new life. The people on the outside would see their world crumble. They would experience breathing problems, increased cases of lung cancer, and other effects that could be ignored until you looked at the big picture. The hospital systems would be strained. Governments would be overloaded. Meanwhile, there was a solution, and they were accepting new members."

"But what would happen when they crossed over from Leamington?" Olson said.

"Let's go back to my office," Erik said. "It's easier to show you."

Natalie was grateful to leave the parking garage. When they'd first entered, the enormity of the situation hadn't hit her. With a life of privilege, she was free to think about the artistic qualities of life, the stories the objects would tell about the people from before. However, her musings about life before the city were cut short when she had seen the bones. She was grateful to leave the horrid sight.

Now, on their way back through the mounds of personal effects, she only saw artifacts of the dead. They were items with a hollow promise of life beyond the death of the planet. Humans may have survived, but it was a city built on the graves of others. Her entire life had been lived inside a house of bones.

Before Natalie began her quest for the truth, the worst hardship she faced was the worry that she might find her post-college job boring. Drudgery in her career path seemed trivial compared to the knowledge she now held. Natalie's life was secure from the sweat of clone labor. Olson was nothing more than a product designed to serve her class of people. However, she knew he was much more than that. Natalie turned and saw his face inside his helmet. His eyes were deep in thought. He had been profoundly affected by the realizations of today. Something changed in her, in that moment, she saw Olson in a different way. She felt comforted by his presence and in turn wanted to comfort him.

She reached out and held his hand. He took it. They both felt a wave of joy surge through their body. It was a stark contrast to the horror and dread they had experienced. Love found a way even in the worst of circumstances.

Natalie couldn't think of any instance of someone from the topside falling in love with a person down below. The people from down below had their sex drive removed. Without a sex drive, a person from below wouldn't even attempt to date a person from above. The people from above wouldn't end up with a person who had no interest in them at more than a friendship level.

From the day they first met on the stairs, Natalie knew that Olson was attracted to her. He was reasonably good looking himself, but Natalie had ignored it at first. She was such a product of her class that the notion of a person from below being anything but a worker didn't cross her mind. Yet the more she got to know him, the more she realized there was something greater to him.

Maybe his theory was correct. Perhaps he'd been abandoned by someone from the top. Perhaps birth control wasn't as safe as she'd been led to believe. But then again, people from the top always seemed to have nothing better to do than to sleep with each other. Cheating was an epidemic that most people did as a pastime, which made her father and mother's story all too common for a person of their social standing.

The rest of the journey happened in silence. The touch of each other's hands through a pressure suit was good enough for the time being, while they processed the implications of what they had seen.

# 31

Once Erik, Natalie, and Olson made it back to the shielded part of Leamington inside Erik's office, they removed their suits. After they were settled, Erik dusted off an old device and attached it to a monitor.

"It's called a desktop," Erik said. "People used to have them in their homes. They are like bulky versions of the touchlite. However, with limited space for manufacturing, the city planners had to settle on one device, so the touchlite replaced computers, phones, everything."

The computer booted up, and Erik clicked a few buttons. He pulled up a video and said, "This was taken from somebody's phone. A phone is that smaller version of the touchlites piled up outside."

Erik clicked the play button on the movie, and the computer monitor displayed a shaky video. It looked like one of those "found footage" streams about something supernatural lurking in the city. Olson had never really liked "found footage" streams. He always wanted to see more than the camera would let him and felt like they sometimes lumbered forward with no purpose in an effort to make the dialogue seem real. As much as a stream tried to make itself real, the fact that it was a video would always mean that it wasn't real, and if Olson wanted to watch real life, he could sit in the IDS Commons.

The video on the screen was clearly the skyway bridge coming from Leamington to the Hilton Gardens. There were slews of people with suitcases, bags, backpacks, and other items. During Olson's time period, suitcases were only rented for a move. Olson shuddered to think he might have used a dead person's case.

Everyone on the bridge was happy and talkative. The camera caught a glimpse of the ruins beyond, except it wasn't ruins. The city beyond looked new, and there were trees. The city was green like the parks and gardens of Olson's world, with the big distinction that trees were growing on the outside. Olson's mind was blown yet again. Plants were growing on the outside!

The strangest part was that the sky was a shade of blue rather than the red haze Olson had grown up with. Olson asked about the blue sky, and Erik said that the sky had looked like that not so long ago.

He noticed there were barriers on the streets surrounding the city. Men and women with guns and strange green uniforms were controlling people's entrance into Leamington. The people with the guns had masks covering their faces. The people waiting to get inside were coughing and sick. Some had masks, others had clothing covering their mouths, and some were unprotected. Olson could see the gloom among their faces.

It was a stark contrast to those who made it into the city. They were joyful and excited. They were ready to start their new lives. They entered a room, where a short man in a jumpsuit that almost looked like a proto-version of the OPS uniform came to greet them with a big smile. He called out a woman's name, and a lady raised her hand. He told her that there was some problem with her paperwork, and she was shuffled off camera.

"That was how they separated the ones who they actually let into the city. She was a leading microbiologist. They actually let a few people in here and there, when they had a skill the city needed. From my research, her descendants, the Nigramoto family, still lives up top in one of the minor buildings. With the strict two-children maximum for those up top, it's amazing that she has descendants at all."

"Two-child maximum?" Olson asked.

Natalie answered the question, "Since resources in the city are limited, people up top who want to become parents have a limit of two children. Having two children will maintain the population levels. Having one child will dwindle the population levels. Every so often, families are given permission to have three to make the population go back up if too many people decide not to have children or only have one."

The man in the video continued to speak to the crowd. He told them about a decontamination process and answered their basic questions about the city. If they got too detailed, the man would deflect the statements and tell them that they would be able to have a longer time to sit down for an extended conversation after decontamination. A team of nurses came out after the man was finished with his speech, and they took samples of everyone's blood. They put the samples in coolers, where mist was rising from the inside. Olson recognized the coolers. He had seen a technician at the ECC pull a sample from one of the coolers and place it into a machine.

After they finished giving blood, they were then sorted into two different rooms, the men and the women. The person making the video went with the men. Everyone took off all their clothes and put them into lockers. A person in the proto-OPS uniform told the camera operator to put his phone away. The operator hid the phone, and the screen went black. They could still hear the sounds of people undressing and the clang of lockers.

After a few moments of this, the person who had asked the filmmaker to put his phone away now asked them to come forward. There was the sound of movement and people walking. There were thumps and cracks on the speakers, like the person was holding it close. There was some nervous chattering. Then Olson heard thump and a hiss. Olson knew that sound. It was the sound of a door closing with an airtight seal.

The person doing the filming was able to switch to visual again. All the men and boys were standing in some room. They were naked and nervously chatting. There were spouts on the ceiling that looked like fire suppression systems. Some of them held their hands out under a spout like they had been instructed, while others were milling about in groups. There was a noise, and instead of liquid, a yellow gas came from the spouts.

At first, people were stunned. They either couldn't believe it, or they must have thought the gas was part of the process. The stunned silence quickly gave way to panic when people began to choke. The screams and yelling overpowered the microphone. It was hard to see what was happening because of the chaos in the room. People were scrambling toward the door. They tried to pry it open until their fingers were bloody. Others were scratching and pounding on the walls.

One small boy gagged and vomited blood. His eyes and ears were bleeding. Natalie turned away. The people dropped one at a time. They coughed blood and bile. The gas filled the room, almost obscuring the writhing mass around the person doing the filming. The person holding the phone was surprisingly resilient and continued to document until he wasn't able to hold the camera anymore.

The phone dropped and landed on something, most likely a body. For the first time, they all got a good look at the filmmaker. He was a boy with black hair who was about Olson's age. He spat up blood and fell back gurgling. The last few breaths of air came from his lungs, and the phone continued to film well past the life of its owner.

The worst part was the lack of noise. After the people stopped stirring, there was nothing but silence. The filmmaker stared into nothing while blood dripped from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

Erik switched the computer monitor off. Olson couldn't speak. His injury throbbed, and his lungs burned. The scene had brought back vivid memories of gasping for breath on the floor of his teacher's office. Natalie's breath came out in quick short gasps. The only other noise was the low hum of the air conditioner. They sat in silence for a long time.

"So what are we going to do about it?" Olson said at last.

Erik brushed Olson off, "What can you do about it? The entire city functions because everyone is only given a piece of the puzzle. Why do you think there is a city park where the gas chambers used to be? They paved over the past and buried it in the soil of the trees. In a warped way, those people that died got a second chance away from their dying world. Look at this."

