The Adaline Series Bundle 1 Read online

  A moment of silence passed before the doctor breathlessly spat, "It's just a dream. It can't hurt me. Not for real."

  62 squeezed the doctor's hand in both of his. His fingers dug into the Man's flesh as he allowed the anger to burn inside of him. "Oh, but I can make it real."

  62 began to break the link between their two dreams. The doctor's eyes went wide as the darkness approached them, creeping inch by inch from the edge of 62's consciousness.

  "Let go of me." The doctor squirmed, his arm still caught in the cuff of the exam table. His eyes were bright with fear.

  "You think you have all of this power, but you don't." 62 pulled the Man's hand another inch towards his side of the closing rift. The darkness closed in so that it blocked the doctor's face from view. 62 refused to let loose the wriggling fingers that tried to escape his hold.

  "Please, stop." The doctor pleaded as the darkness closed on him, just above his wrist. 62's closing dream cut the Man's flesh like a knife.

  62 waited until a trickle of blood ran down his wrist before letting go. The doctor wrenched his hand backward into his own dream, cutting his hand further. 62 could hear him cry out in pain on the far side of the small white light that was left in the hand's absence.

  "Doctor, be careful letting your Nurses look at that. Now you have a physical anomaly. You never know what they might decide to do to treat you." 62's voice echoed in the darkness of his own mind. The light shrank smaller until it was the size of a speck of dust, and then it winked out of existence.

  62 stared at the spot where the light had been. He was so overcome with emotion that he hardly noticed the touch of a Man's hand on the back of his neck, or the quick sting of an electrode as it connected to his data chip.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE CHANGES IN C.A.T. weren't immediate. A change in protocol rarely is. It didn't take long, though, for the Boys to notice fewer Men patrolling the halls. The constant checks for anomalies changed to every other cycle, then every tenth cycle, and finally, none at all.

  62 wasn't sure if C.A.T. would ever go completely back to normal, but he was glad for the extra freedom that he and the rest of his brothers now shared. There was still the occasional Defense Auditor found strolling between classrooms, and the Nurses all seemed to retain their hypersensitivity to any changes in the Boys' behavior. But all in all, life was a lot more relaxed than it had been.

  It took dozens of cycles before 62 could convince 71 that it was safe for them to share dreams again. Once they started visiting in sleep, though, it quickly became a part of each cycle.

  “I don’t think we have to worry about him for a while.” 62 sprawled out across the broad fluffy Stratocumulus Cumulogenitus that he had imagined into his dream.

  “Who, the Doctor from Level 2, or the Maintenance Man?” 71 turned his hand over in the soft denseness of the puffy air beneath him and watched the tiny grey particles swirl between his fingers.

  “Either of them, really. I talked to the Maintenance Man before I went into the doctor's dream. He said his orders came from up on Level 2." 62 tried not to feel the emotion that his teacher called "cocky", but he couldn't help it.

  The doctor had awoken from his dream with a slice in his skin from his elbow to the tips of his fingers and had been so panicked about it that he blabbed the whole dream to anyone who would listen. He'd come to 71, begging the teacher for help in curing his dreaming anomaly. He called 71 an "expert" on the subject. A nearby Transportation Aide overheard the conversation and relayed the report to the Community. 71 had simply watched as the doctor was whisked away by his own Nurses, carried off to be treated by the hands of some new doctor on Level 2. 62 wouldn't have believed it when 71 told him about it later on, except that afterwards the Maintenance Man stopped coming to download his data.

  "So you're saying that they're in cahoots?” 71 interrupted 62's thoughts with his question. The teacher rolled over and pressed his face into the cool mist of his student's dream.

  “Where is cahoots?” 62 practiced closing his mind off from his teacher’s and suddenly surrounded his consciousness with a thick steel box. Everything within the box remained as it was, albeit substantially less expansive. Everything outside of the box became pitch black in the void left outside his imagination.

