Is just fourteen. Her father is an engineer, her mother a mathematician. Under other circumstances, it’s quite possible that Rachel would have become a fashion blogger, but then again perhaps not, considering that intelligence is hereditary. The sobering reality of biology.

Had Rachel been born twenty or thirty years earlier, she would have listened to Hawaiian punk music, collected comics; she might have conducted experiments with a chemistry set or tried to observe dark matter. Today, though, it’s the internet. Nice that the net exists. With a computer that she’d disassembled. With codes, Linux, GNUnet, and accelerated developments that demand intelligence, a resource Rachel has not yet exhausted. It is the most uplifting feeling a human can be granted: not to hit a limit. Right, and so forth and so on. Rachel is happy here with the others whom she regards as totally normal. In school she always stood alone in the corner because she wasn’t an engaging child and also wasn’t necessarily good-looking in that childish way. Her ears are too big, same for her nose, and the rest of her doesn’t conform to the norm that currently holds sway for good-looking girls, either. Today is by far the best day of her life. Her body is so flooded with adrenaline that she feels as if she could fly. Her pupils are dilated, her body trembles so much it’s as though she were frozen. Today Rachel feels at one with the universe, like she’s on an epic heroin high.

Rachel has told the others what she intends to do. To expose people out there to the giant joke, show them that they’re nothing more than lab rats, show them how they’re being deceived. “In a few days the time will have come, and the revolution will kick off,” says Rachel, and … “Where is the other one anyway?”

By the other one she means

KAREN

Who has begun to train. She runs. She listens to grime. She listens to vintage music. Lady Leshurr and Scrufizzer and she’s so angry, so angry, what a bunch of shit, that she can’t rap and instead must run, past the sheds that pass as accommodations, where people celebrate the death of their hope. Running is rapping for losers. While

Dusk

is falling and

KEVIN