Erik picked up his touchlite and typed up a few commands. Eventually, he pulled up a personnel record. After a few clicks of a button, he brought up a picture of the filmmaker. He was a little older in the file, but it clearly outlined that he was a lead technician in one of the manufacturing plants for touchlite electronics.

"Is that him?"

"At least a clone made from his DNA. This version of him lived about three hundred years ago. Lowell 11-0045928-C, but that's not all." Erik tapped more on his touchlite. Another picture of the filmmaker appeared on the screen. This person was wearing different clothes and had a wilder haircut. His job title read custodial staff. "This is from 200 years ago. 135 years ago. 50 years ago." Erik swiped through several profiles. The hair, clothing styles, and job descriptions would change, but it was the same person each time. There was a data entry clerk in his forties somewhere in the city who was alive right now and looked exactly like the filmmaker who had died in the gas chambers centuries ago.

"Can you look up me?" Olson said. He was almost afraid to ask.

"I already did. A while back when I first met you," Erik said and turned the touchlite to Olson after punching in more information. Olson saw his face, citizen number, and the word student listed for occupation. The file said "RESTRICTED."

"Wait," Olson said. "So there aren't any other files of me?"

"No, just the one."

Olson was convinced that he came from up top. Had more important events not been happening, he would have found Marius and questioned him. However, Olson's lineage would have to wait for another time, if they ever got out of this at all.

"But that doesn't mean there weren't any others. They could have restricted files that wouldn't appear in my search," Erik said. "Don't think there are any more of you running around the city as we speak. No two clones are alive at the same time. They wait until one dies out to grow a new one, but most of the people in the city are being grown over and over again from the same batch of blood they collected from the originals. An instant workforce, my boy. All it took was the sacrifice of those from before."

"More like murder," Natalie spat.

"Call it what you will," Erik said. "But this is how the city works. You find a defective worker who repeatedly makes mistakes or never shows up on time—maybe you don't clone them in the next batch."

"That's barbaric," Natalie said. "These people didn't have a choice. None of them do!"

"People rarely have a choice."

"So why don't we tell them the truth? At least let people decide for themselves?" Olson said. Both Erik and Natalie turned toward Olson. "HR lies to everyone. The city's only power over the people is letting them feel complacent in the lie. People don't have a choice because they don't know that the choice exists. The fact of the matter is that the city needs the lower class to function. Without the people from below, they have no one to buy their goods, shovel their shit, and run their society. All we would be doing is giving the people from below a chance to make choices for their lives. The people need to know, and we have the footage to expose them."

Natalie had misgivings. "I appreciate the high-minded sentiment, but what would exposing the truth do? HR will find a way to spin it to their advantage. They also have all the weapons. Even if they knew the truth, what would people do? They are too busy building characters on their apps or waiting in line for a blockbuster stream."

"I have to believe that things will change."

"Let's just focus on what we can do. Let's save my father..."

"Then what?" Olson said. "We can't live in Leamington our entire lives. There is nowhere to hide in the city. How long before they figure out we are here and come looking for us? The way to change society is to do it ourselves."

"We aren't going to change anything. Nothing changes. Ever."

"Sure, we might fail, but we will fail if we don't even try."

A special alert interrupted their conversation. The government TV in the corner of the room flashed the city logo, and the picture switched to a large convention room at the Red Carriage Bank. Olson could tell by the gold trim that was throughout the building. Natalie's mother stood on a platform. There were flashes of cameras, reporters, and a mass of people from down below. Shelia cleared her throat and then looked into the camera.

"We have caught the man responsible for the tragedy in the IDS Commons. He was deemed healthy enough to stand trial for his actions. It is the finding of the OPS Supreme Court that he is guilty on all charges of terrorism, treason, and mass murder. Violence has never been seen on such a massive scale and never will again. For this terrible act, we will be holding a public execution in the lobby of the OPS building tomorrow. It is a grave day for us all, but we can't afford to lose faith. The city has stood strong for many years, and may it stand strong for many more. You make your own fate."

The crowd of people began to chant, "You make your own fate. You make your own fate."

Natalie roared and smashed the TV until it fell from the wall brace and dangled by a cord, sparking and flashing. Erik looked at her and said, "That's destruction of government property, you know?"

Natalie turned to Olson and said, "Let's bring it down. Let's dismantle the whole system."

"I thought you'd never ask," Erik said with a deep grin.

# 32

Olson was on his pad editing together footage. Erik's workspace looked creepy at night. All the gadgets resembled creatures lurking in the shadows. He put everything he had collected from the executions he had witnessed to the real story of the IDS Tragedy. The public would know the truth. Olson put together footage clearly outlining that Natalie's father wasn't the real perpetrator of the incident. The footage began with a clear image of her father in the commons. Then it panned to the man in the unmarked hazard suit. He cut a hole in the protective glass and slid to the ground. Olson could prove her father's innocence.

Olson's fingers ached from swiping and dragging. He thought of videos he had worked on before. When Xiong won the Puck Grind trophy, he compiled a video. When Hanson held the highest score in the entire city on the Danglin' Donuts app, Olson made a video to commemorate the occasion. He was so obsessed with videos that his friends thought he would make streams one day.

He scoffed now at his childish desires. Streams were made by the elite. Olson could get a job getting coffee for the filmmakers up top, but when a position opened up, it would also go to someone's cousin, brother, or friend. He knew that now. Merit meant nothing in the city. What mattered was if you were born or made in a lab. He was born into the wrong class for filmmaking. That's why Olson was never tracked to a career path. He had a skill that wasn't needed from the lower class.

Now his skill would finally come to use. He had a chance to cause real change. It wasn't just the "you can make your own fate" propaganda that was used to give the public the illusion that they were under control of their lives. He was actually going to change the city. At the very least, he would save an innocent man from dying.

Olson could potentially save himself too. Had the authorities held him now, he would be executed as a terrorist. As a video editor, he knew how easy reality could be manipulated. All they needed was to take footage of Olson holding the glass cutter from Duncan's suicide and splice it with him in the IDS Commons. Even if they didn't have the footage, it would be easy to toss a glass cutter at his feet and take a picture.

Olson, however, would not manipulate anything. He would tell the truth. Even as his hands threatened to cramp and were shooting with pain, he furiously cut together his stream.

Natalie walked into the room. She saw him rubbing his hands, and she held them. "Maybe you should stop for tonight," she said. "We'll wake up early and finish it in the morning."

"Your dad can't wait another morning," Olson said and continued to work. He dropped a piece of footage next to a title credit. Natalie sat next to him and stared into the distance. Olson would have given her comfort, but his mind was fixed on the task before him.

After a while, Natalie turned to Olson. "Do you think we can trust him?"

"Who?" Olson said and didn't look up.

"My uncle."

"I don't see that we have a choice."

"But he killed a man."

Olson turned to face Natalie. "I know you're worried. I am too. But he's helped us so far. He has every reason to want to bring the system down too. As long as his goals and ours are the same, we can trust him."

"What about when his goals become different than ours?"

"Then we will have to deal with him. For now, he is an ally, even if he is a bastard."

Natalie didn't say anything more. Olson turned back to his work. After a few moments, he noticed she was crying. He set the touchlite down and embraced her.

"I'm sorry," she whimpered.

"What?" he soothed her. "You have nothing to be sorry about."

"But... it's just... all of my family... they are... I'm sorry...sorry..."

Olson caressed her back and held her tightly. He quieted her down and said, "No, no, you can't help being born. You had nothing to do with any of this."

Natalie's sobs turned into whimpers, and Olson uttered more encouraging words. Natalie buried her head in his chest. He felt her tears soak through to his skin. She turned, and her eyes locked with his. He looked down at her. Even when her eyes were red and puffy with tears, they were beautiful.

She leaned toward him and kissed him. He kissed her back. For a brief moment, everything disappeared. They were no longer in a city bent on destroying everything they held dear. They were two people locked in infinity. However, as much as Olson wanted infinity, it had to end.

He gently pushed her away. The salt on his lips and her sweet smell awoke a passion deep within him. He wanted to reach back out to her. He wanted to clear the worktable of all the gadgets and be with Natalie. He had read about sex, but he hadn't really understood it, at least until tonight.

He had to fight his desire. If he were to be with her, there would be the oppressive presence of the city looming over them. He wanted to be one hundred percent there in her arms. There was a time for love and a time for war. Tonight was a time for war.

"Not like this," Olson said. "Not now."

Olson walked away.

Natalie pulled him closer.

"Yes... now." She kissed him again.

