Chapter 17: Jamar
“Interesting,” Lemuel said. He leaned closer to the screen and Jamar peeked around him.
“What is?” Jamar asked. The screen was split into twelve boxes, each showing the dreams of a different Car. In two of the boxes couples were kissing and in three there was a bloody mass of bodies, some Cars others guards. Jamar wondered what Tymas would think about all the different ways Jamar had seen him die that day. One little boy in particular had been very creative with a fork.
Lemuel pointed to the box in the top right corner. A dark-haired boy a few years older than Jamar, was being crushed under a large rock and the more the teen struggled the deeper he sank. Just as it seemed he might succeed in moving the rock he stopped struggling, either too weak or too discouraged. The teen lay in the dirt and didn’t move. Then the screen went dark.
Leaning over to the computer’s microphone, Lemuel clicked the on button and said, “Bring me the one in Room 5 when he’s done. I’ll be in my office.”
“Yes sir,” one of the guards responded.
“What does his dream mean?” Jamar asked.
“Firstly, this is only an emotional stimulus. It’s not a real dream like the kind you or I might have at night. This is an emotional experience that gives us an idea of the types of Car emotions that are running the strongest subconsciously. Our way of gauging whether the Cars will be receptive to the plan before it is implemented. Understand?”
Jamar nodded.
“There are two kinds of emotional dreams: literal and figurative. In a literal dream, the person experiences exactly what their subconscious is emotionally dealing with the most. If they are angry, they will have an object they can express that anger toward. If they are happy, they will have a symbol of what they love that makes them feel happiness. In a figurative dream, the person’s mind still uses symbols, but those symbols are the emotion itself, not a release for the person to express the emotion. This particular boy is primed. He will be a perfect fit for Project High.”
“What is Project High?”
“I think that will be better for you to figure out on your own.”
“But why do we care where their emotions are?” Jamar asked. He was tired after standing in front of the screen for the past four hours and knew he should have the answer, but it was easier to ask again.
“Because it is important to know that we have emotions worth collecting. It wouldn’t do to plan this elaborate, once every ten years production and then find out that the Cars we were harvesting didn’t have the emotional strength capacity for the types of emotions we need.”
“Oh.” Jamar glanced down at the journal Lemuel had given him.
Several more screens go black and no one replaces them.
“Is that it?” Jamar asked.
His father glanced down at a list of names and nodded. He backed away from the desk and turned to Jamar.
“We are going in my office. You may observe, but you cannot interact.”
“Yes sir,” Jamar said with a nod.
Together they left the Machine room and entered the main house. The hall was quiet and once they were inside Lemuel’s office, Jamar found a chair in the corner and sat. His father took the chair behind his desk and started reading papers.
The door opened and the dark-haired boy came in. He was much taller in person than Jamar would have thought, nearly six feet tall although he had a younger looking face. Not quite as tall as Tymas who was probably still a head taller, but still impressive for someone who was not yet eighteen.
The guard who brought him stood directly behind the teen and neither one said anything. Lemuel didn’t either, he poured over his papers making small notes here and there. An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Finally when Jamar had almost decided that he would be better off reading the journal in his lap than watching the teen stand still, Lemuel spoke.
“Name.” The word was clear and firm and filled the room with a sense of Lemuel’s power.
The boy ducked his head and said, “Marcus.”
“Number.”
Marcus didn’t respond. His fingers curled in and he pursed his lips.
Lemuel didn’t even look up, but he let out a small chuckle. “Is that really where you are going to draw the line?”
Marcus jerked his head, but kept his eyes on the floor.
“You walk into this room on your own feet and willingly offer your name, but your number is too much.” Lemuel did glance up then, but Marcus stayed frozen. “I guess the tests were wrong. You are too weak to lead a revolt.”
The vein in Marcus’ neck quivered at that.
Lemuel went back to his papers. “Probably for the best. You would fail anyway and then you would walk yourself to the Machine and start it for me. Now, walk yourself out.”
Marcus turned stiffly, his head bowed, and he let the guard lead him away.
