The Colony

Chapter 4-2

The Monitor Center was housed in a large, nondescript building of white brick, indistinguishable from its neighbors except for a small, silver plaque near a pair of large, glass doors. Monitor Center, the plaque read in squat, capital letters. Our Teacher waited for us outside on the sidewalk, standing beside someone I assumed to be the Monitor who would lead us on a tour through the facility.

In the past, it might have been customary to use a term of address to show respect to adults, but in the Colony, one’s job was one’s title. Teacher Mendra was older but yet not an Elder—I knew this because Elders no longer held jobs or lived among us, but rather retired to a lush facility on the far side of the Colony, the only building outside the monorail loop. At seventy, everyone was required to present themselves to the Elder Center. A special trip was made around the track, picking up every one of eligible age, all twenty-six members of that year, complete with their Others and their luggage, and the belongings they wanted to take with them. The rest of us gathered around the track and waved as they passed for the final time. Only those who worked at the Elder Center—and the Elders themselves, of course—could enter the facility.

Some day far in the future, every single person with me on the sidewalk outside the Monitor Center would gather on that train and take one last ride around the Colony before we retired, too. Though I didn’t know how old the Teacher was exactly, I could easily look up her Colony Card information on my console and see her birth name, which would tell me what year she had been born. I didn’t care all that much, really. She was older than my parents, from the looks of things. Her hair was long and white, a shade or two darker than the clothing we all wore, and her face was deeply lined. But she had kind eyes and was patient with us, even when we jostled for a position close to where she stood with the Monitor.

“Settle down,” she admonished, her soft voice barely raised over the sound of the monorail as it swooshed out of sight.

Even if we couldn’t hear her, we knew what she was saying—we knew the routine. In pairs, we found our usual places in line, Brin and I at the front because of our names. She still held my hand, but I shook free when the doors opened and the Teacher led us inside.

Walking backward to face us, the Teacher called out, “Tags ready, children! We have a lot to do today and the sooner we get started, the sooner it’ll be over.”

As I passed through the doors into the building’s cool interior, I held out my right arm, hand fisted, wrist turned up so the sensor would be able to scan the tag implanted at the base of my thumb. Each of us was tagged at birth, and everything anyone would ever need to know about us was encoded on a tiny little microchip roughly the size of a grain of rice. Our genetic makeup, for health reasons. Our parents, for identification purposes. Our Other, so anyone caught out after hours by a patrol could prove they were with the person they were supposed to be with, and no one else.

Everything that made me me to the Colony was on my tag. When I turned eighteen and chose a career, that would be added to the tag, too, with a laser-based procedure my mother assured didn’t hurt too much. Or, rather, as she said, “It’s over so fast, you barely feel it until it’s done.”

Which didn’t actually say it didn’t hurt, just that it hurt afterwards.

I heard a faint double beep as I passed through the doors, Brin beside me. We followed the Teacher into the foyer—white, everything white. Sometimes when I came into a building from the overcast light outside, I felt as if I’d gone blind. Everything was the same shade. So clean, so sparse. So Colony.

“All the way in, please,” the Teacher was saying.

I drifted after her, looking over my shoulder for Kyer as Brin took my hand.