Work Text:
Every year in Teen Level 50 seemed like the hardest year to Nicole. The first year, she had been so afraid that without her there to make peace, her parents would split up. Her mother had threatened to leave her father so many times. Her father had spent weeks staying out late at the community center or a restaurant so he would only come home once her mother was asleep. Nicole had got very good at being the liaison between them. She used every tool she had access to, both her strengths and her weaknesses.
It was sort of hard for Nicole to tell the difference between those two types of tools, because it often seemed like some of her strengths were also weaknesses. Nicole had a real talent for coming up with extra convincing lies, but telling lies was wrong, even though they made things so much easier. And maybe some of her weaknesses were also strengths. The fragility of her large muscle control meant that on some days Nicole could walk, if not run. On other days she was completely reliant on a mobility chair. The days she couldn't get up at all were days her parents didn't fight, because they were too busy worrying about Nicole and taking extra care of her.
Sometimes Nicole thought it was her fault, or at least her illness's fault, that her parents were so unhappy. It was extra stress that none of their friends or colleagues had to deal with, kept them from having the full social calendar of outings and dinner parties that her mother would have liked or the parent and child sports activities that her father reminisced about so often from his own childhood. They loved their jobs, at least, and they both loved Nicole, and they loved each other, too — sometimes.
The second year on teen level seemed the hardest because her parents split up, and she was sure it was her fault. Her friends Jon and Kirpal tried to persuade her it wasn't, couldn't be her fault, and she went to counseling where the counselor also told her that, and she pretended to believe them. It was a lot easier and got them to stop repeating themselves.
The third year on teen level seemed the hardest because she fell in love with Maisy and dated for a while, then when Maisy broke up with her, it felt like yet again something that was Nicole's fault. She missed too many of Maisy's favorite activities while her body was messing up badly and the basic utility chair that Teen Level provided for her was too much effort to get onto the faster belts, or over the gaps between.
The fourth year on teen level seemed the hardest because it was getting closer and closer to when Lottery would assign her a job, and there didn't really seem to be any job Nicole thought she'd enjoy and also be good at. Kirpal was always skimping on meals to pay for more time in the bookette rooms, and Nicole thought he would end up with a job similar to her mother's, converting older bookettes into modern ones, adding new roles or updating to newer room specifications, or making single viewer ones work for groups.
Jon spent most of his time in parks, and whenever Nicole was having a particularly bad day, he would help her get her chair to whichever park he had planned to spend that day in, so she thought that the Lottery might assign him to working with plants, or keeping an eye on children playing, or some other job mainly done in a park. She wasn't really sure what that might be, especially if it was done when parks were closed to Teen visitors.
But what would Nicole do, what could Nicole do? Nothing that required any physical ability day in and day out, that was certain. Was there any job you could do with just thinking and sitting somewhere that she would be any good at whatsoever? It felt so important to figure that out, and she kept trying, but nothing came to mind. She wasn't confident enough to be a presenter. There had to be some kind of administrative, mundane job she could do, of course, but the idea of it was stifling and almost terrifying. Nicole absolutely hated to be bored or do repetitive mental tasks, because it left her far too much capacity to think about the things that made her anxious. There were people who might have wanted to become her friends, or more, but the gloom that was overtaking her previous mask of positivity was enough to put most of them off. The rest, Nicole turned down herself, out of fear she'd be unable to make them happy at all. She didn't need a repeat of what had happened with Maisy.
The last year of living on Teen level was the hardest and worst, because Nicole was becoming more and more certain that there was no possible work that she could enjoy and also be able to do, and that she would be given whatever useful assignment the Hive could find for her, but it would be a sort of living death, wearing her down little by little as the only thing she could do between tedious task after task was fret herself into oblivion. And also because Jon and Kirpal broke up, so she couldn't spend any time with both her friends. To Nicole, their breakup, inevitable as it was when Lottery was coming for them all, felt like her parents all over again.
Carnival was over, and there was an end to it all.
An end that would be, for every eighteen-year-old, a new beginning.
For the entire Lottery and then the imprinting that followed, Nicole felt like all her anxiety had left her for once. She was resigned to her fate. All the tests were things she did her best to answer, and so many of them she had not the least clue why she was doing or answering whatever the task or question had been.
