elimination

“It’s today.” A dwindling number of pawns sit across from me whispering during Acquisition of Sustenance. Their eyes brim with excitement at the prospect of the first day of the “new” type of Practical Training. How they can be so intelligent yet so oblivious is beyond me. During the last Practical Training session the material in our tablets came to an end. Today the elimination resumes. I reflect with a small quantity of remorse that Frog Mouth is gone. In the end it was the smoke that did her in. I can still picture her slumped and twisted on the ground, her eyes coated in the residue of black smoke. I shudder. One down, how many more to go? It can’t be more than 50. I stare into the gloppy faces in my sustenance, yet today I don’t find them amusing.

12 and I hardly exchange a word and we avoid each other’s gaze. I don’t want to pour my anxiety into her eyes and she doesn’t want to pour hers into mine. As the hours tick by there are no further declarations of integrity, or vindications of our new found mission against injustice. It appears the fear of death had taken its rightful place above all other considerations. I pull up my coat over my neck as we all slowly head out the door.

I shiver in a single file line facing the indifferent wall of the Practical Training Room. Doomsday stands calmly reading something on a tablet, oblivious to our frigid, wide-eyed existence. Finally she fixes us with sharp eyes and begins to speak. “Today will be a novel experience for you.” She smiles. Apocalypse opens a heavy metal door and begins to escort us through the white labyrinth that hides just behind the Practical Training room.

We are lead through an endless array of identical halls. They are differentiated only by faint indentations on the doors. The language of these indentations—I asked Bump Nose once—is “Braille.” That’s what the officials use to label things they don’t want us to understand. When no one was looking I used to love running my fingers along the tiny bumps, I always wanted to learn it, but there was no one to teach me. I have heard rumors about Titles who actually managed to learn it and used it to break into the room where they keep the domaine pills, yet I highly doubt there is any truth to this. Apocalypse stops abruptly and opens another metal door. We quickly shuffle into a large white room comparable to the Practical Training room except for two rows of large black tables with granite counters and metal sinks. There is a wide array of carefully aligned surgical equipment on each counter. The sharp blades of the scalpels glisten in the electric light.

We re-assemble into our single file line, fidgety fingers ineffectively restrained at our sides. My eyes are drawn to Apocalypse as he emerges from a heavy metal door at the far right of the room, wheeling a giant rectangular metal box. It has 12 rows of narrow drawers, each with a small glass handle. Doomsday begins her robotic delivery of instructions, “You shall proceed to split into groups of two and each group shall cautiously retrieve a drawer of supplies and transport it to a station of your choosing.”

The class instantly takes on a new shape as defensive shoulders and hawk-like eyes take the place of all individual distinguishing features. Titles cautiously maneuver through the crowd looking to partner with either friends or enemies depending on their intuition. 12 and I exchange worried glances from across the room. I am not going to risk it, I will find someone I am indifferent to. Yet as I look around everyone seems to be deliberately maintaining a 2 meter radius around me. They look up quickly before averting their gaze to the ground.

I suppose they fear what I might do to them if I lost control. I suppose they fear correctly. As I am prodded by their uneasy eyes I can’t help but feel dirty, tainted—like I’m some kind of monster. I remember 12 once was telling me about Ivan the Terrible from Russian history when we drifted off into an interesting conversation. What influence does how other people see you have on how you see yourself? Isn’t how you see yourself who you are? When Ivan was born it was foretold that he would be terrible. Everyone expected him to be terrible and therefore he was terrible.

I feel a cold, nimble finger tap my right shoulder. I turn with slow dread to see Tight Rope’s wide eyes and facial features wrought with worry. Her skin is wound a little too tightly over what were once beautiful, high cheekbones. I find the irony laughable now, how I named her Tight Rope, how somehow it seemed that through sheer luck she managed to balance above it all. I can still recall an imp-like smile and air of casual indifference. She walks the same tight rope as before, but she is no longer smiling. She teeters, eyes transfixed on the ground, just waiting for her luck to run out and the rope to snap. She fixes me with an unwavering stare, waiting with patient anxiety for my response to her silent request. This is exactly the situation I was trying to avoid, but I won’t refuse her. I attempt to give her a warm smile of reassurance, but I have never been good at conjuring up smiles from nowhere. It looks more like a grimace, or an animal bearing its teeth. I walk over to the closest table and lay my palms on the frozen surface as Tight Rope returns with the drawer, her thin arms shaking. Yet it’s not the muscles that are weak, it’s the nerves.

She gingerly sets the box on the table to the right and regards the surgical equipment, wild eyes darting around the room. I pull open the drawer by the glass handle and jump back in alarm. The things in the box they’re....moving, like....like....they’re alive. They are animals, actual animals, they must be! My pulse quickens as a dumbfounded smile pulls back my lips, I quickly wipe it away before anyone notices. In the box are 10 animals each about the size of my hand, they have white fur and red eyes, or black fur and black eyes. They have pink pointy noses and wispy strands of almost colorless hair lining their tiny snouts. From their rears protrude long pointy tails, devoid of hair. The name, I read it in a textbook somewhere, it’s a mouse!

