Office of Mercy (9781101606100) by Djanikian Ariel

Author:Djanikian, Ariel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2013-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Archives were one of the great feats of America-Five. In the time before the Storm, when other Alphas had put all their energy into transforming the Yangs’ underground bunkers into suitable homes, shoring up their Domes, and gathering enough seed, animals, scientific equipment, and raw DNA supplies to last them until the Day of Expansion, the America-Five Alphas had also had the foresight to gather information. For the first two hundred years after the Storm, the piles of books, digital files, and paper records had lain fallow in one dehumidified room on level eight. Later, though, sometime just before the Gamma birth, the Alphas and Betas had decided to siphon off the top story of the Department of Living and make this area into a reading room and library. At first no one saw much use in it, since they already had the Pretends for entertainment and schooling, and the Ethical Code for moral grounding. But as the years went on, interest in Pre-Storm documents grew and, eventually, added to that interest, there arose a desire to keep detailed histories of the happenings within the settlement itself, records beyond what individual memory could retain. Now, as had been the case since the first professional assignments of the Gamma generation, the Archives maintained a healthy staff of twelve to fifteen citizens. Their work consisted of recoding the old, Pre-Storm documents and books, maintaining the living record and the yearly biosnapshots of each America-Five citizen, and—though Natasha would never say as much to Min-he—endlessly shifting information from one organizational system to another.

After breakfast, Natasha climbed the spiral staircase to the top floor of the wing. Today was her first free day in weeks, and she was all too happy to spend it away from the Office of Mercy and the dull, streaming data from the satellite feeds. She cleaned her hands in the decontamination sink at the landing and pushed through the handsome, Pre-Storm–style glass doors that led to the Archives. The air in this room was cool from the dehumidifying vents and smelled of old paper. Towering shelves cut narrow rows along each side of the aisle leading to the archivists’ stations, and each shelf boasted a tightly stacked row of faded book spines. Except for the printings of the Ethical Code, these were all Pre-Storm books—really, the only sentimental relics that the Alphas had preserved from that previous world.

Tucked off to one side of the room was the reading area: a comfortable nook of plush armchairs with ottomans and little tables that one could draw up and over the armrests. Along the opposite wall were seven windowed conference rooms that citizens could sign out for private meetings. Arthur met here sometimes with the heads of the Department of the Exterior offices; and often, a handful of citizens would organize discussion clubs that gathered in the evenings. Natasha herself had attended a few meetings of the Moral Principles Discussion Group in her first year out of school, and Min-he had

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