Olson couldn't resist. He took her to the gadget table and tossed the objects on the floor. They landed with a crash. Natalie and Olson could not stop kissing each other. She tore his shirt off. Underneath was a finely chiseled six-pack of muscles. The fitness programs of the school from below were intensive, and most students didn't have the money to eat more than the nutritionally perfect food. For a class of people that was sexually suppressed, it was a shame they had bodies that seemed almost wasteful.

However, Natalie would enjoy his body tonight. As her shirt came off, Olson saw her smooth curves and black bra for the first time. His hands could not stop touching her, and she didn't want them to. He lifted her up to the table and sat her down. He leaned forward for a kiss, and she pulled him close as she leaned backward. They were able to forget their fears, at least for the night.

# 33

Erik went over the schematics of the city on his touchlite. It was one of the perks of being the city's lead engineer before his crime had isolated him. Erik knew the ins and outs of everything. Olson was beginning to understand more and more why they had kept him around.

For a brief moment, Olson thought that maybe Erik's banishment wasn't due to his privilege. Maybe it was due to the fact that Erik was too brilliant to send to recycling. Olson imagined that they probably consulted him on engineering problems from time to time when no other solution presented itself.

Then Olson had to remind himself that his sister was the head of HR. When the head of HR could decide whether or not people lived or died with a signature on her touchlite, Olson knew that it was nepotism, plain and simple. Natalie's mom wasn't a monster. She was a person like anyone else, who was corrupted by power.

HR was more than just the branch of city government that decided people's jobs. They ran everyone's entire life. By deciding who could have what job, and who should be removed from their position, they were deciding people's fates. If job loss could result in death, then HR held the power to execute people, and Natalie's mom was where the chain of command stopped. There was no higher authority than her. When she decided on an appeal, it was final.

While OPS had all the guns, HR had all the power. OPS was just a muscle to enforce the decisions made by HR. The job of Human Resources was compounded by the fact that they had to make all their decisions seem like they were for the benefit of the city. There were slews of copywriters, video editing spin doctors, and people whose sole job was to make others feel like they were in control of their lives. Every motivational message or manipulated news event was all stamped with "From the office of HR. Improving life for everyone."

They let the public think OPS were the meatheads doing midnight raids and patrolling streets, while HR worked tirelessly to make everyone's life better. It was a sick illusion that had to end.

Olson felt sympathy for Natalie's mom. She probably thought that she was doing what was best for the people. She probably thought she was the sole person who kept the system running while the town council dithered on topics like the paint color of the new sporting floor. Olson had to keep in mind that the system was sick, and Natalie's mother was a victim of that sickness too, regardless of the blood on her hands. Even though she had never pulled a trigger in her life, she had probably fired someone who eventually became homeless. They would be killed, a defective clone. A new one could always take their place.

"This is why I need you, Natalie," Erik said as he pulled up a floor plan of the Human Resources offices. "I could never get inside here. No matter what kind of disguise or fake ID I used, someone would recognize me."

"They'd recognize Natalie," Olson objected.

"That's fine. As they should. Ever notice how Natalie's face never appeared on any of the terror alerts? Mommy dearest's love will also be her downfall. She figured if she could catch you, Olson, my boy, and take you out of the equation, maybe her daughter's behavior would change. She could cover up Natalie's involvement. If the general public doesn't know, it's easy to do. So that means when Natalie enters the belly of the beast, all the lowly HR desk jockeys will think that Natalie is just a girl coming to her mother's work."

"But we were being followed! There has to be some people who know about her."

"Sure," Erik said. "Some of the elite agents and OPS officers that needed to know, but where are all those people going to be?"

"At my father's execution," Natalie said.

"Right," Erik said. "So if anyone sees you come into the office, they'll assume that you're there to stay in Mom's office, where it is safe."

"What if it's not safe?" Olson asked.

"It's a risk she'll have to take if we have any chance of interrupting the feed." Erik pointed at the government television, which was now showing preparations for the execution. Meanwhile, "experts" and reporters chattered about the new death toll, the sequence of events (which were fictitious, as far as Olson could tell), and other "news." The day was declared a national day of mourning, and everyone in the city had the option to take the day off work. Olson assumed they were all at home watching their TVs.

They wrapped up their planning session with some instructions from Erik about disrupting the TV stream. All Natalie needed to do was insert a thumb drive into her mother's workstation. Erik said that he'd handle the rest. Olson had the most dangerous task of them all. He was going to turn himself in.

# 34

The walk to the Office of Public Safety was discomforting but not in the way he expected. Olson had thought that he would have to dodge OPS officers and hide when he got near. However, there was no one in the skyway. It was virtually deserted. A few stray people were wandering here and there, but for the most part, it was empty. When Olson passed a sports bar, he saw a crowd of people all glued to the televisions.

People were either at home or in common areas, all watching their TVs. The entire world was watching this event. Considering the city had never seen such catastrophic violence, he could understand their behavior. The real question was what the people would do next, after Erik had taken control of the airwaves. Would there be a revolution? Olson could hope, but he could also see a population so used to inaction doing nothing. The middle of the two scenarios would most likely be the truth. He could imagine outrage.

Either way, Olson wasn't sure if he'd live to see it. He gave himself a fifty/fifty chance of surviving the encounter. If they decided to kill him on the spot, Erik would take over and turn Olson into a martyr. If he survived, they would vindicate him. Either way, he didn't have much of a choice. He could have decided to hide out and spend the rest of his life protecting the secret of Leamington, but they would have won. He would be just another clone discarded after he was no longer useful, if he even was a clone.

When Olson got close to the Office of Public Safety, his heart nearly pounded out of his chest. He thought he'd be detained, and the camera on his collar would be transmitting all the footage to Erik. They would beat, maim, or cripple him. He had to have faith that Erik knew what he was doing.

"Are you insane?" Olson had yelled during the planning session earlier.

"They'll kill him," Natalie added.

"Yes, I am insane, but please know they won't touch you. You'll have to trust me," Erik said.

Olson walked right up to the guards. They were wearing OPS uniforms, with the addition of red armbands. Olson had never seen the armbands before. He figured they must be a special uniform piece. He stopped at the entrance and braced himself for a blow. But the guards said nothing and continued to stand their ground. Their black helmets made it look as if they were staring into the distance. Olson didn't want to test fate and rushed into the Office of Public Safety.

Olson followed the crowds into the meeting hall. It was a grand space. The ceiling was domed. All three of the largest towers in the city could be seen glimmering in the sunlight: the green of the Capella, the black of the IDS, and the gold of the Red Carriage Bank. The space was decorated with all the city colors. Soldiers stood in a line against all the walls. People were milling about, finding seats and chattering. It was oddly like the opening of any normal sporting event with excitement in the air. Olson was disgusted by the whole affair. Had he not been here to intervene, everyone would have been cheering the death of an innocent man. It was disgusting how people were quick to judge and unwilling to forgive.

At the center stage, Natalie's father was tied to a chair and blindfolded. A group of officials were all sitting on various chairs. They looked like a lot of the same people Olson had seen at the Sealing Day celebration. They were all the important people of the city. A group of special OPS officers stood off to one side. Olson recognized them immediately. They were the firing squad he had witnessed. They stood at attention, waiting for the order.

Among the officials, Olson noticed Marius. He was shaking the hand of a man with grey hair and thick, bushy white eyebrows. The man looked like he was steps away from heading to the retirement building. However, people up top probably didn't go into the same building for retirement as people from down below. They would never go into a building from where no one returned. The crowd quieted down when the lights dimmed. Olson decided to take a seat in the crowd. There was no sense in rushing toward his death if Erik and Natalie weren't ready. Because of the number of OPS officers in the room, the outlook would be pretty grim if the people decided to riot. Olson had to wait and see.

Natalie's mother came to the podium and people clapped. She saluted the crowd. "You make your own fate," she said to the masses.

"You make your own fate," the crowd said back.

"Those were the words of our founders who built a society from the ashes of the old world. They built a society where hard work will take you as high as you want to go. A society that values everyone equally. A society where each citizen can pursue their own happiness. You make your own fate."

"You make your own fate."

"But this society, our society, is threatened by one man who didn't want to make his own fate. He didn't want to contribute to society. He wanted to use our resources for himself and give nothing in return. He wanted us to provide housing where others have to pay. He wanted us to provide food where others purchase their own. He didn't want to work. He wanted us all to work for him."

Olson knew that was a lie. Natalie's dad had tried to work over and over again. He may have not been prepared to succeed in the workplace, but there was never any desire to not work. Her dad's biggest problem was that no matter how hard he worked, he never seemed to get ahead.

