Lexicon (9 page)

“Do you know what they’ll do—” He tried to grab it and she resisted and he landed on top of her. This she slightly engineered. His breath brushed her face. She let the textbook slide out and clunk to the floor. He raised a hand and it hovered a moment, then came down on her breast. She inhaled. He moved his hand away.

“Keep going,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can.”

He rolled off. “It’s not allowed.”

“Come
on
,” she said.

“We’re not allowed to be together.” That was a rule. Fraternization. “It’s not safe.”

“For who?”

“Either of us.”

She stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shuffled closer. She touched his white shirt. She had spent a lot of time imagining taking off this shirt. “I won’t tell anyone.” She stroked his chest through the fabric. Then his hand closed on hers.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

•   •   •

“What’s with the fraternization rule?” she asked Eliot. She wandered about his office, fingering books, being casual. Eliot looked up from his papers. Originally, Emily had been going to ask,
Why can’t we have sex
. Because, just once, she would like to see Eliot surprised or offended. Or anything, really. Just to prove that he was human. But then she lost her nerve.

“Students aren’t permitted to enter relationships with each another.”

“I know what it is. I’m asking
why
.”

“You know why.”

She sighed. “Because if you let someone know you well, they can persuade you. But that’s incredibly cold, Eliot.” She went to the window. Outside, she watched a sparrow hop across the slate roof. “That’s no way to live.” He didn’t reply. “Are you saying, for the rest of my life, I can’t have a relationship with an organization person?”

“Yes.”

“Do you appreciate how dull that is?” Eliot didn’t react. “And what about . . . you know, purely physical relationships?”

“It’s no different.”

“It’s completely different. Relationships, okay, I get it. But not for just sex.”

“There is no ‘just sex.’ It’s called intimacy for a reason.”

“That’s one word,” she protested. “Coincidence.”

“‘And the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.’ Note the use of the word
knew
in this context.”

“That’s from three thousand years ago. You’re talking about the Bible.”

“Exactly. The concept is not new.”

She shook her head, frustrated. “Have you ever done it?”

“Done what?”

“Broken the rule,” she said. “Fraternized.”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.” She did. She was just pushing. “You must have thought about it. What about with Charlotte? There’s something going on with you guys. Your feet always point toward her. And she goes very still around you. It’s like when we’re acting up in class and she’s trying not to get pissed. She goes still when she’s trying to control her emotions.”

“I need to get some work done, if you don’t mind.” He sounded completely unruffled.

“I think Charlotte wants to fraternize with you,” Emily said. “Badly.”

“Out.”

“I’m going!” She left. She was more frustrated than ever.

•   •   •

She turned eighteen. She lay in bed awhile, thinking about what that meant. Anything? She got up and went to class and of course nobody knew. At lunch, she walked to the 7-Eleven with Jeremy and debated telling him the whole way. Finally, while filling her slushie, she said, “I’m eighteen today.”

He looked surprised. This was the kind of information you were not supposed to share. “I didn’t get you anything.”

“I know. I just wanted to tell you.”

He was silent. They walked to the front of the store. She smiled at the man behind the counter. “It’s my birthday today.”

“Oh my goodness.”

“Finally free.” She leaned across the counter, grinning. “Free to give a long and happy life.”

“I tell you what,” he said. “I give you the slushie for free.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Happy birthday.” He pushed it across to her. “You are a good girl.”

As they left the store, Jeremy seized her arm. “‘
Give a happy life? Finally free?
’”

She smiled, but he was serious. He steered her to a bench beside the road and sat her on it and stood there, glowering. She felt a tickle in her stomach, simultaneously sickening and thrilling. “You can’t do that.”

“I got a slushie. One free slushie.”

“It’s a serious breach of the rules.”

“Come on. Like
word suggestion
is even a real technique. I bet it’s nothing compared to what you can do.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Is this because he gave me a present and you didn’t?”

“You think the rules don’t apply to you? They do. You can’t practice. Not outside the school. Not on that guy. Not on me.”

“You? When have I ever practiced on you?” She poked him with her shoe. “As if I could compromise you. You’re going to graduate next year and I don’t know anything. Come on. Sit. Drink slushie. It’s my birthday.”

“Promise me you’ll never do that again.”

“Okay.
Okay
, Jeremy. I was just playing.”

After a while, he sat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She felt very close to him. “I promise not to turn you into my thought slave,” she said, and felt him smile a little. But she had thought about it.

•   •   •

The next Tuesday, she hung around the school gates but Jeremy didn’t show up for their slushie run. She trudged back to the school. Something must have come up. Some class. He was getting busier. But she passed the front lawn and there he was, lounging with his friends, his pant legs rolled up in the sun. They were talking in the way of older students, no one laughing or even moving much, every sentence dripping with irony and layers of meaning, or so Emily guessed. She stopped. Heads turned. Jeremy glanced at her, then away. She walked on.

She understood that they couldn’t be seen together too often. They could not be attached. She knew this. She reached her room and sat at her desk and opened a book. If she turned her head, she could have looked down to the lawn and seen Jeremy and his little group of conceited friends. But she did not. Occasionally she leaned back and stretched her arms, or fiddled with her hair, because she knew he could see her, too.

