I’m not sure why Yue has such a tough time completing the Trust Exercise, a task we’ve done since we first learned to speak. Every year, without fail, Yue stammers and quakes, and one of us must push her over the ledge so we can finish our jumps. What we jump into changes every year: a pit of fire, ice, water, boiling oil, sharpened rocks and boulders. I’ve asked Yue why she struggles to jump, and she always says, “I don’t want to die,” which makes little sense to me since we would never die from a Trust Exercise. That’s the whole point; we trust the National People’s Council to protect us so we can suspend our fears and be productive citizens.
Mom tells me that decades ago, people functioned on fear and cynicism, unable to eat or sleep or work without hesitation and excessive self-doubt about their livelihoods. Since the introduction of Amygdala Reprogramming, Mom claims, “People behave more freely now, able to reach their potential and help society.” The Trust Exercise just verifies we can continue operating happily. I suspect Yue is a chronically unhappy person because of how much she stresses during our annual exercises, but it’s not my job to ensure she visits the doctor to check her amygdala out and get it re-circuited.
Normally, I finish my Trust Exercise well before Yue. I try to sign up for earlier slots because the later you perform the test, the stricter the examiners assess you. My reflexes are slow—it always takes me at least three seconds from the starting light signal triggering to actually jumping. Of course, Yue takes much longer: minutes, hours, even days when she was younger, during which she sat at the ledge without food or water. I heard she even peed her pants until the person behind her in line finally pushed her down. And so began the tradition of people pushing Yue over the edge the moment her wavering exceeded two hours.
This year, my turn is right after Yue’s. I had forgotten to sign up for my annual Trust Exercise earlier due to issues with my newly installed low-power neural amplifier—not effective enough at rejecting noise from the power supply. The doctor said this would leave me hazy for a few days until they could fix it or replace the amplifier entirely. I’m not sure how Yue signed up before me, though. She never seems to care about her responsibilities to the State, and I’ve never seen her participate in community service projects or group scripture studies. I suspect she only remembers to sign up out of dread.
One week before our Trust Exercise, Yue finds me at lunch while I’m waiting for the Dispenser to evaluate my day’s caloric requirements. Ever since we went through puberty ten years ago, the machines take longer to make assessments due to complications in measuring our hormone differences. As a result, I stand in front of the machine waiting for my tray of food while feeling Yue’s stare on the back of my neck. I pretend not to notice and focus on the loading icon from the machine display, infinitely spinning with no end in sight. My stomach growls. Yue taps my shoulder.
“Can you not push me?” She whispers.
“Why would I push you?” I play dumb. The screen on the machine flashes ZERO ENERGY UNITS REQUIRED, and an empty tray ejects from the slot compartment. I tap the button on the touch screen with my fingernail to rerun my nutritional profile, but it returns zero every time in equally quick succession.
“You know, during the upcoming Trust Exercise. I’ll jump on my own.”
“I won’t do anything,” I promise. “But I can’t guarantee everyone else will stay still if you take more than half an hour.”
“That won’t happen.”
I don’t know where Yue gets her confidence from. She always had the oddest convictions when we were growing up: don’t trust the teacher with the angular glasses, avoid Dispensers in favor of purchasing groceries and cooking, wear a different headband every day even though it goes against the dress code. But even she can’t ignore the facts – after all these years, she hasn’t jumped a single time of her own volition.
“If you need help with your neurocircuitry, I can take a look,” I offer. Not out of charity or the generosity of my heart though. I don’t want to be stuck knocking her off the ledge because I’ve seen what happened to the others who pushed her down. Eduardo went after Yue last year and is still undergoing operations to repair his emotional regulation. My colleagues have yet to unwind his Pavlovian conditioning, and they tell me that Eduardo can’t shower or drink water or even look at the IV drip without freaking out. The doctors shut off his amygdala activation entirely. Fortunately, I don’t work with humans but study with rats, manipulating protein synthesis during memory storage to eliminate a learned fear, an area of study that hasn’t reached human application yet. We’re mostly understaffed because everyone wants to directly help humanity in the hospitals rather than care for rats, even if it means dealing with pathological cases like Eduardo and Yue. I refuse to deal with difficult people even if it means a lower pay grade.
“Really?” Yue asks. “No one else has offered before.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I mumble as I kick the Dispenser. I take my empty tray from the machine and abandon my prospect of a meal. I suspect my last operation miswired my hunger to return inaccurate results. The Dispenser is never wrong, but the body lies all the time though, perhaps even more so after I self-administered a dose of propranolol.
“I have leftovers if you want,” Yue says, watching me place the empty tray on the rack of used dishes that periodically rotates into the facility for cleaning. I turn toward her as she points to her glass containers wrapped in a bandana. “Just some eggs boiled with tea leaves and rice balls.”
“That’s ok. It’s not optimal for my composition.”
“Is anything optimal?” Yue shrugs. “Do you think there’s a quick fix so I can pass the Trust Exercise? Something within the week?”
