Adaline Read online

  Just as when he tried to follow his own teacher through the tunnels after class, whenever he caught a glimpse of a distant Man wandering at the far end of the tunnel he would vanish in the time it took for 62 to pick his way through the crowd. One cycle, 62 even tried pretending to be lost, wandering into a classroom that was not his own. Before he so much as set foot in the room a strange tingling feeling flowed down his back and caused a foreign fluttering in his chest so unsettling that he stopped dead in his tracks. The sensation upset him so much that he had to push himself against a wall in the hallway to steady himself before doubling over to catch his breath. Because the feeling stopped as quickly as it came, he thought he must have imagined it and attempted to enter the room again. The tingling overwhelmed him again, stronger this time than the last. The sudden pulse of his internal organs inside of him startled him so much that he did not make a third attempt.

  The more hurdles he discovered to finding answers to his many questions, the more 62’s mind sprang forward into new areas of curiosity. The question that plagued him the most frequently was, “Why?”

  Why was he unable to find a Man to answer all of his questions at once? Why was he spending so much time tapping away at a tablet filled with problems? Why was he unable to enter another classroom? Why was he so unhappy following his directive to test into a career function? And more importantly, why did all of the other Boys seem to be so content?

  A wave of heat began flowing under his skin, building and growing more intense as the cycles passed. Between the silent testing and segregated hours in the pods, 62 was feeling restless. The heat sensation was unfamiliar to 62, and it caused his entire body to feel as rigid as the steel walls that enveloped him. There was an unsettling tenseness in his bones, and he wondered if he was transforming into a Machine from the inside-out. Maybe this was how Machines were made.

  The changes in 62 did not go unnoticed. The Nurses passed by the door of his cube more frequently during his rest periods, downloading his data anew with each pass.

  “There, there,” the mechanical voices cooed through the thin wires of the door, “That’s a good Boy.” Although the Nurses each smiled their rigid smile and said only kind words to him, 62 couldn’t help but feel that they were waiting for him to misbehave so that they could spray him with fog and take him away.

  The truth was 62 felt like misbehaving. The more the fear of what might be lurking beyond the walls of C.A.T. grew, the more frequently he had to fight the urge to be bad. He could picture himself throwing his fists through the thin synthetic skin of the Nurses and wanted to rake at their internal mechanisms with fury. He sometimes found himself staring at the seams in the walls or the thin vents lining the ceiling of the pod, wondering if he might be strong enough to rip through them to get through to the darkness on the other side. As the desire to hit other Boys, smash his tablet and rip his blanket became stronger, he became more afraid. 62 began crossing his arms when he walked and crossing his legs when he sat in an attempt to keep them from doing the bad things in his mind.

  Until 62 was transported to C.A.T., and before Boys began disappearing from their pods, he had felt calm and comfortable. But now the constant threat of losing another misbehaved brother, and the fear that he might misbehave himself, caused him to have difficulty controlling his feelings and actions.

  He did his best to hide the bad thoughts, and he believed that he was doing a fair job of it until the end of a particularly difficult cycle of testing. Pretending to be preoccupied with an error produced by thousands of lines of code, 62 suddenly felt the weight of his teacher’s gaze upon him. Quickly, he moved his hands to the margins of the equations, covering the pictures he had created on his tablet and hoping that they would dissolve before 71 could see them. 62 looked up to find the teacher making slow strides toward his desk.

  62 stifled a sigh of relief as the images on the tablet faded into the white background just before his teacher loomed above him.

  71 leaned down until his mouth was level with 62’s left ear and spoke in a soft whisper. “I would be much obliged if you would conference with me outside.”

  A blank stare was the only response that 62 was able to muster. He had never seen any of the other Boys leave the classroom before the end of testing. He fidgeted slightly in his seat and pushed his tablet toward the edge of the desk. He sat on his hands and looked up at the teacher while deciding whether or not to comply with the request.

  “Really, it will only take a few moments and I trust that you will find the conversation most enlightening.” 71 didn’t wait for a response and simply walked towards the exit. He passed his hand along the seam of the door and the lock clicked. The sliding steel door hissed on hydraulics. After he passed through, the door remained open.

  The other Boys looked on as 62 got up and walked past them, curiously staring to see what would happen to him. 62 smiled in what he hoped would appear to be a calm expression and moved toward the door. His nervousness prompted his feet to trip over one another, and there was a loud crash as his knee caught the edge of a hover chair. The chair faltered under his weight and careened into the side of a neighboring desk.

  The teacher’s head and shoulders became visible around the corner of the still open doorway, his beard wagging as he stifled a small laugh. He called out, “Hurry now, we don’t have all the time in Adaline to waste.”

  “Yes, Teacher.” 62 muttered under his breath as he pulled the hover chair and desk out of their entanglement and slid them both back to their proper positions. He apologized to the Boys that his fall had disrupted. As carefully and quietly as possible, he made his way through the remainder of the classroom under the watchful gaze of his brothers. He was relieved when the door finally slid closed behind him with a loud hiss.

