The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,63

year ago. That went to another junior agent, who lavished praise on Sykora and doted on him like an overachieving valet. Well, if Loriana had been offered the job, she would have refused it. After all, everything they did here was nothing but an illusion of employment. No one was being paid, not even the Basic Income Guarantee. People worked because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves, and with ships arriving regularly now, there was always something that needed to be done. The former Nimbus agents joined construction crews or organized social events. One even opened up a bar that had quickly become the go-to spot after a long, hot day.

And no one needed money on the atoll, because the supply ships arrived with everything they might want or need.

Sykora, of course, put himself in charge of distribution—as if deciding who got corn and who got beans on any given day was a meaningful display of power.

From the very beginning, the Thunderhead’s will had to be deduced from its actions. It began with that solitary plane that flew overhead, almost too high for anyone to notice. Then that was followed by the first ships.

When those ships appeared on the horizon, the former Nimbus agents were elated. At last, after nearly a month making do with the atoll’s limited resources, the Thunderhead had heard their plea, and they were being rescued!

Or so they thought.

The ships that arrived were all self-piloting, so there was no one to ask for permission to board—and once the supplies had been off-loaded, no one was welcome on the ships. Of course anyone was allowed back on—the Thunderhead rarely forbade people from doing anything—but the moment they boarded, their ID gave off an alarm and flashed a bright blue warning even bigger than the red “unsavory” mark. Anyone who stayed onboard was marked for immediate supplanting—and in case anyone thought it was a bluff, there was a supplantation console right there, just inside the gangway, ready to erase their minds and overwrite their brains with new, artificial memories. Memories of someone who didn’t know where they’d just been.

That made most people race off the ship even faster than they’d boarded. Only once they had run from the dock did the mark on their IDs go away. Even so, there were several of Loriana’s coworkers who decided to leave on those ships anyway, choosing to become someone else, anywhere else in the world, than to remain on Kwajalein.

Loriana had a childhood friend who was supplanted. Loriana didn’t know it until she ran into him in a coffee shop one day, hugged him, and chattered away, asking where life had taken him after graduating high school.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said politely. “I actually don’t know you. Whoever you think I am, I’m not him anymore.”

Loriana had been stunned and embarrassed. So much so that he insisted on buying her coffee and sitting down for a chat anyway. Apparently he was now a dog breeder with a full set of fake memories of a lifetime spent in the NorthernReach region, raising huskies and malamutes for the Iditarod.

“But doesn’t it bother you that none of it is true?” Loriana had asked.

“No one’s memories are ‘true,’ ” he’d pointed out. “Ten people remember the same thing in ten completely different ways. And besides, who I factually was doesn’t matter—and it doesn’t change who I am now. I love who I am—which probably wasn’t true before, or I never would have been supplanted in the first place.”

It was not exactly circular logic. More like spiral. An accepted lie that spun in upon itself until truth and fiction disappeared into a singularity of who the hell cares, as long as I’m happy?

It had been a year since those first ships had arrived, and things had settled into a routine. Homes were built, streets were paved—but stranger were the large patches on multiple islands that were being prepped with concrete a meter thick. No one knew what for. The construction crews were simply following a work order. And since all Thunderhead work orders always ended with something sensible being built, they trusted all would be revealed when their work was done. Whenever that might be.

Loriana had found herself in charge of the communications team, sending out painfully slow one-way messages to the Thunderhead in primitive pulses of static. It was an odd sort of job, because she couldn’t directly request anything from the Thunderhead, since the Thunderhead was required to refuse the requests of