Outliers

Chapter 1:

Pan Espere twitched an eye from one screen to the next. She squinted to set the text rolling, then relaxed her gaze as she scanned the information. She was well-trained to attend multiple screens, but the tense faces and scurrying figures of the third quadrant displays pulled at her again and again.

It’s just a launch.

Even so, it was the launch.

Pan squinted the Launch quadrant, maxing it. The Launch area was the largest open space in the whole Outlier Core. Roughly flat, the stone floored space was circular, except where a square jutted off, leading to the corridors that snaked through the Core. Spoked out from the center of the circle were a dozen launch platforms, each butted up to a tunneled hole that had been bored into the rock walls. The walls soared twenty meters up, all the way to a windowed control cube.

In her own cube, deeper in the Core, Pan twitched an eye to bring up the sound.

Give me the stats, came the controlled demand of Teague Miyo, speaking to her brother, Awan, who was the Launch Guide Commander down on the floor. Teague was Pan’s Oper—in charge of operations. Pulled back from her narrow face, with its pointed chin, she had rows of braided white-blonde hair. One jet-black braid looped down and around one of Teague’s gray eyes, which were washed with the light of the screens she scanned.

The sound of Teague’s voice set Pan at ease at once. It was the sound of competence, emotionless and sure. Pan knew Teague’s stats were as high as she could ever have dreamed of finding in any uncounseled Outlier but her measured confidence was an added benefit.

Everything’s okie, Pan. Relax a little, will you?

The low tone of Awan Miyo’s response, a precise hum of acronyms and numbers, was all Pan needed to hear to convince her that everything really was okie. Though he and Teague were twins, hewas shorter than his sister—his dark head only came up to her sharp nose—but he was stocky and well-muscled, the result of his constant activity. Right now, he barely contained his desire to be already strapped to the Launch’s Luge skater, its rounded aeroshield snapped in place over the top of his head. To either side of him, other Guides checked the current stats of their assignments, ready to rattle them off to Teague in turn.

Teague gave a clipped, Thanks, to Awan. She had a great relationship with him, but on the brink of a ganger launch, there was no room for being warm and fuzzy. Pan watched as Awan checked his own screens. His concentrated silence showed he was undividedly on task, and Pan felt herself actually take her own advice and relax a little. She twitched away from the Launch quadrant and back to the other screens in her array.

The text was still rolling on the last screen she’d squinted. Pan didn’t bother to stop or slow it. Her scroll time was blowing fast and, even if it weren’t, she’d read this file countless times before. There was nothing she didn’t know about this ganger’s orig, the person he was designed to double. She could recite his stats no review.

Pan twitched back to the ganger Launch quadrant and squinted the screen that showed the ganger, still inert, laid out on the metal and translucent plastic plank of the Luge skater. A cloth draped him from the waist down, even though he’d been dressed in clothes appropriate to his orig—jeans and a tunic length shirt, open at the neck—since the launch prep had begun hours ago. His face, below blond hair lying long across his forehead, was pale and lifeless.

Half-alive, half-dead.

That’s what the cloth had always meant in Pan’s mind. And that was the truth of it, really. The form of the ganger was, in every way possible, identical to that of the young man whose file scrolled swiftly and silently in one of Pan’s quadrants. But the ganger was in stasis now, as unaware of its state as its orig in Hakkam was of its existence at all.

It gave some Outliers the creeps when they understood that someone identical to them was out in the world while they studied and worked at the Core. Pan just took it as part of the job. A very necessary part.

But still, she felt a twinge of something she couldn’t name at the thought of the orig out there. She knew it was a common reaction and had nearly trained herself out of it. Everyone felt a bit flipped about the fact sometimes.

Pan shook her head to clear it, sending her screens into chaos.

Set! she called, and they returned to their previous states.

Pan steadied her eyes and told herself again to relax. If the screens in front of her had been reversed, had shown the Techs and Neers an image of Pan in her cube, they wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. But Pan could tell she was stressing. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, then pulled them away to tackle the tangle of brown curls that kept falling in her face. She wrenched back the mass of her hair severely and twisted it into a knot at the back of her head. Yes, she was stressing. And who wouldn’t be? It wasn’t as if this were just any ganger launch, just any routine re-scan.

Pan fixed on the image of the cloth-draped ganger. Like the other six being launched today, she knew this one by name.

Senon Cormac.

The name had come up over and over in the last two years. Consistently. So consistently that Pan knew it was totally bee-cee, as Awan would say.

Beyond chance.

Awan had picked up the versive slang on all of his Guide launches, and he loved to pepper his off-duty banter with the abbreviations and word mutations that were so popular with the pre-counseled youth he ran into.

