The Culling: The Culling, #1

PROLOGUE

THE IO COLONY

Papa fell down and he didn’t stand up again.

I’d seen Papa jump the tallest fence in our colony. I’d seen Papa laugh and dance with Mama in the living room when I was supposed to be asleep. And I’d seen Papa run alongside me, so fast. But I’d never seen Papa fall down until that morning.

I puzzled it out as I sat with Mama in our front yard, one of my twin sisters on my lap. But where did he go? I asked her.

I don’t know. Her voice didn’t sound like Mama’s voice.

I looked at the place where he’d fallen. The red dirt was pushed around like something had been dragged through it. I tried to understand. But those men took him somewhere.

Mama stood up quickly then, one of the twins on her hip. They took him away. With the rest of the culled, Glade.

I frowned. I didn’t know what that meant. All the grownups had been talking about the Culling, but no one had told me what it was. And then Papa had fallen down. And hadn’t moved for hours. Mama had gone out to him. Just once. Just for a minute. She’d leaned down over him and shook and shook. It had looked like she was talking. But she hadn’t let me go outside. Not until men had come by on a truck and picked Papa up and driven him away.

And he won’t come back? It didn’t make any sense. Papa always came back. He was the kiss on my forehead before I fell asleep. Papa made breakfast for all of us. Of course he was coming back.

No. He won’t. Mama was standing, and then she was snatching up the baby from my arms so that she held one twin on each hip. I thought she was going to say more, but instead she went into the house.

When she came back out, she’d put the girls down for a nap and she didn’t stop walking until she was almost on top of me.

Mama! I cried when she hugged me so tight that I gasped. She was gasping, too.

You have to promise you won’t be like your father, Glade, she whispered into my ear.

The way I look? I asked, trying to pull free of her grasp. I didn’t know how to change that. Everyone said I looked just like Papa.

She laughed, but it sounded like broken glass clinking at the bottom of a trash can. No. The way you think. You can’t be like him. You have to blend in, Glade. You hide in plain sight, okay?

I’m good at hiding. But I don’t like it, I said, trying to pull myself from her arms again. Papa can never find me when we play.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. You have to do it, Gladey. You blend in. You hide. But here. She pressed a dry palm to my forehead. You have to hide here, too.

Mama. I was gasping because she was hugging me too tight again.

If they can’t see you, they can’t find you, she whispered, over and over into my hair as she rocked us back and forth, and after a while, I just sat perfectly still.

Clicking open the small screen at his wrist, the man studied the readout of the little girl’s brain. Even now, he could barely believe what he was looking at. Finding her profile had been like taking a handful of sand on the beach and finding a perfect, polished ruby.

Someone else might have looked at this same image of brainwaves and seen a cloud of colors surrounding a brain. But Jan Ernst Haven looked at the image and saw only potential. A tremendous capacity for greatness. She was the key for him. She held the future of their society within her.

He looked up from the image projected from his wrist and caught sight of the child herself. She sang a song with no melody, lying on her stomach in her yard, her feet making circles in the air behind her.

Haven looked down at the boy standing next to him on the sidewalk. Just a few years older than the girl. Do you see how calm she is, Dahn?

Dahn nodded, with his dark hair long but scrupulously neat.

Her father has just been culled, and her mother made quite the scene, but still, the girl is calm.

Dahn nodded again. A thought struck his nine-year-old brain. That’s what a Datapoint would do in this situation. Stay calm.

Yes. Exactly. Very good. Haven’s eyes moved back to the girl’s brain readout. He still couldn’t believe it.

Dahn’s small chest swelled at Haven’s praise and the little boy thought the man might put a hand on his head or his shoulder. But Haven just kept staring down at the tech on his wrist. Trying to push down his disappointment, Dahn studied the little girl. She had hair that fell around her shoulders like a blanket. And when she rolled over, Dahn saw that she had dark eyes to match.

Her father had been culled that morning, and there she was, playing in the dirt yard. He glanced up at Haven. Dahn thought of the day his own father had died. The way he hadn’t been able to get the tears to stop. How his chest had been made of ice for weeks. He hoped that Haven didn’t know about that.

He was going to be a Datapoint someday. He just knew it. And as he watched the little girl playing, he knew in his gut that she would be, too.

CHAPTER ONE

Ten Years Later

~The Asteroid Belt~

I’ve always hated hide-and-seek.

But if you had to play it, like I did right now, so much better to be the hunter than the hunted.

I cracked my knuckles in front of me as I stepped into the simulator, and the door slammed behind me. I was instantly plunged into darkness – a blunt darkness, as can only happen indoors. Two points of light opened up in front of me, one on the left and one on the right.

I bared my teeth in a feral grin as my eyes bounced from one point of light to the other. They were throwing two colonies at me at once. I waited, tense and ready, as both points of light started spiraling open, focusing. They were forming not just into images, but into my new reality.

