The Outcast Ones (2 page)

The oldest steps forward and clears his throat. “Welcome! Today is the first day of your future. The results of your tests can be predicted on the basis of your performance in recent years, but sometimes one point more or less can make the difference. No matter what job you are assigned to, you all have the essential task of safeguarding the lives of the last humans. You can be sure that we, your Legion commanders, will assign you to the job that is best suited to you. There are no errors, no deviations. Give your best, because only the best is good enough!”

With a brief nod, he steps back and presses the red button behind him. Exactly 99 cubicles rise up out of the floor: fifty on the right, forty-nine on the left. The cubicles are numbered and each is assigned to one of us. Mine is number 18, like my designation E518. I step inside. The cubicle door shuts immediately behind me. The space is just big enough for me to sit on a round stool and look at a glass wall. It is slightly darker than the grey walls around me, but my reflection in it is blurred. There is just one lighting panel in the ceiling, its light so bright that it dazzles me.

I cannot see or hear the others. My universe has shrunk to this tiny cell. I expect the friendly computer voice to greet me, to assign my tasks, but it is silent. I notice something happening with my body that I cannot explain. My hands grow damp and my heart beats faster than it should. I think my heartbeat must be so loud that it echoes from the tight walls right back into my ears. My throat is suddenly dry and I begin to breathe deeply, in and out. The light seems to be flickering, the floor trembling. I stretch out my hands, but the chamber is too small even to spread out my arms completely. The metal feels cool under my fingers.

“Phase one has begun,” says a scratchy voice suddenly from the direction of the glass wall. Everything is all right. There is no change, no threat. Everything is going as planned. No reason to panic.

“Knowledge test, crystallised intelligence.”

This is easy. The first test is only to assess our knowledge. A monitor appears before me. Various questions with multiple choice answers pop up, and I touch the screen to log the correct ones. What is the name of the first Legion commander? What are the causes of war? Which country began the Third World War? What is iron for? Where is the heart located?

The answers are firmly fixed in my head, and even though I am not told that my choices are correct, I am sure of it. It is not important to understand the questions, only to know their answers. The past is the past and is not there to be analysed. Knowledge is there to be passed on. It is constant, unchangeable.

“Phase Two has begun. Problem solving test, fluid intelligence.”

This part is harder, because the answers are not pre-defined. There is nothing you can memorise, rather it all depends on your own intelligence. Who is able to solve problems? Who has understood the rules of the Legion? We must speak freely.

“A member of the personnel decides to wear his jumpsuit with one sleeve instead of two, so that he is individualised. How do you react?”

“Being different leads to envy, and envy leads to war. The person should be isolated in order to keep the peace.”

The question seems to be tailored for me. Maybe they want to see if I learned anything from my misbehaviour when I was a Yellow. I will never forget my teacher’s lecture. But soon the questions get trickier.

“You are a helper in the Archive. While sorting books, you find a living animal—a mouse from the genus Old World mice, or Murinae in Latin. What do you do?”

With intense thought, I imagine the situation in my inner view. I have never seen a living mouse in my life, never mind any other animal. All of us only know them from schooling or documentaries about Old Earth before the Third World War, before our time. Animals are carriers of sickness. I know the right answer but I hesitate to speak it. Again my hands become unpleasantly damp, a bodily reaction I do not understand.

“I...I would hide it,” I answer truthfully. It would be useless to lie, because the chamber is measuring my body’s sweat output and would know.

“Why would you do that?” It is the first time the computer responds to one of my answers. My heart begins to beat wildly again. I could be destroying all my hard work in one stroke.

“It is the last of its kind. Therefore it is valuable. Uniqueness leads to disharmony and disharmony leads to war.”

“Do you want war, E518?”

“No! If I hide the mouse, no one will find out about it. Ignorance maintains the peace.”

The light goes out and I sit there in the dark. Tense, I listen for any noise that is not my own breath. Was the answer so wrong? Are they going to abort my test?

But then the light comes on again and the computer continues as if nothing has happened.