  The relief was short lived. As the embarrassment of his uncoordinated exit melted from his consciousness, the looming dark mass of the teacher suddenly replaced it. 71 stood just inches from 62, his bulky robes and long grey hair seeming to push all of the nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere around him. 62 pressed himself against the cold steel of the wall behind him, more worried about the Man in front of him than the sensors that would begin scanning the second his skin made contact.

  “Don’t look so frightened. I’m really quite harmless.” 71 crossed his arms and adjusted himself until his beard lay over his forearms like a living blanket.

  “What… why are we out here?” 62 could feel tingling in the tips of his fingers where the scanners had found him. He worried that he and the teacher might not be allowed outside of the classroom and quickly pulled away from the wall.

  “I wanted to speak with you about some changes in your behavior that I've noticed.” The old Man spoke softly, watching as Boy 62 shuffled uneasily. “It appears that there is something bothering you, and it has been affecting some of your testing results.”

  62 hadn’t considered that his moments of trailing thoughts might be affecting his tests. He was still finishing them far earlier than any of the other Boys, and even with the distraction of his thoughts didn’t feel that they had become any more challenging. In fact, they seemed to be getting easier.

  “I don’t understand what happened with the testing, but I’m sorry if I have been performing below standard.” 62 felt the smooth fabric of his smock run between his fingertips and imagined that it was able to erase the strange sensation that remained after touching the scanners. “What can I do to be a better Boy?”

  71 looked intently down on his student. He sighed and uncrossed his arms. Placing one hand on his hip, and the other softly on the small Boy’s shoulder he said quietly, “Honestly there is little that you can do. You are testing well, and I will be surprised if you don’t test into one of the higher levels of Education or Defense when all is said and done. What I am really worried about are the pictures that you make when your tests are complete.”

  Boy 62 felt his stomach churn. His eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open but no words escape
d. He hadn’t known that anyone would be able to see the images. “I – I didn’t mean to… I just always finish the testing with so much time left.” 62 stumbled over his words as he tried to explain his actions, even though he didn’t fully understand them himself.

  The teacher looked over one shoulder and then the other, ensuring that there was no one but the ever-present wall sensors to record him. Once satisfied, he kneeled down until his eyes were level with the Boy quivering before him. “It’s alright,” he whispered quietly. “No one has seen the pictures but me. I erase them before sending the tests out to the Head Machine for review. The Machines have never had any interest in the creativity of humans at any age, and I doubt even if they saw them that they would add them into your data file. I only have wondered why they have changed.”

  “Changed?” Boy 62 looked onto the Man through the blurriness of tear filled eyes. “I’m not in trouble? Oh…” he looked down at the floor somberly and then back at his teacher. “You mean, the disassembly?”

  “Yes,” 71 nodded. “Violent disassembly. Before, you seemed to be drawing random shapes and Boys. As if you were recreating friendly dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Oh, dear. Forgive me; I forget just how little your generation is being taught now. The definition of ‘dream’ is ‘A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.’ Dreams are the pictures you see after you close your eyes at night and go into a sleeping rest. Sometimes they can happen in the wakefulness as well, those are called ‘cycle dreams’. But as I was saying, your drawings seemed to be pictures of happy dreams. Of Boys you might have known and places you might be imagining.” The man shifted slightly as the strain of kneeling pricked at his old knees.

  “Drawing?” None of what the teacher was saying made sense.

  “Mother Dustblower!” The teacher yelled, pounding his free hand firmly against the floor and shaking his head in frustration. “Drawing. The action of moving your hand or stylus across the screen and creating images with one or more lines. We really aren't teaching you anything, are we?”

  Boy 62’s face became frozen save the quick flutter of his eyelashes as he blinked in astonishment. He repeated quietly, “I draw and I dream. I draw and I dream. I draw… and I dream…”

  “Yes, yes,” the teacher’s face had started to become puffy and red with the strain of staying at eye level with his student and the frustration of realizing that the child knew so little of his own capabilities. “But why such change over time? Why the disassembly?”

  “I have heat,” Boy 62 replied frankly. He pointed to the center of his chest with his index finger. “I feel it here. It boils and burns and it makes me want to… to disassemble.” He whispered the last of the sentence, understanding the gravity of what might happen if the Nurses knew that he longed to scrape the tiny gears from their eyes and pull at their hydraulic hoses until they burst.

  The old Man nodded silently for a moment, then with great effort pushed himself up off the floor until he was again standing at his full height. “I think I understand. This heat; it came after we discussed the Nurses disciplining your brothers and taking them away?”

  “Yes, and when I think about the fog.” Boy 62 wondered if 71 felt the heat too. “I feel the heat and it fills me up like the fog, except after it fills me up I don’t want to sleep. I want to disassemble them.”

