That day wasn’t here yet. The bell rang again, signaling that the halls were empty, and Miss Oldenburg opened the door.
The recess system used by Evergreen Elementary, and by other schools in the district, was revolutionary for its time, and even now, eight years after the 2036 incident, experts have been unable to find any fault with the design. The issue, it can be argued, was not with the system itself, but with the simple fact that no system, however idealized, can be expected to behave with perfect predictability once a human element has been introduced. In short, the issue was not with the school itself, nor with any of the checkpoints installed to prevent incidents such as the one which unfolded on that chilly March morning. The issue was, and will always be, with us.
Elaine Oldenburg led her students down the empty hall to the rear door leading to their quarter of the blacktop. A security official was waiting there with a blood-testing station. As each student tested clean, they entered an airlock, waiting there until the entire class, and their teacher, had been cleared. Only then did the airlock open. The school playground had been divided into four sections, each containing a portion of blacktop, a portion of lawn, and a play structure. These sections were sterilized throughout the day, with a ten-minute break between recess sessions, and plans in place for closing individual sections as needed in the case of greater contamination. Walls separated them. Only sound could travel from one section to another.
The sound of laughter. The sound of screams.
—FROM UNSPOKEN TRAGEDIES OF THE AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM BY ALARIC KWONG, MARCH 19, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:05 A.M.
Seventeen first graders poured out of the back door of Evergreen Elementary and onto the playground. They had been assigned the coveted leftmost section for this week’s recess, with one wall that actually bordered on the forest. The forest! The big, dark forest, full of mysteries and monsters! Half the class ran to claim space for kickball on the grass nearest the wall, where they could feel brave and clever for standing so close to the forbidden outside world. The other half took refuge on the play structure at the center of the blacktop, some of them grabbing red balls from the available basket, others swarming up the monkey bars with the ease of long practice.
It was still a little chilly, and Elaine smiled and wrapped her arms around herself as she watched her charges storm the battlements of childhood, their shrieks and laughter drifting back to her like the sweetest music ever composed. They would learn to be afraid soon enough, she knew; she had done substitute playground duty for third and fourth graders when her name came up in the rotation, had watched their sea of dismayed faces as they jockeyed for spots on the blacktop nearest the school doors, where they could flee back to safety at a moment’s notice. Fear really crept in during the summer between first and second grade, she felt; that was when the world became too big and loud to be overlooked, when the fact that it could touch you became unavoidable. This was their last truly carefree time, and she was blessed to be one of its custodians.
It was a little harder to hang on to that feeling of being blessed when things got messy, as they inevitably did. “Miss Oldenburg!” wailed Sharon, running over from the strip of green, her legs pumping wildly as they ate up the distance. “Mikey pushed Emily down and said girls can’t play kickball and you have to come tell him he’s in trouble now! He should be in trouble! He pushed her down!” Sharon mimed a pushing motion, just in case her teacher didn’t understand.
Elaine sighed, dropping her arms to her sides and pulling the mantle of “teacher” back over herself like a cloak of assumed authority and vague disapproval. “All right, Sharon, take me to him.”
They hustled across the playground, not quite as fast as Sharon’s angry run of the moment before, but faster than Miss Oldenburg’s usual calm stroll. All the students who saw them pass knew that someone was about to be in trouble, and a few of them fell in behind the pair, ready to watch punishments rain down. It was a rare treat, really, at least for the students who knew they weren’t the ones in trouble.
Scott watched his teacher and classmate hustle past and jumped to his feet, abandoning the piece of grass he’d been slowly shredding as he seized this rare opportunity and ran for the base of the slide. The playground equipment was all mounted on a soft, spongy material made from recycled tires and guaranteed to minimize accidents; it wasn’t quite like falling on a trampoline, but it was softer than the pavement and more hygienic than sand, and it didn’t rip up student knees and elbows like tanbark did. It was the perfect solution in a world where blood was the enemy, but where little kids still needed the freedom to run off their excess energy.
There was just one problem with this wonderful material: it was made of rubber, and like all things that were made of rubber, it could rip.
Scott’s rock collection was the center of his world. He was a quiet, inquisitive child who enjoyed spending time in his room, playing with his toys, and liked his solitary activities. He didn’t have many friends, and he didn’t feel like he was missing anything. But oh, how he wanted a piece of his playground. He understood dimly, from listening to his mother and father at the dinner table, that there were adults who wanted to take the playground away; they thought that it was dangerous to have children running around outside like wild things, no matter how closely supervised they were, and would replace all outdoor play areas with enclosed, padded, safe equivalents, ones where there was no sky, or grass… or rocks. Scott thought this was just about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. He also knew that no one was going to listen to him. People barely listened to him about things that were facts, like how many kinds of quartz there were or why you shouldn’t play with mercury. They sure weren’t going to listen to him about things that were opinions, like “Skies and grass and rocks are important, and you should let us keep having them.”