“Phase Three has begun: Memory and attention test.”

I am surprised. They never prepared us for this part of the examination.

“E518, which of today’s Legion commanders has a scar over his right eyebrow?”

The question is a contradiction in terms, because we are all the same. In any case, we should be, but I know it is not true. There are tiny details if you look for them. I close my eyes and call up the image of the three Legion commanders on the podium. The oldest was in the middle. He had deeper wrinkles around his eyes than the others. On his left was the woman. She did not smile, but even if she had, she would not have dimples. I would have seen if she had a scar on her eyebrow. It must have been the man on the right. He was the only one I did not look at.

“From my point of view, the man on my right,” I answer, and the cubicle door slides open. Surprised, I turn around and see that the other teens’ doors are also open. All the intelligence tests end at the same time.

“Phase Four has begun.”

Sweat runs down my back. Tiny drops form on my skull and run into my face. They catch in my eyebrows, but the longer I run, the wetter they become, until finally the first drop comes loose and runs into my eye. It burns, but I keep running.

It began slowly and then the speed increased with every minute. The treadmill clock reads 20 minutes and 32 seconds. I cannot run any more, but I am not going to give up. Physical tests are not exactly my strength. We began with squash, but I was so afraid of the shooting electric ball that I was one of the first to fail. That will give me only a few points in defence and reaction. After endurance they will test attack ability, to discover the guards and soldiers among us. They wear blue and their designation is C. Only a few women make it into that department and I am certain I will not be one of them. So it is that much more important that I prove myself in endurance at least. Sufficient stamina is valuable.

21 minutes, 1 second. The speed increases again. I am biting my teeth so hard that they grind. The girl next to me stumbles and falls. Her crash is so heavy that I feel its shaking beneath me. I look down at her. Her face is almost as red as her jumpsuit and she is holding her arm. Pain contorts her expression. I read E523 on her badge, but she is more than the numbers and letters that will only be valid for today—The small spot of pigmentation directly under her left eye registers itself in my mind.  She will no longer be a stranger to me, I would recognise her anywhere. She returns my gaze, her lips pressed hard together. I see anger in her—she has failed and begrudges me that I am better than her. This is why all people in our world should be the same. But the performance tests prove that it is not so.

My gaze slides from the girl to my other side. 22 minutes, 13 seconds. There is a boy. I know him. He is missing a corner of his right front tooth. He lost it when he was a Yellow, in a fight about an electric car. When the car smashed into his mouth, blood shot out of his lip. It scared us other children so much that we all began to cry. We thought he would die and so would the rest of us. Blood is a harbinger of war, and war means death. Since then I know him. I do not know if he remembers me too, or if I am just one among many girls for him. In any case he is not distracted by me looking at him. Stubbornly, he looks at the grey wall opposite, and runs.

24 minutes, 6 seconds. My throat burns and it’s raw like sandpaper. It even hurts to swallow. My heart is beating in my neck and black dots begin to dance before my eyes.
Beeeep
...That’s the alarm signal from my pulse gauge. It shows 140 beats per minute. Under 120 would be optimal. If I don’t manage to reduce my pulse, I will be eliminated. I try to breathe gently through my nose.
Beeeep
...24 minutes, 20 seconds. Pulse: 145. My eyes wander over the other runners. I count 25, only three are women, including myself.
Beeeep
...24 minutes, 29 seconds. Pulse: 146. I want to be one of the last 20 at least.
Beeeep
...24 minutes, 32 seconds. Pulse: 144. 24 runners. The Legion commander is moving towards me. I must drop my pulse.
Beeeep
...24 minutes, 41 seconds. Pulse: 142. She is already preparing to speak, but the loud beeping does not return. My pulse gauge shows 139. Only one more and I would have been eliminated.

22 runners. My legs feel like lead, so heavy that I might collapse at any moment. A protein tablet will not be enough to restore my muscles to good condition. 25 minutes, 12 seconds. The speed increases again.
Beeeep
...Pulse: 142. 21 runners. My vision goes black. I feel myself hit the ground and then everything goes still.

