Chapter 6

After a week I was ready to throw in the towel. The code, and the file, had to be somewhere, they just weren't any place that I looked. I stewed about it for another few days before Irene suggested I stand the question on its head. How would the information get created and saved? Find examples, and I'd find the file.

Take your average kid. Their first exposure to Claiborne was in the Orientation Class. I checked with Administration. We were due for a new crop of kids in the next few days. I spent the intervening time learning how to 'tag' a student—it was a lot easier than I thought, and made me think it'd been done before—and monitor and log their activities. Then I pulled up the list of new students, six boys, eight girls, and tagged each of them. Reading their files would be a lot of work, but if it gave me the answers I was willing to put the time in.

When Orientation started I couldn't tell much about the boys. That was because Boys Orientation lasted about 30 minutes, and ended with the girl who was guiding him having sex with him. Tell me the teenage boy who'll turn that down. But a file was being written, and I flung my net wide enough that I found particulars were being created for him: physical characteristics, where he was looking when things got going, what happened in the shower in P.E. (very important), and so on.

I put markers on all of that information. Then I studied the girls.

I was more at home here, being one myself. And I understood nearly everything I saw. It didn't take long before each girl's personal preference for her looks had been logged. When they came into Claiborne those preferences were activated: longer hair, curly, straight, or styled, different color, bigger boobs, smaller waist, and so on. And the constants were logged as well: fingernail color and makeup being the two I identified right away, not that I'd ever really tried makeup. And suddenly I had the file.

It was located as part of what I called the Startup Routine. I made the time to show it to Irene, and she walked me through the whole process. Each time a person entered Claiborne the Startup File was run, and their personal preferences were executed. This was what was happening when we were "on the bus".

"What happens if we take a gay boy and make him hetero?" Irene asked as we read through the file of one boy who was mostly gay.

"What happens if we take a lesbian and make her really interested in boys?" I countered, pointing at another girl.

"Or vice versa. Fancy a little girl-on-girl action?"

"Only with the right girl, and only if the time and situation are right."

"Me, too. But..."

"Do we have the right to do that?"

"Well, no," she said, "we really don't. Pity, I'd really be interested in trying this. There are a couple of people I wouldn't mind shaking out of their routines."

"Yeah, but once we start playing God, where do we stop?" I jotted a note. "We'll let someone else do that. Now how is the system determining these things? I don't see any questions."

"It's got to be interfacing with the student's brain in some way."

That took another week. Irene went back to what she was doing, though I showed her things from time to time. But at the end of the week, and just about when the girls would join the student body of Claiborne (or, if you will, the student bodies plural), I had something. I got permission to conduct some interviews with the new students, and that clarified a few things.

"Yes, I did feel awfully tired that first couple of days," the girl said. Her name was Melissa; she had Pippi Longstocking red hair that hung in braids over her shoulder, very pale skin, and a faint wash of freckles on her face and chest. And the file said she was a hetero.

"I didn't really feel like doing too much, either," she added. "You know, you get so tired you just want to veg out when you get home."

"I know exactly what you mean," I said, nodding sympathetically. "Other than that, how are things going?" We were meeting in one of the rooms that were used for Girls Orientation.

"Well, I'm a little nervous. I'm still not used to the..." She gestured at her body.

"I was, too. Don't worry, you get over it. Pretty soon you won't notice it very much." I grinned. "You'll notice the boys, but that's normal."

"I hope so. Tell me, are the classes really as tough as they say?"

"Tougher, actually. I got to compare myself against a high school in the outside world, and I'm so far ahead of them it isn't funny. They tested me into college level courses."

"My friends think I'm a big brain."

"You need it around here. And you'll make some really close friends at Claiborne." Really close, I thought, like intimately close.

"I hope so." She swung back and forth in her chair. "Do you ... what about the... ?"

"Sex?"

She nodded. "The teacher said I'll want to, but I never had before, not until..." She blushed.

"I hadn't either when I came here," I said. "But you have the normal set of teenage hormones, and you'll want to."

"But ... but what if I don't want to?"

"You will. After all, you can do it without consequences here. No babies or weird diseases, and it gets kind of fun when you remove those worries. I felt I didn't want to, either, but now..."

"Now?'

"Now it's fun. I had to learn to relax and let things happen, but now that I have, it's wonderful."

"What about my monthlies."

"You don't have them here, either, which is kind of nice. I know on the outside there are days I feel pretty cruddy. I've had cramps, too, but that's something else that doesn't happen here."

She brightened up. "Really? 'Cause I've had them so bad I've just stayed in my room."

"When you get some time, look them up," I said. "The library here has a whole section on cramps, and how to prevent them. I followed what they said, and it works." I didn't add that I still felt somewhat nasty in the last few days before my flow, and that didn't happen at Claiborne, either. Essentially you got all the advantages of being female, with very few of the disadvantages.

"There are so many things around here that I'd never do in the outside world."

"See that you don't," I said. "It's safe here, and you should take advantage of it."

She nodded. "Look," I added, "I've got to get to class."

"I guess I should, too."

She returned to her books, and I went back to my little room next to the library. I accessed the Claiborne program, and focused on each of the routines that ran when a student was in Orientation. It took two more days, but at last I isolated it and sent it to print in downtown Portland. Then I placed a call to Mrs. Griffin.

