Regulators, p.26
Regulators, page 26
“Are you above compromise?”
He said, “There’s no compromising with that.”
I didn’t let myself smile.
There was always a way to get through a door. You just had to know the passcode. Sometimes they were longer, more difficult than others. But there was always a way through any door.
You just had to figure it out.
“I’m not talking about that,” I said. “I’m talking about living. There’s so much. And because I care about you, I don’t want to sit here and watch you not-living while you have the chance to. Really living. So, you can exclude that word if you promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked stiffly.
“That you’ll live,” I said. “You’ll let yourself experience all this, while you can. That’s what I’m doing.” I shook my head firmly at him. “I don’t give a shit if you don’t, or won’t, or can’t feel that for me, Seb. I want you to live with me.”
His voice went quiet to say, “I can’t promise you that.”
I looked out at the water. “I wonder how long it’ll take them to find someone who would.” Or at least someone who would pretend to.
“Are you threatening me?”
I brought my attention back to him and clarified with, “Compromising. Either live with me or get the hell out now. I don’t want you if you won’t.” I paused, letting that sink in, before continuing on. “They might not care about us as people, but they care about something. I think they’re pretty set on this little combination we have going, don’t you?”
His jaw was clenched for several seconds before he said, “You are threatening me.”
“No.” I couldn’t help my mouth just barely tugging up at the corners. “I’m manipulating you by dangling a threat in front of your face and hoping you’ll go against your manly pride and turn away from it.”
“Are you that sort of fucking person?”
“No. But I’m IC, Seb. I can. Sure, this is slightly different from what I was taught, but it’s still the same at its core.”
“So are you just bullshitting?”
“No. You compromise with me or I’ll have you replaced in as long as it would take me to walk inside.”
Even though he didn’t respond at all, he was angry and it was obvious. His hands were clenched into fists near the edge of the pool and his jaw was again clenched. Angry was good, as long as he could keep it under control. Angry meant he cared about what I was threatening. It meant he didn’t want it to happen, and that he knew it could, but that he didn’t want it to.
“Where’s the compromise?” he asked through his teeth.
And I said it, for the third time in my life. “Love.”
The anger faded and was replaced with confusion. I was sure several minutes had passed before he asked, “Why?”
“Because I’m going to show you something,” I said assuredly, looking straight into his eyes. “You’re worth something. Maybe not to them, maybe not to yourself. But you are worth something to me. It might take me a while to figure it out, but I’m going to show you. If you don’t want to or won’t see it, I don’t want you here. Just another person driving past things that should be stopped for.”
His eyebrows slowly went farther down. “Show me what?”
“It’s a secret,” I whispered in amusement. It wasn’t a secret.
Still, he leaned his head down toward me just slightly.
“Do you want to hear it?”
“Stop fucking with me and just tell me,” he said, clearly frustrated.
I pulled my feet out of the pool and got on my knees at his left side. I moved closer until my mouth was all the way against his ear, and then I cupped my face on either side. Even after rinsing them off in the pool who knew how many times, they still smelled faintly of bleach. I didn’t care.
I barely said the words, but I knew he’d hear them.
“I will push, and push, and keep pushing. I don’t feel like I can do what you said you could last night, but I will. I will either break the world, or I’ll break myself trying. For myself. For you. For them. I will do it because . . . I don’t care. I would rather break myself than never live. And I will push as hard as you make me because the thought of you not living while we all have the chance . . .” I breathed. It was all I felt I could do. “We’re people, Seb. What’s the point of being alive if it’s only the bad things?”
His left arm wrapped around me, picking me up and moving me over until both my knees were outside either of his legs. His mouth was against mine when the words, “You’re going to get us killed,” hardly came out.
“I don’t care,” I told him.
It was better than never living, as long as there was living done first.
I kissed him.
I kissed him, and I tried to pay more attention to what was happening—the way his hands felt on me, the feel of his fingers going beneath the bathing suit on the outside of my hip, just touching. But when he pulled me down against him and leaned his face down to follow mine, I couldn’t pay attention to anything.
Feeling.
The breathing felt so heavy. Everything felt so heavy and so light at the same time. God, that feeling.
“Seb!” Paige yelled from an open window. “Seb, your com! It’s going off! It says WR CO, over and over.”
“Shit,” he said quickly under his breath.
Seb took off running toward the door, taking me with him. I didn’t know how he managed it. It happened so fast.
The door was still open and his hands were shaking while he was putting his com back on. My legs were wrapped around his lower back. As soon as his com was in place, his left arm went around my back, keeping me in place.
I was looking at his com, watching the red letters blinking. WR CO blinked one last time after it had been put on.
Will Remove. Com On.
How was he supposed to know to put it on if he wasn’t wearing it?
FMTF appeared, blinked several times, and then disappeared. And full words started scrolling almost immediately after.
THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE CAN BE OBSERVED BY BOTH SEB-16945276 AND REG ID JCE-286. ALL PHYSICAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PARTIES MUST BE MONITORED DUE TO SAFETY CONCERNS. IF A BREACH IN ORDER IS MADE AFTER THIS MOMENT, JCE-286 WILL BE REQUIRED TO WEAR COM AT ALL TIMES AND SEB-16945276 WILL BE REMOVED AND REPLACED. REFUSAL TO COMPLY FROM EITHER PARTY WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE REMOVAL AND REPLACEMENT OF SEB-16945276. DO YOU COMPLY?
“Yes,” Seb and I both said immediately.
“What does . . .” I started and then stopped. “What counts as a physical interaction?” Did hand-holding even count?
The only thing his com said after was, JCE-286 CO.
Seb was shaking his head when he reached out for the com Paige was holding in her hand, extended in the air between herself and the two of us. He was frowning at it while reaching.
He reattached it to my arm and said, “Jaycee, go upstairs.”
He looked away, I unwrapped my legs, and he dropped me slowly. I walked upstairs, glancing over my shoulder at him. He was staring down at his com as I went. More messages.
Once inside my room, I sat down on my bed and brought my com close to my face. “I know there are people on the other end of this,” I said quietly, feeling more tears on my face. There had to be. “Will someone please tell me what counts as physical interactions?”
My wrist buzzed.
JCE-286, LIST OF PERMISSIBLE
It disappeared and then buzzed again.
PHYSICAL INTERACTIONS TO FOLLOW
My wrist buzzed so many times, going through a list of them. Then it buzzed more, giving me the other list of physical actions that were non-permissible without wearing the com.
I was certain I’d sat there staring at the small screen of my com for well over an hour by the time it was finished. They’d given me no margin for error, no slipups. If I slipped up, he would be gone.
ANY CONFUSION OVER LISTS? my wrist buzzed.
“I’m clear,” I answered quietly.
It didn’t buzz when it said, JCE-286, WATCH WORDS. The screen went blank and didn’t buzz again, but more green words appeared.
THEY ARE VERY CLOSE TO
REMOVING THE GEN
DEATH LIKELY, FAILURE
TO FOLLOW ORDERS
DO NOT RESPOND VERBALLY
WATCH WORDS, JCE-286
SLOW HEART RATE
THEY ARE LISTENING
I kept staring at the screen, even after it had gone dark and nothing else appeared on it. I focused on my heart, on my breathing, slowing both as instructed.
Seb and I were getting messages from two different places.
I understood, in that moment, why there were two birds.
I didn’t care about either of the birds, but . . . one of them included what I wanted.
They were . . .
They were trying to help me. Even if it was helping themselves by helping me, they were still trying to help.
They knew. I knew that they knew.
Love. It was such a dangerous word. It made people do ignorant things. They knew how I felt, how I was feeling. They’d known even before I’d heard what the word actually meant. They knew because they were aware that I’d do anything to keep him here. It made no sense. It was ignorant, but I knew what it was.
Love wasn’t something that you just were. You fell into it.
I knew that was what it was because it was the only way to describe the way I felt around him.
It felt like I was falling. Somewhere. That had to be what it was, with how he described it.
If I slipped up . . . I was going to get us killed.
Chapter 21
Together
I didn’t leave my room for a very long time after getting the lists and realizing about the coms. I took a shower, trying to get the smell of bleach and pool chemicals off my skin. It took a while, with the bleach. I was also concerned about scrubbing too hard with the sunburn, and that added time. I also did a few experiments that left me feeling very strange and awkward to the point where I wasn’t comfortable enough being in my room, let alone contemplating vacating it. I was sure I’d be more uncomfortable around anyone else than I currently was by myself.
I was already uncomfortable enough, but staying where I was seemed like the only way to not make it as bad as it could be. I wasn’t used to being around anyone for even somewhat extended stretches without far more time away than near. Such close and personal proximity. Such personal anything. I realized . . .
I’d never really felt like a person to have personal anything. I’d just always known I was one. And I couldn’t help wondering . . .
I couldn’t help wondering how many of us were back there feeling like I always had. How many were sitting in class wondering why no one seemed human, why we couldn’t be human. I wondered what I’d wondered so many times.
How many of us were still people, hiding to survive, and how many no longer were because it had been removed from them in some way or another if it had ever been there at all?
I sat as straight as a board on my bed for what felt like hours, staring at the blankness of the television in front of me and occasionally down at the blankness of my com. I tried to make sense of it all, but I just went around in what seemed to be endless circles.
It was during one of those times of staring down at my wrist resting over the tops of my legs that I saw it.
JCE-286
That was all it said for a moment, but then something else appeared.
DO NOT SAY SAFE WORD
AGAIN UNLESS NECESSARY
EVEN IF WITHOUT COM
DO NOT STARE AT COM
WHEN OUTSIDE ROOM
WATCH WORDS, JCE-286
LEAVE ROOM IF
MESSAGE RECEIVED
I stood up and left my room, trying to figure out why my arm didn’t always buzz me. I didn’t know. I could’ve taken a guess or two, but I couldn’t possibly be right.
