he days slipped into a week, and each night he fought the fight to slip into natural dreams, but as his brain learned the path, it became easier and easier.
Until tomorrow was Choosing. He watched the sun setting through his bedroom window pane. The rosy fingers of day released suburbia into night, tinged subtle blue by the city smog.
There were few grains of sand in the hourglass top now. And by morning all stones would tumble through the moment’s slender hole into memory, a cairn marking the grave of possibility.
His thoughts were of her. She had still never sent a single response to his messages. She was in his mind, always hovering in the background. She had awakened him, had given him reading, had taught him to see the structure of the world as bigger than himself. But all the memories resolved into her pressed against the glass of the car window, weeping at the pain of being operated by him.
He had offered to choose her, to choose the vac world, if she would promise to be with him. He checked his inbox again. Nothing. She’d had nearly a week to respond to his offer of his whole life to her, but she had said nothing. Frustration and betrayal welled up inside him.
How could he choose her if she didn’t choose him back? It’s like his life was worthless to her because of how he was born. Because of who he was. But he would change that for her!
But that was over. She was past. He couldn’t count on her on the other side of choice.
If he chose to become a vac, they would pull some of his memories out. But the roots would come up too, and he might not even make it out as himself. How many memories would they take? How much of his memories could he lose and still be himself? Would he even remember her on the other side of choice?
On this side of things, he had his parents, and probably even a job as an eye with Roman. But he had no desire for any of the girls in his classes. They seemed like… tools. Tools of the Mind. Extensions of the thing he hated.
And Billy was dead to him. His pict still sat like an undigested hunk of meat-fat that churned up bile and anxiety—unopened.
He loved his family. But how could he live his whole life with them? They didn’t see eye to eye on anything.
But he knew he didn’t want to be a vac for the rest of his life. He would be assigned to some factory somewhere where they would feed his body slowly into the gears until his joints pulped. Making widgets for the war.
Sol’s tears were not just for him. He’d had time to think about those tears. They were tears for what the social fabric had done to her. Tears for what she never had. Tears for what he proved he was a part of.
He never wanted to be a part of the Mind. He never wanted to spend his life operating or spying on the vacs. He wanted a life of dignity where he neither had to exploit nor be exploited.
So where did that leave him? He didn’t want to make the choice.
In some sense the choice was already made for him. He just had to find out what it was. There are no choices that are not prefigured by a thousand smaller ones. His inability to make this choice was already written.
And that’s why Choosing every year was a charade. The Mind knew who would choose and who wouldn’t. And those who were going to choose otherwise, well, they somehow didn’t make it to the choosing ceremony. By the time the sun rose they were walking out to their new appointments. A scene of weeping rejects and their parents would ruin the celebration.
He knew that Sol would say that the only reason why he expected another option from the world was because he’d been raised to be an operator. And there was something in that. But could he really become something he wasn’t? Could he just relax into it and close his eyes now that he’d opened them? What choice did he have?
He reached behind his dresser and untaped the little plastic container. It was a hallucinogenic, that much he knew. The girl from the grainy filmstrip was Alice, and the “eat me” was a reference to growing larger. Or smaller.
But what would it do to his connection to the Mind? He could feel the resistance to it, the pressing away, even as dull as it was compared to what it had been. And that made him happy.
He would take the third way, thank you, even if none existed. He held the tiny piece of paper on the end of his index finger and looked at the picture of the blonde-haired girl contemplating a picture of herself contemplating a picture of herself.
And then he ate it.