  Another Man walked across the far end of the hallway, checking on the entrance to another set of pods. 71 turned to face him, waving his hand in the air in a form of greeting. The other Man did the same in return and disappeared through a distant classroom door. Without turning around to face 62 the teacher said quickly, “Class is about to end and you will need to go back to your pod. However, I am going to put in a request to the Head Machine to allow me to tutor you for one hour following class from now on. It is very important that if anyone asks you about these tutoring lessons that you tell them you are learning about coolant systems and Defense Mechanics. Do you understand?”

  Boy 62 stared at the back of his teacher’s robes, and if anyone had looked at his confused expression they would have known that he didn’t understand at all. But for some reason he felt that it was very important to answer with, “Yes, I understand.”

  The tones played quietly in the classrooms, the sound pushing its way through the tight seams of dozens of closed doors. Before 62 could muster the courage to ask what a tutoring lesson was, the doors all slid open with a quick hiss and Boys flooded the tunnel as they marched back to their pod.

  CHAPTER 4

  62 lay in the darkness of his cube and went over his brief conversation with 71. The things he was experiencing had names. That meant that other Boys and Men must have experienced them before. Drawing and dreaming had come to him without any effort. Although he was nervous that his teacher might share these activities with the Machines, and the Machines might decide that he was being bad, he was glad there was someone who he could share them with.

  As he stared at the ceiling above him, the glow of the scrolling data of the Boy across the hall reflected on the thin light panel embedded above him. His fingers traveled against the warm floor, absently drawing invisible swirls and lines. When he realized his fingers were drawing, he closed his eyes and pretended to see the lines extending beyond his fingertips, transforming into ragged shapes and then melding into a series of gears and circuits.

  The thought of mechanical components made the heat return to his chest. He thought about the gears and circuits in the Machines around him. The Nurses silently patrolling the hall outside his door. The boiling sensation flowed under his skin until it was so hot that he felt he might burn up. One of the Nannies in the Nursery had once caught fire when a Boy accidentally urinated on its charging pack during their toilet training phase. The Machine had sputtered a bit, and then sparks could be seen in its joints before it suddenly caught fire. Several of the other Nannies surrounded it, simultaneously pushing the Boys back from the blaze and dousing the burning Machine in an inflammable powder. Once the fire was out, a Man, who looked thousands of cycles younger than 71, had come to repair the broken Nanny. He explained to the Boys what had happened as he quickly repaired it. If he burst into flame, 62 wondered if they would send a Man to repair him.

  62 raised his hands to his face and examined them in the faint blue light from the hall. They were softer than the hands of the Nurses. He didn't have any exposed joints or circuits; instead his skin stretched across his organic frame in one continuous sheath. The more he learned about himself, the more new questions bounced against one another inside his mind.

  He turned his thoughts away from the Machines and again concentrated on what his teacher had said about drawing, dreaming and tutoring. He closed his eyes tight and thought about the dreams he had experienced the last few nights. He couldn't remember more than a few flashes of them, but as he concentrated on the friendly faces and the comfort of the Nursery that filled them he could feel the heat in his chest start to cool.

  He wondered sleepily about the tutoring. Because he'd never heard the word before, he had no concept of what it might be but his mind wandered into visions of 71 and himself drawing on tablets and showing them to one another on the large projection wall. A small smile crept across his lips as he drifted off to a deep sleep.

  When the sounds of breakfast rolling through feeder tubes rang in his ears and the flickering lights above him began to shine through his eyelids, 62 sprung up with excitement and energy. The heat that had filled him the night before was replaced with cool assurance. Long before the Nurses began opening doors to the pods, he had stuffed his poorly folded blanket into its bin and had almost choked on his breakfast by swallowing it too quickly. He was able to sit in his appointed spot in the center of the cube, but not without wiggling his toes and tapping his fingers against his knees in excited anticipation.

  He nearly toppled over the Nurse that unlocked the door and
had to hold himself back to keep from running into his brothers as he anxiously wove through the sleepy mass headed toward the Dressing Hall. He got irritated with the Shower Assistant for taking too long, and was in such a hurry that he grabbed the wrong tunic before he ran toward the exit. He bounded through the crowd completely unaware that he was wearing dirty clothes. Luckily, Boy 99 caught him by the arm before he stepped through the door and out into the tunnel.

  "62! You're not dressed! Don't you know you can't wear a dirty tunic to class?" 99 spun 62 around so that he was facing the rows of Boys and Shower Assistants that he had just fled. "You're going to get yourself sprayed running around like that."

  "Oh, yeah. Thanks." 62 shook his head and tried to focus. "Do you think my clean smock and pants are still around somewhere?"

  "I don't know," 99 said quickly, "I've never seen anyone leave them behind before. Let's not find out what happens if you lose them." The two Boys walked quickly back toward the showers, each trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. "Which line were you in?"

  "I don't remember. I was thinking too hard." 62 glanced sideways at 99 and tried to judge if he was a Boy who would report this misstep to one of the Machines. "You know, about tests and stuff."

  99 didn't respond right away. Instead, he craned his neck to try to see beyond the identical Boys ahead of them to the shower stalls. With all the bodies in the way it was hard to tell if any of them had an extra set of clothes in their stall. "I can't see if... wait... there they are!"