Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (17 page)

“Then why did I get hit?”

“The same reason that young man you watched got hit.”

“To see how we would react,” I guess.

Lyder blinks at me but says nothing. She calls something up on the viewer that we’d just been watching a moment ago, and then she rises from the desk chair.  “Come. Sit here. The next set of tests is ready.”

As I settle in her chair, I see nothing but a blank blue screen.

“As soon as you press the space bar on the keyboard, the test will begin. You have one hour to complete as much as you can, so don’t linger too long on something if you have trouble. Skip it. If there’s time, the computer will return you to any missed questions later.”

She leaves the room.

The tests are strange, with no logical order to the questions. I get one of those “red is to color as one is to (blank)” questions, followed by a math question, followed by a prompt to pronounce a series of words on the screen. I am told to type sentences dictated by a disembodied woman’s voice. I am told to repeat words in foreign languages, find the correct puzzle pieces to fit given receptacles for them, break simple codes that get increasingly difficult until I finally have to skip several in a row.

Some of the questions are ridiculously easy, and some might as well be written in another language.  I have no idea how much I finished by the time the screen fills with blue again. Lyder steps through the meld at almost the same second.

“You may leave now,” she says as I stand. “You will receive a log with your Day One instructions tomorrow.  Do not be late. You’re on thin ice,” she repeats.

“Don’t I get to find out how I did?”

Lyder’s eyes make me wish I could rewind the spools of those words until they are back in my mouth, then past my throat, down into my fluttering stomach.

“You’re dismissed.”

13

THERE ARE THREE hundred people in this Assimilation class, including me.

Upon arrival at the Assimilation onboard, we are sent to a waiting room of sorts. Whispers begin to circulate. Like me, some of them have heard rumors about the disappearances of several candidates from the last class.

The guy next to me is tall and lean and his knee bounces frantically, prompting a memory of Rae as doing the same thing as I drove us to the house party in Tempe, her excitement leaking out in movement.

This is how it always happens, some random event setting off a fresh ache in me. The stitches rip open, and I have to start all over again. I want to get away from the guy, but there’s nowhere to go. Every seat in the room is taken. I am actually relieved when the meld opens and a group of thirty men and women file in.

Lyder is last to enter but first to speak.

“Candidates, please rise.”

We stand at once like a clumsy platoon. With the rumors swirling, we’re all on our best behavior.

“Please line up in front of your respective facilitators, standing behind the green line.”

I am relieved when bouncing knee guy moves to stand behind an older but muscular man.  I am the first to reach Lyder. She blinks at me but says nothing.

Lyder was the last facilitator to enter the room, but she’s the first to leave, taking us with her. She leads us to a classroom with ten desks arranged in a horseshoe.

Things move quickly after that. There are thirty facilitators, so there are only ten of us under each of them. I am one of five girls, and there are five guys. Lyder looks at us all with utter disdain.

“Sixty days,” she says. “We have a lot of work to do.  Look around, because these people will be your best friends for the duration. But don’t get too comfortable, because they are also your worst enemies.”

I look at the girl on my left and wonder if my eyes are as wide, whether my chin trembles like hers.  I look at the guy on my right and suspect that his leering grin and the direct way he looks at me are just bravado. I stare back long enough that he breaks eye contact first with a sneer.

One by one, we exchange glances, sizing each other up. Lyder watches, saying nothing, giving us time to sniff at each other and begin to form a natural order. I’ve noticed this, myself, with each of my moves.  Every new school was the same. Sometimes I fell to the bottom, and sometimes I managed something close to the top, but I’ve never been the alpha anywhere.

I sense that I will fall somewhere in the middle here, too, because that is the place I have occupied in most of my twelve installations. Neither top nor bottom. I find this comforting. I’m not cut out to be a leader. I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I’ve seen my father struggle with the burdens of leadership. No, thank you.

Lyder places a fresh portfolio on each of our desks with instructions not to open them yet.  I look down at mine and see my name stamped into the leather zippered folder.

“Leave your portfolios and follow me,” she says.

We enter a room that looks like a tiny movie theater. Not one to waste time, Lyder begins the mystery show at once.  As the screen cues up she says,

“Watch in complete silence and carefully consider what you see. You’ll be questioned afterward.”

