Chapter 15: Jamar
Jamar slammed the main door as hard as he could and took the stairs two by two. He hated Carlyle. He hated Tirean pride and their constant suspicion. What was worse is that now Carlyle thought Jamar considered Silas an equal. Which was totally wrong. Jamar knew he, and all Tireans, were superior. Maybe he treated Silas a bit better than he would other Cars or the lowest Ajaks, but he didn’t think Silas was an equal.
“You were going to help him.” Carlyle had accused, after Silas crumpled to the ground and Jamar instinctively moved toward him.
Jamar froze running through the various excuses he thought Carlyle might need to change his mind. He couldn’t deny that he thought about going to Silas’ aid. He’d moved when Silas fell and to deny it would only increase Carlyle’s suspicion and confirm that Jamar was going to help a lower class. Tireans had to maintain their separateness from the lower classes to keep their status. So the only way to spin his reason for moving had to be something that would ultimately benefit him and the Tirean class.
Jamar turned his back on Silas and said, “Are you saying I’m not allowed to show concern over the potential loss of our product? We lose him now and we lose money.”
“If your father saw what I did, he would agree there was more behind it than just the loss of product.” Carlyle’s eyes narrowed, but Jamar could see there was also a sliver of doubt.
“You think I care for this thing?” Jamar infused his tone with as much haughty disdain as he could manage. “He is nothing to me.”
And Jamar had stomped away leaving Silas groaning in the grass. He didn’t have a choice. It was the only way to throw Carlyle’s suspicion off track.
When Jamar made it to the hall leading to his room he looked out the window three floors above the main entrance. The grass below him was bent and mashed from their sword fighting and to his relief no one was there. Jamar wasn’t sure what had happened to Silas. He’d had some kind of epileptic fit and fallen to the ground holding his head. It might have been his emotions coming in. From what Jamar had read it was a painful process, although he’d never witnessed it.
He left the window in the hall and checked the window in his room that overlooked the yard. No one was out, which Jamar thought a bit strange. It wasn’t lunchtime yet and after they had their morning run the Cars were allowed to play until lunch. He’d have to ask his father what was going on. Although he’d have to be careful how it was done because his ruse with Carlyle might get back to Lemuel.
Jamar sighed. He didn’t want anything to ruin his relationship with his father. He’d spent much of his life with Lemuel since Prisca, Jamar’s mother, wanted nothing to do with him. Even earning a gold medallion had done little to improve her opinion of him. She was of old blood. There were even some Tireans who didn’t meet her qualifications. Jamar knew because he still didn’t live up to her standards, which is why he traveled with Lemuel and didn’t stay at home. Prisca didn’t like having her life inconvenienced by those she considered unworthy, which was almost everyone.
Sometimes Jamar even thought she didn’t consider Lemuel worth her time. His father was always tense when they were home. There were all these rules that Prisca expected to be obeyed and there was hell to pay if they were not. She’d screamed and shouted at Lemuel once so loud that the light fixtures in Jamar’s room, two stories up, had rattled. It was just easier to stay away. For some reason though Prisca tolerated Carlyle’s company better than most and would often require him to be at the house. Although what he did for her Jamar never knew and wouldn’t ask. He doubted his mother was the affair type, besides Carlyle’s family was even lower than Lemuel’s since Carlyle’s grandmother’s mother had been Faan.
Jamar picked up the binder his father had given him and started to leaf through it again. He’d read the whole thing last night, but wanted to go over it one more time in case his father asked him questions. What interested Jamar the most about the binder was how it used genealogy to estimate what kind of profit could be expected. If the aunts and uncles were profitable than it was easier to assume the parents had similar genes and the kids would be equally profitable. The biggest issue for his father was knowing which to save for the farms and which to harvest. It wouldn’t do to reap all the profitable kids and then be stuck with less desirable stock. Neither would it make for a good profit to only reap the undesirable ones. There was a balance to which ones they kept and which they harvest.
Jamar wished he’d also had the previous books. Perhaps reading all the past years would give him a better idea of why his father kept some but not others. One day he would have to make those decisions and Jamar was wise enough to know he would need all the knowledge he could get to keep the company running as smoothly as it was now. Lemuel might defer to the lords, but he was a shrewd business man. Most of his father’s success came from the fact that those in power thought they could use Lemuel and didn’t realize he only let them think that so they would support him.
Unlike Lemuel, Jamar couldn’t abide to have others think less of him. It was a flaw that Jamar didn’t care to adjust in himself. He would not grovel and secretly maneuver people to do his wishes. It was beneath him. He had to be on top. He had to have people recognize him. What was the point of having power if no one knew he was the one who really had it? He was tired of boys like Edworth treating him like nothing and he wouldn’t live the rest of his life in that shadow.
There was a soft knock on the door.
“I will start my lessons tomorrow,” Jamar said. He knew it would be Carlyle. After their disagreement outside, Carlyle should have known that Jamar wouldn’t be in the mood to learn. It wasn’t like one more day would put Jamar behind schedule either, Carlyle always made certain Jamar was ahead in everything just in case he was called away.
The knob slowly turned and Carlyle appeared in the doorway. Jamar rolled his eyes and refused to look up from his book. It figured that Carlyle wouldn’t talk through a door.
“We will start lessons when your father has dictated that we will start them. But for today all lessons are suspended. Your father requests your presence.”
Jamar blinked. “What does he want?”
“You will see.”
After placing the book on his desk, Jamar followed Carlyle downstairs. Instead of going to Lemuel’s study, they exited the main house and entered the Machine building. The Machine building was three stories tall. It contained the Machine, several labs and the top floor was where the reaped Cars stayed until they were needed. Jamar had seen the floor plans for all the buildings in Cartiam III the last time he was there and Cartiam V seemed to follow the same design. He was please that he’d remembered the floor plans enough to find his own way without Carlyle.