“These things don’t have quick fixes. Especially not quick correct fixes. But maybe there’ll be something that resolves the issue temporarily so you can pass,” I say.
“Even better. I don’t want to be permanently altered.”
I rip off a slip of paper from the notepad I keep in my pocket, scrawl my lab’s address, and hand it to her. “I’m free any evening if you want to drop by.”
Yue folds the paper once, twice, three times so that it fits neatly in her fist. Then she grabs my hand, turns it so it faces upward, and places the container of leftovers on my palm. “So you won’t starve,” she says.
I empty the contents in the Disposal after she leaves.
***
Yue and I share the same father but we live separately and are as good as strangers. Neither of us live with our father, a “two-timing, penny-pinching bastard” who wouldn’t even spare a cent on a cup of soy milk noodle soup from a street stall that Mom loved. He’s a big-shot professor at one of the pharmacological manipulation labs and I see him on TV all the time. It’s easy to forget he’s my father if Mom isn’t around cursing his face and threatening to grind off his balls and feed them to the starlings. I’m still better off than Yue whose mother works in Waste Disposal, a job assigned to you only if you’ve got no education and failed all the talent projection assessments.
Mom works in a lab too which is how she met my father, but she switched institutions after their falling out since my father was too much of a “man child” to treat her fairly at work after she threw him out of the house. He was the face of the institution. Only one of them could be kicked out, and it wasn’t him.
Mom forced me to study until I was dreaming about the hypothalamus and brain networks. Sometimes while in the library late at night, I’d see Yue painting lotus flowers on the brick walls across the street, her figure dimly lit by the lamppost, the street empty of everything except her bucket of paint and her small, sweeping gestures. The lotus flowers always disappeared by the next morning, painted over by Morning Sweepers scheduled to run every dawn. Mom claimed that Yue was defacing public property and it was a miracle she hadn’t been caught. Yet, Mom never called the authorities. I think she felt bad that Yue was also a product of the same two-timing bastard father.
“You’re lucky that I work in a decently paying job. You can’t trust men, not a single one of them,” Mom often tells me. “Study hard, pass the required exams, be a productive member of society, not a leech, and money will follow.” Money seems to follow the leeches too, from what I could see of my father’s career trajectory.
What the Web of Predictions can’t predict for us: optimal partnerships. You either take risks or forgo partnerships altogether. The latter option is more common these days since no one wants to make a mistake. Most babies come from stem cells coaxed into forming embryos from the Cell Biology Lab. The labs claim it’s a safe and effective replacement. Mom had me the traditional way though, but she’s never told me whether it was worth getting involved with my father. Instead, she’d point to the linear scar on her stomach and complain about the inefficiencies of the female body, a suboptimal vessel in which the National People’s Council failed to invest enough research.
“Darn painful process, but the children aren’t the same as from the lab,” she told me about childbearing. “Induced pluripotent stem cells only resemble sex cells to a certain extent, and it shows in the results.” I think she meant that I was more real, but I couldn’t tell the difference besides missing some of the stem cell humans’ emotional cues. They’re more subdued and adaptable. Not like Yue. Not like me during the occasional lapses in my programming. For the most part, my behaviors mimic stem cell children accurately enough that Mom forgets to complain how my frown resembles my father’s or how her back has never felt the same way again after conceiving me.
***
Yue visits my lab on Friday, the evening before the Trust Exercise, right as I’m packing up my equipment and bag. She opens the door without knocking even though I prefer it shut.
“I’m ready for your solution,” she proclaims as though I was the one begging to help.
“Sit down.” I point to the stool by the lab table.
Yue walks around the table, gliding her hand over the corner as though inspecting it for grime. Then she sits and laces her hands under her thighs, swiveling in the seat left to right and left again, the aluminum and steel screeching against the faux leather.
I take several platinum multielectrode arrays from my storage. “Where are your ECoG skull holes?” I ask.
“My what?”
I point to my head, where my hair covers several gaps drilled through my skull and temporarily patched with stem cells. You can see the scars through my hair. “Wherever your doctor drilled the holes for your initial electrical stimulation treatments.”
“I don’t remember that ever happening.”
“You must’ve gotten electrodes implanted in your cortex at least once—it’s required. Did your mother not take you to the mandatory annuals?”
“No, she didn’t have time to take me to the doctor. She had waste disposal quotas to meet.”
It’s a miracle Yue hasn’t been dragged into a lab for permanent correction. I suppose our father pulled some strings to keep her off the records. After Mom tossed him out of the house and wrote a scathing email to the lab shareholders which inevitably leaked to the press, my father’s reputation took months to recover. The press would have a field day to discover the presence of his bastard child, the result of his sexual escapade with a waste disposal worker.
“Just to be clear, there’s not a single drill hole in your skull?”
Yue shakes her head.