When she woke from the imprinting, lying on a sleep field in a clean yellow room, she was confused. Shouldn't her mind be filled with all sorts of new information?
A doctor came in. "You're awake," she said. "Good. You've been imprinted for Law Enforcement, so there's a different process for you. You'll go to level 20 and be given an orientation before your imprint is activated."
"So I have been given my imprint, but it's not done yet?"
"Your orientation will explain it all," the doctor said. "As soon as you're recovered, we'll send you to the hasties, and they'll take care of the rest."
Nicole was utterly confused. She was Health and Safety Law Enforcement? How, why? "Can I have my dataview?" She could look the answer up.
The doctor gestured to the dataview on a table next to the sleep field. It was such a fancy model, Nicole had been sure it was the doctor's.
"That's mine?"
"Yes, that's yours. Go ahead and look up your assignment and all your friends'. I know I did that right after I got out of Lottery myself." The doctor smiled at her, waving a medical device over her head and then examining its readout.
Nicole was examining her own readout. She felt such disbelief. How was she supposed to enforce laws? Maybe, she thought wildly, when my imprint is activated, I'll understand everything.
None of this was at all how she had expected this to go.
The next day, when the doctors had cleared her to leave the medical center, two hasties arrived to escort her to level 20 to her orientation. Two very blond, very fit young men, one several inches shorter than the other, but otherwise surprisingly similar in appearance.
"It can't be some kind of mistake, can it?" Nicole asked the shorter one, aiming her question at him rather than the other one because he smiled at her while the taller hasty was giving her a calculating look through narrowed eyes.
"There can't be two beautiful redheads who came through assessment at the same time, that'd be more luck than I could stand," he said, his smile even brighter.
Nicole felt herself blush. "Oh," she said very softly.
The more serious of the two blond hasties rattled off Nicole's name and number, then raised his eyebrows with a question.
"Yes, that's me," Nicole admitted.
"Then we're to escort you to your orientation, then to your first assignment." He pushed her chair down the yellow-walled corridor and into a lift that could have held twenty people, the other man following them in.
Crystal eyepieces slid out from behind each man's ears when the door of the lift closed. "You're level 1 now, Nicole, you know that?" The friendlier man actually winked at her.
She was? Maybe, Nicole thought wildly, level 1 preferred unthreatening, socially adept hasties? Her childhood on level 33 hadn't really provided her any sightseeing trips to level 1 to have any basis of comparison, and certainly she'd never dared visit anything above 33 during her teen years.
"She'll know everything she needs to after the orientation when her imprint is triggered," the more serious man said. "Don't mess with that. You'll have plenty of time to talk to her afterward."
"He will?" Nicole asked curiously.
"Yes, you're going to join our team." He paused, his smile dimming for a moment. "That is, if our boss says you're okay. She doesn't accept everyone."
"True. But I have a good feeling about Nicole," the taller man said, as the door opened on the lift. He pushed her out, and down more corridors, ones all decorated in Health and Safety blue. Everyone around was wearing blue uniforms, though few were as nice as the ones her two escorts wore.
"You're both level 1, like you said I was, aren't you?" Nicole asked.
"Guess those high scores weren't a glitch," the smiley one said. The room they brought her to was filled with benches on a slight slope, about half the seats occupied, and a big screen in front with a raised platform where a speaker could present and be seen by everyone. Leaving Nicole in her powered chair in front of the benches, her two escorts retreated to the back of the room.
She looked at the stage, but when she glanced back, she could see at least one of them was still there. The rest of the people filling the benches were fit and strong, at least the majority. Nicole saw a few scrawny figures and one plump, buxom girl who didn't look at all athletic, but no one else with a visible disability like Nicole's.
It looked like nearly three quarters of the room was boys, but the front row held mostly girls. Near the middle, there was a skinny unathletic boy, then two big strong ones, and then the empty seats Nicole was sitting in front of.
"What are you even doing here?" the nearest boy asked.
"I wondered myself. Hope we find out soon, you know?" Nicole could have taken offense at the question. It could be judged purposely rude of him to ask. Instead, Nicole decided that his curiosity was natural and relatable, and that he had trouble keeping his inner dialogue quiet. She knew other people like that. She knew people who liked to be purposely rude and provoke, too, but she was happier with the story she had chosen.
