I turn to see Mara, who looks a bit like an ancient Elizabethan with her pale makeup, rouged cheeks, and high lace collar. The style for IS workers is the opposite of the mines. Everyone wants to look brown, sun-kissed, like they vacation aboveground. But IS workers like to look like they’veneverbeen nor heard of outside.
“I’m here for my things,” I say. “And also—I’d like to talk about reinstatement.”
Mara blinks once, slow. “Reinstatement?”
I nod. “I want my position back.”
Her mouth twists like she’s trying to suppress a laugh. Then she does laugh, a short, sharp bark that carries across the office. Heads turn. People peer over monitors. I recognize a few of them. Some avert their eyes, but others—Bronzes, Nickels, even goddamn Aluminum-level IS workers—look right at me and smirk.
My stomach twists.
“I’m a Diamond,” I say, as if reminding them, as if reminding myself. “Theonlyone down here.”
“A Diamond,” Mara says, still smiling. Then she holds up an information system slip.
My haughty resignation. I actually set this up to auto send this morning. I groan rereading the first lines
“As an abovegrounder blah blah…in order to focus on my husband’s rapidly accelerating…yada yada.”
It is humiliating.
Mara closes the slip. “A Diamond who eagerly forfeited her coveted position,” she says.
I press my lips together. “That was?—”
“Before Josh came to his senses? What would make you think he’d bring an unmodded girl up there?”
The Bronzes snicker.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “The Diamond status was for the move. It was so people could see how worthy we?—”
Mara holds up a hand, stopping me cold. “Excuse me,” she says, her voice cutting. “Everyone here actually gives a damn about the Information System. A living, breathing ecosystem we swore an oath to protect. You showed your true colors the second Josh got the lottery. You abandoned your post. You turned your back on the work.”
I open my mouth, but she isn’t finished.
“And now you come crawling back?” She leans forward, eyes as sharp as scalpels. “No. You don’t get to waltz in here with your diamond collar and expect us to roll out a welcome mat.”
My throat feels tight. “You’re saying I have to start from the bottom?”
“I’m saying,” Mara says, voice cold, “you’ll be below Aluminum.”
I sputter. “You can’t be serious.”
She steps closer, her voice dropping, like she wants to make sure only I hear every syllable. “Until you learn respect for this work, yes, I can.” Her lips curve, but there’s no kindness in it. “So take your seat. And either collect your things or take the Aluminum files and sort them.”
I sit. A little dumfounded. Do I love this work enough to start at the very bottom?
WhatdoI love?
I think I love the IS searchers.
Most people in the Information System have their patterns. I know them all by heart. The Erotica Searcher, always hunting for increasingly esoteric smut. The Obsessive Infant-Laughter Seeker, whose sole mission in life seems to be playing and replaying the sound of babies giggling in various tones and pitches. Creepy, but ultimately harmless. And then there’s the Touch Starver, a person so desperate for sensory input that they spend hours watching videos of fingertips brushing over skin, of hugs held just a second too long. Watching goose bumps rise on flesh for hours. I like them, whoever they are. Though their search patterns always drove me insane.
They’re maddeningly methodical, like a person trying to solve a maze by brute force, hitting the same dead end over and over because it never once occurs to them to climb the walls.
They start with a concept—say,nutrient synthesis models in post-industrial economies—and work their way through it step by step, narrowing their parameters and refining their queries.Fine. Logical. But then, without fail, they get stuck circling the same five articles, the same cluster of datasets, as if the answer will suddenly appear if they just reword the query in a slightly different way.
It’s infuriating, watching them flail against the limits of their own logic. Creativity is what they lack. The ability to make that sideways leap, to see what isn’t there and ask why. And yet, they’re up there, aboveground, in the labs, in the halls of innovation, while I’m stuck down here in the dirt, my hands deep in the guts of the Information System. I could be up there. I should be up there.