If the playground was going to go away, he was going to save a piece of it first, so that he could look at it forever, even when everything else was gone. He’d spent months trying to figure out how he could steal a piece of playground. It was solid around the edges, fresh and square and not given to breaking off when someone tried to bend it. He couldn’t bring a hammer or anything like that to school; he’d get caught and he’d get stopped and then Miss Oldenburg would take whatever he’d brought away from him. Then—worst of all, worse than anything else in the world—she would look at him sadly, shake her head, and say, “I’m disappointed in you, Scott. I thought better of you.”
No. That wouldn’t work. But there were other ways, and after searching all the way up into November, he’d finally found one: the plastic under the slide was starting to crack. It was good, strong stuff, but it wasn’t meant to last forever in the Seattle weather, and the rain was weakening it just enough that it was breaking around the posts that anchored the slide to the ground. He’d started out by digging his fingers into the cracks, peeling back the rubber until—o, wonder!—he could see the equally cracked surface of the blacktop beneath. The new blacktop had been poured in a hurry, to meet the sudden need for higher safety standards. They hadn’t installed the playground equipment on the dirt, but had bolted it straight to the blacktop.
It had taken Scott three whole months, not counting the days when snow had kept them all inside, but he had managed to work a large enough chunk of rubber loose, and now he could get his whole hand into the hole he’d created. Since then, he’d been wiggling the broken pieces of blacktop, shifting them a little bit at a time, like he was working a puzzle. They were getting looser all the time. He could feel it, measuring his progress in the increased give and lessening resistance of the artificial stone. Soon, he’d be able to pull a piece out to keep forever, and then he could stop keeping secrets from Miss Oldenburg, who was very strict about things like digging in the dirt and messing with the play structures. Technically, he was doing both at the same time, which meant she would be doubly strict, and probably doubly disappointed if she ever found out.
S
ome of the other kids knew about his digging—it was impossible to keep anything completely secret when you spent so much time with the same sixteen people, all of them bored and scared and poking their noses into your business—but they all thought it was one of those weird but harmless things that everybody had. Nobody tattled about those things. Someone who told on how Scott liked to dig when the teacher wasn’t looking might get told on in turn, and their thing might be bigger and worse than a little dirt. There were nose pickers and butt sniffers and hair lickers in the class, all of them trying their best not to get caught, which meant not setting anyone else up to get caught, either.
Elaine Oldenburg’s class was a complicated web of social connections and uneasy alliances, all of them watching each other with the wary suspicion of a Cold War American military, none of them willing to strike the first blow. All of which led, inexorably, to Scott Ribar digging in the rubber surfacing under the slide, unremarked upon and unbetrayed by his classmates, who weren’t willing to put themselves into the line of fire.
Scott was so intent on working at his chunks of blacktop that he didn’t notice when John—probably his closest friend in the class, which wasn’t saying much, since they were both tagged “the weird kid” and left mostly to their own devices—loomed up behind him and asked, brightly, “How’s it coming?”
“Shh!” Scott yanked his hand out of the hole so fast that he scraped the side of his wrist on the edge of the hole. Bright blood immediately beaded up along the line of torn skin. His eyes widened when he saw it. “Shit. Shit.” Saying the forbidden word made him feel a little better, but not much. He knew that blood was bad. Blood meant no more classes for the rest of the day, and not in the fun way, like when they went to the chocolate factory to watch the machines or when there was an assembly and everyone watched movies on the big screen that stretched the length of the gymnasium wall. This would be the kind of no-more-classes that meant needles, and quarantine, and interrogation, and being weighed a dozen times to make sure he hadn’t magically gained ten pounds between the start of the day and the moment when he’d started bleeding. Blood was the worst thing.
John didn’t move away. He actually leaned a little closer. “Whoa, you’re bleeding,” he said. “Does it hurt?” He sounded only academically interested, not frightened in the least.
“A little,” admitted Scott.
Something in his tone told John what he was worried about. It was a common enough scenario, triggered by every skinned knee and bloody nose since they were kindergarten babies. John paused. This was an opportunity to take Scott from being an almost-maybe friend to a real friend, someone who would be nice to him because there were debts between them, spaces filled with secrets and unspoken oaths. “You don’t have to get caught,” he said.
Scott froze. “Wh-what?”
“It’s on your wrist. You have a long-sleeve jacket, and it looks real absorbent inside. Just pull it down over the tops of your hands, and tell Miss Oldenburg you’re cold when we go back inside. She won’t make you take it off. She’d have to keep the classroom warmer if she started making kids take their coats off.”
Scott was quiet for a moment, considering the scope of the monumental deceit that John was suggesting. It would mean lying. Not only that, it would mean lying to a teacher. He was almost never cold. His mom always said that he was a little furnace on legs. But if he would just lie to a teacher, he might not have to go through quarantine and needle jabs and people asking him questions he didn’t want to answer—and most important of all, they might not find out what he’d been doing under the slide and fill in the hole before he could finish getting what he needed.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
When the bell for the end of recess rang and Miss Oldenburg’s first-grade class lined up to head back into the building, no one noticed that Scott Ribar was wearing his coat pulled all the way down over the tops of his hands. They had other things to worry about, and he was a weird kid, and besides, when he got his finger stuck at the airlock, his test results came back clean and uninfected, just like the rest of them. There was no danger. There was no reason to think that anything was out of the ordinary.