Within seconds, I was straddling the line between two worlds. I could see the images with my eyes, but when I closed them, I could see the images projected across my brain, as well. The computer implanted in my arm and head was cool like that. There was almost nothing I couldn’t do with it.

I scanned the two landscapes on either side of me. Glacially icy on one side, offering all the blues and grays of an icy planet. And on the other side, the black sky met the umber sand of a red planet. I looked back and forth between them. Two colonies at once. I knew it was just a simulation, but still, a bead of sweat rolled down my back as I planted my feet on the floor of the simulator.

Come out, come out, little citizens.

Using my computer, my integrated tech, I zoomed in on the icy landscape first. I felt the frigid wind, the brisk scent of ozone filling my nostrils, and soon I was close enough to see the roofs of dwellings. And yup. There the people were. I ignored the heavy furs that covered all but their eyes. I ignored their varying heights and weights. I ignored the way some of them held hands or rode on one another’s backs. I ignored the laughter that rang out from a group of citizens who had to be just about my age. I ignored the familiar admonishing tone of a mother at her wit’s end. The only thing I saw were the reddish glows that emanated from each person’s brainwaves.

The integrated tech computer that had been implanted when I’d been chosen for this job was designed to detect brain patterns. The computer in my brain could see other people’s brainwaves, and it presented the information in a way that allowed my eyes to see it, too. It had taken a long time to get used to it. But now it was almost like second nature. I let the reddish blurs around each person’s head remain just that – blurry.

Shifting my attention to the red planet now, I gave my eyes a second to adjust from the blinding white of the ice planet to the burnished, sunburned bake of the second colony. The black sky was a rich dark, the kind of black that had depth. With the Milky Way splashed across the skyroof of the red planet, I gave my eyes a second to adjust as my tech zoomed in on the colony, the red planet rushing past in my periphery. Soon we were there. The thick canvas tents that the citizens used as dwellings flapped in the constant, stinging wind. Each person wore white garments to reflect heat, but they were all dyed a deep, dusty pink from the red sand being flung in every direction.

This was a busier colony than the ice planet. People bustled past one another, balancing baskets of wares on their heads. The streets were narrow and craggy, lined with red rock walls that gave way to the canvas dwellings that stood every ten feet or so. So little of this planet was hospitable that the people had to live on top of one another like bees in a hive. The simulation raced me down one twisting street and to the next, so that I was coasting past grannies in doorways who were sorting seeds into one basket or another. Past children huddled around a game of skipping rocks on the ground. Past a ratty dog, everything but his eyes covered in red grit.

And then I landed in the main square. A place I’d only seen photographs of in the past.

People haggled over prices in the canvas booths that lined the square. Eggs and bread were traded and bartered. A group of unwatched children ran screaming from one end of the square to the other, adults scowling after them. A line of people 800 feet long wrapped around the square. Everyone held empty chalices. It was the line for water. A group of citizens shouted over one another as they crowded around a small wooden platform where an ox stood. The animal’s age was shown in its milky eyes and swollen joints, but still, the farmers shouted and scrapped for the auctioneer’s attention. On a planet as hard to farm as this one, any help was highly sought after.

I pulled my attention from the details of the two worlds and back to the task at hand. This wasn’t a sightseeing simulation. I was a trained Datapoint. This was my job.

This was a Culling.

Using every bit of training that had been pounded into me over the last two years, I began to block out all of the sensory details of the two colonies on either side of me. The slate gray clouds and the pale icy sun melted away on my left. On my right, the baked red became nothing more than a neutral background. Like I had a hand gripping a knob on a radio, I guided my integrated tech into turning the volume down. The noises of the market on one side muted, and the noises of the children playing on the other side did the same.

Soon, all I was left with were the citizens and the halos of red around their heads. I brought each red blur even further into focus. Starting with one alone and then moving to each citizen individually, I read their brainwaves with practiced ease.

My integrated technology and my brain worked in perfect, synchronized tandem as I identified the citizens I was looking for. In the simulation, they were scattered about, as they’d be in their worlds. But in my mind’s eye, it was as if all of the citizens were standing neatly in a line before me. Using my technology to organize them, I saw about a quarter of the citizens stepping forward. These were the ones I was about to cull. The ones with brainwaves indicating violence and aggression. The ones with the capacity to commit murder. The ones who were inclined to bring down pain on the citizens around them.

There were hundreds of citizens about to be culled, and another bead of sweat traced down my spine. This was almost as many as I’d culled in the last simulation, and I’d ended up in the infirmary for two days after the strain of that Culling. And I still hadn’t even readied the icy planet yet.

Sure, it would be easier to cull them in groups. Do a hundred here or a hundred there. But that wasn’t what this simulation was for. This was mass culling.