Pan used the term literally, though. She had scrolled so many files since she’d been made Admin. Even after the files had been filtered down to the barest of minimums, it had seemed like an endless fountain of files, all so close to perfect, but not quite.

And she’d almost discarded Senon Cormac because of his father. She’d been looking for Youth who were well-associated, but Senon’s father? The High Reverend Doctor Mansa Cormac? That was risky. She felt it in her nerves even now. Yet Senon Cormac was an Outlier who matched her needs beyond chance.

And it doesn’t hurt that he’s wick dazzling—as Awan would say—does it?

Pan had less control over blushing than she wished. Even though she was alone, she quickly tuned in and stopped the blood from fully flushing her caramel skin.

As important as this Launch is and you go all bio and horm on me? You shouldn’t even care what he looks like. What would all the Techs and Neers think if they knew?

The thought of what they didn’t know set Pan’s focus once again. It was necessary that she be the one who knew this wasn’t just a routine re-scan for Senon Cormac and his ganger. Or for the other six today. But she hadn’t told anyone else. If all of the command staff knew, they would understand. But she didn’t want them stressing.

Pan resisted shaking her head again to clear it. Instead, she squinted hard at Senon’s file. The view stopped at an image of him, clicked sometime since the last re-scan.

Senon was long and lean. Even when he was crouched, like in this shot where he rode a skater between buildings of Hakkam, you could see he was tall. The passing wind blew back his yellow hair, hair that was kissed with sunlight. The skin of his face was tanned and the blue of his eyes almost startling.

Eyes. Yes, he was not hard on the eyes, Pan thought, pulling the ancient cliché from somewhere. Feeling her own eyes locked and easily holding onto the image, she realized how apt the saying was even now.

But that really wasn’t the reason she’d selected him. Everything else about him was bee-cee. Everything that mattered so much more than sun-bleached hair, blue eyes, and well-conditioned body.

If hair, eyes and body were the deciders, Pan would have chosen another file—another orig—altogether.

Pan didn’t blush again even though she knew that minned way down deep on her screens was another file, a file labeled Abran Negasi. It was one she hadn’t let herself look at since she’d made her decision and chosen Senon.

Addressing Admin.

The call pierced through her mind.

Go, Oper, Pan said, her voice clear and relaxed, even to her own ears.

Oper confirming. Ready for Ganger 11061 Launch, Teague said in a monotone, her words crisp above the hum of Techs and Sub-Neers reporting in and double-checking stats through her Oper screens.

Guide? You a go? Pan asked, twitching over to Awan, strapped now to the Luge skater, the ganger’s body flipped and hanging against straps from the bottom side of the skater plank. Pan squinted the stat screens she saw behind him to bring them to split-image with his smiling face.

This guide is ready to hide and slide! he called and gave a wink that set his screens to stuttering before he straightened them with a stare.

Any other time, Pan might have cracked a smile. Awan was always good at lightening the mood. But not this time. The last thing she felt like doing was smiling. In fact, if she hadn’t had the whole array respondent to her gaze, she would have closed her eyes a blink, just to give her a sec to take a breath.

As it was, she held her gaze steady on the image of the first—and perhaps most important—ganger to launch today and, before she could think twice, she gave the command.

Ganger 11061: Launch!

Chapter 2:

Senon Cormac lightly beat a rhythm on the keyboard of his self-report tablet. His father sat next to him, a fixed look of bright interest on his face as he scanned the waiting room. When anyone looked his way, he inclined his head patronizingly.

Senon’s father caught the eye of a frowsy woman sitting with her daughter across from them. She tittered at his attentions and the Reverend Doctor beamed.

Even here, he’s on, Senon thought with disgust. His father seemed to ignore the press of dayflash reporters who stuck their head through the door anytime it opened, but Senon wasn’t fooled. The reporters had pushed around the surface car when it pulled up to the clinic and the Reverend Doctor had served them one of his special smiles. He’d kept Senon locked at his side for twenty mins, going on and on about how proud he was to lead the way in proving that it was now safe, with new techniques he’d helped develop, to counsel youth as young as sixteen, thereby setting them on a productive course early enough to avoid so many of the teen ills, like vidding and loading. His own son would be the test case that proved the efficacy and safety of the new methods. And, within a year, he would put forth doctrine suggesting the world-wide adoption of a younger threshold age for gene modification and counseling.

Lucky me.

Senon tapped harder on the keyboard, not typing, just making noise. It annoyed his father, he could tell.

Which is exactly why I’m doing it.