"When we told him no, when we said that we have worked hard for everything we have earned, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to lash out against the society that gave him opportunity. He decided to kill innocent people. But since we are a fair and just society, we looked for evidence before we judged him. We do not just accuse and exact punishment without the truth being on our side."

A screen at the back of the stage lit up. Footage began to play. The first was Natalie's dad milling about the IDS Commons. The next sequence was a series of videos that made her dad look responsible for the crime. Had Olson not been there and taken footage of his own, he would have believed it as well. It was very convincing. The crowd roared, jeered, and taunted the person on stage. They cried out for vengeance.

Shelia let them go on for a while before she quieted them down.

Olson touched the camera on his collar. Hopefully Erik was recording this. Olson stood up and broke through the silence. "Liar!"

The crowd strained to look at Olson. Those near him shifted away as if to claim they didn't know him. Shelia pursed her lips and said, "Come up here, young man."

The crowd parted ways for him, mostly because no one wanted to be associated with him. Two guards went to intercept Olson, and Shelia waved them away. The guards returned to their posts with the other OPS officers. Olson climbed up to the stage. It was hot on stage, and he immediately began to sweat. He hadn't realized how hot stage lights could be.

The society's elite mumbled to themselves along with the crowd below. No one would dare disrupt a function, especially on a day like today. Olson moved toward the podium. He locked eyes with Marius. There didn't seem to be a hint of recognition. Maybe Olson's memory was wrong, or perhaps Marius was just visiting the ECC. Olson would have expected to see something like he saw in Duncan's eyes. Some hint of emotion. But there was nothing. Olson was a curiosity to him and nothing more.

"Come here, my boy." Shelia gave him a warm smile. Two assistants came out and fitted him with a wireless microphone, like the one he could see clipped to the back of her dress. There was a smug "I got you" look, even though she couldn't do anything in front of a crowd of people. She squeezed his shoulders like they were the best of friends. "Now tell me: Why do you say such harsh words? Have we not given you freedom? The chance to make your own fate?"

"You've given us nothing. People from below work to serve you and are discarded when they are no longer useful."

"Everyone has the chance to make their own fate."

"My fate was decided before I was born, just like every person in this room. Don't give me any crap about control over my destiny when my opportunities were limited by whether or not I was born at the top."

"I don't know what you are talking about. The One Years all come from the ECC. Everyone knows that."

Olson hoped that Erik had hacked the signal by now. He could really use some support for his words. He would end up looking like a raving madman without the evidence he had collected. Olson turned to the crowd. "They are lying to you. We are grown, in batches, to serve the people at the top. They kill people who don't follow along. Anyone who doesn't fit is defective, and a new person is grown as a replacement."

Shelia smiled and turned to the crowd. "You see, that is exactly what a terrorist would want you to believe. He wants you to believe that each of you are not the wonderful, unique individuals that you are. It's easier to justify mass murder."

Shelia gave a hand signal. Olson realized too late that he was walking into a trap. He cursed Erik out loud as he saw the footage appear on the screen. It was video of Olson sneaking out at night and dodging the OPS. There was footage of Duncan handing the glass cutter to Olson. There was footage of Olson with Natalie's father. The crowd began to jeer and cry out. Olson turned to run, but OPS security guards were already on top of him. They forced him to his knees.

"Quiet down, please. Quiet down," Shelia said to the audience. The uproar trickled to a murmur. The people all watched the stage. "As you can see, terrorism knows many faces. False ideology can corrupt even the youngest of minds. However, I don't blame him. After all, he is just a child. We only have ourselves to blame. Report your neighbors. Don't let the corruption spread..."

While Shelia gave her speech, Olson realized that Erik must have planned everything. Some of the footage used to incriminate him was from his time with Erik. Natalie's uncle wanted back into the city and had worked out a deal with his sister to get him there. Natalie was safe and most likely detained by the authorities. The OPS had probably descended on the office the moment she put the thumb drive into her mom's workstation. Meanwhile, the worst part was all the data Olson had collected would be gone. It would most likely be wiped and discarded or locked away in Leamington, another forgotten injustice, the filmmaker long since dead.

The image of the filmmaker from the gas chamber appeared in Olson's mind: the bleeding and hollow eyes, the lifeless stare, and the finality of the moment. The filmmaker was no longer some forgotten teenager snuffed out after he thought he'd survived the oncoming storm. He was now Olson. They would share a grave as they shared his fate.

Where did the bones of the firing squad victims go after their bodies were stripped of all useful material? Leamington, of course. The bones were more than just those of the distant past. They were the present and would be the future.

But then something happened. There was a murmur from the audience. Shelia even trailed off from her beautifully written speech and turned around. Olson lifted his eyes from the floor and turned to see what everyone was watching. The screen at the back of the auditorium was lit. It was showing another stream. This stream Olson recognized as the one he had cut this morning.

Shelia's image appeared on the massive screen behind her. "You can make your own fate. You are in control of your destiny."

A title credit appeared next, "BUT IS THAT TRUE?"

Images of the ECC appeared: babies grown in batches, little humans being brainwashed.

The nurse appeared next. "We dispose of the children who don't work out."

The next image was the description of how they get rid of the unwanted children. Then OPS roughing up the people of G-Town. The crowd chattered and pointed at the screen, and they began to shift and look around. As the video progressed, the audience got more and more nervous. The OPS guards looked toward Shelia for orders.

"Cut the screen," Shelia said into an earpiece. "What do you mean it's on every TV in the city?"

"THEY'VE LIED TO YOU."

The next scene was the exonerating video of Natalie's father. It clearly showed that he wasn't the perpetrator of the act. The crowd became angry now. They began to shout and jeer at the stage. They were advancing toward the stage when Shelia nodded at the guards, who advanced on the crowd.

The video of the OPS officers gunning down people came next, and full-scale panic ensued.

The OPS officers closed in around the crowd. The people pushed back and began to swarm the officers. Stunners were discharged, and people dropped, shaking from the blast. A group of people beat down one OPS officer and took turns kicking him. The guards got nervous and set their weapons to kill. Citizens began to fall. Others liberated a firearm and blasted back at the OPS officers. A citizen walked through the crowd, shooting random people, both OPS officer and citizen alike. One citizen was running from person to person and checking on the wounded.

"Is this what you wanted?" Shelia screamed at Olson. The guards had let Olson go to join the fray. Olson was already on the task of untying Natalie's father. Most of the people from up top had already snuck out a back door.

"No, this is what you did." Olson replied.

"I was going to offer you leniency," Shelia said. "I know my daughter likes you. I can't change that, but what I can do is change your class. I can make you one of us. You can live at the top. All you need to do is make a public statement. Tell them you made it up."

"It's too late. They already know."

"It's never too late," Shelia said. "You think this will change anything? There is a think tank meeting going on right now. Probably at the top of the IDS Tower. They will find a way to spin this. You've accomplished nothing. You've only gotten these people hurt or killed."

Amidst the chaos, there were already countless victims. A woman with an open head wound cried. An OPS officer lay limp in a contorted mess. A trampling victim groaned.

"I wasn't the one that created this mess," Olson said. "I was the one who inherited it from people like you, who just keep the system going even if you know it's wrong. You claim people have freedom, but they aren't really free."

"You don't know what true freedom does to people. The world from before continued to expand, grow, and use resources until there was nothing left of the planet. They were free to fix their society, but instead they lived for themselves and planned nothing for the future. No one wanted to reduce their standard of living, so the planet died. The founders knew that about people, so they created the system we have, and it works. No one takes more because they can't attain more. There is a glass ceiling so people will live with less because they certainly won't do it on their own."

"Meanwhile, those up top use most of the city's resources on themselves."

"I'm not saying it's perfect," Shelia said. "If everyone could be what they wanted or reach their full potential, there would be nothing left of the city. We would suck the resources dry like we did before."

"So who gets to decide? You? Birth?" Olson said. "Clones or not, they are still people, and they should decide for themselves. That's where you are wrong. Just because we screwed up in the past doesn't mean we are going to do it again in the future. You just don't want to give control back to the people because they might make a decision that will affect your bank account."

"The people have no power, and they never will," Shelia yelled.

"That's right," a voice called from a distance. It was familiar. Olson turned toward the back door, where most of the city's elite had snuck away. They were being pushed back into the room with their hands above their heads. OPS officers flooded the room from every entrance. They were all wearing red armbands. They pointed their weapons at citizens and OPS officers alike. The officers who weren't wearing the bands were forced to kneel.

