Daughter 4254

Chapter 16

“Didn’t go so well huh?” 0203 flopped her dinner tray on the table and took up the stool next to me.

“How could you tell?” I was still getting used to having people want to sit with me during meals, much less talk to me in public.

“I could see the smoke rising off of your head from across the room. You look angry enough to break down a wall if the right button was pushed.” She smirked at me and took a bite of her carrots. “I don’t know what else you expected from 789. I told you, he’s a bastard.”

“It’s a long story,” I mumbled through my bread and cheese.

“I’ve got time. 5547 is working on a project through dinner and won’t be free until tomorrow.”

“How do you have time to worry about boys with all of your classes and assignments and plotting? Your schedule is twice as full as mine and yet you seem to know everyone and have your hand in everything, including a potential mate!”

“Simple. I delegate.” She pointed to a table across the room. “That girl over there, with the triple braids down the side? She’s is a whiz when it comes to horticultural abnormalities so she’s writing up my paper on pea pod production challenges. In exchange I’ve agreed not to tell anyone that she was snogging face with a junior professor in the common room supplies closet.”

“But you just told me, and that’s not delegation, that’s blackmail. How do you know she’ll do a good job for you? How do you know she won’t make stuff up and try to make you fail?” I didn’t want to add that I had no idea what snogging face was, I was tired of being the new girl who didn’t know anything.

“Ha! I’m not that bad. You’re so serious 4254!” She took another bite of her meal, chewed carefully then smiled at me before she swallowed.

“Well?” I asked.

“I was teasing you. You are familiar with the concept of an untruth as a humorous point of conversations right? A joke?”

“I know what a joke is. I know that you’re lying, I’m just not in the mood.” I continued eating my own food as she explained.

“This school is impossible. The amount of classes they make you take that are completely irrelevant is ridiculous. A few of us have worked out a system. If you are good at something or enjoy it, that’s your thing. My thing is psychology and sociology as well as anthropology and cell biology. If you ever need help with a psychology assignment, I’m your girl. Likewise, triple braids over there is, like I said, a whiz with horticulture. So we swap. I do her psych, she does my hort. Fair and square. We save a ton of time.”

“But how do you learn anything for the tests? Isn’t that cheating?”

“My friend. Haven’t you noticed how absolutely childish your math class is?”

“Well, now that you mention it, yes. I don’t really understand why I’m in that class at all. I asked the teacher and was given a lecture on controlling my academic vanity.”

“Ha! I love that one. I swear they have a training camp for these morons where they teach them all the key phrases to turn a kid away at the door,” she snorted and carried on. “The whole point of this fine institution is mediocrity. They want us to be barely more literate than the field workers - no offense .”

“None taken.”

“Then they pull out a few of the top notch kiddos, the ones they are absolutely sure they can control, and then they teach them the real stuff. They are the ones who get to learn all the fancy schmancy technology and cutting edge theories. They are the ones who get to actually DO something with their brains. The rest of us... we’ll be lucky to have permanent assignments that don't’ bore us to death before they put us to final use.”

What she said made perfect sense. If you really were to pass on all of your knowledge to your children there was a very good chance that they would find a different way to do things, a better way. And that could very well be a way that was not popular with the leaders.

“So I guess it’s all about revolution then?” I grabbed the chance to accuse her of being a revolutionary herself.

“No, it’s about survival,” she mumbled through a bite of food. She was eating her lunch like it was her last ration.

“I thought you liked your studies.. all that horrible Mind Wipe stuff?”

“Oh I do, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m not in the super brainiac group, but I’m allowed to at least work on things that interest me. Granted, they won’t give me access to the ancient library on psychology or the database on human psychological genome project, but they let me off of this campus once in a while and they actually ask for my input on research projects now and then.”

“Do you think you could find something out for me?” I realized suddenly that 0203 could probably help me in a lot of ways with my new goals.

“Depends on what you can do for me. I have a math exam coming up that I’m not hyper to tackle.”

I looked around to make sure no one was listening then I whispered, “I want to know if Professor789 has always been assigned to work here at the Secondary School.”

“Why are you so hung up on him?” She looked at me skeptically.

“My mother said he was a friend of hers, that he knew her. I assumed he was her teacher, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Yikes. Your mom was friends with 789? It’s kind of hard to imagine him having any friends at all.”

“I know. None of it makes sense,” I paused but decided to go ahead and confide in her fully. “He was so horrible. He said he didn’t remember my mother at all, but I could tell he was lying.”

“Lying huh? That is interesting. I’ll see what I can do. I have a friend who got assigned to the front office a couple years back. He is a walking data pad of inside information on professors.” She took a couple of bites in silence then asked, “Why do you think he had an assignment before here? That’s pretty rare you know.”

“My mother had an assignment before she was a field worker. He’s obviously never been a field worker, and I’m fairly certain she never attended this school, so they must have had the same assignment.”

“Interesting! I like a good mystery. I’ll start pulling strings and see what I can do. How about the math test?”

I thought about it for a minute, still worried about my probationary status and the chances of getting caught. Then I remembered my new objective and it did not include succeeding at the Secondary School. “You’ve got a deal.”

“Hmm.. Little Miss Rule Minder didn’t hesitate. He must have really gotten to you. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get kicked out?”

“If that’s the worst thing that happens to me in this life, I think I’ll be just fine.”

The twins showed up just then, chattering about their day and how excited they were for the exams in the morning. It was a nice diversion from my own dark thoughts. Watching them I wondered, how would it be to have such a simple life laid out in front of you like a new outfit every day and you just had to put it on and walk out the door and smile?

I waited for the twins to finish their meal and we all walked back to the B wing together. 0203 had more important things to attend to before curfew so we said our goodbyes and headed down the sleek white corridors and gray polished floors, twisting and turning until we came to our familiar bright blue recycling receptacle. Even though I had only been here a week, the pleasant splash of color on the otherwise washed out space quickly turned into a welcoming beacon to me. My dormitory was not anything like my pod back in my community, but it was comforting and felt like a safe place. It smelled of cleanliness and new linens. The girls were all surprisingly friendly, something I chalked up to the fact that they did not yet know me, or my record of misconduct. And even the mothers, 1, 2 and 3 were not as horrible as my teachers at Basic School had been. They seemed genuinely interested in what we were excited about and making sure we stayed out of trouble.

The twins were still talking happily about their plans and ideas when I left them in the common room. I did not begrudge 12 and 13 their happiness like I had with others in the past. I just let the idea of it wash over me. That was the life I wanted: contentment. I always knew it had to be possible and now I could see it before my eyes. Why shouldn’t I have that?