  “It isn’t ‘where is cahoots’. The proper question is, ‘What is cahoots?’” 71’s voice echoed in the emptiness that sprawled between them. As suddenly as the steel beams and thick walls appeared, they vanished and 71 found himself seated on the puffy Stratocumulus Cumulogenitus aloft in a bright blue sky beside his student once more.

  “You are getting very good at that.” The teacher noted.

  “Thank you. So, what is cahoots?” 62 rubbed his hands together and a small black book appeared with a thin yellow writing utensil.

  71 blinked in astonishment. “What is that you have there?”

  “A book. I created it to take notes in. I keep it in a secret place in my mind so that I can look through it and remember things.” 62 turned to a blank page and scribbled the word “Cahoots” along the edge of the page.

  “Ingenious!” 71 clapped his hands together in delight. Then, remembering the question, regained his scholarly visage. “Cahoots means that two or more Men are in league with one another. That they are working together toward a shared goal or purpose.”

  62 scrawled the definition across the page, filling it with unskilled handwriting. It had taken some practice but the words were getting easier to write, and easier to read. 62 hoped that some cycle he would be able to produce text as legible as what he had seen in other books. The definition of cahoots recorded in his ledger, he laid the writing utensil down, closed the book around it, and pressed his hands together until the journal disappeared with a small pouf of smoke.

  “So then, are we in cahoots?”

  “I should say that we are,” 71 mused. “But then, what are we cahooting for?”

  62 thought for a long time before answering.

  “I guess we're in cahoots to try to make being different okay. Like you said at the beginning of class, we all look the same on the outside but we have differences on the inside. Some Boys are smarter or faster or funnier than others. Some of us work hard and others don’t work at all. We all are different in the way we act. And I think that some of us want different things than others.” 62 thought back on all the things that 99 had said about wanting everyone to be the same. The sadness of it made him shake his head.

  “I don’t think I could have said it better myself.” 71 nodded.

  62 looked up at the bright blue air above him and imagined that he could see the faces of his many brothers smiling and laughing in the swirling sky. He liked to dream about them and promised himself that he would do it more often.

  “But how do we teach Men like the doctor from Level 2, or Boys like 99 that it is good to be different?” The laughing faces above 62 vanished and were replaced with the visage of the Boys trapped behind the fiery door from the doctor's twisted dream. 62 sometimes thought he saw 99's face pressed against the flickering flames.

  “It is simple, little Brother. All we can do is keep trying.” 71 reached across the short distance between them and picked up 62’s hand in his own.

  "Do you think it's real?" 62 stared at the doctor's steel doorway. Painful cries filled the corners of his consciousness as the specters of lost Boys grasped at the air.

  The teacher squeezed the Boy's hand tenderly for a moment and used a surge of shared energy to push the grim scene from the dream. 71 shook his head. "No. Although I doubt our friend, the doctor, had much of an imagination I also doubt that anything like that could be real. I suspect it is just his consciousness teaching him a lesson."

  62 sat up. "But what if it is real? What if there are Boys that need help?"

  71's cheeks spread into a soft and reassuring smile. “Don't get lost in the terror of a mad Man's dream, Brother. Use your imagination to expand your mind and do good in Adaline. Without ima
gination we are nothing but a collection of cogs helping to turn the wheels in a giant Machine. It is our dreams, our loves and desires, that make us Men.”

  62 looked down at his hand, firmly clasped in his teacher's. The sensation of warmth and transfer of energy between their fingers was shocking in a way that was comforting and wonderful. It was so different from the feeling of holding the doctor's clammy hand. He squeezed his teacher’s fingers in response to the empowering gesture.

  “I will always dream.” 62 stated simply. “And I will never give up.”

  END OF BOOK ONE

  Biocide

  For Sir Robert.

  “DESPITE ITS MORAL IMPLICATIONS, I've begun to consider Biocide as an option. A method which would be used to exterminate biologically inferior subjects, leaving more resources for the better specimens. We must systematically purify our legions if we hope to survive."