I could almost hear Haven’s voice in my ear. "Push yourself, Glade. You have the capacity for greatness. Yet it’s almost like you’re trying to blend in."

I took a deep breath and turned my attention to the next planet, zooming in on each citizen’s brainwaves, pulling forward all the ones to be culled.

Between the two colonies, there had to be at least a thousand that needed to be culled. My vision blurred and I realized I’d stopped breathing. The way I would if I were lifting something heavy. I felt my brain stuttering as I attempted to combine the culling groups from the two colonies. It didn’t matter that they were across the galaxy from one another. It didn’t matter that I was attempting to separate each citizen from the next, to cull some and not all. It didn’t matter that each citizen was moving about, talking and laughing and pulsing. I had to cull all at once, and with vicious accuracy.

Within the simulator, my knees trembled. My hands clenched open and closed and, for a horrifying second, I lost grip on my tech and all the sensory stimuli flooded back in. Red dust and jutting glaciers of ice. Children playing, women hugging, the dusty dog digging in a pile of refuse.

No!

My brain wove itself into the integrated tech and took control again, zooming in on the citizens waiting to be culled. I ignored the faces, and I ignored the voices – all I saw were the reddish blurs of their brainwaves.

Ruthlessly separating them in my mind, I realized my mistake. I was going too slowly. I’d never been a long-distance runner. I was a sprinter. My knees shook again and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it more than ten or fifteen more seconds before I collapsed and ended up in the infirmary again; my brain couldn’t take the strain.

My vision blurred as I huffed air in and out of my lungs. I was losing the groups. The culled were mixing in with the regular citizens. I couldn’t hold the line. Couldn’t tell the difference. With my heart stuttering in my chest, the computer in my arm felt foreign and angrily sharp. I was failing. I was failing again.

Clarity raged within me even as every single brainwave of every single citizen melted into the next. Their brain patterns were a single, cacophonous blur.

I gripped the sides of my own head and screamed into the strain of it. It was useless. I was too exhausted to distinguish them.

Mass Culling.

I could all but feel the breath of Jan Ernst Haven in my ear. Mass Culling.

Individuals didn’t matter.

The red blur of their pulsing brains seemed to cloud around me, bearing down on me. They were so close. Everywhere. I lifted one hand in the air – the arm where my integrated tech had been implanted. My brain warred for dominance with the computer that had been implanted in me. The integrated tech strained, searching for just the cullable citizens. My own brain strained for silence, for this to be over. I felt the familiar feeling of my tech’s grip on the brainwaves of a citizen. I always visualized a hand gripping a giant plug. This was bigger than any plug I’d ever pulled before. But there was no looking back now. The red of each citizen was about to collapse on me. I couldn’t hold them all. It was me or them.

My brain and my tech synchronized and, in one crystal clear moment, we, as one, yanked the red brainwaves together. The citizens, such a large group, resisted at first. Pulling one citizen’s brainwaves was easy. It was like plucking a hair from a head. But pulling thousands at once was like yanking out a whole handful of hair.

But my brain was strong. And so was my tech. With a scream like a warrior, I gritted my teeth and gave a final yank. I felt the brainwaves come loose from each citizen, blinking instantly into blackness. Into silence. My tech immediately stopped blocking my senses. And there were the two colonies. One icy and gray-blue. The other baked red and blistering hot. Both of them silent as a tomb. And not a brainwave to be found.

I sighed as soon as the door to the simulator creaked open. I knew exactly who was standing on the other side and I knew exactly what he was going to say.

You’ve got to be joking, Glade.

Apparently, he always thought I was joking. I merely raised an eyebrow at Dahn as I pushed past him, out of the simulator and into the training room. Everything was gray metal and brown upholstery – even the command chair where Dahn had just been sitting. For one brief second, I thought wistfully of the two gorgeous landscapes he’d just shown me in the simulator. And then I thought of the vacuous silence I’d left in each of them. I shoved that thought away.

He let me brush past him, but immediately chased after me. When I didn’t show signs of stopping, Dahn slid his stocky frame in front of mine, blocking my way. His dark hair stood out starkly against his pale skin as he stared down at me, his arms crossed over his chest. It always annoyed me in moments like this that he was so handsome.

All of them, Glade? All of them? Every single citizen?

I shrugged, acting as if I wasn’t sure what was so wrong about the choice I’d just made. "You heard Haven. He wants us to focus on mass culling."

"Don’t play dumb. You know he wouldn’t have meant for you to cull every single citizen. A piece of his long dark hair fell forward across his forehead and he elegantly tied it back with the rest. I don’t even know how you manipulated your tech to cull the citizens who didn’t require it."

That gave me pause. Actually, now that he mentioned it, that part hadn’t been hard at all. Even though my tech wasn’t designed for that purpose, it had been surprisingly easy to cull everyone.