The unpleasant smells of burning plastic and acrid cleansers rise into my nose. So sharp that my nose screws up and I open my eyes. Above me, I see the faces of the Legion commander wearing white, and a man wearing green. He retrieves the little bottle he was holding under my nose. His left hand holds my left wrist, which he carefully lets slide onto the floor.

“She would never have given up. So her body took over for her,” he explains to the Legion commander. 

“How stupid. A person must know her limits,” she says with disgust, as if I were not here at all.

“She is ambitious and strong-willed.” The man defends me but does not look at me.

“Ambition leads to unrest and a will is there to be broken.” Her voice is colder than the floor tiles in my room at morning. Her nametag reads A470. I will remember it. She’s dangerous.

The man in green nods and gives her a bottle with a light-green liquid in it. “This will invigorate her.”

The woman accepts the drink. “Thank you, Doctor, you are no longer needed here.

He leaves, and her light-blue eyes land like spear-points on me. Her cold hand pulls me to my feet. My belly feels empty and nauseous, and I am so weak that my legs barely carry my weight. I sense strongly that someone is looking at me. I turn around. E523 meets my gaze and I don’t know the meaning of the look in her eyes. Maybe she is happy that I failed. I keep looking around the room, but the treadmills are abandoned. The endurance tests are over.

The white suit presses the bottle into my hand. “Drink this. You’ve held up the proceedings long enough!” She herds me with the others into the next room.

Bright light falls on the soft sand of the Arena. The ceiling lights are so far away that it would be easy to think we are under an open sky—if we didn’t know better. Even though I have never left the safety zone, that is how I imagine the sky to be. Bright and free, without limits or flickering.

Like in ancient Old Earth times, the Arena is round and has seats for an audience outside of the battleground, as well as a platform for the Legion commanders. There is no audience today except for the three dressed in white. Battles are only public during mating time. The next one is still a year away, so there’s no reason to waste a thought on it.

The oldest commander steps forward.

“I, A330, hereby open Phase 6 in the name of the Legion. This is your last test, your last chance to win points. Hand to hand combat is only for defence. We are the last survivors. Our top priority is to maintain order in the safety zone. Any enemy of order is an enemy of life and must be destroyed. Fight fair. Fight hard.”

We bow before the commanders and step back against the wall, making a circle around the circular battle arena. The computer determines our ideal fighting partner from our previous results.

“E515 against E572.”

Both are boys. E515 is the one with a piece of his front tooth missing. I don’t know the other one. Like everyone else, they are wearing armoured sensor breastplates and elastic leg protectors. In their hands, they activate the laser pointers. The light dims automatically so that the red and green laser beams are easier to see. Front Tooth has red and his opponent, green.

They take up fight positions and the start bell shrills so loud through the arena that it hurts my ears. The green laser fires immediately and only just misses Front Tooth’s upper arm—he did a perfect roll on the ground to escape. Sand falls from his black vest but the green shooter fires on him incessantly. Greenie is attacking very offensively but E515 is more on the defensive. He has good endurance and is trying to make the most of this advantage. He hops from one place to another like a rubber ball, bending and stretching. E572 has more than enough to do, running after him.

The clock shows 6:05 minutes. If both of them can endure ten minutes without either suffering a theoretically deadly injury, both will be given the same number of points—but only half of the possible points. If there is a winner, he gets all the points and the loser none. So the goal is to take out your opponent as quickly as possible. Even though Front Tooth is so agile, running away won’t get him a win.

7:50 minutes. E572’s attacks are coming more slowly. Where he was firing every second to begin with, now he is missing by metres and needs longer to orientate himself afterwards. E515 is whooshing around him like a sprinter.

After 8:15 minutes he fires his first red shot and...he hits! E515 has won. He gets all the points.

More battles follow. Not many end in a draw, because compromise is not our goal. All or nothing, says the motto. The palms of my hands become inexplicably damp when my designation finally grates through he loudspeaker.