  - Father's Journal Entry

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CAREER APTITUDE Testing center was buzzing with a new kind of energy. Boy 1124562, called 62 by his friends, had developed enough to do more than just learn from lectures and diagrams. He, and the hundreds of other Boys animated in his batch, were being moved to a new compound. They were being promoted to the Training and Skills Kinesiology center.

  It had been nearly 250 cycles since 62 had embraced his anomaly and had scared off the doctor who had tried to stop his ability to dream. 62 stretched his arms out in satisfaction as he woke from his most recent session with his imagination. It wasn't much of a stretch; elbows bent and knees locked within the narrow walls of his cube. But it felt good to move. He smiled up at the ceiling as he thought back on the dream he'd just had and shook his head. Although he knew dreams were an anomaly, he didn't know how his brothers survived the monotony of C.A.T. without them.

  62 picked up his breakfast tablet and downed it with two gulps of the thick drink from the tube on the wall. He was just as excited as the rest of his pod about the promise of new surroundings, even if he'd be leaving his closest brother behind. Man 2871 was the one who had helped him understand the gift of dreams. Without his help, 62 might have disappeared in a foggy cloud of discipline long ago.

  A shiver ran down 62's spine. Whether it was from the anticipation of his upcoming transfer, or the fear of the sleep fog that the Nurses used to subdue bad Boys, he couldn't tell.

  62's thoughts were interrupted by a pair of flashing eyes peering through the grating of his cube door. “You've been a very good Boy, 1124562. Welcome to cycle 3,896. Please make your way to the Dressing Hall and prepare for class.”

  As the Nurse pulled away from the door, it unhooked from his data port and its eyes dimmed slightly. It was easy to tell when the Nurses were watching a Boy closely. Their eyes flashed in sharp bursts of color as they processed incoming information and calculated a response. The data passing through their processors burst with sparks of intelligence that made them seem alive and powerful. But when they weren't connected to a data port or streaming information through the feel of a Boy's skin, they were nothing more than a hive of mindless Machines.

  62 exited the cube and traveled shoulder to shoulder with the other Boys of his pod toward the giant Dressing Hall. Just like they had every day since they came to C.A.T., they would shower, change clothes and head to the classrooms. When 62 and his brothers first arrived in C.A.T., there had been a lot more room to move around. The area had never been spacious, but after so many cycles together, the Boys’ growth was apparent. All of the empty spaces had been filled with identically boney elbows, lengthened feet, and widening shoulders.

  The throng of Boys passed by the Nurses, Shower Aides, Transportation Aides and other Machines without giving them much thought. 62 stood in his shower for only a brief moment while the cool liquid infused with microscopic nanobots cleaned his skin and repaired any nicks or scratches. Just as a hundred other Boys before him, he shook his chilled body once the faucet stopped spraying. The cold lasted only a moment before the Shower Aide blew warm air over his skin to dry whatever liquid remained. His shower complete, he moved forward in the line to put on fresh clothes.

  62 didn't pay much attention to anything around him until he entered the small classroom that he'd been assigned to upon his arrival to C.A.T. Aside from his dreams, where he discovered almost anything was possible, the classroom was where he felt the most alive. He made his way to the back of the room, the hover chair bobbing slightly beneath him as he dropped into his seat. Tones rang through speakers hidden behind smooth white walls and just as the door was about to slide shut, Man 2871 appeared.

  71 had a few more wrinkles around his eyes, and slightly less hair around his gleaming head, than he had on 62's first day of class. The teacher maintained the same flourish as that first day though. His arms waved and his beard wagged as he greeted his students.

  “Good cycle, brothers. Welcome to the beginning of the end.” 71 winked, a facial expression that 62 and most of the other Boys had still failed to master.

  “Good cycle.” All nineteen of the Boys echoed back.

  “This cycle, we will begin reviewing your basic knowledge of Adaline in preparation for your transfer. Before we begin, does anyone have any questions?” Two wild eyebrows crept up 71's forehead. His crisp brown eyes darted around the room before settling on the tablet in front of him, waiting for the flashing buttons to appear as questions were formed.

  It only took a second before 71's tablet was aglow with a dozen blinking lights. He tapped his finger on the device. “56, your question please?”