The film turns out to be footage of each of us crossing the field in the reaction center. Our names display on the large screen in block lettering.  Kate Knox, the big-eyed girl who’d been sitting on my left, saw the dog go down and continued running head on toward the exit. She was fast. She either had exceptional peripheral vision or just an uncanny sense of when the arrows would come, flinching away from them just in time.  She never hit water. A quick shift to a bird’s eye view showed she veered slightly off course with every flinch.

June Waketon, a sinewy middle-aged woman with short blonde spikes, walked the field, her eyes in constant motion. She saw the dog running at her, a Mastiff, and her face shifted. Whimpering, she broke into a trot, then a jog, then began running full tilt as the dog began to snarl and give chase in earnest.  I guess they figured they didn’t need arrows to keep her moving. The dog scared her enough. Interestingly, though the bird’s eye view showed she was right on target for the splash down, she never hit the water. It didn’t exist in her reaction center.

What did exist is the dog, which caught the cuff of her pants several times and tugged her off her feet. But instead of leaping at her, it growled and snarled and nipped in her direction. She rolled, shrank away and screamed, fumbling to find her footing, always running from the dog.  When she hit the concrete pad outside the meld, just before the buzzer sounded and it opened, the dog stopped short, sneezed at her, and trotted back the way it came.

Randy Balmoral, the cocky guy from my right side, did something odd. When the first arrow hit the dog, he scooped the dog up over his shoulders like a living fur stole and ran to the right, straight toward the unseen archers. The arrows stopped, but the ground began to quake and split and drop away. He just missed pitching headfirst into a void of unknown depth. 

When he corrected his course, he ended up in the water but didn’t stay there long. Still carrying the dog, he crawled on top of the thick blanket of weeds and vines, skittering across them to dry land.  Either he moved too quickly for them to sink much or they were just that strong. Right beyond that was the concrete pad.  A man stepped out of the meld, shook his hand, and collected the robot dog, whose tail offered a weak wag.

I wonder, as the screen goes black between reviews, whether the rest of them know the dogs weren’t real.

The last six crossings—those of the rest of the group—are all some variation of mine, Kate’s, June’s or Randy’s. Others swim through the flap like I did, but none of them use the dog as a shield. Heat rises in my face as I wonder what they must think of me, so callously allowing the dog’s lifeless body to be riddled with arrows. Everyone was grazed, except for Kate, who managed to flinch back from the arrows just in time.

The lights rise, and Lyder orders us back to the classroom, still in silence.  Once we are seated again, she asks,

“If we were to score that exercise, whose score would be highest?”

Most of the group thinks it is Kate because she’s the only one who made it out without injury.  Randy thinks it is June. She saw a potential enemy in the dog while the rest of us judged by its demeanor that it was friendly. Lyder's eyes come to rest on me.

“Davinney, you haven’t offered an answer,” she remarks.

“I don’t have one,” I reply.

“Why not?”

“Because in order to know which reaction was the best, I need to know what reaction you’re looking for.”

Lyder’s eyes narrow. “And if I said I was looking for the best survival reaction?”

I shrug. “We all survived. We all win.”

Lyder’s eyes burn into me. “Who did it best?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Randy, I guess.”

“Why?” she demands.

“Because there were two lives saved, his own and the dog’s.”

“Kate’s dog survived,” Lyder points out.

“Kate’s dog was injured, though,” I counter.

“Do you really believe that?” she asks.

I frown. “That the dog was injured?”

“No,” Lyder corrects. The room is watching us like a tennis match. Her. Me. Her. Me. “Do you really believe that Randy’s survival reaction was the best one?”

I look down at my desktop. “No,” I admit.

“Why not?”

“Because he ran straight toward the enemy without anything to protect him.”

“And the enemy was…?”

“The direction the arrows were coming from,” I sigh. Randy’s face colors. “He made himself a clear target.”

“Then who do you really think survived the best?”

I could burn a hole in the desktop with my eyes. “I did,” I mumble.

“Repeat,” Lyder directs.

“I did,” I say forcefully to the desktop.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I used the dog to shield myself from the arrows.”

“And?”

“And I took the first chance I found to get out of the line of fire.”

Lyder is still not satisfied.  “And if I asked you for the best leadership reaction?”

I sigh again. “Randy.”

“Why?”