Are you finished with that or are you going to beat it to death? his father asked, a tension underlying his joking tone. He sucked a peppermint in his cheek, then quickly rolled it to the other side of his mouth with his tongue. He always sucked them, as he was always hoarse from speeches and sermons, always concerned about his breath.

Senon didn’t respond. He didn’t have to worry about his father getting too upset with him here. He wouldn’t risk a scene with all the monitors they had going in this place. Not to mention the pack of dayflash reporters pressing against the entrance of the clinic. The Second forbid they catch something on flash and send it out on the net for all the world to see.

Senon glanced up at the small monitor tube mounted just above the door and continued his tapping. The only thing on his tablet now was the Benevolent Genetics logo and the words Unified…Integrated…New…Temples… Enduring…End…of…Days, tracking around the edges of the screen, followed by the UNITEED symbol of a cross centered in a six-pointed star, cradled in a crescent moon. Though he didn’t want to say so to his father, Senon had finished the self-report mins ago. This was the third he’d had in the last thirty days and the twelfth in the past nine months, after all.

Twelfth and final.

Or so they all thought.

The waiting room wasn’t very crowded today. They allowed enough others to make it look real, but Senon suspected the few other families in the room had been carefully screened and chosen for this day. Senon had been here before when all the dozens of chairs had been filled with teens and their parents waiting for scans, waiting to be counseled, reviewing options and tapping away at self-report tablets.

He remembered one of his first few visits, months ago, when they’d walked in and been unable to find any empty seats. A man in a gray vest and hastily shined work boots had recognized Senon’s father and jumped up to offer his seat, tugging his pimply son to standing beside him. Reverend Doctor Cormac had waved away the offer and remained standing. The gray-vested man protested, and it ended with Senon and the pimply son taking the two seats while the fathers looked on, beaming with pride at their sons, the perfect picture of UNITEED’s New Tenant of tolerance toward all.

His father should have had someone click a still to use for some UNITEED propaganda, Senon thought with an inward sneer.

It wasn’t that he was a sniffer, like some of the kids he knew, who wouldn’t have sat next to the gray-vested workman’s son if you’d promised them Salvation. He didn’t mind his father’s insistence that they get his counseling done at a public facility. It would have been weird if the Reverend Doctor hadn’t chosen the clinic where he’d started his career, growing it into Benevolent Genetics. It was the clinic that conducted the most research in the field even now.

It was just the obsequious way—to use a sniffer word—the workman acted toward his father.

As if he weren’t born of woman like the rest of us.

Senon glanced unwillingly at his father beside him, checking to make sure the ancient versive lyric from The Afterwards wasn’t heard outside his own head.

Of course, his father was just looking around the waiting room, trying to seem as if he weren’t bored to Damnation, having been here a dozen times already. But sometimes Senon really felt like his father was as all-powerful and all-knowing as everyone said on the dayflashes. Like he really was worthy of the bowing and groveling the gray-vested man was so ready to do.

Sometimes Senon was even sure his father knew about The Afterwards tee that he’d bought in the grungy ancient clothing shop by the University. The shirt’s cotton fabric was so thin and delicate that he only wore it for a couple of hours at a time and only to the most versive parties.

Even now, the Reverend Doctor’s knowing about the tee wouldn’t have been half as bad as him knowing about the brittle paper books and pamphlets Senon had collected and munked away, political papers from just after the beginning of EOD. One had cost him all the creds his father had allotted him for his birthday.

Imagine. The High Reverend Doctor Cormac’s son spending his own father’s gift creds on the most versive lit imaginable.

There in the waiting room, the thought made Senon smile.

Well, he’ll find out all of it soon enough. They’ll tear through my room with sensorwands after today, now won’t they?

Senon smiled more broadly without realizing it. The girl two rows away looked up from her self-report tablet and gave him a confused look, then a shy grin. Quickly, Senon straightened his face and looked away.

You’re really excited, eh?

Senon shrugged. Let his father misinterpret his expression if he wanted.

I suppose I would be too. The options these days…

Senon resisted rolling his eyes, a habit his father decried as way versive. He hated all the things teens did these days, especially the way they warped the language, as he put it by using technical terms like corper as slang.

It means correct percentages. Carefully designed percentages for every trait and characteristic. And that is the only way it should be used. Senon remembered that lecture really well. And this one he was giving now too.

…tests are much more sensitive and they correlate the gene-modding with your self-reports so much more accurately than we did when I first started in the field. Do you know, when I was still in Development, we used to have a twenty-eight percent rate of returns for tuning? Can you imagine? Almost a third of all teens were back in here before they hit Majority. The cost of it! The pain and dissatisfaction those kids had to go through… for nothing. For lack of funding, lack of commitment on the part of the UNITEED congregation…

He was going to keep spewing now, Senon could tell. It was a sermon of his and he was here, giving it to his son. Like Senon hadn’t already heard it a tril in the Residence, his father practicing it over and over as he paced the rooms.

