The schools of the Caldari State differ in a great many respects. With each falling inside the demesnes of one or another of the eight great megacorporations, and also within the ambit of different catchment areas, with different demographics, under the control of a dizzying variety of subcorporations, education contractors and citizen resources executive control boards, the result is that no two are quite the same. Not least because children inevitably introduce a touch of anarchy to any system.
The one constant is monitoring. In a society rooted in Meritocratic principles, the argument that each person naturally gravitates towards the role for which they are best suited is subtly aided from a very young age through observation, data mining and the findings of centuries of studies in child psychology. The children who prefer to run around on the padded part of the play yard, throwing the ball around in a vague semblance of the final, adult form of a game are encouraged towards physical pursuits. The ones who cluster at the other end of the yard and buzz around playing Pod Pilot are destined for a life of intellectual education and academia. With subtle labyrinths of extra checks, tests, observations, data points and feedback, the ideal is that a person's life can from a young age be set on the course intended to be most fulfilling to that person.
Such a system must – and does – account for a staggering variety of burgeoning child personalities.
The girl's first fight was at age four. A boy knocked her down while running after a ball. Where other little girls her age would have resorted to upset bawling and caused the teacher to reprimand the careless boy, this one picked herself up again and, even with hurt tears clouding her vision, attacked her classmate with such vicious energy that corporate security had to be called. The boy, two teachers and a Spacelane Patrol officer were treated for bites.
She was a tube child. No parents except in the genetic sense. No home except the creche she shared with other children, none of whom felt comfortable around her after the fight. The problem escalated – they avoided her when they could, ran scared from her when necessary. She responded with violence despite the best efforts of their caretakers to prevent it, which only made the problem worse.
She was eventually taken out of the creche by a tall woman in a silver-grey greatcoat. The other children, demonstrating the remarkable mental tenacity of the young, soon forgot all about her.
They took her name away. It had never meant much, having been randomly assigned to her by a computer when she had been born from the tube, but it had been hers. Now, only the initial “A” remained, tagged to the number 7 for identification purposes. She fought at first, refusing to respond to the label, insisting on doing nothing unless called by her name. She quickly found that discipline was a real thing in this new school. Before, “discipline” meant being sent to stand in the naughty corner, or stacking the chairs at days' end before being released to the lonely quiet of the Creche.
Here, discipline meant a firm slap across the face. She attacked the first person to slap her – she got slapped harder, a ringing blow that left her too dizzy and sick to even stand, let alone try to bite. The approach was simple and made her cry at first in frustrated anger, but unlike the weak bleating of her previous teachers, she came to respect it in time, and appreciate that it wasn't handed out arbitrarily. She was told in clear terms every time what she had done to earn the reprimand.
She stopped demanding her name and started answering to “A-Seven”. Before long, she became more comfortable with her designator than she had been before. Eventually, she forgot her name entirely.
Her class numbered more than a hundred children of both genders, all sleeping in one enormous barrack patrolled by armoured persons – she couldn't guess at their sex under the riot armour they wore, and she wasn't allowed to talk to them – whose function was to keep a barrack full of psychopathic pre-teens from each others' throats. Fights were broken up by the simple expedient of hauling the participants apart, binding their wrists and ankles and throwing them onto their bunk to cool down. Bigger fights prompted the use of charged pain prods that left many a child buckled over and mewling in pain. Riots were ruthlessly gassed. A-7 felt the sting of all the various humiliations the guards could give over the years, and by the time she forgot her name at age ten, discipline in the barracks was absolute.
They were educated, for much longer hours than she had experienced at her dimly-remembered first school. Calisthenics, gymnastics, swimming or running in the morning before breakfast. Physical education theory after breakfast. Gentler lessons in the afternoon, with no apparent theme – biology, chemistry, languages, acting, mathematics, engineering, mechanics, military history, literature, music and more. The lessons were well-taught by engaging, intelligent teachers who made learning fun. Then in the evening – practicals. Some were obvious training for war and killing. Martial arts with bare hands, martial arts with weapons, firearms training, medical training, assault courses, stealth challenges. Others were of no obvious practical benefit to a soldier, which was what they all now believed themselves to be. They learned how to play poker, they staged plays and concerts, they role-played conversations in a host of languages and dialects with assumed personalities and histories, they sat and discussed philosophy with their tutors.