A man in a hazard suit came in the back entrance with Natalie at gunpoint. Olson recognized the suit instantly. It was the same one that he had seen on the man who had cut the glass in the IDS Commons. The suit was a lot like Erik's, except it wasn't dusty and old like his. That's when Olson remembered when they put on their suits to go into Leamington. There was another suit on the hanger, except it was in a protective bag, like he was saving it for something special.

Erik popped the headpiece off his suit and said, "It's nice to smell that city air. Sorry about not starting the video sooner. I had an errand to run. But from the sound of it, you two really seem to have hit it off. It's always good to get along with your in-laws."

Erik tapped on an earpiece and looked toward Shelia and Natalie. He gave Olson the thumbs up.

Natalie yelled, "Olson, don't trust him. He—"

Erik kicked her in the head, and she went sprawling to the ground. Both Shelia and Olson ran to get her, but Erik lifted her up again. He pressed his weapon into her back. Shelia and Olson halted in their tracks.

"Oh no, no," Erik said. "While I'd love to stay for the wedding, I'm rather busy with the regime change, and I have these lovebirds to thank for it. Well, mostly this one for giving me government TV access." He pointed to Natalie.

Shelia didn't skip a beat. "You know those of us at the top won't support you. You know how the city works. You need the cooperation of lots of different families to get anything done. You can have your little soldiers, but they won't do you any good without more clones, or without access to wealth. That's why Human Resources has the true power. We connect all the departments."

"Oh yeah, those families." Erik laughed. "I almost forgot."

Erik pulled a device from his pocket. He pressed a button, and the sky lit up with an explosion. A fraction of a second later, the sound wave hit and the building shook. The top floors of the three tallest towers in the city collapsed. A large chunk of the Cappella Tower toppled into the skyway level and crashed through the windows. The IDS rained debris and fire into its already battered Commons area. The Red Carriage Bank blew up in several directions, shattering the windows of neighboring buildings.

The people screamed. The elite from up top cried out in terror. Some of them yelled the names of their children, who were no doubt caught in the blast. Fires raged at the tops of the three buildings where the blasts had happened. The doors were no doubt dropping to keep the atmosphere out and were probably trapping people in the burning parts of the buildings.

Erik didn't seem phased by the destruction that he had unleashed. He turned to his sister and said, "You were saying about the families not cooperating?"

Shelia had nothing else to say. She looked on in horror at the incinerated floor of the Capella Tower where her home had been.

Erik turned Shelia to look at him. He said, "I won't need the families because there won't be any families. There will just be clones to serve me. Well, maybe I'll keep your daughter around. A man has his needs, you know."

Shelia lost her composure. She had played everything so calmly, even as Olson was revealing her dirty little secrets. If anyone deserved the title of Human Resources Director, it was her. However, Erik had crossed the line. She let out a low growl and ran toward him.

Erik lifted his gun and shot her in the chest. Shelia dropped to the ground, and Natalie screamed. She tore out of Erik's grasp and ran to her mother. Erik turned to look at her with a strange, perverse glow in his eyes.

Natalie knelt by her mom. Shelia coughed up blood, and Natalie held her.

"Mommy," Natalie said, tears streaming down her face. "Please don't go."

"I'm sorry." Shelia squeezed her daughter's hand, and then it went limp. Her eyes glazed over, and her head tilted to the side. Natalie wept. Erik's pleasure only seemed to increase at the sight of his niece's pain.

Olson used the momentary distraction to charge him. He knocked him down and sent the weapon sprawling. The red-band OPS officers that had been guarding what remained of the city's elite drew their weapons. However, since Olson and Erik were grappling on the ground, they couldn't get a clear shot.

Marius was the one who acted next. He was kneeling in a row of councilmen who were all mourning the loss of their loved ones. His guard was attempting to get a clear shot at Olson. He tripped the guard and took his gun. The others began to follow his lead. People from the audience used the distraction as well to get the better of their captors. Soon, violence erupted in the meeting hall anew.

Erik got the better of Olson. He pinned Olson down with his legs and wrapped his fingers around Olson's throat. Olson's lungs burned and after a few moments, his vision dimmed.

# 35

"Wake up!" Olson heard the words like they were from a faraway place. He wasn't sure what happened. His head ached, and he felt like he was drowning and could barely get enough oxygen. Erik was nowhere to be seen. The entire crowd was still fighting for their lives and what seemed like a brawl before was now a struggle for life and death. People didn't use stun settings. They set the weapons to kill.

He finally noticed Marius standing over him. The man had a black eye and a burned shoulder. Marius fired off a couple more rounds and yelled, "Come on! Get up! We have to get out of here!"

Olson pushed himself to his feet. "Hold on! We have to get Natalie!"

He surveyed the room. Two red-band guards were bearing down on her. Olson picked up a gun and tried to shoot one of them, but its battery was drained. He swung it like a club instead and sent one man sprawling. Marius shot the other one in the head. Olson and Natalie picked up her father. Dale had sustained a head wound.

"Come on. We don't have much time." Marius ran toward the back entrance. Olson and Natalie dragged Dale to follow. Marius passed by the back door and went into a service elevator. They both ran after him as fast as they could to escape the fray. Their mysterious guide swiped a badge, and the elevator began to move.

Once the elevator was safely moving, Olson turned to Marius and said, "What good is going deeper into the building? We need to get to the skyway level."

"Erik and his goons probably have their run of the city by now. And who can blame them? The people are so scared that they'd probably listen to anyone who looks like they are in charge."

Olson hesitated. He knew it was a selfish question to ask, especially at a time like this.

Marius seemed to notice his hesitation. "What? Will you just say it already?"

"I..." Olson said. "I have this memory from when I was a child at the ECC. I know I'm not supposed to have them, but I do."

"Memory wipes were never that effective, but it's easy to dismiss leftover memories as a dream or the kid's imagination. So what do you remember?"

The elevator doors opened to a dark basement. They stepped outside the elevator, and Olson said, "I know this is going to sound stupid... but are you... my father?"

Marius laughed. It was a loud, wholehearted laugh. "Father? Kid, you don't have a father. Look." Marius pulled out his touchlite and swiped a few commands. He shoved the device into Olson's hand. It was his personnel file, the one that Erik wasn't able to access. It had Olson's name, and under that name it said, "EXPERIMENT 1000-26-2."

"Experiment? What do you mean experiment? I remember you and a woman..."

"You know as much as I do, kid. The woman you saw was my wife. She was in the IDS, taking our kids to the top-level park, when that son of a bitch blew the upper floors."

"But I saw her crying!"

"That's because she didn't want to let you go. No offense, but I didn't want you. We had our two, and while a third is permissible every now and then, it's still just weird. Look kid, I did it for the money. We were paid—quite well, mind you—to let them use my wife as a surrogate. It was her choice. I told her not to, but my business was shutting down. They passed that damn food truck law, letting clones own food trucks, and it killed my food court."

Olson remembered the derelict food court.

Marius continued, "So we got money. I was going to revitalize the food court, or at least buy some trucks and staff them with clones."

"Who is 'they'? Who implanted me in her womb?" Olson pressed.

"I don't know. It was secretive. The ECC implanted the embryo. We'd see you to term and then drop you off at the ECC. There were no questions, and we were glad to get the money..."

"But there had to be someone, a person who contacted you."

"It was all email. People at the ECC didn't even know. Look kid, I know as much as you do now. Meanwhile, it's only a matter of time before they come looking. So what do you say we keep moving?"

Olson and Natalie nodded. Marius took them through a long series of tunnels. Most of the doors needed a key card to access them. Natalie's father slowed them down, and they seemed to be inching through an endless maze.

Marius explained that the tunnels were all part of a lower subbasement network. The founders realized that some actions needed to happen in secret to protect the city. They created a network of tunnels that could only be accessed by the elite.

Natalie shrugged when Olson asked if she knew about them. "They don't teach us everything in school."

Marius went on to say that most of the people up top didn't really use them unless they were cheating on a spouse. "OPS mainly uses these tunnels to haul off defective clones."

Marius noticed the expression on Olson's face and was quiet the rest of the journey.

# 36

They eventually made it to a garage. It was different than most parking garages. It was small and flat. There was a metal door that must have led to the outside, as Olson could hear wind buffeting against it. There were yellow lines painted on the ground, and between each yellow line was a vehicle. They were large and camouflage colored. They were much too big for city use. The only vehicles in the city were forklifts and carts used to transport boxes and food trailers across the city. These vehicles looked airtight inside, which made Olson think that they were for outside use, which was strange. Olson had never seen a vehicle outside.