I almost literally bumped into Paige when turning onto the stairs.
“Oh,” she said, sounding startled. “I was just coming to get you.”
“What for?” I asked.
“We need to go out, but Sebastian thinks two nights in a row of clubbing is too much,” she said. “He said he’s going to take us shopping.”
Though I was indescribably relieved about not going to another club tonight, I had to ask, “What’s that?”
After preparing me in a much more suitable way than had been done the night before and extensive explanations of things from Seb, we were off.
I couldn’t really understand the point of shopping after it was explained, especially when we already seemed to have everything we needed and more at the house, but there were a lot of people around when we reached our destination. That seemed like reason enough. So I walked between Seb and Paige, observing all those people as they came in and out of small stores and interacted with their companions.
It was interesting how large groups of people’s behavior varied from one location to the next. There were the similarities—bumping, maneuvering, and the like—but they were so different. I was unsure if that was due to locations, the people, or a combination of both. And despite all the people, I didn’t mind the mall as much as I’d minded the club. Though my head still felt a bit funny and light, and it was still loud, the lighting and the noise wasn’t as bad or hard to deal with here. It was also a massive relief that not all congregations of people had to do with touching and reproduction.
Paige insisted that we get our nails done, which made no sense because they’d been painted the day before. I didn’t know how it might potentially be different. Seb insisted on not splitting up the group, but she insisted we’d be fine and that we had cellphones. Those were the things the brother and sister had used to communicate with one another at the beach, I knew now. He took the boys somewhere and we got our nails done.
It was pleasant in some ways, though the smells were horrendous.
Paige had told them what to do to both mine and hers, and they did precisely what she said. I didn’t know how she knew about it, when and where she’d learned as much as she had. Surely they didn’t teach the brains about everything there was in the world. There was no way they could’ve had the time. There was so much.
I examined my nails when they were finished, finding black ends on them with thin lines of silver beneath the black and little sparkly things on the nails of my third fingers. They caught the light strangely, and I found that I liked them very much for some reason. Paige paid for both of ours with a credit card located in the wallet of her purse. They didn’t look like the boys’ wallets, but I supposed the same things could look different, sort of like with the nutrition facts. Or bathing suits, bikinis, and swim trunks, more like.
When she was finished with paying, she touched the screen of the cellphone, hit the number two, then held it to her ear. While she was talking to Seb, I stared down at my hands, holding them in front of me and just looking. It had seemed disgusting the day before, and even though there was something still disgusting about it to me . . .
They were . . . pretty.
“I like these,” I told Paige when she’d put the cellphone back in her purse.
We sat down on a nearby bench, I supposed as Seb had instructed, and she looked down at her own. They were almost identical to mine, apart from being white at the ends and having pink sparkly circle things rather than white.
After Seb and the boys came over, we went into a lot of stores. Paige would pick out clothes for both of us and we would try them on in little rooms that reminded me of bathroom stalls without the toilets. She would insist on seeing everything that I tried on. I thought that would be best because everything I wore just looked so strange to me and didn’t seem . . . right. I sometimes had to check the tags of shirts multiple times to ensure I hadn’t put them on backwards. I was glad I’d noticed that so I didn’t have to continually ask her if it was right.
I’d never even thought about the uniforms and how much trouble they eliminated in day-to-day living, but Paige—during some of her searching for clothes—explained to me how fashion was used to show who you were to the world. Self-expression by personal style and taste.
I liked the thought of that very much.
So, after some time, I started looking with her and asking her more questions. I looked at females when they would walk in or pass by the glass store windows, seeing what they were wearing and wondering what it was that their clothing said about them. They sort of carried themselves differently. The more I watched the females in the mall, the more patterns I started noticing.
The boys did the same thing with their own new clothes—tried all of them on and showed them to each other before purchasing—which Paige thought was funny for some reason. I thought it was a perfectly natural thing to do, given that we were doing it.
When asking Seb—who remained close to the two of us and kept an eye on the boys where he could—if he wanted to shop for himself, he said to her, “I’m fine. Haven’t you seen how much is already there?”
I didn’t know that he could find anything to fit him outside of what was already there. Even Brent and Garret seemed to have some sort of difficulty finding clothes that fit over their muscles.
Paige told Seb, “Just getting the experience.”
And it was an experience, so I let myself experience it. But I also did as much observing as I could. Once, I accidentally met gazes with a random female while watching. I’d done it a few times with others already by that point, but people were quick to look away. Look away and or make unpleasant faces, like people weren’t supposed to look at others at all unless they were trying to reproduce with them or be rude to them.
After several instances, I realized that seemed to be accurate. There were so many people converged here together, but no one wanted anything to do with the others unless they were already with them. It wasn’t so different from where I’d been before in that sense, but at the same time, the mall seemed to serve dual purposes. Necessity of one sort or another with the shopping, but also socialization. It told me things were not as simple as they had seemed at the beach, with one male throwing a football to another and two groups converging at that.
