It smelled like baking pavement, car exhaust, summer heat, scorched metal, old blood. She has not seen the sun for many sleeps now. Days otherwise are slippery, like sidewalk earthworms after rain. 06 knows today is Wednesday, because Wednesday is 06’s day in the simulator, and here she is. The working definition of “children” is vague. The working definition of “safety” is vague. The working definition of “ready” is vague. She cannot wait to see the looks on their faces when they see what they have become. The Director savors this eventual revelation as she blinks at the machine’s interface, making selections.
A fairy godmother, vivid and glorious in her malevolence-until, at some late stage in the children’s story, she is revealed to have had their best intentions at heart all along.
The Director does not know how to assure the children that they only fear her in the way they fear the doctors down in Medical: a necessary good misperceived by childish naiveté as evil. Building and testing and calibrating the thing took a healthy bite out of the dwindling pile of the Director’s funding, but it’s well worth it for the children’s safety. The children will go in singly, and in what’s left of their designated pairs, and if that goes well, in rotating squads of three and four. They say this with an overblown enthusiasm that reminds 06 of a birthday-party clown she saw once, a lifetime ago, and distrusted even then. Instead they say: we’ve set up a new game for you. If they break in there, the diagnostics assure, it will be along other faultlines than these. They all jump the low bar of the necessary diagnostics: medical, psychological, emotional, physical. There are only ten children left by now, so there’s plenty of scheduling time to go around. When the children are ready, they go in the simulator. Content note: child endangerment and death
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