The day started at 05:00. Breakfast was at 06:20, and lasted an hour, including recreation time. Lunch was at 12:00, again lasting one hour. Dinner was 17:00, lasting half an hour. They had an hour and a half for recreation before bunk time at 22:00. There were no days off and the pace was unrelenting, but the things they did were so varied, and their tutors so skilled, that every day was fun.
Time progressed. The class splintered into smaller groups as the aptitudes of each child were identified and they were re-assigned into smaller classes to better focus on their fields of expertise. A-7 found that her philosophy lessons came to an abrupt end, replaced with classes on people – how to read their emotions and manipulate them, and how to spot other people doing the same to you and fool them. She enjoyed those.
Failure had always been an option for the children – right from the first weeks, a few had quietly been removed from the barrack and the big board at the end of the room would have a big red stamp over their designator that simply said “Failed”. Now, it became rampant. The lessons began to encompass more difficult concepts, the practical lessons and exams got much harder. Classmates vanished at a steady pace, their “names” buried under that stern red stamp.
At age 14 – below the age of consent for CBD and the State, but the normal rules didn't apply to her - she had sex for the first time. K-1 was from a different education group, one which hadn't received the social training she had. He was almost alarmingly easy to seduce, pathetically eager to believe the things she told him. She enjoyed playing his emotions like an instrument, thoroughly enjoyed the physical act itself when she allowed him to think he'd finally convinced her to “go all the way”. She found a perverse pleasure in the sense of superiority she felt when he cried afterwards. She checked his name on the board in the morning. K-1: Failed. She wasn't surprised – instead, she allowed herself a moment of satisfaction at this confirmation that even their most intimate moments were closely scrutinized.
It also didn't surprise her when later that day, her social lessons discussed sex and seduction, and the power they held for controlling people. “You are all young, and in peak physical condition” the instructor told them. “Unwary persons, and you must remember that the average citizen is not wary of being seduced, will prove remarkably eager to obey your wishes if they are given even a hint that you might reward them with your bodies. We expect that none of you are afraid to couple with whomever you wish, whenever you wish and for whatever reason, nor will you be afraid to enjoy it. But remember – your openness will titillate some persons, and scandalize others. Your behaviour must forward your objective, and if your objective would be threatened by sexual openness, then you must become closed.”
That objective, of course, was assassination, and by the time that the board in the barrack had dwindled to only a handful of identifiers holding out a grim last stand against a red army, She and the others had all figured it out. None of them minded. There were no more failures throughout her seventeenth year of life, nor her eighteenth. Their practical lessons trained them on investigative procedures for homicide and how to elude identification and capture. They were never called upon to actually kill somebody in training, but they all knew that if and when the time came, none of them would hesitate for an instant. They had been selected, and eliminated, far too carefully and cleverly for that.
Their graduation was nothing special. They were each given a certificate describing them as “CBD Human Resources Troubleshooting Specialists”. The bland, corporate term described thirteen precision weapons, each one of them capable of telling a direct lie with a perfectly straight face, of assuming a whole new identity, of walking undetected in a crowd, or silent down an empty corridor. Each of them was nearly as lethal with their bare, unassisted bodies as they were with any form of weapon. A-7 was quietly proud that the difference between her best time on the assault course, and her time while wearing an extremely impractical formal dress, were within five seconds of one another.
They bid farewell to the classmates they had grown up with. It was a quiet, unemotional affair – a handshake and a good luck wish – and then each was off to their assigned posts, complete with address, cover story and cover job for which they were perfectly qualified.
A-7 was assigned to a lowsec settlement called Jesken's Reach. She had expected a shanty town – she got a thriving city of seven hundred thousand citizens. She had a house, a job with the local security contractors as an investigator, a rank – Lieutenant – and a name. HER name.
She'd forgotten that name, and felt some mild surprise at seeing it written down again, but not the shock that some gut instinct told her that somebody else might have felt. It made, she realised, a good deal of sense to use a name to which she was at least distantly accustomed to responding. It would help her fit the role a little more naturally.
Her name was Aato Sihayha.
