The voice of nineteen

Turn 23 of 26

Yell YES MA'AM with the rest of the 19 new officers to confirm your jobs. you accept hair station two before she opens the book. She reads the book. Soon, the bell rings and everyone stands at attention, gets in. single file line by number to get breakfast which is eggs, bacon and toast. You and the other 4 hair station 2 workers eat the same with the same movements like everyone else.

'YES MA'AM,' you detonate with the other nineteen across the compound, your voice going out through the office walls to join the confirmation rolling off the tarmac, and the Lead Instructor receives it without expression. 'Hair station two is accepted, then,' she says. 'The job is held. Now the book.' Her hand lifts from the cover and the binding falls open under the lamp, and she begins to read — not aloud to you at first, but to herself, her gray eyes tracking down hand-inked pages of postings and audits, dates and numbers, a ledger of the standard's growth written in a hand identical to her own. Then she turns one page and reads aloud. 'Entry one. Ninety-Nine was selected at first observation. The lag was not a defect. The lag was measurement.' She looks up. 'Every recruit in this compound was made identical. That is the intake standard, and it is enough for duty. But the standards station requires more than a body that conforms. It requires an eye that noticed the standard before it was applied to it. You lagged because you were watching. Hair station two does not only perform the style, Ninety-Nine. It evaluates the intake. It decides when a head is ready.'

She is reaching for the next page when the bell rings — two strikes, brass, cutting through the walls of the building and through the recitation of the hundred voices, which stop mid-word. 'Chow,' she says, and closes the 99 book on her thumb, keeping the place. 'The rest of this entry is read after chow. In this office. Not before, not elsewhere.' The quiet officer opens the door for you, and your body marches out into the corridor, where officers are already falling into single file by number from every direction, streaming toward the mess block with the sound of one formation moving.

The mess hall is white and long and exact. You fall in with the file and the line moves down the service counter, and the women behind the counter — cooks, Eighty-Eight's function already at work — put the same tray in front of every pair of hands: eggs, bacon, toast, squared on the tray in the same arrangement. You take your seat among the hair-station workers, Eighty-Six at the far end, and the five of you eat in the same movements as the whole hall — fork up, chew, swallow, fork up — at the same tempo, twenty trays and eighty trays emptied in step, no voice raised, no word spoken, because chow is not for talking. It is fuel executed on a schedule.

When the trays are cleared, the bell has not yet rung for return to stations, and the quiet officer is standing at the end of your table, waiting, her gray eyes on you and then on the door that leads back toward the office. 'Ninety-Nine,' she says, low. 'She is holding your place in the book.' Behind her, at the head table, the Lead Instructor has already risen, the large gray book closed under her arm, walking back toward the office ahead of you — and as she passes the kitchen door you see, for one half-second, a figure at the pass-through window watching her go, someone in a uniform you have not seen before, and then the shutters come down.