I cleared my throat and gave the only answer I could think of. It was too many people. My sensors were completely fuzzed over. I couldn’t tell one from the other. I tried to step past him, but he smoothly moved right along with me. After years of knowing Dahn, this behavior didn’t surprise me. He’d been smoothly putting himself in my way since pretty much the day I’d met him.

You’re telling me that you had trouble distinguishing between them in the simulation? he asked, a line of worry forming between his eyebrows.

That was Dahn for you, always balancing frustration and worry.

So what if I did? Not an answer, exactly, but not a lie, either.

Dahn narrowed his eyes in that way of his. The way he did when he thought he was hiding his temper. Let’s go through this one more time.

He waved his hand through the air like he was wiping something clean between us. A glowing projection of a human brain appeared where his hand had just been. I envied the ease with which he was able to manipulate his own tech to do what he wanted.

I’d been selected to be a Datapoint – just like all of the other Datapoints – because apparently, I was naturally inclined to be one. And sure, give me a computer, no matter how archaic, and I could make it stand up and dance for you. But the integrated tech they installed when you started your training as a Datapoint? Well, even after two years, it still felt unwieldy.

I traced my own hand over the shimmery, clear motherboard that lined my left arm like crystal jewelry. As my fingers brushed the tech, I felt the shivery corresponding buzz in the tech on the left side of my face, also illuminated by iridescent crystals.

Dahn’s own tech pulsed with light at his temples as he almost carelessly rotated the projection of the brain to face me. A flick of his fingers, and the brain lit up red in a few different zones. Dahn raised one of those imperious eyebrows at me. His soft gray eyes shone with frustrated expectation.

I sighed, surveying the projection, knowing exactly what he was asking of me. We’d only done it about a thousand times before. It needs to be culled, of course.

He flicked his fingers and the red zones on the brain shifted, but infinitesimally.

Culled, I repeated, almost bored.

The red zones in the projection shifted again, this time indicating a person who shouldn’t be culled.

That one’s to be left alone.

Now the projections went faster and faster, showing different zones each time.

Culled, left alone, culled, culled, left alone, culled.

Dahn snapped his hand closed with barely disguised frustration and the projection disappeared, leaving behind only a slightly black spot in my vision.

Explain it to me then, Glade, he bit out. How you can score with one hundred percent accuracy on the projection tests, and fail so catastrophically in the simulations?

With a strange tug in my stomach, I thought of the strain of distinguishing between the citizens, how unnatural it had felt. And then I thought of how relatively easy it had been to pull the plug on all of them, rather than just the ones needing to be culled. But I said nothing. Instead, I did what I pretty much always did around Dahn. I shrugged.

His temper flashed bright in his gray eyes for only a second before they dimmed. "This isn’t something you can shrug off, Glade. This is the Culling. The glue that holds our entire society together for God’s sakes. And the decade is up. It’s coming. Around the corner, and you’re not ready for it!"

Shame sliced through me for just a second, white hot. Dahn was right. Frustrated with my inability to do well in the simulations, I’d begun treating my training with disdain and indifference. I know.

His look softened, but Dahn Enceladus had never been one to pass up the opportunity to make a point. One of his graceful hands floated back to gesture at the simulator. "You just culled people who shouldn’t have been. Instead of concentrating and ferreting out the citizens with violent or murderous tendencies, you culled every single one of those people. Including the people with attributes that strengthen our society."

I cleared my throat and tossed my long black hair back over my shoulder. I shifted my weight onto my good leg; even so, I felt the tremor in my knee. I was exhausted from the simulation, but I’d be damned if I showed weakness in front of any other Datapoint, even Dahn. I know what I did, Dahn. Now, if you’d get out of my way for a second…

Instantly, his soft gray eyes went from boring into mine to scanning down my body. The black workpants and tight black t-shirt that every Datapoint was required to wear didn’t do much to hide the trembling in my muscles.

You’re exhausted, he said, stepping back, and a look came over his face that I couldn’t interpret. I’d seen that look before from him and it confused me every time. It was… soft. He reached one arm toward my elbow.

I’m fine. I just need to—

Glade Io.

I tried not to wince at the reedy voice that always seemed to be speaking directly into my ear. There was only one person who consistently called me by my full name. I’d hoped that he hadn’t taken it upon himself to watch that particular simulation, but he always seemed to be keeping an eye on me.

Sir Haven, I addressed him, turning on my heel and nodding once to show respect. As a member of the Authority, Jan Ernst Haven was one of the seven most important people in our solar system. Each of the seven members of our government served for a lifetime, working together to uphold the laws and rules of our solar system. He was the only member of the Authority I’d ever actually met, and he lived on the Station with us. Really, it was an honor that he’d taken a personal interest in my development as a Datapoint. But one look at the subtly disappointed expression on his face and his interest once again felt like an