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“Now watch closely. Do you see the little triangular ones surrounding the virus? Those are antibodies. They identify bad guys and hold them down until the policeman can arrive! In this case, the white blood cell which you can see approaching on the right.”
Mrs. Kugla gestured to the immense pale mass closing in on the restrained microorganism. Slow but inevitable death for the virus. Almost tempting to feel sorry for the little guy. The film was irritatingly grainy, obviously worn out after decades of reuse. The rapid clicking and humming of the projector also conspired to drown out whatever the narrator was saying. She just talked over it anyway.
“Now, I don’t know if you heard, but Shana here just made a very clever observation. The antibodies perform a role in your bodies quite like the Erratics do in our colony. Isn’t that right? And they must be exceedingly good at it, as otherwise even a single virus would mean certain death.”
I glanced over at the only Erratic in our class. He grinned smugly, making no effort to hide that he knew of his greater importance relative to the rest of us. Even to me. I remember when Mom got the mail from colony administration saying I’d been identified as a probable Erratic and should come in for testing.
I don’t remember any time she’s ever been that proud of me. I wish she hadn’t sent out notice to all the relatives and otherwise made such a big deal out of it, because following the tests we then received a mail notifying us that I’d scored two points short. Not quite an Erratic. Deprived of that life by the width of a hair.
“You must understand, the Erratic phenomenon is only expressed beyond a certain threshold of pattern recognition capability” the counselor had told my weeping mother. “Everything sort of clicks at that point. A narrow island of cognitive focus, sweet spot if you like. Anything short of that is a disability.”
She argued with him, though I tried many times to tell her it was needless. “Because the Erratic maps out every possible interpretation of every little detail he or she encounters, they might easily overwhelmed even by everyday life. But because they are then able, by some not yet understood process, to immediately eliminate all but the most probable interpretation….well, you can surely imagine the benefits.”
“If the government didn’t snap them all up early on and put them to work filtering out...unwanted visitors, they’d likely dominate finance or any other field where accelerated pattern recognition confers a significant advantage.” The unspoken corollary was that if you come close to that condition but fall just short, it bought you nothing. I could identify ‘em alright, but not always, and with an unacceptable frequency of false positives.
My vision filled with geometric shapes. Faintly forming, dissolving then reforming dynamically on various surfaces, illustrating proportional relationships between them. I noticed significant sequences of high and low pitch in Mrs. Kugla’s voice as she narrated the film for us. I could see the estimated trajectory of the white blood cell as a vector, though it was not part of the film. A constant barrage of this sort of imagery makes learning anything difficult.
I’ve spent no small number of years and sessions in Illogic therapy learning to filter out such information if it’s not relevant. That’s the missing piece, intuitively knowing which parts of it are relevant to what’s happening. I looked at the Erratic again with undisguised envy. Close only counts in horseshoes.
“So you see, the organization of our society is quite like how your own body is laid out,” Mrs. Kugla continued. “With each part of government or other societal institution analogous to the various organs in your body, perfor-....” She stopped cold. We all waited for the rest of the sentence. She stammered slightly, eyes now wide, trying to finish the thought.
“Per...Performing theeeEEAAY-YAAAEEE-HHHAAAAGGAH” a long, thin crack appeared from her forehead down the contours of her face to her chin. It began weeping a thick black fluid. Then suddenly, the two halves split apart in a violent fountain of oily black fluid, showering those in the front row. We all began screaming.
Inside the hollow outer shell was simply a writhing mass of viscous black gel. The halves of her head fell away and the thrashing cluster of thin black tendrils radiating from where it’d been a moment ago began spinning about, latching onto whatever was nearest. Red emergency lights I’d only seen come on before during fire drills now illuminated, and a piercing siren sounded over the school intercom system.
Throngs of terrified students stampeded from one side of the room to the other trying to get away as the flailing mess of bubbling goo continued to hatch out of what’d been Mrs. Kugla’s body a minute ago. It stood up and walked towards us, lower half still her legs and dress but a carnival of impossible tangled flesh from the waist up.