  “What is the Training and Skills Kinesiology center? I thought after C.A.T. we'd be assigned straight into our careers.” 56 sat up straight, his hands folded neatly in his lap. There was not a single crease in his tunic, and his brown hair laid perfectly across his forehead. He'd been telling his brothers that he was sure he'd be assigned a career in Defense.

  “In C.A.T. our innate knowledge is tested. We learn about the Community in terms of theory and hypothetical conditions. Your tests have been tracked throughout your time here, and by now the Community has a good idea of which career you'll be placed in.” 71 swiped his hand along the screen of his tablet, throwing an image onto the wall behind him.

  The picture was of two Boys standing across from one another in a large circle. Each Boy leaned back on his heel, fists raised in front of him. Although the two Boys appeared identical, the one on the left seemed to be enjoying himself more than the one on the right. 62 had seen those expressions before. Back when the doctor from Level 2 had discovered 62's ability to dream, he forced all of the Boys to be checked for anomalies. The stress of constant surveillance took its toll on everyone. As tensions grew, fights had broken out amongst the Boys. There wasn't always a decisive winner or loser, but sometimes one Boy was so comfortable with the fight that his opponent looked at him with the terror of inevitable defeat.

  A bubble of guilt grew in 62's gut when he thought about the doctor from Level 2. It had been risky, but with help from 71 he'd been able to get into the doctor's dreams. By showing the deranged Man his own nightmares, 62 had convinced him to leave C.A.T. alone. The plan had worked, but 62 injured the doctor in the process and caused the Man to be taken away for a treatment that he may not have survived.

  “... and so because you haven't put any of these theories into practice, you will now be tested practically. The Head Machine must know what physical attributes you possess before it will make a final assignment for you. Intelligence will do you well in any of the careers, absolutely. But if you have both intelligence and innate physical strength? Well then, you're going to grow up to be the kind of Man we all want to lead us into the future.”

  “So, we're basically just going to find out if we're good for Defense or not?” An overconfident smile crept along the corners of 56's mouth.

  “Oh no, much more than that. The Men who toil to maintain Adaline also need incredible strength.”

  A voice carried through the class from
some Boy not waiting for his turn. “You mean, you have to be strong to dust things?” A rolling wave of giggles erupted.

  “Now, now.” 71 patted the air in front of him to hush the room. “Every career in Adaline is important. If we all worked in Defense, we'd probably have to stand all the time because there would be no one to repair the hover chairs when they malfunctioned. If we were all brilliant enough to be employed in Education as I am, then... well, I suppose that would be perfection. Who wouldn't want to be me?”

  Laughter erupted throughout the room, this time without smirks hidden behind hands. 62 laughed, too. Most of his brothers had a good idea of where they would be placed based on the testing and awards they had received in C.A.T. 62 was the only Boy in his classroom that had scored almost evenly and won a variety of awards in each of the career types. Although he didn't know what the future held, 62 secretly hoped to become a teacher just like 71.

  “94, what was your question?” 71 boomed over the laughter, and the noise quieted to a whisper.

  “What is Kinesiology?”

  “A fantastic question!” 71 swiped through several screens on his tablet before finding a diagram and pushing it up onto the wall. The image was of a nearly naked Man with cables and data receivers connected all over his body. The Man appeared to be running in place while a doctor typed data into a Machine nearby.

  “Kinesiology is a study in how our bodies move. It takes into account our skeletal, muscular and neurological structures and deciphers which type of movement best suits our bodies. It's quite a fascinating area of study.” 71 stared at the photo with awe equal to that of his students.

  “But aren't we all the same?” 94 looked around at the Boys seated on either side of him.

  “As always, that answer is both absolutely, and not quite.” 71 flicked his wrist and the image of the two Boys about to fight with each other reappeared. “Although we are virtually the same, there are small differences in the way we move. One Boy might be slightly faster than another. One Man may have more clumsiness than his neighbor. Although their strengths may be strikingly similar, they are not exactly the same.”