“Because he made it to the meld with the fewest number of casualties.” All those war movies I watched with my father are finally useful. Lyder moves on.

The last part of the afternoon on day one is reserved for receipt of our Idixes…our very own shiny mirror tattoos. We sit, nine of us, in hard plastic chairs in a dull waiting room, listening to the distressed cries of those before us. Fresh from a crash course in hand-to-hand combat, most of us sport bruises and scrapes.

I snort as Randy’s shouting can be heard from down the hall.  “With all the medical technology Concordia has, you’d think they would have come up with some way to numb us up or put us under.”

Wendy, a green-eyed blonde with a fat, split bottom lip, replies flatly, “They do it on purpose.”

“What?” Julian, a moon-faced thirteen year-old and the youngest in our class, looks shocked. Everyone tried to take it easy on him in combat training, but Lyder put a stop to it and ordered Krill, a skinny but amazingly powerful guy, to fight him with intention. Julian has some shadows on his face that promise to darken.

If the rumors are true, he ran away from home with his older sister, a similarly moon-faced girl, because they’d been bullied mercilessly about their weight their whole lives. They’d read about Concordia’s ScanX technology and decided their lives would be much improved by moving to a world that took away their choices. Neither of them is expected to do very well with Assimilation, or so say the whispers.

His sister is lucky to be here at all. Although they’re from an open world, the Tribunal nearly disposed of her for stealing him from the care of their parents, given that he’s still a child. If he fails, he gets sent back to his folks.  If she fails, well, she’ll wish her weight were her biggest problem.

Marco, dark-skinned and bony, leans toward Julian and gives him a pat on his thick shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. It’s quick. Over and done.”

“How do you know?”

Marco shrugs. “Listen to them. Do they keep screaming and screaming?”

Lyder motions silently to June. She shoots Julian a determined look, straightens her shoulders, and disappears behind one of the closest melds to the waiting area. A few minutes later her cries make Julian’s squinty little eyes go almost round in his fat cheeks. There’s nothing quick about her agony. Marco doesn’t offer any further encouragement.

Wendy gives Julian a triumphant look. “On purpose,” is all she says.

Krill punches Julian’s right arm hard. “There. Now you have something to distract you.”

“You guys are mean,” I say, staring down at my unblemished left forearm and try to imagine having the same mirrored tattoo that everyone else has.

When I look up again, Lyder meets my eye and gives a little nod, her hand pointing down the long hallway to the farthest meld before the exit. I give Julian a wink I don’t really mean. I generally hate the anticipation of scary things more than the actual things themselves. Julian strikes me as being that way, too.

The room is too white. It reminds me of the death room at the Tribunal. I instantly tense up, though I don’t hesitate to ease onto the chair when a voice directs me to do so. Come what may, I’m ready to get it over with.

It’s just me in the room. Judging by the machinery present, I wonder if the Idix will be applied by a robotic arm. This seems even more likely as a disembodied voice tells me to turn my left arm face up. Once I comply, slender metal cuffs snake around my arm just above and just below my elbow and at my wrist, locking them down. The cuffs are uncomfortably tight.  I can hardly move my arm.

A man enters the room. He’s whistling, cheerful, totally unconcerned by the fact that everyone who comes into this room screams bloody murder.

He hands me an open tube of liquid. There’s no point in arguing, so I knock it back and hand him the empty vial. “Relax,” he says. “Everyone was just messing with you.”

I blink at him as I realize I really can’t move my left arm now. The potion in the tube has paralyzed it. I wonder how knows to paralyze only my left arm. Maybe the metal in the cuffs has directed it there. He points at the viewer as a message pops up in front of me:
If you scream as loudly as you can, you will be cleared from Assimilation for tomorrow
.

I’m just starting to laugh when it feels like he sets my arm on fire.  I scream, loudly, and it isn’t pretend. It isn’t to earn a day off of Assimilation. It’s because the fire has spread everywhere inside me. It feels like flames might shoot out through my hair follicles, through the pores in my skin. A redness at the edges of my vision convinces me that the fire is real. I am the first person to spontaneously combust while receiving an Idix.

“Congratulations,” the man says, his smile just as cheerful as the searing pain vanishes as quickly as it had come, “You’re function free tomorrow. See you bright and early the day after that.”