"They're called hummers," Marius said. He used the gun he had stolen to blast out the tires of all the vehicles except one. Then he began testing out keys from a rack until he found one that opened the door to the only hummer with good tires. He shoved the key into Olson's hand, and they loaded Natalie's father into the back. "They are leftovers from the world before. They were designed to keep out the atmosphere. The city maintains them in the hope we can go outside again one day."

"Why don't they use them now?" Olson asked.

"See those tires? They are made of rubber. What affects the air outside also dissolves rubber. The founders planned for everything they could think of, but there is always something you can't plan for. It's a bacteria that was released when the permafrost melted. The holes in Siberia? Nevermind, just know that its byproduct is that damned red fog that covers the planet. Rubber, living material, people—they dissolve. There are treatments for people who come in contact with the outside, if we get to them soon enough. Some wanted to spray the treatment into the atmosphere, but how can planes take off without landing gear? The whole damn world was connected through rubber."

"What?"

"Never mind. The point is that society was meant to go on. But we lost our way to get to each other. I suppose we could have invented a plastic substitute, but we were always so internally focused. By the time technology caught up, we had already created our own world. There was no room for outsiders. Not in our city."

Olson was afraid that Marius had cracked. He was ranting and near tears. There was a loud clang from behind. They could hear the shouts of OPS officers and the stomping of boots.

"Quick. Inside. Hurry." Marius shoved them into the front seats. "Drive pretty much due east. Maybe a bit south. You can't miss it."

"Miss what?"

"Oh, the Hennepin Bridge. I think that's the one that isn't broken."

"What? Where are we going?"

The boots drew closer. The OPS was almost upon them.

"One more thing. I want you to come back one day. I want you to come back with an army and kill the son of a bitch who murdered my daughters. You'll do that for me?"

"I will."

Marius slammed the door shut and then ran to the large metal shutter. He pressed a button, and there was a hiss as the seal was broken. The garage door began to rise. Marius waved one last time and shot himself in the head with the gun he had procured. The OPS with red armbands burst into the room seconds later.

Their uniforms protected the OPS officers from the toxic air. However, the blasts from their weapons were absorbed by the armor of the hummer. Olson looked at all the controls with a dumb expression. Natalie grabbed the keys. "Don't you know how to drive?"

"It's a job skill. Only the cart and forklift drivers are taught how to drive," Olson admitted.

They switched places while the OPS guards approached cautiously.

"One of the perks of living up top," Natalie said as she turned the key and thrust it into gear. "There's a go-cart floor."

She gunned it, and the hummer leapt forward. The OPS officers scattered, and the hummer hit the half-opened garage door on its way out. Gunfire followed them out the door, but it wasn't enough to impede the vehicle. The hummer bounced and bounded over the terrain, away from the garage. It had way more power than the carts Natalie used to drive back home.

They traveled through the ruins of the city. There were many derelict buildings, empty and abandoned. They were crumbling and beaten by the weather. There was debris decaying in the streets. It was messier than the areas visible through the city windows; those roads had been swept clean, except for objects too heavy to move without machinery, like the bus near the Leamington bridge.

A child's toy collected dust on the side of the road. Its once bright pink colors were now dull from the searing heat of the sun. Near the toy, there were bones hiding in the debris, not just one or two but many. They weren't neatly stacked like the ones at Leamington. They were strewn about with the artifacts of the world before. The people had died, and no one had been there to clear them away.

Natalie had to dodge and weave around rusted old cars, now useless, their tires dissolved long ago. She could feel her grip on the road slipping. The tires of the hummer were losing traction as the atmosphere ate them away.

They found the Hennepin Bridge easily enough. There was a great chasm on the east side of the city. There was a large, dry bed of sand at the bottom. Most of the bridges that crossed it had collapsed. The only bridge that survived looked as if it was about to crumble. There was a sign that said "Grain Belt" that was about to topple on the other side of the chasm. Olson wondered what it meant. It was another ghost of the world before.

Natalie crept the hummer across the bridge. She thought of her mother. While she wasn't the best mother, she didn't deserve to die. She regretted their last argument. The words were hateful, selfish, and petty. Her mom was a tool of society as much as the rest of them. What choice did her mother really have? If her mom had resisted, she would have fallen to G-Town too.

They made it across the bridge and kicked up the gear. The tires were dissolving. Hopefully, Marius had a plan other than to strand them in the middle of nowhere.

She looked at her father in the back seat. He was dazed and tired, but he seemed to be doing much better than he had been when they were dragging him through the tunnels. He was at least awake.

They charged through the ruins of the city. They were both shocked by the number of buildings that lay derelict in the endless expanse of death. The world from before had been so full of people. Most of the buildings weren't connected like the ones in the city. Olson had to wonder how many people had attempted to seal themselves inside, only to die when the resources ran out.

They reached a blockage in the road and had to make their way south a bit before they could continue east. They reached a road called Summit that was filled with debris. It looked as if it had been scorched by a fire that incinerated every part of the block. They were about to give up on finding anything at all when they saw a glow lighting up the sky. Natalie pushed the car down the road and wove through the wreckage.

They came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a hill. There was a large structure with a domed roof to their left. A section of the dome had collapsed long ago. The decayed structure watched over a city not too far from the bottom of the hill.

There were lights and skyways. Reinforced windows and protective domes. A building close by shimmered in the night. It had a giant pyramid at the top. They decided to head for that building.

Tears streamed from their eyes. They would be safe. There was another city. Best of all, there were other people.

Natalie kicked the hummer into reverse, and the wheels spun out. "No, no," she yelled. She hit the accelerator again with no luck. The tires had degraded too much.

"There are some hazard suits in the back," Olson said. "We can walk from here."

"What about Dad?" Natalie said.

Natalie's father gave her the thumbs up. Olson climbed into the back and found that there were only two suits.

"You go," Natalie's father said.

"No," Natalie said. "You'll die when the hummer runs out of battery. The air filters won't work. We may not be able to come back in time to get you."

"It will be like falling asleep," her father said.

"Don't say that!"

"You don't have a choice," he said sternly.

"No, Daddy. No."

"Go. Before the battery dies for all of us."

Natalie hugged her father. She wanted the embrace to last forever. Her dad eventually let go and looked her in the eyes. "I love you, honey."

"I love you too."

They suited up and said their final goodbyes. They left the vehicle as quickly as possible, so as not to cause Dale needless suffering. They walked through the debris and eventually spotted a road that made its way to the pyramid building.

They trudged toward the city, making sure they carefully watched their steps as well as their oxygen supply. Natalie turned back to see the hummer on the hill. The soft glow of the interior light faded away. Her father would be fading shortly after it.

Olson reached out and held Natalie's hand.

The city ahead of them reached toward the sky. It was a beautiful wash of colors. They were close enough now to get a glimpse of the inhabitants. There were people walking the skyways and going about their lives, but it was different from the city they had come from. There were families. People were walking about with their children—not just a few people, but lots of people.

Olson gripped Natalie's hand tighter. They walked toward the pyramid building.

Maybe they had found their home.
Notes

Check out the sequel set to be released in late 2018! For free books notifications, discounts, and more join my mailing list. Follow me on Twitter. Or check out my website.

If you enjoyed the book, consider leaving a review or lend it to a friend. It helps me out.

Thanks to:

My Editor: Therin Knite

My Cover Artist: Phillip Hughes

And to my wife Felicia Karas for all her support and feedback as well as all those who took time to read, provide comments, and offer their support of this book. It means a lot to me!

# Time Burrito

A time travel comedy by Aaron Frale

With great burrito comes great responsibility

"This is a wacky and fun SF book." --Teller (shorter, silent magician half of Penn & Teller)

# 1

Chef Andre Pierre Jaramillo, or Pete for short, wanted to make the perfect breakfast burrito because his life was a mess. His food truck was a derelict crap factory that a cat had pissed on the day after his grand opening. He never could get the smell away. The students of the University of New Mexico bought his burritos not because they were good, but because they could get one for a dollar. If they could ignore the urine smell, they could feast for pocket change.

If he could make the perfect burrito, he could charge more. If he could charge more, maybe he could buy a storefront and get out of the university area. Pete envisioned himself making breakfast burritos for the Albuquerque mayor, shaking his hand, taking a picture, and framing it on the wall with all the other celebrities. Instead, he was listening to some ungrateful dweeb complain about a buck burrito, "There's bone in my meat."

"It's cartilage, not bone," Pete said as he changed out some wilted lettuce for slightly less wilted lettuce.