A woman of about fifty stepped onto the platform. She addressed the room, and her voice was amplified so everyone could hear her.
"Welcome to Law Enforcement. Because you have all been imprinted for work that requires you to be familiar with secrets that most of the Hive cannot be told, your imprints cannot be triggered until you know this information and have dealt independently with your emotional reactions, whatever those may be." She paused to let that sink in.
Nicole felt her mouth opening as if she would speak, but she knew it was not at all the time for interruptions. She closed her lips together firmly.
"Come on out," the speaker said, beckoning to someone behind a door near the front of the room.
A team of four hasties came out, escorting a nosy! Behind her, Nicole heard a couple of voices start chanting numbers, but it sounded like they were hastily hushed by their neighbors. They were hasties now themselves, they shouldn't be trying to hide ... anything.
The nosy's strangely modulated voice said, or at least Nicole thought they said, "I am not what you are thinking." Or was it I know what you are thinking?
The hasties helped the nosy take off the shapeless gray garment, revealing an ordinary female figure underneath. Then, and Nicole put her fist to her mouth to stifle any shocked noise from herself, they took the nosy's head off!
Or rather, the mask. Underneath, she was an ordinary dark-haired young woman.
"Is the secret that telepaths actually just look like regular people?" a girl's voice asked from somewhere behind Nicole.
"That is part of the secret, yes," the speaker said.
"But I'm not a telepath at all," said the girl who'd been dressed as a nosy.
"Many times, one of us goes out dressed as a nosy to help instill good behavior in the citizens of the Hive," the speaker explained.
"And sometimes it's a borderline telepath who's wearing the costume," the girl on the stage added. "But I'm not one myself."
"And the real telepaths just walk around and no one even guesses who they are because they look ordinary," another voice from the audience said.
"No, actually the true telepaths don't just walk around," the speaker told them. "That is because there are too few of them. Some of you have imprints to work on their teams. Your imprints will tell you everything you need to know about the true telepaths. But, we have found, if we don't tell you before triggering your imprints, your emotional response to the secrets can cause psychological aftereffects.
"Trust that the Hive will do what's best. Keep this information about hasties and telepaths completely secret from everyone not a part of Law Enforcement. Now, it's time to celebrate your new adulthood, colleagues. We'll have a party. High level food and drink have been provided. Enjoy yourselves, chat with your new fellow hasties, and at the end, we'll give you the trigger so you can find out all about your new work."
A few of the audience members began to applaud, and soon they all did, Nicole included.
The two fit blond men, neither of them looking as young now as they had earlier, now that Nicole had a room full of eighteen year olds to compare them to — they were probably four to eight years older than Nicole and the rest of her class — came back to escort Nicole again.
"I don't get to join the party?" Nicole asked them.
"You can if you want to," the taller one said.
"But there's a lot better parties where you're going with us," the other one added with another of his infectious grins.
"I'll stay with my group," Nicole told them, "at least until they do the imprint triggering. I don't want to go to my work site without knowing what my job even is." She tried too late to correct that last not to sound too nervous.
"Fair enough."
And about an hour later, when the trigger dumped so much knowledge into Nicole's mind, she was glad she'd held out. Even more glad she had a powered chair holding her. There was so much! The maps alone, detailed layouts of the Hive's architecture. All the things about telepaths! Emergency runs, check runs, and the Liaison job...
All her teenage fears about Lottery had been unfounded, Nicole realized. This job, the one she'd be doing... it was everything she'd ever wanted and thought she could never, ever have. The beauty of it. She'd be constantly having to meet challenges, ones she would be great at, and while there was a lot at stake — so much she thought she might never get over the anxiety it would cause — that was likely to be pretty far in the future, since new jobs only opened up at the rare times the Hive found a new true telepath. For now, she would just be a team member, with a more experienced deputy and team leader keeping any mistakes she made from causing a disaster.
A beautiful future started to unroll itself before Nicole, one where she did vital work that she was ideally suited for and would enjoy tremendously. She smiled with all her heart, tossing her flyaway red hair as she threw her head back in happiness.