Page 79 of Poster Girl

“So,” Naomi replies. “They didn’t exile me. After Regulation 82 passed, I wanted to leave, and I agreed they could tell people I was dead if it was advantageous to them.”

“Regulation 82 made Insights mandatory,” Alexander says, after swallowing a mouthful of apple and bread. “That was your technology, and it was about to be everywhere. Why would you want to leave?”

“You’ll notice I don’t have an Insight of my own,” Naomi says, tapping the skin under her right eye. “That’s not because I’ve had it disabled. It’s because I never had one put in to begin with. I knew that if I bent to that particular rule, I would be submitting to constant observation, and that was something I didn’t want. Nor was I interested in spending the rest of my life playing a game with every decision I made.”

“I don’t understand,” Sonya says. “A game?”

“What do you think DesCoin is?” Naomi says. “Use a crosswalk, earn ten points. Jaywalk, lose ten points. Eat a healthy breakfast, earn five points. Indulge in a donut, lose five points. It’s a game that assigns moral value to even the smallest decisions of your life. Do you know the term ‘operant conditioning’?”

Sonya shakes her head.

“It simply describes how human beings learn,” Naomi says. “That particular behaviors are shaped by their consequences. If you’re a child and you grab a knife by its blade, for example, the resultant pain will train you not to touch blades again. If you’re a parent and you’d like your child to learn how to pick up after themselves, youmight offer them a reward for doing so. The Insight system made use of this psychological reality—it defined desirable behaviors and shaped people by offering either penalties or rewards. In effect, it treated you all as its children. It molded you into exactly who it wanted you to be.”

Naomi picks up a piece of bread, breaks off some crust, and eats it.

“Only,” she says, “who gets to define what is and is not desirable? There are some things we can all agree on—we don’t want people to murder or fight each other, we’d like them to feed and care for their children, we would prefer that they don’t urinate in public. But things like humming on the subway, eating a chocolate, pointing out when someone is unkind to you... A relatively small, relatively homogeneous group of people decided that those things had moral value, too. And that certain things were suitable for some, but not all. You, for example, would be docked more DesCoin for raising your voice to a stranger than, say, your sister. Why do you think that is?”

Sonya glances at Alexander. Naomi Proctor seems to know Sonya’s family better than she let on.

“Becauseyouwere being shaped, not for political power or influence, like her, but to be a supportive spouse and devoted mother,” Naomi says. “Each of you quite literally lived in a different system under the Delegation, developed to cultivate particular qualities. For you, patience and passivity. For your friend...” She narrows her eyes at Alexander. “My guess would be, loyalty, a high tolerance for tedium, suppressed curiosity.”

“I... Wouldn’t we have noticed if we were losing more DesCoin for a given act than other people?” Alexander says.

“Those discrepancies can always be explained away by context. No one was privy to the exact algorithm that quantified behavior, and the differences for individual acts were relatively minor,” Naomi says. “And even if you had realized, at the time, that you were being treated differently—who would you have taken your complaints to?” She smiles. “August Kantor?”

“He did have a system for taking suggestions,” Sonya says, softly.

“Ah yes. Slip your complaints into this little box and weswear”—here Naomi lays a hand over her heart—“we will address them as soon as we are able.”

Sonya sits back in her chair. She remembers, too well, the description of her person as laid out by the Delegation. Moderately intelligent, moody, and not interested in her studies—those must have been the qualities that determined her future. Compliant, though; trusting easily; lack of curiosity—those made her well-suited for the future they had offered her. They presented it like a reward:Congratulations, darling. You’ve been assigned a special role.Her mother was the one to tell her about it.You’re to marry Aaron Price when you turn eighteen.Aaron, her friend since childhood, the two of them put together at every opportunity.Isn’t that exciting?And it was. Everyone knew Aaron was poised to become someone important. And Sonya would get to be at his side when he became it, whatever it was, which meant she was important, too.

How early, exactly, had they decided who she was, and what she might be? Was she a teenager, when they put a cap on her usefulness to society?

Was she a child?

Thinking of it now, she wonders how it was presented to Aaron. Had they told him that because he would be someone important, he had earned himself a good wife? Sonya Kantor, beautiful, smart enough to be an interesting conversationalist, obedient enough not to cause trouble?Congratulations, we’ve given you a special treat.Bile rises in the back of Sonya’s throat. She realizes that she is squeezing the edge of her chair so hard it’s hurting her palms.

Alexander touches her shoulder, gently. She looks at him, her face hot. He nods a little.

“So you wanted to opt out,” Alexander says, continuing in Sonya’s place. “But they couldn’t allow you to do that, could they?”

“No, there were to be no exceptions to Regulation 82,” Naomi says, and it’s as if she can’t see the turmoil in Sonya, has no idea what kind of wreckage she’s left behind. She sips her coffee casually. “They offered me a choice: get the implant and join the game, or leave. They weregenerous with me. Gave me a hero’s death. Gave me this beautiful house. They arranged regular shipments of food and special goods. I always liked to be alone.”

“And the Triumvirate, what? Just continued sending you things at no cost?”

“Indeed.” Naomi smiles a little. “Don’t underestimate the power I wield, boy. Do you know what kind of trouble I could cause if I came back from the dead and told everyone that their Insights hadn’t actually been removed, and could be reactivated at any time? It’s been said before, of course, but never by anyone as credible as I would be.”

“What are you talking about,reactivated?” he says, heated.

Naomi tilts her head, looks at the scar running along Alexander’s temple, a shade darker than the rest of his skin. “That scar is just for effect. Deactivating the Insight is not a surgical procedure, since the Insight cannot be removed without severely damaging the brain. You can only take them out after a person is dead. The Triumvirate consulted with me about this extensively. You can dismantle the system, turn off the lights—but the hardware must remain in place. The Triumvirate thought people would react violently to having dormant technology buried in their brains that couldn’t be removed. They thought there would be mass panic. So they made a big performance of the deactivation process—give people a nice little scar to reassure them. The fact is, I could reactivate your Insight right now, Mr. Price. All I have to do is hook you up to a computer.”

“How could youdothis?” Sonya is surprised by the force of the question. Her lungs heave, desperate for air. “How could you make technology that does something you find soevil,sorepulsive,that you won’t even use it for yourself?”

Naomi looks at her like she’s a child. Sonya feels like a child, too, about to throw herself on the ground and scream.

“It didn’t begin that way, of course,” Naomi says, flatly. “I was asked to come up with something more convenient than the Elicit. No one wanted to carry those things around all the time. We tried glasses—but people didn’t want to wear glasses all the time, either. The implant was a marvel. Elegant. Injected into the eye, and then it usedthe body’s own tissues to self-replicate and grow, like . . .” She laughs a little. “Like a living thing. It’s not some foreign body that your brain has simply developed around; it’syou,it’s comprised of your cells, it’s technology and flesh in perfect unity.”

She sighs.

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