•   •   •

From time to time she saw students with ribbons tied around their wrists. The ribbon was red or white; if it was red, it meant a senior taking his final exam. The rule was not to talk to them, or even look too closely, although of course Emily did, because one day she would be wearing that red ribbon, and she wanted to know what that meant. She had once seen a red-ribboned boy building a house of cards in the front hall. He was there for two days, making the house taller and taller while he grew thinner and haunted-looking and it got so that people avoided the hall, in case of drafts. Then one morning the cards were gone and so was the boy. Emily never found out what had happened, whether he passed or failed. Another night, she woke to an odd bell and went to the window to see a girl leading a cow up the driveway. An actual, live cow. Emily could not deduce anything useful from this.

At the end of her second year, she found a slip of paper beneath her door, notifying her of a room change for Higher-Level Machine Languages. But when she turned up, she was the only student there. The teacher, a short, balding man named Brecht, handed her a white ribbon. “Congratulations. You’re ready for your junior exam.” She tied the ribbon around her left wrist, feeling excited.

Brecht told her to make a computer print the word
hello
on its screen. This sounded like something she could do in about two minutes, with a command like PRINT or ECHO. But Brecht said not to leave the room until it was done. She sat on a cardboard box, because this was not a classroom so much as a crypt for the corpses of prehistoric computers, and flipped open a laptop.

So the catch was the laptop didn’t work. She crawled around, testing power supplies and fans. She found a monitor that powered on but had a burned-out VGA input. Everything in the room was like that, she discovered: sabotaged in key ways.

She assembled a machine, Frankenstein-style, from the innards of different devices. It had a hard drive and a monitor and it powered on but wouldn’t do anything else. She had a blinking cursor that refused to respond to the keyboard. The operating system was sabotaged, too.

Her bladder pinged. She had drunk half a bottle of water on her way here, which was unfortunate. Her new goal was to finish this test before she needed to pee into a bag. She uncovered a BIOS problem and then a hole in the boot loader. By the time she got to the operating system, an actual responsive prompt, she knew what she was going to find: All the useful commands were broken. She began searching for bugs. There was one in each level. One deliberate flaw in each layer of software that lay between the screen and the ECHO command. There were so many layers—it was kind of crazy, how much code sat behind ECHO. She hadn’t appreciated that before. There were scripts and libraries and modules and compilers and assembly code, one built on top of the other. Technically, none of it was essential; you could accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers did was distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.

•   •   •

She finished her silicon monster and went to fetch Brecht. He looked at the HELLO hanging on-screen and nodded once and began to pull her machine apart. She felt a little sad. She was learning that people were just machines and it was working the other way a little, too.

Over the next week, she had to be careful when approaching other students, in case they were wearing a white ribbon. Some students disappeared for days at a time, and some didn’t come back at all, which Emily guessed meant they had failed. She hadn’t really noticed before, because the classes weren’t based on age, but there were more lower-years than seniors. A lot more.

After exams there were two weeks of vacation, during which most other students went off to their homes. This left Emily with the school to herself, practically. She felt bored and restless and began to hatch plots to break into people’s rooms, so she could learn something. She spent time with one of the few other students to stay over vacation, a doe-eyed girl with dark bangs and a permanent air of disdain. Earlier, Emily had disliked this girl quite a lot, because she was older and spent a lot of time around Jeremy. But now she was basically the only person here who could teach her anything. Emily cut her hair the same and adopted the girl’s walk, which was a kind of drifting, as if she was being blown through corridors on the pages of a million mournful poems. This was not as successful as Emily had hoped, since the doe-eyed girl didn’t open up at all, so Emily was stuck with a dumb haircut for nothing. But she did discover that the girl swam for an hour every day. So Emily snuck into the locker room and stole her key.

The doe-eyed girl’s room was like her own: a single bed, a wooden desk, a chair, and a window looking over the grounds. But her books were completely different. The girl had
Persuasion in Middle Europe
and
Modern Psychographics
and a small yellow book Emily had seen seniors carry around and always been intrigued by, titled
Gutturals
. That one, disappointingly, turned out to be full of word fragments with no explanation or context. But she pulled down a tome with an alluring title,
The Linguistics of Magic
, and that was better. It was a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn’t tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like
charmed
came from, and
spellbound
and
fascinated
and
bewitched
and
enraptured
and
compelled
.

This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type—their true name, basically—and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got
fascinated
and
charmed
,
spellbound
and
amazed
, they
forgot themselves
and were
carried away
. They just didn’t think there was anything magical about that anymore.

•   •   •

When classes resumed, they began to teach her words. No one said what these were for. Charlotte simply handed out envelopes. “Study these in private,” Charlotte told them. “They are not to be shared, ever, with anybody. Repeat them to yourself in front of a mirror, five times per word, every night.”

“Until when?” asked Sashona, but Charlotte just put on her fake smile, like this was an amusing question.

She took the envelope marked
EMILY RUFF
and carried it to her room. Inside were three pieces of paper.
JUSTITRACT. MEGRANCE. VARTIX.
They were difficult to read; her brain kept slipping in the wrong direction. They were too similar to real words, maybe. She studied them. She stood in front of the mirror and watched herself. “
Varrrrrtttt
,” she said, which was supposed to be
Vartix
, but for some reason it took a long time to come out, time stretching and getting grainy, and not only time but everything: the walls and mirror and air, all undergoing a slow disintegration that she could see and feel with every molecule of her being. She felt fear, because she didn’t want to see what was underneath the world. The sound of her voice fell to pieces and the silence between them froze over. She regained consciousness. She realized this in retrospect. Her fingers and toes tingled. She closed her mouth. There was drool on her chin. She felt bruised in the brain. She walked to her bed and sat. She put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.