Just then, from doorways on either side of the classroom emerged men in shiny foil fire-repellant garments with glossy black faceplates. Both held weapons of some kind which they leveled at what remained of Mrs. Kugla and immolated it. I could feel the heat from the fire on my face and arms despite the distance.
It shrieked, at first sounding human but the cry broke down as the creature burned into ear splitting intermittent chirping, then gurgles. Then at last it fell to its knees and the upper half of it collapsed onto the desks in front of it. I still screamed, though in large part because everyone else was. The next into the room were the school nurse, principal and an EMT.
We all had to go through screening after that. I dreaded undressing for a stranger. Never embarrassed me any less despite having done so four times I can remember during trips to other colonies. While I waited in line, two colony security officers talked about whatever adults consider important. Gossip by the sounds of it. But my ears perked up when I heard them mention Mrs. Kugla.
“How in the fuck did the Erratic not recognize her immediately? Like, the moment she entered the room. Really calls the value of the whole program into question if that can happen.” It pleased me somewhat to hear that.
The other ruffled his beard, staring thoughtfully out the window. “Breach in the tunnel. That’s what I figure. Everything else is locked up tight as a drum, but there’s miles of tunnel that doesn’t get inspected more often than once a month.”
The walls, floor and ceiling of the corridor were the same shade of grey. Reminded me of my classroom, although the ceiling and floor are a touch lighter there. Once I asked why people aren’t grey when everything else is, one of those questions you blurt out when you’re too young to have a sense of how things work, so all the adults laugh and gush about how cute it is. Even at that age I knew when I was being patronized.
“You can get all kinds of ideas from colors”, I recall Dad explaining. “That’s no good. You should know better than most what a burden unnecessary ideas are.” Whatever that meant. I don’t tell people I meet that I’m an Illogic. Because the first thing anybody says when they find out is that they don’t see you any differently. Then they proceed to behave completely differently around you from that point onward.
The sun was beginning to set. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I peered out the window from my place in line. The immense circular cluster of electric lights was dangerous to look at directly. Above and below I could see the long pair of rails mounted to the dome by which it travels overhead every day.
“Why does it move? Why not make it light all the time?” Another one of those naive questions, apparently. He’d told me that our bodies are designed for 24 hour days, and need darkness for sleep. I asked who designed them that way and he laughed. “The same fella who designed the colonies, I suppose. And the sun, and the tracks it moves on, and all the rest. That’s why we give thanks before we eat.”
There’s a limit to his patience for questions, though. “What’s outside the dome?” He’d become very grim and quiet for a while, perhaps contemplating how best to answer. All I got was “That’s one of those unnecessary ideas we talked about. Don’t ever let your mother catch you asking that. Now clear your place and go start on your homework.”
At last, my turn. I passed through a thick pair of metal doors, which clanged as they were shut behind me. A voice greeted me over intercom by name and ID number. A little off putting, but I suppose colony security knows everything.
“Blow into the tube on the far wall please.” There were outlines of handprints to either side of it as if I needed help figuring out how to stand against a wall. I wiped the tube as best I could, put it in my mouth and puffed my cheeks. Kept doing it until my face turned red. Finally I heard the “ding” and the woman’s voice instructed me to proceed into the next room.
I envisioned the cold concrete rooms, laid out end to end in a line separated by the metal doors. Like a rectilinear centipede. I understood the lack of color but at least adding carpets didn’t seem like it would bankrupt them. The next room had a video monitor which flickered to life and at last gave me a face to put to the nondescript female voice which had ordered me through the process up to this point. Plain features, pointy nose, black hair down to her ears and a pair of horn rimmed glasses.
She instructed me to strip. I did so reluctantly, struggling to cover myself with one hand while putting my folded up shirt, pants and underwear into a cubby under the monitor. My shoes and socks next. I shuddered as my bare feet touched the floor. I’d anticipated it but it was still profoundly unpleasant.