"I'm looking at it," she said when I finally got through. "I think what happened is that we'd isolated Claiborne as a security measure when the auditors came through, and this is why they never found this module."

"How do we test it?"

"'We'?"

"Or are you going to claim credit for finding it." I'm not sure why I asked that. Maybe I was just showing that I was my mother's daughter.

"No, you get full credit. But before we test it we have to determine a few things, and that's what I'll be looking at. You might not be the one to test it, that's what I was saying. For instance, will this work only for Claiborne, or can we use it for anyone."

I had this image of a group of people trying it out, and going at it in some living room. None of them were pretty or in shape. Trust me, it was not a pretty sight.

"But I don't want you cut out of this," Mrs. Griffin said. "I want you to come up with some ways to test this. We'll consider them, though we might not implement any of them. Consider this a test."

"How long do I have?"

"Until Monday afternoon." It was Wednesday, so I thought I had plenty of time. "You'll need the entire scenario: what you're looking for, how to measure it, and so on. Trust me, Shannon, it isn't as easy as you think, especially the measuring part."

I thought about it on my way home. Once in my room I started listing all of the things that I thought would be needed. How do you measure what's in a person's head? Simple. You go in and look.

I longed to try this out on some of the people hanging out around home. People were still kind of down because of the 'betrayal' of Professor Bainbridge, so I couldn't get much of a conversation started. When Saturday night rolled around, the booze came out for everyone else (no reefers, don't give the Man any reason to harass you), and I 'enjoyed' a Saturday night typical of my life. While other girls my age were out on dates, going to dances, movies, football and basketball games, or even necking in the backseat of a car, I was involved in games of our own, such as "If I Was King of the World".

'King of the World' supposes you can have one wish, and that whatever it is comes true. You can't wish for something in the abstract; world peace, for example, is out. But 'raise the minimum wage', or 'free health care for all' are both allowed. You propose it, and then you spend the next half hour defending the idea, while people tell you everything both right and wrong with it. And the focus is always on 'practical' details.

Let me be clear up front. These are the 'practical' details that are perceived by a bunch of revolutionaries who have never worked a day in their life, and political wish fulfillment is a large part of it. For instance they believe people will always act in accordance with their theories about Class. So right away you can see that the 'practical' difficulties are really a sham; good old collectivist ideals, outmoded and proven false 50 years before, would more than suffice to solve critical issues. People will behave in the manner you want, and all will be wonderful. And if they don't? Let's just say there were a few assumptions everyone had.

Misty, well, we called her Misty, though that wasn't her name, lived in the Annex next to the bomb shelter. This was a separate set of rooms in two levels that had been built over the years. They had an emergency exit a few houses away (the homeowner didn't know) and independent water and power purloined from the neighborhood. We gathered in the main room of the 'bomb shelter'—in quotes because the heavy blast doors had been removed.

I wasn't sure why Misty was staying with us, probably some activity that the Federal Government objected to. Suffice it to say, she needed to keep a low profile until things blew over. Anyway, Misty brought up the topic: 'Get rid of wrong-thinking people'.

It's been a favorite topic since the 1960s, and everyone dove in. I'd heard it enough times that I could recite the details from memory. In any population you'll have three categories of people: your supporters who will follow you without question: your opponents who must be destroyed; and those who just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. The ratios are about 1/5th supporters, 1/5th opponents, and 3/5ths indifferent. The solutions are to eliminate the opponents, reward your supporters, and propagandize and terrorize the rest through an informant network, random arrests, and creating a climate where nothing would be allowed to exist that contradicted the Official Line (something the Educational System was well on its way to doing). Or, in other words, if the State didn't approve of it, it couldn't happen, and those who tried to do illegal things would be arrested and treated harshly.

By 'elimination' Misty and the others meant just that. The discussion came down to the technical and logistical details of murdering 50 to 60 million people. That's more than the Soviet Union did at the height of the Great Killings of the 1930s. But these people could discuss this without any horror at what it meant. Americans weren't really 'people', not in their books. They were numbers in a book, an abstract, and so on. That's the sort of deliberate blindness you get when intellectuals make policy.

Misty ended, as always, with plans for a series of camps across the country, mostly in North Dakota and other wintery places, where the borderline types could be educated properly, and the undesireables eliminated by the climate. Her eyes were alight, a 'true-believer' seeing the future. This must have been what it was like in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, or Hitler's Germany.

Would you believe that the point of greatest contention was how to dispose of the bodies? Most people wanted to bury them where they wouldn't be found. If you think about it, that tells you that they knew what they were doing was morally reprehensible, and they wanted to hide the evidence. Everyone discussed the models: burn them like the Nazis tried, but you needed a super-hot furnace, 3000º or something like it to consume the bones and make sure you didn't have bits of burned flesh drifting out of the smokestacks; others wanted to do as the Cambodians and Russians did it and bury the remains in large pits. That risked discovery by people in the future, so they prescribed 'deep' pits. When it came round to me I suggested what the Argentinians should have done with the people the Junta made disappear: load the bodies, living and dead, on giant barges and sink them in 16,000 feet of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I got a lot of objections to that from a couple of the more rabid people: they wanted proof that the person they were destroying was dead. Essentially they wanted to gloat over a dead body. Failing that, they wanted pictures. Others were concerned that people might escape from the barge and swim ashore. My reply: go another 100 miles to sea. Theoretically someone might survive, but the odds were against them.