The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,64

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 unsavories. So all she could do was make declarative statements.

The supply ship has arrived.

We are rationing meat.

Pier construction delayed due to bad concrete pour.

And when a ship with extra meat and fresh concrete mix arrived five days later, everyone knew the Thunderhead had gotten the message without anyone having to actually ask.

While Stirling, the communications tech, was in charge of actually tapping out the messages, he didn’t decide what messages to send. That was Loriana’s job. She was the gatekeeper for all information passing out of the island. And with so much information, she had to pick and choose what got through and what didn’t. Although the Thunderhead had set up cameras all over the atoll now, those cameras couldn’t transmit through the interference. Everything had to be recorded and physically brought out of the blind spot before it could be transmitted to the Thunderhead. There were talks about building an old-school fiber-optic cable that ran to the edge of the blind spot, but apparently it wasn’t the Thunderhead’s top priority, because it had not yet sent the supplies required to build it.