The Machine room took up half of the first and second floors. It wasn’t that the Machine was so big, but the generators it used required the ceiling space. There were several viewing rooms and a string of small exam rooms on the first floor. On the second floor there was a large office and conference room overlooking the Machine as well as living quarters for the guards.
Within the Cartiam walls there was a storage building that stored any items needed to run the facility. There was also a warehouse where the e-mems were processed, stored and shipped. The warehouse workers and main house staff lived on the second floor of the main house. Lemuel had his office and business meetings on the first, but had his private quarters on the fourth floor across the hall from Jamar. The third floor included guest rooms, storage rooms, cleaning closets and completely empty rooms. But the third floor was never used. It was as if there had to be a physical reminder for who was on top. And last of all there was the ward, where the Cars ate and slept. Those were the buildings that comprised the Cartiam. It was an efficient set-up.
There were only two reasons for why Lemuel would have Jamar see him in the harvest building. Either because he wanted Jamar to observe some aspect of the business or because Lemuel was too busy with business to see Jamar somewhere more private.
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They passed through the doors of the main house and entered the Machine building’s hall. The Machine room had several entrances on the left and they took the first one, a smaller single door entry, rather than the double door entry farther down. Carlyle walked across the room to the wooden staircase leading to the second floor control room that over looked the Machine with tinted glass. At first glance upon entering the control room, Jamar couldn’t tell which reason Lemuel had called him there for. Lemuel leaned over a round table covered in papers like a table cloth. He was so engrossed that he didn’t hear the soft click from Carlyle closing the door behind them and Carlyle would never interrupt. He knew his place well.
Together they stood near the door waiting for Lemuel to notice them.
“Jamar, come here,” Lemuel said. He didn’t look up and Jamar wondered as he walked over if he’d known they were there the whole time.
“What is all this?” Jamar asked looking over all the papers.
“Once every ten years we do something special to increase productivity. Have you been looking through the book I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“What is the estimated profit we would make from 799137?”
Jamar glanced up at the ceiling and mentally flipped the pages of the binder. He’d seen that number before. Was it the girl on the first page, the one worth $110k? No, that would be too easy and if Jamar was right her number was 798137. He knew 799137 was a girl, one more toward the middle of the book and as he thought through the pictures he remembered why he knew that number. She was sixteen and even her doe-eyed, straight-faced picture couldn’t hide the fact that she was pretty. He’d seen her in the yard too, talking to Silas that first day. Jamar threw all those useless tidbits out and focused on the information his father was asking for. He pictured the page and let his eyes scan down to where her estimated profit was.
“The estimated profit for 799137 is $165k.”
“And where is that number compared to the average?”
Jamar tilted his head as he thought. “That is a little less than average.”
“If you want to be general about it then that is correct. To be specific it is 2.7 points lower than the average. And the average is 15 points lower than our current demand.”
“How do we fix that?”
“At our current rate of production we would have nothing left in fifteen years. We would have to harvest everyone. It wouldn’t matter whether they are ready or not, whether their descendants would produce more. To keep up with our current demand we would take everyone. In fifteen years, all of them would be used up and if the lords think our energy crisis is bad now....” Lemuel looked up and gave Jamar a grim smile.
Jamar was a bit surprised. He didn’t think the demand was that high or that they could run out so quickly.
“But we’ve had this problem before. The first year I started working my father introduced me to the ten year system our family created to stimulate a growth in production. Here,” Lemuel pointed to a worn green leather journal. “I want you to read this. It’s my grandfather’s and it details how the system works. That is the old version and I’ve updated or modified some of the overall plots that I keep in my personal journal, but this is to give you the history of what we do.”
“Why does it take ten years?” Jamar asked. He picked up the journal and flipped through the pages. The handwriting was in tiny block letters and it took him a second to realize that the ‘4’ was really an ‘A.’
“The system takes ten years because each year has a unique element to it that will make the young Cars feel more than they would if we just let them live their lives like other people. Cars will exhibit extreme emotion without any interference, but the system manipulates those emotions to make their emotions stronger and even more extreme and it does this for whole years of product rather than just a few individuals.
“This is why the system takes ten years. Young Cars arrive at the Cartiam when they are eight and the longest they stay would be until they are eighteen, although we make certain that they don’t stay here that long if we intend to send them to the farm. During the whole time the Cars never experience the same cycle of events and so they cannot catch on to the system. If they talked much they could pass rumors along, but we’ve made them afraid of that. They remain mindlessly under our control.
“And once every ten years we have a grand finale that more than doubles our usual production. A girl like 799137 that would only produce $165k will produce $400k. That is, if we play it right.”
Jamar smiled at his father’s enthusiasm. “What’s the grand finale?”
“I’ll show you. The first thing we have to do is see where all the Cars are emotionally. So we test them with this.” Lemuel pushed off of the table and walked over to a metal cart by the wall. It had a syringe and several vials of clear liquid on it. Lemuel took the syringe and drew out some liquid from a vial.
“What is it?” Jamar asked.
“This is a compound that overloads the emotional center of the brain with hallucinations. It jumps from one emotional theme to another and shows us where the Cars’ weaknesses are. It also contains trackers that we instantly upload into the computer. This gives us the information we need to devise the best strategy for dealing with them individually and as a whole.”
Lemuel set the syringe back down and pressed his thumb to the intercom on the wall.
“Start bringing them into the exam rooms.”
A crackly voice that was still unmistakably Tymas answered, “Yes, sir.”
“We will monitor things on the floor,” Lemuel added. He started for the door and then paused with his hand held out to Jamar. “You will want to see this.”