BREEDER

My name is Will. Naming me was the last thing my mother did before she died. Sometimes I tell myself a story for comfort. In this story, my mother wanted to give me a name that was a secret message, the only one she would get through to me. I imagine that my mother looked back over her short and crappy life and thought about all the hell that lay ahead for me, and the message she wanted to pass on was Have strength, be resilient. Will. I give you Will. Sometimes I even imagine that she wanted to say something more—I’m happy you were born, Will. I love you and want you to survive. But I don’t think she actually loved me, and I know she wasn’t happy that I was born. She killed herself a couple of hours after I came into this world. I don’t blame her—she was only thirteen years old.

The note she wrote before she killed herself just said: “Baby Name Will.” She couldn’t write that well—she was a Breeder, after all, so she’d never been to school. She left the note, and a heart-shaped locket, and me, on her childhood bed, waiting for Ma to come home from work and find me. My Ma never, ever talks about her, or about what happened, and mostly, I don’t dare ask.

***

My name is Will. I’m a Westie. I live in Zone F. My Corporation account is in credit. These are the things I say clearly and quickly to any CSO—Corporation Security Officer—who asks. These are the facts that flash on a screen, whenever I push my wrist against a security scanner: when I get on the bus, when I log on at school or work, and when I go through my front door in the evening. Twenty times a day—at least.

“Will?”

I look up. Sir is frowning at me. “We’re waiting,” he says. I nod, staring at the icons on my screen. I’m nauseated—everyone is. It’s Evaluation Day. But for me, it’s also because of the Crystal 8 withdrawals.

I click on the first icon, Profile, and everyone watches my screen projection at the front of the classroom.

Name: Meadows, Will

Sex: Male

Type: Westie

Age: 15

Guardian: Meadows, Jessica

Siblings: 0

Academics: Average

Physical: Below Average

Psychology: Average

Employment: Desalination Plant—Technical

Long-Term Track: Desalination Plant—Technical

“Next screen, please, Will,” Sir says. He’s alright, Sir: he suffers almost as much as we do each Evaluation Day, and you can feel him wishing us all to pass. Not like our teacher last year—that bastard looked ecstatic whenever there was a Corp alert, and he loved it when Craig Jacobsen’s screen flashed Unsatisfactory and we went into lockdown until the CSOs arrived and took Craig to the Rator. They didn’t even send Craig to the Circle for retraining—just straight to the fucking Rator.

The tension rises as I hover over the second icon: Units. Our units are aggregated daily and reported every month on Evaluation Day. But the Corp changes the algorithm each month, so you can never tell for certain whether you’re going to measure up.

“Will?” Sir says again; his tone is anxious.

I click, and quickly scan to the bottom of the screen.

Units invested in Will Meadows by the Corporation to date:

* Social: 42,687

* Material: 54,679

* Education: 19,677

Units returned to the Corporation by Will Meadows to date:

* Work output: 33,543

* Education output: 0 (N/A—Westie, Zone F)

* Genetic output: 0 (N/A—Westie, Zone F)

* Projected genetic output: 0 (N/A—Westie, Zone F)

* Projected lifetime debt owed to the Corporation: 480,000

* Projected rate of pay-off: 12,000/year

* Projected time to pay off: 40 years

* Projected rate of pay-off: Satisfactory

Overall result: Satisfactory

Satisfactory. Everyone claps. My mind buzzes as Sir smiles at me and then moves on to Sandeep Michaels. I breathe out, relieved. I wasn’t really that worried, since each month I hustle extra units on the side through the Gray Corps. Hustling Gray units isn’t a problem—as Ma says, the Corp usually looks the other way at the Gray economy, because the Corp benefits from it. But you never know if someone has been secretly reporting on you for working too slowly during a shift or cracking a joke about the Corp to the wrong person, which is what happened to Craig.

As Westies, we are allowed to be in a state of increasing debt to the Corp until we turn twelve—then we’re expected to return units. Our class started out with half-days at the desalination plant and now we all do four and a half days per week. Our half day of “school” is timetabled for different days each week—it depends on when we’re most needed at the plant. On high-demand weeks, they just skip timetabling our school session altogether, which is fine with me. It’s not like we’re actually getting an education. All we do is go through our history and discuss ways to maximize the units we can give back to our generous Corporation, which has so selflessly protected us.

We’ve been evaluated every month since we were toddlers. If you’re a Westie male, you get sent to a training center as soon as you’re toilet trained. The center matches you to a school and future workplace, based on your Zone and test metrics, as well as any units your family is able to give you. If you’re very lucky, your parents and grandparents have earned a lot of Legacy units from the Corp to pass down to you. If that happens, you may get sent to a proper school in Zone E; we sure don’t have any in Zone F.

