Our job is to sift through the links on our respective screens and sort them, moving material that is clearly of no pertinence to the Mogadorian cause to the “Discard” directory, while kicking material that might have some bearing on our interests up to the “Investigate” directory, where it will be assessed personally by the lead surveyor before being dismissed or moved up the chain to Command HQ. We are also supposed to tag and grade the material we move to the “Investigate” directory according to our judgment of its possible relevance: “PV” for Possible Value, “HP” for High Priority, and “EHP” for Extremely High Priority. Items we flag with an “EHP” rating are simultaneously routed to the lead surveyor and to a small cadre of analysts over at command HQ for immediate review.
Ultimately, if Command HQ is persuaded a news item is a legitimate sign of Garde activity, reconnaissance teams are dispatched.
All three eliminated Garde members were located with some degree of surveyor assistance. But despite our importance, we’re really just data monkeys. Exciting stuff like reconnaissance and combat occur outside our purview as surveyors.
Not that it’s easy work. Within minutes of struggling through this endlessly updating data stream, I miss the clarity and simplicity of my physical labor back in Kenya. Jumping all over the place on the internet—from a story about the birth of quintuplets in Winnetka, Illinois, to a grainy web-video from a Syrian insurgent—without getting involved in what I’m reading or seeing is a challenge, and after just twenty minutes of wide-eyed staring at the monitor, my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed.
Then it gets worse.
At the end of the first hour, a little digital bell sounds and a tab pops up on the upper right-hand corner of my screen. My heart sinks.
“Oh yeah,” says Serkova, managing to smirk at me without looking up from his monitor. “I forgot to mention. We get ranked hourly.”
Our individual results are tabulated at the end of every hour and broadcast to all the terminals. Number of Discards, number of Investigates, as well as a provisional computer-graded percentage score for accuracy.
There I am, all the way at the bottom, in last place: twenty-seven Discards, six Investigates, and a provisional accuracy ranking of 71 percent. I scan up the list to see Serkova in second place, with a whopping eighty-two discards, thirteen Investigates, and a provisional accuracy ranking of 91 percent. I’m going to have to go a lot faster.
“What was that you were telling your father?” Serkova cracks.
I’m too distracted to respond. I need to improve my score, and I resent Serkova’s ability to work and needle me at the same time.
“Something ’bout what a great tracker you are, how much better you’ll be at surveying than we are?”
Ugh. Not only has the General given me an impossible task, in which failure will result in my death, he’s also poisoned the well with my new coworkers by reporting what I said about my superior tracking skills.
But I don’t bother to respond: I don’t have time.
I get back to work, fighting against my own dismay. One reason I manipulated the General into placing me in the Media and Surveillance facility was because I thought I might have enough downtime to use my console to hack into the servers of the adjacent laboratories, do some digging into Dr. Zakos’s research. I know that One’s only hope lies in those files. But if I don’t pull my ranking up soon, my father could justifiably terminate our agreement: I’d be killed before I even got a chance to help One.
I need to improve my score.
I manage to go faster. The trick, I learn, is not to process any of the information I encounter. Instead I let my consciousness skim just above the text or video, then let my judgment occur without thought or reasoning. Basically the trick is to accept that I am just a cog in a data-combing machine.
Finally, I feel myself getting into a groove. In the next hourly ranking, I’ve climbed two positions. In the one after that, I’m position thirteen out of twenty.
“Luck.” Serkova sniffs.
I glare at him. I know I’m not here to compete with this jerk, but I can’t help it: wanting to knock him down a peg drives me on. By late afternoon, I’ve climbed up to position eleven.
I figure I’ve bought myself enough of a cushion to give myself five minutes of snoop time. I quickly page away from the hyperlinks and try to access the hub’s central servers.
But doing research with a ticking clock hanging over my head proves disastrous. I enter in searches for phrases like “mind transfer,” “Dr. Anu,” and “Dr. Zakos,” but they all lead me to restricted areas on the server, and I don’t have time to hack into them. I try to be more general. Remembering what Arsis said about humans in the lab, I do a search for “human captives.” Instead of directing me to anything about Anu or Zakos’s research subjects, I’m led to some internal, hub-wide memo about a broad new policy regarding human captives. “Whenever possible, humans suspected of aiding and abetting the Garde shall henceforth be held at the government base in Dulce, New Mexico.”
A government base? Why would the U.S. government have anything to do with the Mogadorians?
I put it aside for now. It’s an interesting—and unsettling—tidbit, but it’s not going to help me save One. Before I even have a chance to enter a new search, my five minutes is up.
I turn back to my work. Predictably, that short diversion cost me, and my hourly rank plummets. Regretfully, I accept that I can’t afford any more “independent research” today.
We finish at seven p.m., replaced by the night shift, who we’ll relieve at seven tomorrow morning. My body aches from remaining hunched and sedentary, and my eyes feel like they’ve been blasted with sand. I’ve finished the day back in the middle, at position eleven.
“Not bad,” admits Serkova, getting up from his chair. “But hardly what you promised the General.”
He’s right. Landing right in the middle of a group of twenty can hardly qualify me as a master tracker. I can only hope my ranking is enough to let me live another day.
I walk the tunnel alone, heading back to the hub.
I’m too tired to even consider sneaking off and snooping around the other tunnels: I’d definitely blow my cover.
“Arsis, you flaming moron!”
Arsis! The idiot assistant technician in the labs. Advancing my secret agenda was the last thing on my mind until I heard that name.
“Sorry, Doctor.”
I round the corner to see an open doorway leading into one of the laboratories. Inside the gleaming white lab, an incredibly tall and spindly doctor has a young guard backed up against a wall, prodding him with an angry index finger.
“These samples were supposed to be refrigerated at subzero temperatures. You put them in the regular freezer.”
“Sorry, sir.” The boy is docile, subservient, nothing like the sullen brat I’d imagined from his IM transcripts.
The doctor commands him sternly. “Revial the samples from our remaining cultures, and get it right this time. You asked to be trusted with more important work; now show that you can do it properly.”