Unnaturals by Lynna Merrill Page A

her shoulder as if she expected someone, or something, to be there. She was never sent to the dark room again, but she grew as thin and pale as Mel had become, and her hands shook even more often than Mel's.
    We could fight her, Adi, Mel wrote one night. Look at what she has done to us. Together, the two of us could do something.
    You're mad, Adi replied after many minutes had passed. Just like those people eighty years ago you told me about. We don't fight. We don't break. We don't give wrong pills or poke medstats with needles. We learn what we are taught, and we create and heal.
    Their nightly messages grew sparser.
    Mel learned to pretend in front of Eryn and to avoid the dark room. Before that, however, she spent so much time there that she thought she'd climb to the ceiling soon—though she was scraping mortar and climbing the walls every time and hadn't reached it yet. For all she knew, the walls of that room might go as high up as the Academy's roof. She didn't eat or drink much. She couldn't do it in the room, and outside she'd stopped caring. The Academy medstats didn't force her, either.
    She cared about finally making a computer program! About stopping train crashes, about making everything better. She also cared about Mom, of course, which was perhaps the main reason she wasn't spending time in the dark room any more. Besides, she wanted to find Nicolas and the City of Life.
    Nicolas, at least, hadn't been on those trains years ago. That much Doctor Theodore told her.
    Now if only he could tell her how to really program.
    "Hey, Ivan," she told the boy one day in their third month. "Let me watch you work for a bit, all right?" Perhaps she could catch some knowledge from him.
    Today, they were writing a communication program, or what Theodore had called a demo version of one. It was like the hummie interface, but not the entire hummie interface. Mel and Ivan were only working with two notes instead of all seven, and with a melody of a set length of four intervals, set in only one octave. The number of variations was more limited than that of a full hummie, but the principle of the program was the same.
    The program took the melody hummed by the person sending the message and compared it against a database of note combinations and their meanings as pertaining to this person. When it found the correct meaning, it compared it against a second database, of meanings and their expression in words, pertaining to the message's receiver. The aim of the program was to get a person's humming and produce another person's words, based on meaning.
    Ivan took his stylus and started planning his program.
    "Where do you think the information for these databases comes from?" Mel asked.
    "From people's personal computers." Ivan glanced at her with a momentary expression that suggested she was daft. It was gone in the next moment. His politeness wouldn't let it stay—yet. Ivan had been very polite when they had first arrived and it still showed, though politeness didn't matter much in the Academy.
    "How does it get into people's own computers, is what I am asking. Theo said that Doctors of Computers and People don't watch people all the time—only sometimes do they take a look into a person's computer habits and communication."
    "I don't know. It doesn't matter as far as the program is concerned, Mel." He started drawing again.
    "But how is the information gathered? Through another computer program? How can we know our own program is correct, when we don't know if the information it relies on is correct? We should be writing that other program, too."
    "Mel, I am designing this program now. The other one is none of my business!" He started drawing again. He hadn't started typing yet, and usually, by now, he would have.
    A moment later: " What, Mel?"
    She noticed she'd been tapping her own study screen with her stylus, tap tap, on and off.
    "Theodore wouldn't tell me how they watch people exactly. Why? It must be done through a