I stare at the tiny creatures in utter bafflement, how are they even here? No animals survived into the modern day. Yet, I suppose by that logic there would be no humans either. Somehow the people survived, I suppose some animals did so by the same means. By what means I do not know. I look down at the box to see Tight Rope’s bony child’s hand cautiously hovering over the mice. It seems she is trying to grab at one, yet she refuses to touch them. Then I see it. There is a tiny cylindrical metal container in the far right corner of the box. Impatiently, I shove one of the mice into the side of the drawer and retrieve the box for her.

I stare at the mouse. It does not move; it’s right legs are bent at an odd angle. Did I really shove it that hard? Can mice die? I swallow hard. Though seemingly impossible, Tight Rope’s eyes have grown even bigger, she looks scared, more scared than usual. For a moment I feel uncomfortable, the skin of my right hand still retains the feeling of the mouse, softness, warmth, life. I return my palm to the frozen table and sigh. There are nine more mice. Tight Rope, who has been slowly gravitating away from me is attempting to open the cylindrical container, yet her rigid, white knuckled fingers have no luck. I extend my left hand to her as an offer of help, she flinches and hands me the box. I tear the lid off with easy precision and silently set it down on the table. The box is full of a clear gel, not unlike the medicinal cream dispensed to us after practical training, submerged in the middle of the gel is a tiny reddish-purple blob. My mind conjures up a textbook image. It’s a tiny heart.

With the smallest gesture of her hand Doomsday lifts the eyes of the entire class to her thin lined mouth. “The lesser organisms you have been presented with each have been bred to have a heart defect, under certain conditions their hearts will gradually slow down until they die. Such conditions have been chemically induced for this activity. The mice each have half an hour to live. Your task is to perform a series of tests in order to determine the one organism in your sample set that is most physically and intellectually superior. This organism shall receive a new heart, if you perform the operation correctly.” She scrutinizes the class. “You will do well to make sure you have selected the correct mouse.” The threat diffuses through the air settling on our rigid nerves.

Tight Rope’s tiny finger pecks my left shoulder again, I turn, annoyance itching at my esophagus as I conjure up a smile. Why on earth is she this nervous? “Yes.” I say in a metallic tone of voice as her insistently shaky lips begins to whisper. “What if that was the mouse we were supposed to save?” At this I start to get annoyed. Really annoyed. And a thought occurs to me, a nasty intuition. “Why are you so nervous?” Tight Rope freezes. I insist yet again. “20, why are you so nervous?” Her finger hovers in the air directing my gaze to the dead mouse. I take the corpse by its tail and slam it against the table until it’s skull cracks open with a satisfying crunch. I sweep the bloody mess into the trash with my hand. Tight Rope looks utterly petrified. I grab her arm and wipe my hand on the inner sleeve of her right forearm, leaving bloody fingerprints on her palm. “20, why are you so nervous?” Finally she cracks, tears pooling in her eyes. “I didn’t mean to tell her.” I look over to see One intently watching our discussion. Realization sets in.

Somehow I maintain my composure. “If that was the superior mouse it wouldn’t have broken so easily now would it?” Tight Rope swallows hard and doesn’t meet my eye. “You’re right.” She squeaks, quivering as she swallows hard. Hopefully she swallows her tongue and will finally shut up. I look up from the table to find 12′s eyes boring into me from across the room, her facial features are unreadable, yet her eyes smolder in a rage at my behavior.

Tight Rope and I go through the mice in silence. Our resources are limited in terms of determining the “superior” mouse, so we decide to take the mice and set them on their backs. The time it takes for them to revert to proper position serves as a test of intelligence and physical ability. After nine rounds of elimination we are left with a single black mouse. I set the tablet containing the surgical information on the counter across from the sharp metal equipment. I am not letting Tight Rope’s shaky fingers anywhere near this mouse.

As I dig the scalpel into it, it begins to squirm and tries to bight the knuckle off my pointer finger, I feel a twinge of remorse and attempt to hurry up. After much difficulty the mouse finally lies on the table with a long, clumsily sutured scar across its front and the new heart in place. I roll the old one between my thumb and forefinger absentmindedly wondering what was wrong with it. Tight Rope regards me in horror while cowering in mousy silence. She is muttering something under her breath. “It’s not right, it’s not right, it’s not right.” With each repetition she quivers more. What’s not right!? I performed the surgery perfectly! She’s not right in the head.

Now I’m getting really annoyed, something is rising within me, something is escaping. It’s a familiar sensation. My teeth are itching to sink into Tight Rope’s little lying neck, but somehow I restrain myself. She now looks at me long and hard, something far away in her eye. She opens her mouth to speak leaving me an opportunity to fling the defective mouse heart she was so illogically repulsed by at her. My aim is perfect, she tries to scream, but instead she starts to choke, the bloody appendage now lodged in her esophagus.