“You may go too,” Lemuel added to Jamar. “We will have some busy days coming up and you’ll need your rest.”
“Yes sir,” Jamar said. Then he paused. “What did you do here? I thought he was too weak in his dream to lift the rock. Won’t this make him give up?”
“You should be smart enough to figure this out on your own.” There was finality behind Lemuel’s intelligence barb that meant all conversation was now done and Jamar took the journal back up to his room.
It was already dark so he had his dinner brought up to him. He spent the rest of the evening paging through the journal. Many of the notes at the beginning were about the use of a controlling drug that Jamar knew they had replaced with an implant when his father was young. But near the middle his ancestor began to mention the ten year system. Each year was supposed to have a theme that would develop a concentration of specific emotions and also build on the past years emotions to create well-rounded individual who would produce a greater harvest.
During this ancestor’s leadership they started a schooling program. The Carillians were given an education during their years at the farm and allowed to read once they were in the Cartiam. Knowledge gave the Cars hope and a deeper despair. The journal recorded a year when his ancestor let the Cars believe a plague was wiping them out, but apparently it was a lot to maintain for the guards. There was an experiment where different gangs were formed who would fight each other under the guards’ supervision and the losers would be eliminated. One year several Cars proved to be difficult to harvest and were placed under physical distress until they cracked and begged for death. There was also a lighter year where the dorms were haunted and Cars would vanish in a puff of smoke while everyone was in the yard.
Jamar wondered what his father had in mind and what had been added to the ten year system since it was started. There were several pages missing from the middle of the journal and he wondered what was on them or where they were. But just thinking about it made him realize how tired he was and he put the journal away and went to sleep a bit earlier than he normally did.
His room was dark when Jamar awoke, but once he opened his curtains light flooded the darkness away. There was a breakfast tray on a cart next to his desk and it had a plastic bucket on the bottom shelf with a note attached. Jamar’s name was carefully written in Carlyle’s handwriting on a folded piece of paper, but he ignored the note until he was finished eating. The food was colder than Jamar preferred, but from the brightness of the sun he’d also slept later. When he’d eaten all he could stand, he pulled out the plastic bucket and lifted the note.
I will be in the city today. In lieu of your economics lesson, you will catalog the e-mems in this bucket. Include going rate, price and production quality and write a five page essay on what you have discovered. I will grade it when I return this afternoon.
It was signed Carlyle.
Good, he would have the whole morning to himself. Jamar called for a servant and gave them a note to Tymas requesting that he bring Silas to Jamar’s room. Perhaps Jamar could get some sword fighting in too.
Jamar sat back at his desk, opened t
he lid on the bucket and pulled the highest e-mem out. It was already coated in a frosted yellow and was the size of a plum. Setting it aside, Jamar pulled out some of the others. Three frosted blue, one green that was five inches wide and two tiny red, although the frost made them look more pink than red. Taking his time, he rummaged through his desk looking for the e-mem product guide his father had given him. He also pulled out some paper and started writing. Reading and writing were not some of his strengths but Carlyle had spent years drumming them into Jamar through constant practice and he managed to have a page done by the time Silas’ hesitant knock reached his ears.
“Come in,” Jamar called over his shoulder and he finished writing another sentence while the door clicked open and footsteps entered the room.
When he spun around in his seat, he saw Silas waiting patiently in the center of the room. It made him want to laugh inside at how easy it was to control Cars. They just did everything they were told. They would walk meekly to their deaths if he told them to.
“You can help me,” Jamar said. He pointed to the plastic bucket. “Grab some of those e-mems out and I’ll catalog them.”
Silas’ eyes darted to the bucket and back to Jamar, a surprised arch in his eyebrows. It took a moment more than Jamar would have liked for Silas to get to the desk and when he did, he couldn’t seem to get his hands away from his side.
Jamar slid the bucket closer to Silas. “Pull them out and tell me what color they are.”
Silas reached into the bucket. “It’s blue,” he said. His voice was so soft Jamar wouldn’t have heard it if there was any other noise on that floor.
