Z 2134

escape to the outside? You would have laid your life on the line for theirs, made sure they were spared, safe outside The City?”
    Jonah was walking into something, blind and empty handed. Egan’s logic was spinning, but he had no idea what it was spinning around.
    He should say that yes, of course he would have helped. But that wasn’t the truth — that wasn’t how it worked. Jonah didn’t always do the right thing because sometimes the right thing was wrong for the greater good. He had interests to weigh, and things were never as simple as the needs of one family. The cause was most important, and protecting the interests of The Underground, or maintaining his cover at City Watch, meant innocent people were often denied passage.
    The truth wasn’t kind, but in his seat, it was all he had. “I don’t know what I would’ve done,” he said, hoping his honest answer might surprise Egan enough to nudge him closer toward his point.
    Egan chewed on Jonah’s response, pacing in a small circles around Jonah’s chair, looking like he wanted to sit. “Why do you think no one helped your children escape?”
    Jonah was confused, and uncomfortable with the edge in Egan’s voice.
    “What?”
    “When City Watch came for you, you were finished. You and everyone else had to know it. Have you ever known City Watch to make a high-profile arrest, then let their prisoner go?”
    Egan paused, as if waiting for Jonah to answer, though both knew there wasn’t any need. City Watch arrested plenty of citizens, often for questioning, hoping to turn neighbor against neighbor, or even better, sibling against sibling or child against parent, but if an arrest made the monitors, suspects were guilty of something — regardless of the truth.
    “The Underground must’ve known you were arrested and must’ve been aware that your children could be used against you or would be shuffled off to the orphanage, right? So why weren’t they spared? Why not get them out of City 6?”
    Jonah whispered the same answer he’d turned in his mind so many times already. “Because my children were under watch. They had to be, especially Ana. The State needed her testimony, and they weren’t willing to let anything stand in their way.”
    “Ah,” Egan sneered, “so now that she’s outlived her usefulness, it’s off to The Games with her? Maybe they had to get her out of The City since those false memories don’t exactly last forever. They had to destroy evidence, which is, after all, what you Watchers are so excellent at doing — besides manufacturing it from scratch, of course.”
    Jonah met Egan’s eyes, surprised by something he’d said. “What do you mean the memories don’t last forever? What are you talking about?”
    “Do you know what I did for credits before my inconvenient arrest?” Egan said, ignoring Jonah’s question.
    “You were a factory worker, making circuit boards for the orbs, right?”
    “Wow,” Egan said, grinning. “They really didn’t tell you anything, did they? Perhaps you weren’t as complicit in my frame-up as I suspected.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I didn’t work on the orbs. Well, I did, at least when I started, but I’m good with code and was quickly moved to the seventh floor. By my third year at the factory, I was with a small team — six of us working full-time on their chip program.”
    “The identity chips?”
    “No.” Egan shook his head. “Chips used to alter your reality, to control you.”
    “They’re real?” Jonah nearly gasped, relieved at least to finally understand his daughter’s betrayal, and sick that The State would go to such lengths to control its citizens.
    “Yes, they’re quite real,” he said, “though far from perfected. At least they were , but I can’t imagine they’ve inched much further. They’ve been crashing into the same development walls for decades.”
    “What do the chips do?”
    “Initially, they were designed to control violence by turning citizens docile, making and keeping them happy. That was simple enough, but the older developers, most of whom loved to whisper, said it was barely a minute into development before The State started looking into other applications.”
    “Like what?”
    “Finding other ways of controlling people — to manipulate memories and even bloom new ones from a seed of suggestion. I was involved in the earliest stages, though. I’ve no idea where development is now, or how close they might be to