She starts to slide down the side of the table, her face turning a pretty purplish blue color. My rage and anguish feed on her descent, finally approaching satisfaction as my demons swarm

around her, ripping the flesh from her bones and caressing it through the gaps in their

teeth. There is laughing in the background, cold, clear, maniacal. I turn to see the other Titles watching with twisted statue faces. Doomsday and Apocalypse are nowhere to be seen. That’s odd. Suddenly I feel bony fingers bite my ankle sending me to the ground, my head hits the hard countertop with a weird tasting grainy BOOM.

Something is different. I blink my eyes and look through the tiny speckles of light clouding my vision. Tight Rope is on the ground, tiny sounds escaping her throat as she clutches it with desperate fingers. I swallow hard, a faint foamy taste in my mouth. Panic races through my veins as I try to get up, but my head spins and bile rises in my throat. Unidentified emotions bite at my internal organs making me squirm in pain. They bounce around my insides leaving destruction in their wake. They’re planning, plotting changing SNAP. They disappear. Clarity comes as I launch myself at Tight Rope.

In an instant I have pulled the mouse heart out of her throat and am bringing water from the sink to her mouth with cupped hands. I swallow hard and take Tight Rope by both hands, gently pulling her to her feet. I search her eyes, for terror, panic, something, but all is see is fatigue. “Are you quite alright?” I whisper. After an eternity she shakes her head affirmatively and croaks out a set of scarcely distinguishable syllables. “I’m sorry Seven.” She emits a tiny sob. “It’s not right.” Right. What does that mean? There is a right answer and a wrong answer, in math, in science. Yet there is no right and wrong in life, there is only following orders, or death. My eyes cautiously scan the room as Tight Rope records the data from the mice experimentation on a tablet. Doomsday and Apocalypse are still conveniently absent.

It’s not like them to leave us unsupervised, perhaps if they remain just in the other room it’s easier for them to pretend I’m not a murderous raging lunatic. The Titles, however haven’t turned a blind eye to my little escapade. They remain engaged in their work, yet dark eyes continuously dart up landing on my face. I pretend not to see them as Tight Rope’s incessant mumbling continues. “It’s not right, “It’s not right.” 12, Switch and 14 have abandoned their work entirely and stand with tensed muscles, their eyes transfixed on Tight Rope and I. They are waiting for something to go wrong, waiting at the bottom of the ridge to catch me when I fall so that I don’t crush anyone standing below. Having fully completed our selection and salvation of the superior mouse Tight Rope and I stand against the counter top in silence. She has finally stopped muttering, but her mantra continues in my mind. It’s not right. It’s not right.

I clear the foamy residue from my throat and begin to speak, my tongue cautiously wrapping around each word. “Has Bump Nose by any chance been giving you books to read?” She looks up from the countertop surprised. “How did you know?” I study her eyes. “Just intuition.” Tight Rope looks down shamefully and regards her finger nails. They are chewed to the nail bed. I shudder, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people who chew their nails. After scrutinizing her hands for about half a century she looks up and begins to speak with stuttering words. “S-s-seven, w-what are you going to do to m-m-me?”

It’s my turn to stare at my nails. For the billionth time I attempt to remember once again when it was exactly that I became the forbearer of all doom and destruction. I regard the quivering animal in front of me. She betrayed me. She allowed herself to be pressured by One into divulging I don’t know how many of my most dangerous secrets. Any day now One will probably go forward to the officials and sell out Bump Nose’s group. Tight Rope stares at me as though any moment I could rip her throat out and disappear into hysteric laughter while gurgling foam over her corpse. I probably should do that, given everything; she certainly deserves it. I open my mouth. “20, I won’t do anything to you.” I whisper quietly. “There’s nothing I could do to compete with the damage that’s already been done.” Her mouth drops open, as she stares at me with her great big insect eyes. “T-thank you Seven.” She sniffles.

Doomsday and Apocalypse emerge from an unambiguous door in the far left of the room ending their inexplicable absence. I’ll bet anything they know exactly what happened. Doomsday’s facial expression is about as expressive as the plain grey wall behind her. Yet I can read Apocalypse like a book. He fixes me with a look of pure hatred. I turn to Tight Rope who is sadly stroking our chosen mouse with her index finger. I regard my hands on the table. There is blood under my fingernails. It looks like I chewed them into oblivion. I chuckle to myself. I don’t know why I pardoned Tight Rope. Perhaps it was foolish of me to do so. But I have a feeling none of it really matters in the end. If we were going to be busted for Bump Nose’s group it would have happened by now. I don’t know much about Bump Nose, but I know he’s important, probably important enough that if he wants to direct his little extracurriculars no one will stop him. In the end it’s Bump Nose who decides if I live or die; Bump Nose and his “colleagues.”