The books' loss

"Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason."

With the wan lightbulb that flickered overhead, Kaĉjo had to squint to make sure he had read the words correctly. "What is this?" he demanded.

Lya turned to see what he held, and she recognized the grey canvas cover with faded blue lines of her favorite book. "It's David Copperfield by Charles Dickens."

With a scoff, Kaĉjo shook his head. "I know what it says it is, but it's not," he disagreed. "I've read this book a dozen times, and this line was never in it - at least not this way."

Narrowing her eyes, Blix - no, Lya - approached and gently tugged the book from his hands. "Which line?"

"This one."

She tilted her head in thought as she read the line above his finger, and Kaĉjo smiled at the image she presented - so like the mimicked humanisms of the Senters, yet he thought he could read the humanity in her eyes. Even now, it was hard for him to trust himself - to believe her. Blix carried herself exactly like a Senter, and humans held no technology that could tell the difference. No doubt the Senters could tell. If he had not worked in the Consortium every day for seven years, he would not have been able to note any hint of discrepancy between the electronic beings and the humans they resembled.

This head tilt. It was one of the Senters' tells. Still, surely the mannerisms and gestures had to come originally from somewhere - from some human.

"I assure you," Lya insisted. "This book is over ninety years old, if the Upset date is to be trusted."

"You mean the Set date?"

Lya bared her teeth in a grin, and her nose wrinkled with apparent amusement - surely, a Senter couldn't fake that smile. "You call it the Set date?"

"The day of the first bombardment, when the mass extinctions happened."

"When the Senters shut the doors on the Remnant."

Crossing his arms over his chest, Kaĉjo raised his eybrows at her. "The day the Deplorables refused to undergo the treatment that saved everyone else, and the day they would have callously brought destruction on the people who listened to sense."

"Listened to sense," Lya mumbled, pursing her lips. She breathed out slowly through her nose to restrain her response. He had never sat among the Relics and heard the stories of that day from the survivors. Lya had, and though the tales did not match completely between the various tellers, she could paint a pretty good picture of the horror. "Which printing press, I wonder, would the Deplorables - " she leaned on the word so that he knew her irritation at its use - "print this book from?"

Kaĉjo almost smiled at her pique, though he knew he'd better not. Instead, he just shrugged. "Yes, I know that the Remnant - " he emphasized the word in turn to let her see his concession - "does not hold any technology that could have done this. Still, maybe it's something in the translation device."

"I don't use a translation device for this. I speak and read English perfectly. It says what you read, though I worry that the Cons will set up some filter in your mind from now on so you can't ever see this again - they will adjust you."

"Adjust me!"

"They adjusted the book," she leveled with a wry twist of her face.

Maybe it made some sense - maybe they had altered it. Purposely suppressing his trench feed, he considered the version he remembered. "Learn to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, for this is solid reason."

When he spoke the words aloud, Lya puffed out what almost sounded like a growl. "And who decides what a bodily defect is?"

"Yes, okay. I know - the Senters. But my question is, why would they alter it?"

Lya widened her eyes at him, seeming to consider the answer apparent.

"What?" he demanded.

"I swear, the trench renders people completely incapable of thought! What is the claim of the Senters regarding the Deplorables?"

"That they refused the regimen out of an inherent defect, and - "

"And they bear the marks of that defect on their bodies. The Senters want you to believe that there is something inherently broken about the 'Deplorables,' and that is why they have deformities and weaknesses." She exaggerated the word "deplorables" once again.

"The Senters don't want anything. They just run their programming."

"It amounts to the same thing," she insisted with an arch tilt of her head before spinning away from him, apparently done with the conversation.

Not that he wanted her to walk away from him, but he couldn't take his mind off of that book. Running his fingers over the fragile paper, he could feel the slight alteration in the surface where the letters marred its smooth plane. How hard would it be to alter the words on that paper? How hard would it be to alter the words in his mind? For the Senters? The first would prove impossible. The second, though...the Senters could definitely alter the feed from the trench. He just wasn't sure they would. If they would, what would that mean for everything he thought he knew?