"I could have choked!" The student slammed the floppy burrito onto the counter. The other students behind him in line rolled their eyes. The piece of "bone" was no bigger than a pencil tip. It wasn't Pete's fault they tossed the entire damn cow into the grinder, and a piece of cartilage had gotten through.

"Even a baby couldn't choke on that."

"I'm going to report you. This is unsanitary. What's your permit number?"

"Sorry," Pete addressed the line of students. "We're closed!"

He slammed down the shutter to the food truck, and the angry student was drowned out by the thick metal crash. Pete slumped to the ground and pulled off a hat from his head. The front pictured a burrito. Embroidered on the back were the words: "The perfect burrito."

_______

Later that evening, Pete locked up his food truck. It was November, and the days were getting shorter. It was dark by the time the dinner rush was over. He cleaned the truck and prepped for the next day. He would have had to wake at three in the morning if he were to prepare for the breakfast burrito rush, so he'd rather do it at night. By the time he was walking towards his truck, most of the students had gone home. Even the ducks at the duck pond were sleeping.

He hefted his way across campus, sucking in breath while he walked. His doctor had said he was pre-diabetic a couple of years ago. He hadn't done anything about his health and had even gained fifty pounds since the diagnosis, so he was sure he was full-blown diabetic by now—not that he cared—Pete was always walking one step closer to death.

He crossed Lomas towards the squat, brown, adobe-style Physics building. There was a lot behind the labs where he parked his truck. It was one of the most expensive lots, but he didn't see any other way he'd have time in the morning to park the trailer, the truck, and open at 7 am. At least, not if he wanted to sleep.

He'd circled the building as far as the other side when he saw a blue flash of light come from one of the windows. A loud explosion quickly followed. Pete ducked and stumbled backward. He toppled over and cracked his tailbone on the pavement.

"What the—" he yelped and pushed himself up. Before he could figure out what had happened, a man in a button-up shirt and slacks stumbled out from one of the doors of the Physics building. The man's hair was burnt, and his hands were bloody and charred. He looked at Pete and collapsed.

"Hey," Pete yelled and ran to the man. "Hey, mister. You OK?"

It was a stupid question. The man was clearly not OK. In fact, the man might have even been dead. When Pete got close enough, he poked the dude with his foot. The guy looked up and said, "It worked!"

"What? What worked?" Pete asked.

"The perfect—The perfect—" The man coughed and hacked.

"Burrito? The Perfect Burrito?" Pete bent down to help and held the guy.

"The perfect quantum tunneling—." The man gagged and continued. "Tell my lab assistant—that I love her."

The man died in Pete's arms. Pete stumbled backward. He was in serious trouble now. This guy was a professor, from the looks of his graying hair, and crow's feet around the outer corners of his eyes. He didn't look like any customer of Pete's. The only people who would eat his swill were college students. He'd tried to cook at the state fair once, and they'd put his truck right next to the Garduno's tent. He couldn't compete with Garduno's.

To make matters worse, there were already rumors about his burritos. Students would say they were chupacabra ground up with rat. Seniors dared freshman to eat his burritos. Frats used his burritos for pledges and pranks. He didn't care, for the most part, because it was good for business. The only reason he survived was that they were cheap. Students shoved anything in their mouth that cost a dollar. He'd tried raising the price to a buck fifty once and had lost half his business in one day.

If Pete were found by the campus police next to a dead professor, the rumors would end him. He was having enough trouble as it was. The one bedroom roach motel he called home was already one month late on rent and perpetually three months late on power. Each bill came with a friendly threatening notice that they would shut off his lights. He was seriously considering sleeping in the food truck.

He was about to run when he looked at the open door to the physics lab. He thought about what the man had said about his assistant. Maybe she was still in there. Maybe she was unconscious, or something. Maybe the lab was on fire. He imagined carrying her heroically out of the building. The Albuquerque Journal would say the next day, "Pete 'The Burrito Man' Jaramillo Saves Local Woman."

Pete sucked in his breath and went into the building. Smoke filled the hallway. There was a lab down the way with a door hanging off its hinges. Pete gagged and coughed. Holding his breath was much harder than it looked in the movies.

He bumbled through the hallway to the lab doorway. A network of supercomputers was on fire. In the center of the room was a long black table that reminded Pete of this busted air hockey table, with all the white paint stripped off, that his uncle Ricardo had in the basement. Except that this wasn't an air hockey table. There was some weird blue and white, glowing, crackling portal on top.

It looked like the special effects he saw in the Wayne's World movies, or was that Bill and Ted? He couldn't remember. He knew it was the one with that guy from The Matrix. Behind the table, he saw the lab assistant. She had a cute round face, brown hair, and thick black glasses. She was the most beautiful chick he'd ever seen—and he was around college students all day.

He circled the table and poked her with his feet. There would be no use saving her if she were dead. However, she stirred and mumbled something. He attempted to bend down to pick her up, but he wasn't so good at bending anymore. The extra pounds and the relatively sedentary lifestyle had taken a toll on him.

He finally maneuvered himself in a way that he could grab her by the arms. He hoisted her up and dragged her toward the doorway. Her white lab coat got stuck on the edge of the black table. He huffed and grunted but couldn't free her by force alone.

He plopped her on the ground and waddled towards the table. He leaned on the edge with one hand and went to fiddle with the lab coat with the other. His weight was too much for the table to bear. The leg cracked and shattered, sending both Pete and the science experiment to the ground.

The strange glowing portal crackled and flashed. The whirlwind of activity increased. It began to suck everything in the room towards it. Lab equipment and office supplies flew into the portal. Lightning flashed with each hungry gulp. The unconscious lab assistant started sliding towards the ravenous hole.

Pete grabbed onto her leg with one hand and onto the base of a server rack with the other. The phenomenon intensified. It swirled and engulfed everything that wasn't nailed down. Pete and the assistant rose off the ground as it ate. At the peak, Pete felt what it must have felt like to be hanging on for dear life while being sucked from an airlock.

His hand was numb, and it slipped. Pete and the lab assistant flew into the portal, and they disappeared from the room.

_______

Pete woke up in the blazing hot desert sun. He spat dirt and grit from his mouth. He looked towards the Sandia mountain range that was pressed up against the side of Albuquerque, and it was right where it always had been. However, Albuquerque wasn't where it was supposed to be. There was no city whatsoever. The desert surrounded him. There were no buildings, no university, and no physics lab.

The lab assistant groaned from beyond a bush a couple of feet away. Pete ran towards her and kicked a notebook in the sand. It looked like some crazy math stuff. There were also some office supplies littering the desert. He picked up the notebook and was going for a pen when he felt the tip of a spear poke into his back followed by a loud grunt.

Pete put up his hands and turned around, dropping the notebook back into the sand. When he finally saw who was holding the spear, he thought that he was back at a Metallica concert after he had taken something his friend Tito called an "herbal supplement." It was way back when the band all had long hair. He remembered hearing the primal music and watching James Hetfield scream into the mic.

He realized, at that moment, that humans had evolved from apes. His whole life, his father had never believed it because he thought the planet was six thousand years old. Pete saw it for himself. James Hetfield melted into some sort of ape-man. Kirk went next. Thousands of years of evolution right before his eyes, and the vision all went away when some crazy screaming skinhead guy head-butted Pete and jumped back into the mosh pit.

Unlike the vision at the concert, the man in front of him was a real-life caveman. He had a large forehead, a mop of hair, and was wearing pelts. The man eyed Pete cautiously and picked up the journal. He sniffed it and took a bite. It didn't taste good, so he tossed it.

Pete went to pick up the notebook; the caveman squealed and shook his spear. Before the Missing Link was able to impale Pete, the lab assistant crawled out of a bush. She cursed and swore, "That stupid git. He thinks that he can take advantage of me. Just because I'm a woman in physics doesn't mean I'll sleep with him for a Ph.D. I'm going to report him to the provost."

Her accent made her even hotter. Pete knew it was Downton Abbey that she was speaking or was it Downtown? He wasn't quite sure where it was from. He was pretty sure Downtown Abbey was in Australia. That hot actress from Once Upon a Time was also from Australia, so he was pretty sure Downtown Abbey also happened there too. One time his friend Tito had caught him watching Downtown Abbey, and he'd had to punch his buddy so he would shut up about it.

The caveman's eyes lit up when he saw her. He let out a soft grunt, and his hold on his spear went limp. Pete used the moment to snatch up the notebook. The assistant felt around on the dirt for her glasses. They were thick hipster glasses that were almost too big for her face.

"What's this, then?" she said when she saw the two shapes of people staring at her. She was used to people staring, mostly men. It was no wonder why she wanted to lock herself up in a lab the rest of her life. She hated dealing with people. Once she found her glasses, she put them on and said, "Are you kidding me?"

