HELPER12, Jack Blaine [reading in the dark .TXT] 📗

I wait, at the place I’ve called home since I was reassigned from the training complex.

Cubes aren’t much, but they’re a big step up from the dorms in the training complexes.  In the dorms, we all slept in one big room, so they did feel less claustrophobic.  But my cube, cramped as it may be, has been my sanctuary, my only private haven.  The unpainted concrete walls have been my protection from everything outside of them.  Not just the violent clashes that sometimes erupt in the complex halls, the sounds of people screaming at each other, hitting each other.  Those things are a part of living in the lower complexes; the police don’t come here unless they have to, and they don’t think most crimes merit a visit.

These walls have protected me against other things, too.  The loneliness of my existence, the helpless feeling of knowing I will repeat my steps each day, that I will do as I am bid, do what I have been trained to do, until I can’t do it anymore.  That I will die as I’ve lived, alone.  Within my cube walls, sometimes, I’ve been able to forget my real life.

I’ve been able to do that because I draw.  I know it’s forbidden, I know I could be punished.  But I do it anyway.  I can’t really see the harm in my doodles.  They are just pictures, just marks on paper.  I would never show them to anybody.

Still, they’re illegal, at least for me.  I wasn’t tracked as an artist, and I haven’t been trained as one.  I’m not supposed to engage in any sort of creative work.  According to the government, unless you are trained in the proper subject matter and implementation, creative work can be dangerous.  It can incite people, and that can lead to social unrest.  Social unrest is not allowed. Untrained creation is a serious offense.

I’ve always loved it, though.  I doubt I’m any good—my drawings don’t look anything like what the government-sanctioned artists produce.  I started accidentally, when I noticed that one of the illustrations in one of my training manuals was inaccurate.  It was a picture of a baby, but the way the eyes were rendered was  . . . wrong.  They were placed just off from where they should be, and it made the whole face look funny.  I had a pencil for charting—in training we didn’t have electronic charts—and I remember drawing over those eyes, enlarging them so that their placement looked more natural.  I didn’t think about it; I just did it.  And from there, I drew more, and more.

My cubicle kept me hidden, safe from discovery for many hours, while I scribbled my little pictures.  Yes, the cameras are live in my cube, just like they are in the rest, but I know a way to lie on my cot, turned just so, that blocks their electronic eyes.  It must, or I would have been dragged away long ago.  I draw in the flickering light of the ever present vid feed coming from the screen set into my cube wall.  While the ads play pretty pictures of carefree people living lives I will never come close to, I draw, and I escape.

I get the paper from the Ward.  I know it’s stealing, but it’s only the wrappers from the gowns we use; they would be thrown out anyway.  When I left training I stole two of the charting pencils, but they wore down to nubs long ago.  So I had to go find a Jacket.  That was an adventure.

You can find them easy enough, the ones wearing the over-sized coats, hanging around outside the train station entrances.  I’d heard about them, heard that those coats were outfitted inside with countless pockets and loops, holding all kinds of wares.  I didn’t think I would be lucky enough to find one with pencils; they aren’t in common use, and I think most Jackets trade things like drugs or knives.  I’d never thought of approaching one; they look scary.  But I needed pencils.

The Jacket I picked was almost always outside the entrance to the station near the Central Nursery.  I decided it would be better to try there, in the bustle of the crowd, than at the station near my complex, where it was less busy.  I walked past him a couple of times before I got the nerve to speak to him.

He wore a black coat, bulky and long.  He was surprisingly young—not much older than me, I don’t think.  He sized me up as an amateur pretty quickly.

“What you want?”  He had a twitch—the right side of his mouth kept hitching up.

“I want some pencils.”  I whispered, so soft he had to lean in to hear.

“What?”

“Pencils.”  I spoke a little louder.  “I want some pencils.”

“Keep it down, will ya?”  He looked irritated.  “I got no pencils.”

“Oh.”  I was crestfallen.  I had planned this so carefully.  I had taken two analgesic tablets from the Ward; I had planned to tell the Jacket they were blitzers; they were a popular drug in the complexes because of their mood elevating qualities.  I could have access to blitzers as a Baby Helper, and he would know that, so it might work.  I started to walk away.

“Krike.”  The Jacket sounded as irritated as he looked.  I turned back toward him.  He was shaking his head, as though I were the saddest thing he’d seen today.

“Don’t mean I can’t get ‘em.”  He crooked his finger at me.  Dutifully, I stepped back toward him.  He crooked his finger again, until I came close enough to hear.

“What you got for ‘em?”  His lip hitched while he waited for me to answer.

“I’ve got some blitzers.”  I hoped I sounded convincing.  “Two,” I added.

His eyes widened.  “You?  Blitzers?  You sure?”

“Yes!”

How many pencils you want for your blitzers?”

It struck me then.  I couldn’t tell him I had blitzers when I didn’t.  He was here at my station every day.   When he discovered I’d duped him, I