“Just how many rooms are in this place” I muttered. The microphone built into the frame of the monitor must’ve picked it up. She chuckled. “Not far until the end. Don’t worry, I can’t see you clearly, they blur it a bit ever since that law was passed. The Erratics get much more of an eyefull than I do and they’re almost all boys. Really is like a maze in this place though, isn’t it. Rooms upon rooms, all together making up a building.”
I shrugged, said “I guess so” and awaited further instruction. But she kept going on about rooms. “Rooms upon rooms upon rooms. One building is made of many rooms. Then there are many buildings per colony. And many colonies…”
Her eyes widened. The edges of her mouth drew up into a twitching grin. The look of someone pretending to be happy at gunpoint. A maniacal, paranoid grin, like she was awaiting the punchline to a joke told by someone who meant to kill her. She started to laugh. Even her laughter sounded nervous and manic.
“Ahaha...haha….hahahahhaaHAHAHHAHAHA!! Oh it can’t be, can it!? It’s so simple! And here I thought it would be something grand and complicated so somebody like me without much education would be safe, but I aaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEYYAI-YAE-YAEI-YEI-YAI-YIIIIIIIIII”
Her head began to lift up off of her shoulders on a shiny black helix of muscular flesh. The skin just ripped apart at the neck like tissue paper, the head slowly rotating as it ascended. The mouth hung open, shrieking almost musically until cockroaches began pouring out of it. Her eyes looked just like Mrs. Kugla’s when it happened. Wide open, pupils dilated as though noticing something vast and incomprehensible for the first time. But which had always been there.
I heard gunfire and screaming through the monitor. Then it broke up into static. The emergency lights in the room came on and the familiar siren sounded. Naked, cold and afraid, I waited for the doors to open. Then, although the monitor still displayed only static, I heard men’s voices.
“Is it dead? Fuck me. They really went to town in here. Were any of the Erratics hurt?” A second deeper voice with a subtle drawl answered. “Not the most abrupt epiphany I’ve seen. Lead time of nearly ten seconds before the eruption followed. One type 2 Erratic was outside of the plexiglass enclosure when the sterilization team swept through, minor burns to the neck and shoulder. The others were inside when it happened, no damage. To their bodies, anyway.”
I struggled to follow most of it. A lot of the words were unfamiliar. “What is it? Drives me up the wall. Something they figure out all of a sudden. Reframes their understanding of everything so powerfully that it warps reality. But what is it? Shut up, I know. It’s the one big idea you never wanna have. Curiosity killed the cat. Worse than killed, in this case. Still, if I forget to fight it I just get to thinking about it again.”
The voices drifted off as the two walked away from what I guessed must be the desk the woman I’d seen before was sitting at. I probed the edges of the room looking for a way out, shivering, until someone finally came for me.
“It’s outrageous!” Dad bellowed on the drive home. “What do they do in there all day that justifies their paychecks? If they can’t even protect themselves, how can they protect us?” In his fit, the car strayed a bit off the road. The vibration of the markers at the edge startled him into returning his attention to driving.
Mom turned in her seat and doted on me. “I’ll bet you would have caught it soon enough, sweetheart. If only those idiots had calculated your score right.” She still hasn’t really accepted it, or given up. I could see the symmetry in her face expressed as faint polygonal outlines. Something which happens subconsciously for others, never visualized. I blinked a few times to disrupt the effect.
I found out after I’d gotten dressed and ready for school the next day that there wouldn’t be any. Everyone who’d been in that classroom had the next three days off to recuperate. A gift horse I had no interest in inspecting the teeth of, as I whooped in excitement and tore out the front door before Mom could object.
The streets were uncommonly clear of traffic. In the distance I heard the faint echo of the emergency siren, and shuddered. The sun continued climbing overhead, with a couple more points of light towards the Eastern horizon. A cluster of stars some fool had forgotten to shut off before sunrise. Then the rain started.
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*<sup>Stay Tuned for Part 2!</sup>*