For Zone F Westie guys like me, with zero Legacy units, there’s nowhere to go. I’m of average intelligence and slightly below average in physical health. If I’m lucky, and I work hard, and keep up my side hustles, I’ll get to keep working at the desal plant. Hopefully, in twenty years or so, I’ll have saved up enough units to buy a Shadow from the Incubator. Maybe she and I will be one of the 5 percent who have live births, and we’ll work our asses off to give a surplus of units to our son. Maybe I could give that kid a chance at a Zone E life in plant management, or even, dare to dream, a semiprofessional job in Zone D.

If I’m unlucky, I’ll screw up my units and get sent to the Rator.

For Breeders, of course, things are much worse. They’re born into debt that they’re not allowed to pay off themselves. But that’s another story.

***

“Do I need to light a fire under your ass this evening?” Ma yells from the kitchen. She is a Westie to the core and speaks plainly. Ma is actually my grandmother; nobody except me knows that. Jessica Meadows is not her real name, and Will Meadows is not my real name, either—they’re the names someone put on the fake documents Ma bought the last time we had to move. I don’t know Ma’s real name, or my mother’s; whenever I ask Ma, she says, “What’s the point of going into all that? What’s past is past.” I know that Ma was a Breeder, just like my own mother was.

Ma’s at the stove cooking, and it smells awful. Most food now smells awful to me, because of the Crystal 8 withdrawals, but Ma is also a terrible cook.

“Will!” she yells. She wants me to feed our goat, Cranky. Yes, we have a goat. Yes, he is highly illegal, and yet he’s only one of the many things in our home that are highly illegal.

“Will!”

I’m sitting at the little fold-up table reading a novel—illegal!—and that’s what is really pissing Ma off, and is the reason she wants me outside with the goat. Today Ma looks about a hundred years old. No offense. Normally, I think she looks very good for her age; even beautiful for forty-five years old. She’s not angry at me because reading novels is illegal—as I said, there are many illegal things going on in our home. Ma can’t read or write much, like most Westies, but that isn’t the problem either. The problem is that Ma is an extremely practical person, and she thinks reading novels is a massive waste of time, and that I’m too daydreamy and impractical as it is, without, “Getting lost way up my own ass with a huge bloody book of lies.”

Now Ma sighs and gets that deep wrinkle down her forehead. When I see that wrinkle, I get up and put my mask on and go outside without a word.

Cranky bleats at me as he hears the back door and his bell is ringing—he shakes his head from side to side to really make it bang around. He clangs it when he’s irate or happy. I love that sound, and it feels good to be out of the house—even though the chemical fumes in the air hurt my lungs and make my eyes tear up.

Cranky’s giving me the evil-goat-eye. “Sorry I’m so late,” I say, but he just glares back. He’s wearing one of my old raincoats, which Ma cut up when the last heat wave started. She was scared he’d get sunburnt. I told Ma he didn’t need it, that a bit of sun wouldn’t bother him. He looks undignified in it, tied around his back with a strange knot sticking up, and this makes me smile as I fill his little pail with bread. I scratch his ears as he eats, and feel his body relax, from the food and the touch. On the way back to the house, I see our tomato plants are blooming. Our garden’s illegal too, but it feels good to eat something you’ve grown yourself, and besides, we need the calories. Like all Westies, we are actually starving, and like everyone else, each day, Ma and I make hard decisions based on units: do we eat a little more, or do we buy extra gas for heating or, in my case, do we buy my Crystal? Our fruit and veggies are probably full of carcinogens from all the radiation and pollutants, just as the Corp ads warn—so what? Everything’s carcinogenic.

I come inside and drop my mask near the door. Then Ma hands me a bowl of food and I make a face. “Don’t start,” she says, and shoves a fork at me. We sit on the broken-down couch and before I can take a bite, she says, “So. It’s not coming.”

She means my damn Crystal 8. Ma gets it from a Gray Corps smuggler at the desal plant, and it costs us a fortune. Over the last six months alone, the price has doubled—we’ve been skipping a lot of meals to pay for those pills.

“Maybe they’ll come tomorrow,” I say, not looking at her, even though I know that’s not going to happen.

“You’ll need to go out tonight, Will.”

“Yeah,” I say, meaning Nah. I’m not doing it.

“It’s been five days already.” Her voice is so calm. She could be talking about a shopping trip, rather than going down to the Gray Zone. I’ve gone there before, of course. But not for over a year.

“I’m okay with waiting another few days,” I lie. “The withdrawals aren’t that bad.” Living without the drugs isn’t really an option. Then I think about what the Gray Zone entails, and that doesn’t feel like an option either.

She’s on her feet and standing in front of me. Damn, she’s fast. “I can see the difference in you already.”

I feel the heat in my face, and I look away. “Okay. Okay. I’ll go.”

We sit there and eat silently. I manage to swallow my food only because I’ve made my mind completely blank. When I finish, she says, “Go have a nap first.”