Jamar scribbled a quick line. “Next one.”
“Pink.”
“There are no pinks. It’s red. Next.”
“Red.”
“Next.”
“Green.”
“How big is it?”
“Why does that matter?”
Jamar glanced at the product book. “Because green is the color used for anything bigger than blue and the bigger the green is the less it is worth.”
“It’s the size of a grapefruit, I think.”
Jamar looked it up and wrote the answer down.
“How much is it worth?” Silas asked.
“About 70 dollars, if this estimate is current.”
“How much are the blue ones worth?”
“Closer to 300 and the yellow are 1100 and the red are anywhere from 15k-100k.”
“Why are the red worth so much more?” Silas asked.
“Because we only get less than five of those, but we could get 15 yellow, 30 blue and 50 green. Next one.”
“Green, the size of a baseball.”
“Next.”
“Two more yellow and that’s it.”
“Good.” Jamar wrote a few more lines.
“Is it true that they are frosted because the memory replays itself on the glass?” Silas asked.
Jamar’s pen halted. Silas held one of the reds in his palm as if it were a robin’s egg that he wanted to put back in the nest.
“I don’t know. I’ve never really seen them without the coating. Scratch some of it off and we’ll see.”
Silas shook his head and put the red e-mem back on the desk. “I can’t.”
“Afraid?” Jamar asked with a small laugh.
Conflicting emotions crossed Silas’ face, but he stuck out his chin and said, “I’m not afraid. I just don’t think we should see the image that someone cared the most about. It’s private.”
“That’s stupid.” Jamar snatched the e-mem up, took the knife from his breakfast tray and scratched the red paint. He could make out brown eyes, sadly looking back at him and then wrinkled cheeks and mostly white hair that had been cut too short if it was a woman. And it was. The picture continued to pan out revealing a woman’s hunched back and a broom. The woman swept the front porch, pausing every now and then to look at out of the glass at the person watching her and memorizing every detail. A scene similar to those Jamar had observed in the Verandia. This e-mem must have belonged to the woman’s husband.
“It’s just an old woman. Look.” Jamar stuck the e-mem under Silas’ nose, but Silas wouldn’t look down.
“I said I didn’t want to see it.”
“You don’t know what you want,” Jamar said.
“And you do?” Silas pushed the e-mem away and stared at Jamar.
“Of course.”
“If you know what I want then tell me what it is.”
“That would only work if you actually knew what you wanted in the first place.”
“You’re stalling.” Silas crossed his arms.
“No, I’m not. There’s no point in telling you what you want if you aren’t smart enough to know it.”
“So you think I’m unintelligent.”
Jamar turned back to his desk and picked up his pen. This wasn’t turning out quite the way he wanted. “It’s not a bad thing. Most people are and your whole class is. You are all sheep and that is why we take care of you.”
“Are you really saying that, or is this just the line Tireans tell you so that it seems okay for you to treat us differently?”
“I--it’s not that simple.” And yet for all he tried to think his way around it, Jamar couldn’t think of another, more complicated reason. Tireans were superior. Jamar knew that. It was a scientific fact. Their brains moved more efficiently, they had better coordination they could logically decipher the answers to life. But then, here he was unable to give a Carillian an answer. How did this happen? How could an inferior boy have more courage and beat him in an intellectual debate? It wasn’t possible--shouldn’t be possible.
“We aren’t sheep. We can think for ourselves and if we were given the chance we could take care of ourselves too.”
“Is that what you want?” Jamar asked. He turned and looked Silas in the eye, but Silas’ face was blank, completely closed off from Jamar’s ability to read it.
“I should go.” Silas opened the door, told the guard that they were done.
“Wait.” Jamar jumped up and slipped the red e-mem into Silas’ pants pocket. “In case you change your mind.”
Silas just stared at him with his right arm extended where Jamar had pushed it when he reached for the pocket. Silas didn’t say another word as the guard appeared in the door and motioned for Silas to come out. Then the hall was silent and he was alone again.
Jamar finished the rest of his essay, but his heart was no longer in it.