She walked up to the caveman and examined him. She poked and prodded, even sniffed his hide. While she worked, she just talked to no one in particular, "The old goat knew what he was talking about. I thought he was just a pervert trying to impress his grad student. But this—a real life Homo Neanderthalensis—this is amazing, and would you look at the jawline? Completely different from the speculated—who the bloody hell are you?"

She noticed Pete for the first time. He shrugged, and said, "I'm nobody—I guess—but Pete's my name."

He stuck out his hand.

"Clara, and if you make a Doctor Who reference, I'll kill you." She stuck out her hand. However, before they were about to shake, the caveman screamed. He roared and pushed Pete to the ground. He grabbed Clara and slung her over his shoulders. Before Pete could get back to his feet, the caveman was halfway up the rise heading towards the mountains.

# 2

Pete ran up the hillside, huffing and puffing. The characters in Lord of the Rings made it look really easy to run for hours. The last time Pete had run was when his gym teacher had made him do it in high school. He'd had to run a whole mile, and it took him fourteen minutes, but he still beat the kid in the wheelchair.

The foothills leading to the Sandia Mountains were gigantic. He'd never realized how much so until he had to run up them himself. He stopped and puked several times during the journey, and one time he had to sit and cool off under a piñon tree. The caveman was way more physically fit than Pete, so he was long gone before Pete could crest the first hill.

However, Pete reckoned that he was smarter. He'd taken half a college class called Introduction to College Studies. He bet the caveman didn't have any college experience. So he would have to use his wits against the caveman's brawn. It was an age-old tale. Like David and Goliath. Pete was pretty sure David had challenged Goliath to a checkers match and won by outsmarting him.

Pete figured he would do the same, except he would challenge the caveman to a game of PvP in Halo. Pete was pretty good at Xbox, so he figured he could win Clara's freedom back. Now all he needed was to find them.

Lucky for Pete, he'd spent a lot of his high school years finding new places to take Tito's herbal supplements. Since he'd spent most hours after school with Tito and friends, Pete had driven all over Albuquerque and the surrounding area. There was a cave way in the mountains near Placitas that was called the Sandia Man Cave. It was a spot where archeologists had found some caveman's bones.

In Pete's time, the cave was nothing more than a place for teenagers to party. If a person went to the very back of the cave, they'd find nothing but beer bottles and graffiti. Pete and his friends had set out to party in the cave once but had found out that they would have had to walk far away from the parking lot, and had decided to hang out in the car instead.

The landscape receded from the desert into the forested foothills. Day turned to night, and after an eternity of pseudo-running, mostly walking, Pete came to a stream that he knew led to the place where the Sandia Man Cave was located. He drank from the stream greedily. He was dehydrated from his day in the sun, and the cool water was the best he had ever had.

He pulled out an empty flask of whiskey that he had used to keep himself sane while making burritos. He filled the flask and shoved it into his pocket. On the way to the cave, he drank and filled it several more times.

In his time, there had been a dirt road leading through the mountain valley. Now back in the caveman days, it was nothing more than a game trail following a riverbed. It was peaceful, back in the olden times. He never heard a car, a plane, or anything. Even when camping in the Jemez Mountains with his buddies, he would hear an occasional plane fly overhead.

The woods were dark, and the shadows were long at night. All the mysterious sounds of the forest at the witching hour seemed louder in the crisp night air. Most people would be scared of aliens or wendigos, or some crazy beasts in the woods after dark. Pete, on the other hand, liked it. He liked hearing the chirping of insects and hooting of owls. The night was always his time. He had planned to hire someone for the morning shift, as soon as his burritos got famous.

Finally, after a day and a good part of a night of walking, he saw the cave. It was easy to spot because the caveman must have lit a fire. It was blazing at the cave entrance up on the cliff face. Pete sighed. The cliff face.

In Pete's time, the cave had been at the end of a trail with a spiral staircase leading to the cave entrance. With railings, stairs, and platforms, it was a rather safe tourist experience for anyone who wanted to visit. Back in the real Sandia Man times, it was a cave on a cliff face.

An experienced rock climber would have had no trouble making it to the entrance of the cave, but Pete sometimes got winded when he had to use the stairs at his ghettotastic apartment complex. There was no way he was going to make that climb. His rescue attempt was going to end in failure. Once again, he was going to make matters worse for himself and the girl.

Oh well, she would make a good Sandia Man bride. Maybe her smart genes would create whole new smart generations, and by the time he got back to his time, they'd have Star Trek technology. He was pretty sure Wesley Crusher never used the holodeck to study. A teenager with the ability to create any scenario he wanted? A few choice ones came to mind. They wouldn't have been able to take Pete out of the holodeck if he'd had one. Especially if they'd had a Halo-themed one.

Pete was about to pack it in, and find a place to sleep for the night when he saw a figure standing at the edge of the cave entrance. If he wasn't mistaken, the figure was a short female that he'd recently had the pleasure of meeting.

"Hey," he whisper-yelled. She didn't seem to hear him. "Hey! Hey! HEY!"

The last one was a bit louder than he'd intended, but it seemed to do the trick. Clara responded, "Pete? Is that you?"

"Yeah," he said. "I'm here to rescue you!"

"I do appreciate it, but I don't need rescuing."

"Huh? I thought he was going to—um—mate with you."

"Oh, yeah. I thought so too at first, but he's been a perfect gentleman."

"He has?"

"Well, yeah, by his standards; he's attempted to pick the lice out of my hair, offered me a dead squirrel, all the things you do when you like someone."

"Does that really work?"

"The dead squirrel?"

"Yeah."

"We have nuptials planned for tomorrow."

"So that's what I've been doing wrong. No chicks ever want to sleep with me."

"Are you serious?"

"Um—" Pete had been very unlucky with women his whole life. At this point, he was ready to believe anything.

"Please promise me you'll never give a girl a dead squirrel. Look, I'm not in any real danger for now, but I think he's a bit jealous of you, so I don't think you should come up here."

That was a relief. Pete didn't even need an excuse not to come up. Plus someone was jealous of him! Pete had never made anyone jealous before. That made him feel slightly more manly, in the sense that he'd never really felt manly in his whole life.

"So what do we do now? I thought I'd challenge him to a game or something to win ownership of you." Pete said.

"First off, I'm nobody's property, and second, what game could you possibly play with a Neanderthal?" she queried.

"I was thinking Halo."

"Where are you going to get a Play Station?"

"Xbox."

"Whatever. I do appreciate the sentiment, but I think the more important question is how to get us home. Did you see if anything came through the portal with us?"

"Um," Pete pulled the notebook from where he'd tucked it into his waist. "I found this notebook."

"Good! The professor's notes. That will come in handy." She turned around and peered into the cave, "I think I hear him stirring. I suggest you make yourself scarce. Here."

She tossed down a cooked carcass of an animal. By some miracle, Pete caught the morsel, despite the way he flailed wildly every time someone threw something at him. It looked like a rabbit. It was charred and covered in some sort of seasoning. He looked it over.

Clara called down to him. "It's rabbit, with a special seasoning he made. I had some earlier. It's quite good. Now, I'll find you in the morning, and get the notebook."

"Wait!" Pete said. "How will we find each other? I'll write down my phone number in this notebook."

Pete scrawled on the first page.

"Um—Pete—" Clara said.

"Yes—" Pete said and looked up after he was done writing.

"Do you see any cell towers around?"

"I heard they look like trees now. So you never know what could be a cell tower."

"You do know that we're in the Stone Age, right?"

"Like time travel?"

"Yeah."

"That's what I figured, but did they have cell phones back then? I mean I heard once they used to be made of brick."

"That's 'brick phone,' like a bulky phone."

There was a grunt from the cave, and Clara said. "I think he's waking. Hide!" She ducked back into the cave. Pete didn't wait for the caveman to discover him. He tromped through the forest until he was out of sight. He found a relatively soft spot on the ground and popped a squat.

He looked over the rabbit several times and then decided to take a bite. It was the most wonderful flavor he'd ever experienced in his life. He ate ravenously, cleaned all the bones, and sucked every last drop of seasoning.

Later, when he was picking his teeth, he realized the seasoning on the rabbit reminded him of something. It was a flavor that was with him his entire life. It was what he'd craved when he would hang out with his friends after taking Tito's herbal supplements. It was what he dreamed about at night. It was the taste of his grandmother's cooking. It was what he'd failed to achieve in his kitchen. It was the flavor of the perfect burrito.

