The Five Laws ✓

12

The apartment door closed behind me as I stepped onto the hardwood floors, my coat adding to the warmth already occupying the room which caused me to reach for the silver zipper underneath my chin immediately.

Florence was perched on the couch near the window, her fingers wrapped around a mug with colorful polka dots painted all over it. The mug itself was one she made and painted herself in the third grade, which was only used when she was stressed and needed something familiar and cozy to calm her down. That was how I knew something serious was up.

"What's going on?"

My voice sounded extremely loud, it being the only other source of noise apart from the streets below, their faded sounds flowing in through the wide opened window.

She glanced at me and took a drink of what I assumed was tea, before motioning to the spot next to her. I complied and sat, my bag falling to the floor as I crossed my legs underneath each other, watching her carefully. My stomach felt uneasy, like when I was a teenager and would be sat down to talk about grades, or moving out, or college. I tried to do my breathing exercises.

"I don't really know how to say this..."

Her voice wasn't shaking, but I could feel my hands doing just that. Of course, I had no real reason to be this nervous, but my brain always got the best of me.

"Just say it." I persuaded her, tugging on my bottom lip with my teeth slightly afterwards. Her hair wasn't up in the usual bun she wore, instead it curled in waves around her ears and chin. She looked different, but still pretty.

She sighed before nodding, starting to speak quickly.

"So I was in my office today, working normally as usual, but then something happened. There was an error on one of the reports and it made the numbers not add up the way they should. I spent almost thirty minutes trying to find out why, and then I finally did."

I squinted in confusion, waiting for her to go on. She took a deep breath before starting again.

"Someone had tried slipping an extra hundred onto the spreadsheet, thinking we wouldn't notice. Which is stupid because it's my literal job to notice something like that."

I didn't really understand what she meant. So someone had messed up, what was the big deal?

Florence looked at me with wide eyes, as if I was supposed to react just as she was.

"Okay so... what does that mean?"

She ran a hand through her hair and stood abruptly, walking towards the edge of the rug thrown over the wood and back towards me, pacing. I wanted to tell her that she was most likely stressing out due to being new. She was smart, we both knew that, and people mess up all the time. I tried smiling up at her to calm her nerves, but she looked unamused.

"Mia. It means someone was getting funding for something but not wanting anyone to know what. It was from a certain wing in The Personalization Facility, but I don't know which one."

I chuckled, "Clearly someone messed something up. Doesn't that happen every once in awhile?"

Florence was quiet as she looked at me, her arms crossed over her torso. My smile faltered.

"That's what I had assumed at first. We work with mistakes like this all the time, but it's a Personalization Facility, Mia. They don't mess up like that... they just don't."

I shook my head, "Alright, this is getting way too weird for me." I stood, my stomach doing flips in all the wrong ways.

"But that's the thing," She flailed her arms out, emphasizing her words, "I went to speak to my boss anyway. And do you know what happened? He was on the phone with someone who's a researcher in the facility. He was mumbling, and I stood outside the door trying to listen in-"

I cut her off, "Isn't that sort of snooping?"

She rolled her eyes, "Forget snooping. He was talking about why they needed the extra funding!"

I waited for her to go on but she just sat back down, pulling her knees up to her chin.

"Well," I spoke, "Don't stop now. What did he say?"

Florence looked paler than I had ever seen her, more so than that time in high school when her crush Harry had caught her taking pictures of him for her diary. I remember that day incredibly well, especially how funny the pictures had looked when they printed out. I hadn't let her live that memory down for years.

"The funding is going towards adding a special, almost invisible sized, compartment in all of the memory sticks." Her palms went white where her nails were digging into the skin, "They're trying to get control over our whole brains, Mia. That's why we've been being monitored all this time. Not for our safety, not for an easier understanding of human memories, but so they know how we react to multiple types of crisis. They're collecting data so they know how to overpower us. So they know how to win against us."

My throat went dry as I stared at her, no words coming out of either of our mouths after that moment, fear behind both of our eyes. My whole body felt cold. My mind wasn't racing because of funny memories or how pretty my best friend was anymore, it was racing due to all of the possible things I could say. Only, in that moment, I had none. All because of the small devices already tracking the words that had been exchanged between the two of us, the reason we had them in our necks in the first place sending another anxious feeling washing over my entire body.

They weren't for our protection. They were for our destruction.