One teacher and seventeen students walked back into the building.
Twelve of those students would never walk out again.
>> AKWONG: DON’T HOLD DINNER FOR ME TONIGHT. I’M TRYING TO FINISH THIS REPORT BEFORE THE BOSS DECIDES TO HAVE ME THROWN TO THE WOLVES.
>> AKWONG: POSSIBLY LITERAL WOLVES, I MEAN. IF I DON’T NAIL THIS ONE, HE’S LIKELY TO DECIDE THAT I SHOULD BE THE ONE TO HEAD UP TO CANADA AND LOOK FOR S&G, AND KNOWING THEM, THEY PROBABLY HAVE A TAME PACK OF TIMBER WOLVES PROTECTING THEIR HIDDEN, HEAVILY BOOBY-TRAPPED CABIN.
>> MGARCIA: SO WHAT I’M HEARING IS “PLEASE MAKE SPAGHETTI, SINCE IT REHEATS EASILY, AND BE PREPARED TO OFFER SEX AND SYMPATHY WHEN I FINISH WORKING AND DEIGN TO COME DOWNSTAIRS.”
>> AKWONG: YOU ARE THE PERFECT WOMAN.
>> MGARCIA: DON’T I KNOW IT.
—internal communication between Alaric Kwong and Maggie Kwong-Garcia, After the End Times private server, March 16, 2044
Wednesday, March 19, 2036, 10:40 A.M.
The recess period after Miss Oldenburg’s class had gone to a fourth-grade classroom this week. The actual assignment of recess periods was random, but the smaller students were often followed on the playground by larger ones, and vice versa, in the theory that it would reduce potential contamination vectors. First graders got into different things than fourth graders did, and so on. This was an innately flawed way of thinking. Sadly, the flaws were not fully understood until the events at Evergreen Elementary. Because of this, no better system had yet been proposed.
The fourth graders poured out onto the blacktop, following a somewhat different pattern than their first-grade schoolmates. They sauntered, some of them looking intentionally relaxed, like they weren’t bothered at all by being outdoors. A few went to lounge on the play equipment—not using it, of course, since that would have been so uncool, but sitting on it, dangling their feet off the edges of it, and pretending as hard as they could that they were still comfortable without a ceiling above their heads. A few of the girls wandered over to the grass and sat down, choosing bravery in order to get the privacy they so desperately craved.
There were twelve students in the class. None of them would survive to the end of the school day. But they didn’t know that, not then, not with the fresh, cool air filling their lungs and the sky glimmering blue through the cracks in the clouds. They went about their business like this wasn’t the last day of their lives. For Nathan Patterson and Joseph Lee, this meant waiting until their teacher was distracted and then ducking into the space beneath the slide, where they could browse the contents of Joseph’s phone in peace. Joseph was a whiz with computers—there were already three private high schools jockeying for him to come to them, once he graduated from middle school—and he had been able to bypass the parental controls installed by his father with an ease that approached unreal. As a consequence, he was the only kid in class whose data plan came with all the pornography the Internet had to offer.
Joseph and Nathan sat down under the slide, staring wide-eyed at the various naked women, all of them striking poses that looked uncomfortable but somehow enticing, like there was an important component sitting just outside of their reach.
“Dude, look at her boobs,” said Nathan.
“I’m looking,” confirmed Joseph. He was less enthralled by his companion: after all, the magical fountain of breasts and butts and other parts went home with him at night, where he could look until his eyes were hot and his mouth was dry. He tried to have fresh things every day, though, just to keep Nathan from getting too jealous. So far, Nate—who was a good guy, if a little slow—hadn’t realized just how inequitable their friendship was. Joseph didn’t want to start getting asked to jailbreak his friends’ phones. It would begin with one person, but it never stayed that way, and if the teacher found ou
t…
Joseph didn’t have to be a genius to know what the consequences of unlocking the phones of everyone in class would be. Being a genius just made the images clearer and harder to ignore. He didn’t like getting in trouble. This would be trouble on a nuclear scale.
There was a certain irony that neither boy would have appreciated, had it been pointed out to them then or later. Because Joseph Lee didn’t want to get in trouble, he and Nathan hid what they were doing from their teacher. Because Scott Ribar hadn’t wanted to get in trouble, he had hidden his injury from his teacher, and from the guards who performed his blood test at the school gates. Had school security known that a student had been bleeding on the playground, they would have closed it down for the rest of the day, bringing out the canisters of bleach and the black lights and the bloodstain detection equipment. The fourth grade would have missed their recess. Everyone would have missed recess the next day. But no one would have been hurt.