Found Wanting was my continuation of 1984, set in postapocalyptic Boston. It followed Andrew Hsu, a Thought Cop newly deprived of Party, and Cassandra Montgomery, a teenager being stifled by protective survivors. I have tried to make this a novel and I’ve tried to make this a short story, but it never came together. I have isolated scenes, no more. I give a more or less standalone chapter, published here in its entirety.
The alley had run between twin wooden three-story family units. One had burned to the first floor and the other was sagging toward its far neighbor. It wasn’t much to speak of, but the coyotes didn’t follow.
The alley was strewn with siding, shingles, bits and pieces of detritus from the Event and the ensuing weeks of settling. There was still a green metal dumpster at the far end, stinking and troubled by fat gray squirrels. It looked like it predated the Party. Maybe it did.
Matthew tugged up the collar of his crew-neck sweatshirt. It didn’t provide the comfort that Party-approved turtlenecks did, but a Party-approved turtleneck would draw the attention of people more dangerous than coyotes. Slacks didn’t get the same scrutiny, so he wore the best ones he could secure.
Would the skitterer come to the rendezvous? It was infinitely frustrating to have the ability to speak to the robotic servants, the Party’s last vestiges of power…and to not know what questions to ask. Worse, he could never let any of the survivors know that he could command skitterers. That was a Party capability, and every survivor he had met was a prole. They would tear him apart.
Someone rounded the corner. Just tall enough to be…but it wasn’t. It was Cassie Montgomery.
Matthew took a few steps. “Cassie, the coyotes! Did they follow you?”
“What coyotes?” She jutted her chin out. “I was just, looking.”
Matthew slumped, sighing. “You know…”
“I know I shouldn’t go looking for you,” recited Cassie. The girl was in cargo pants torn at the knee and a blue T-shirt only slightly dusted with ash and grime. She looked the part of the survivor. “Maybe you shouldn’t go off by yourself all the time. It’s dangerous out here.” She lowered her voice. “Even for you.” She knew. Alone among the proles, she knew.
“I know,” said Matthew. He looked at the dumpster at the end of the ragged alley. Two squirrels had vanished when Cassie appeared, but were now creeping back out for their spoils. “It’s hard being near everyone.”
She looked at him. She lowered herself to lean against the more intact wooden siding. “Would you teach me Oldscript?”
Matthew stared at her for a moment. “What, you mean the old fonts? Why? We’re not finding any literature here.”
She looked up, away from him. “They cut us off from history by teaching us to write in Newscript. Everybody speaks English, of course, but only the Party gets Oldscript. The letters all the historical guys used to record their histories.” She looked at him. “Well, I want it.”
“What did they teach you in school?”
“I told you. Newscript.”
“It’s just a cipher. Character by character replacement. It isn’t a big deal.”
Cassie grimaced. Her chin was shaking. “Of course not,” she whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“It isn’t a big deal, but using it was a prison offense. You know that, right? Anybody who left Oldscript lying around went to get de-educated. It’s like reeducation but there’s less of you left after.”
Well, there was a simple reason for that. “We had to,” said Matthew. “Proles accessing pre-Party documents? We couldn’t give up that control.”
“Bastard,” she said to the air. Her anger at the Party so frequently flew past him, above, to one side, never directed at his face. He knew how much he deserved, though. It was more than she’d admit.
Her brow was tensed up, her mouth, her round cheeks. “We worked, we all worked, but we had school five mornings a week. John says it was all propaganda. We had activities. Like, every week we drew lots and there was a new Traitor. The Traitor had to do things to the class, like steal lunch tins or change words on the board. The rest of the class had to get the Traitor by catching them or figuring it out.” She scoffed quietly. “It was a setup. We always got the Traitor. Even if they hadn’t done anything yet, we got the Traitor. Once a student found them the teachers would drag them out and they’d have to sit in a dark cold room by themselves until someone explained to them how they must never think that way again. It was…a walk in the park, really, knowing what I know now about Party reeducation. But it was enough to keep us in line. We all knew a Traitor’s tricks and how to catch them, because we’d been there, and we’d lost.” She bit her lip. “We always got the Traitor. And the person who reported them got dessert for a week.”
Childless, Matthew had never thought about it. It would have sounded like a prole problem. “That sounds insane.”
The wind picked up past the alley. Scraps of cardboard blew by. He barely heard her next words. “It’s worse than that.”
“How?”
She finally shot him a glance, as if to make sure he was really him before she continued. “Once the traitor was a friend of mine. Judy was sabotaging the desks so they kept coming loose from the floor. It wrecked our concentration, probably our best traitor all year. I realized she was coming in early, before sunrise, before Hate, to do it. And I didn’t say anything. I didn’t offer to help her, but I didn’t say anything. For four days the desks got loose and I didn’t say anything. Somebody else turned her in on Friday. She tried to stand up to the teachers who came and they knocked a tooth out. I just…I thought, maybe nobody but me would know. Maybe she wouldn’t get hurt if I just kept my mouth shut.” She slapped her hands to her face and took a stuttering breath.
Matthew thought about it. The cultivation of the Party kept presenting new and spiky angles to his consideration. “You have always been a decent human being,” he said slowly, guessing that that was the difficult part of all this. “I imagine that hurts.”
Cassie wiped her face and set her jaw. “You never had to worry about that game.”
“We didn’t have play traitors, no. What we had was the Insider Threat. This idea that anybody, anybody at all, might be a traitor to the Party. We didn’t have random assignments, but we did have agents who tried to use social engineering and other approaches to break into our networks, open our doors, and get where they weren’t supposed to be. There were consequences to being tricked by one of them.” He shuddered. “There were consequences. In general, you were supposed to second-guess and check up on everybody. No matter how well you knew them.”
Cassie’s blue eyes were huge. “How did you people breed?”
“By assignment, and abruptly.”
Cassie stared a moment. Her mouth wobbled open. Suddenly, decisively, she laughed. It scared the squirrels again. She went on. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” Matthew found an interesting point on the ground to stare at. “Childbearing was by assignment. You wouldn’t trust your assignee any more than you trust anyone else.”
“Did you ever…?”
He felt his face heating up. His rare and mechanical recreation with members of the Party was not for this small earnest listener. “No. I wasn’t deemed genetically useful. Even if I did, I would never know which one of the early development cohort was mine.”
“Was there someone, though? Someone you did trust. In John’s stories even the worst guys had someone, a sister or daughter or girlfriend. The girl you would burn it all for.”
It took mere seconds to scan the entire map of his inner history. “No. I never loved anyone. I was perfect, Cassie. I would’ve turned my friend in.”
She looked past her knees at the broken city. “Oh,” she said. Then she was quiet. He couldn’t see her face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Not for being in the Party, not for his privilege, not for doing his job of hunting proles for the Thought Police to take. No. Between them there was no more to be said about that. But for never loving anyone enough to make a secret against his masters… “I’m sorry.”
Cassie shook her head. “They always die anyway. In the stories, I mean.” She swiped an arm across her face and stood. “Can we get out of here?”
He hesitated for form’s sake. He never seriously considered turning her wanderings down. “I’m waiting for one of my skitterers.”
“Ugh. What happens if you don’t show up?”
“It reverts to the preset programming I gave it before.”
“Which is?”
Protecting you. Since the day you spared my life knowing, it’s been protecting you. “Oh, patrolling. We can walk if you want.”
No tag, no links, that’s all.
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