Yeah, yeah, Senon said, in an attempt to shut him up. That must have been really no buzz.

"No buzz is right. But when I got elected by the Assembly, what was the first thing I did? My number one priority? Counseling. Public counseling. That’s right. How better to solve so many ills in one fell swoop than to make available to every member of the UNITEED congregation the procedures that made so many of our wealthy young adults so happy, so adjusted and productive? What better solution than to mandate counseling for the betterment of all? What more important program to fund than improvements in scanning accuracy, in gene-modding itself, in every process involved in counseling? We’d all benefit, the entire…"

Senon tuned him out. He’d heard it all before. And he couldn’t believe he shared genes with someone who said things like, one fell swoop. How pre-EOD could you get?

His father kept rambling on. He was on to how modding only took two days now instead of weeks.

You want to know why I’m not going to stay here for the next 48 and get nipped, Dad? Because I know what they’re going to counsel me towards. I know what the scans have shown them, what they’ll enter even if I made my self-reports as versive as I dared. I’m already more like you, Dad, than I can stand. Do you think I’m going to let them nip me even closer?

Senon gave the exit hallway a quick glance.

No nipping my propensity for this or that to the point where I’m so redeemed it makes me what to throw. No additive gene-modding to strengthen my tendency toward whatever’s needed by UNITEED so I can be a humble servant until the Second, like you, Dad. No nanobios set loose to crawl through my sys until my body can’t tell anymore what’s Senon and what’s…what’s…

Senon shuddered. The girl opposite him gave him another queer look, then went back to her tablet. Her mother leaned over to snoop.

Leave me alone, Mom, the girl whispered harshly. "It’s called a self-report for a reason."

But, hon, I don’t think you’ve indicated how much you enjoy –

Mom.

Well, really, how very talented you are at –

Mom! Let it be. It’s not like I’m an Outlier or anything.

Sana! Don’t use that word around me. We say normatively challenged, if that’s what you mean. If you meant the other… well, I don’t want to hear it.

Sheesh, don’t get all bent. It’s not like they exist or anything.

Still. It’s not a nice word. And just about everyone can be modded toward the mean, nowadays, if they’re uncomfortable with their propensities.

The girl rolled her eyes. She moved a seat away from her mother and continued pecking at the tablet.

Now there’s a girl after my own heart.

But Senon didn’t think that for long.

Oh—my—Holy—

Sana! Sit down. People are staring.

Mother. They don’t have it. They’re not offering it anymore!

What, dear? Not offering what?

How am I supposed to get through this when I can’t even choose my own…

Senon didn’t hear what she wanted to choose. Sana broke down at this point into wailing and sobbing. Her mother reached for her—whether to commiserate or silence her, Senon wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. Two Keepers appeared out of nowhere and escorted the hysterical girl and her embarrassed, apologetic mother out a side door.

Serves her right, Senon thought. She’d seemed happy to peck away, working through the Options screens, as if her choices really mattered. Senon wanted to scream at her.

Don’t you know they don’t even use the unredeemed self-reports anyway? What are you, some gullible tween? They just see what range you fall into, what occs their forecasts say they’ll need in five years, and they nip you into being happy with that. You study that course and wind up in some occ that would make you just throw if you knew now what it would be. But don’t worry. You’ll never know you’re miserable. The first sign of depression and they’ll just tweak the level of dorphins in your meals and you’ll be a happy camper bee-cee.

Senon looked guiltily at his father once again. Happy Camper Bee-Cee was a song by Mad Monkey Men. Versive lyrics ran through his brain all the time. Damnation, he even thought up his own versive lyrics.

Bet you’d be the one throwing if you knew that, eh, Dad?

Senon closed his eyes and slumped down in the seat. He just had to relax and get through until they assigned him a room and started nipping. The first part was all bio and Senon had spent the last year prepping to resist that. He’d concocted tranks and hypnotics in his father’s home lab and dosed himself, training his body to desense for up to an hour.

An hour will be enough time.

Enough time to mask the sensors, uncover the badge and doc coat he’d munked away in a wall panel the last time he’d been in for scanning, enough time to get out and fade into the crowd on the trans car, get off at the University stop farthest from the clinic, pick up his knap from the pile in the recyclers behind the microbiology building…

Senon went over the steps for the tril time.

And finally, the Scarlands.

The flaking paper bit that was the instructions