“It takes several months to recover from just placement of the electrodes below your scalp. Then another few months to measure and optimize the cortical stimulation.”
“So you can’t help me?”
“Not with traditional methods. And it’ll be tough with no existing entry points.”
Yue stands to leave. “That’s ok, I’ll try to jump on my own tomorrow.”
“We could try some of these above the skull, but bone dampens the signal significantly.”
“Let’s do that.” Yue sits back down.
I part her hair and apply the electrodes, letting my computer run and graph the signals live. Yue stills, even resisting squeaking in her chair as she had been doing seconds ago. I turn back toward my computer, holding the wires in one hand so they won’t swing.
“I’ve only done this with rats. If you don’t want to continue, let me know,” I warn. Even in rats, the results of axon hyperpolarization can be unpredictable, sometimes inhibiting action potentials when I need them activated, or vice versa.
“Better than failing the Trust Exercise and getting zapped into ashes and carted off for Disposal,” Yue says.
“That doesn’t happen. You just get repurposed for other jobs in society.”
“The job of providing Sweepers ashes to clean up.”
“Relax,” I tell her as I click into her neuron distribution and begin a sequence of activity signals. These operations work best when action potentials avoid agitation, which is why we leave rats surrounded by cubes of pork belly when delivering electrical stimulation to the decoding controller. As I wait for the signals to propagate, I watch the clock’s minute hand move closer to the hour. In four minutes, I will need to leave the lab, otherwise it will be my third strike staying overtime, putting me at a rank of Highly Volatile Individual. We all have set work hours provided by the Web of Predictions, optimized for our inefficiencies and skills. Exceeding those hours too often will throw your neuromodulation into overdrive and turn you insane. I’ve measured my neural signals and extracted several signals with filtering software I designed, and based on those results, I think I’m already clinically insane. Mom laughed at my results. She said I was missing a low-pass filter but she wouldn’t say where and that if I couldn’t figure it out during my work hours, there was no point in her spoon-feeding me answers. She also didn’t believe my neural circuits would break down so easily since I was naturally born and only stem cell babies exhibited this type of deterioration so early.
“Is it done yet?” Yue asks, poking her nails into the seat and bearing the whites of her knuckles.
“Almost,” I reply. Yue purses her lips and shuts her eyes. I watch the rest of the signal graph propagate across the screen. “And done.”
She stands abruptly, and I rush over to push her shoulders back down on the chair. “I need to take the electrodes out. You might rip a thread,” I explain, disconnecting each electrode and wire.
“What a painstaking process.” Yue crosses her arms.
By the time I finish removing the electrodes, it’s three minutes over today’s designated work hours. “Certified insane,” I whisper under my breath, hoping this doesn’t cause me to fail the Trust Exercise tomorrow.
***
I can tell Yue is nervous because she’s the only one bobbing her right leg and looking front and back at the line of silent, calm people waiting to do their annual exam. The line moves quickly. Most walk over the ledge like rolling marbles, not pausing to look down at what lurks at the bottom of the abyss today.
When it’s Yue’s turn, I wait for her to fall. She pauses at the edge. I’m not surprised. I don’t expect the stimulation events to be terribly effective without at least an invasive operation. But she should be able to pass even if it’s not immediate. She looks down and turns toward me, her eyes round and pupils like glass. She inches a toe forward. Pause. The examination room contains no clock so I can’t tell if I’ve waited minutes or hours for her to close the additional distance. If the administrators haven’t removed Yue from the room, she must not have exceeded her time limit. Even so, the folks behind me in line have begun to whisper, their tones increasingly loud and agitated.
“Just push her in,” they tell me.
“Why don’t you?” I want to ask back, but I stay quiet, waiting for Yue to show a sign of conviction. Or is it confidence? Trust?
Yue looks over her shoulder at me again. She mouths something I can’t decipher. She grips her shirt so hard the fabric thins in the center as though made from spider webs. I bend one leg and then the other, stretching my knees, and stand straight again. Those behind me don’t have the guts to cut in front of me and push Yue down. “Might as well go home. She’ll get removed tomorrow once her time is up,” they whisper. I cross my legs and sit on the ground. I hear their footsteps fade, and soon I’m the only one in line, watching Yue’s hunched back as she stares down.
“What do you see?” I ask.
I walk up to her, our shoulders side by side.
“It’s a dead end,” she whispers. I follow her gaze. Last year’s Trust Exercise entailed jumping into lava. The National People’s Council even mimicked the burning sensation perfectly. This year, an abyss—darker than the ocean, swallowing the crisp light from the halogen bulbs above—greets us.
“That’s not an end,” I counter. “That’s not even a hypothetically certain and painful death.”
“What if it is?”
“If it is,” I pause. “We’ll just turn around and go somewhere else.” I look down at Yue’s trembling hand, though she puts on a firm, confident grin. She grabs my hand, her fingers calming against my skin. As she jumps, I tighten my grip and let her pull me down too.
