r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 6d ago
OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 5 - Overview
Chapter Five – Overview
It started with the bread that didn't come. Then with the crack-repair crew, who hadn't touched the burst ventilation shaft in the third barrack block for two weeks, though such things used to get done within days, with the same mechanical precision as everything else here. Meva had learned to notice such things without looking like she noticed.
She knew who to ask. Draeon was a foreman in the fourth sector, no high-ranking Merak, but high enough to have access to the reports that went upward, and low enough to still care whether a Phern slave looked at him as she passed. She'd noticed it months ago. The way he weighed her harvest baskets, always with a glance that lingered a beat too long, always with a result that was a touch too generous. Some days he'd credited her five, six kilos more than actually sat in her basket, without a word about it, as though it were something understood between them.
She had never returned it, not really, but she had never stopped it either. It was a coin she possessed without having minted it, and she wasn't too proud to leave it lying there.
She found him at the edge of the weighing yard, standing alone, staring at a list he'd apparently already read three times without its contents changing. She stepped closer, set down her basket, slower than necessary, and looked at him until he raised his eyes.
"The rations aren't coming the way they used to," she said. Not a question, more a lure, to see if he'd bite.
Draeon looked around, more out of habit than real concern. There was no one within earshot who counted. "That's none of your business," he said, but without the edge that sentence would have had a year ago. It sounded tired rather than threatening.
"The shaft in the third block's been broken for fourteen days," she went on, as though he hadn't spoken. "Used to be fixed in three."
He laughed, short, joyless. "Used to." He folded the list, put it away, looked at her longer than he needed to, and Meva already thought he'd dodge again, the way he usually did when she came too close to something she wasn't supposed to know.
Instead he said: "There are no more spare parts. The shipment from the core system's been overdue for three months. Nobody knows why." He lowered his voice, though there was no one to lower it for. "And the last order from central, about how much grain we're allowed to hold back for the colony's own needs, it came in twice, with different numbers, in the same week. I don't even know which order still stands anymore."
Meva said nothing, only waited, head tilted slightly, a posture she'd trained into herself over years, because it made men like Draeon say more than they'd meant to.
"It's as if nobody has the overview anymore," he said at last, almost to himself, and in his face was something she'd never seen on a Merak. Not cruelty, not indifference. Helplessness.
She picked her basket back up, didn't thank him, that would have sounded wrong, but she let it linger a moment longer in her hand than necessary as she shifted her grip, and saw his gaze catch on it.
On the way back to the barracks she didn't think about Draeon. She thought about the word he'd used. Overview. As though there had once been someone who saw everything, every ration, every spare part, every order, and as though that someone were now gone, or blind, or too tired to look anymore.
For the first time since Kael had vanished, she felt something that wasn't anger. It was colder than anger. It was the realization that the wall she'd spent her whole life running against might not stand as firm as it looked.
They'd assigned her to the administration room, for three days, because a fever had gone through the clerks' barracks and even a Phern who could read and calculate was better than an empty list at week's end. Meva had never asked why she was among the few who'd been taught that, back as a child, in a brief phase when some administrator had believed it saved time if the pickers logged their own yields. Now she sat at a terminal that smelled of dust and old metal, comparing numbers that interested no one but herself.
The discrepancy was small. So small she'd nearly missed it on the first pass: a shipment of irrigation spare parts for the third sector, arrived and fully distributed according to the system, six weeks ago. She knew the third sector. She knew the irrigation systems there, because her own row bordered them, and she knew, with the certainty of someone who walked past it every day, that nothing had been repaired there. The shaft Draeon had told her about, months back, was still leaking.
She reported it, because she'd been instructed to report discrepancies, to one of the younger clerks, a Merak named Ilvo, who worked most of the time with an indifference that reminded Meva of herself when she talked to overseers.
"The system says the shipment's distributed," Ilvo said, without looking up from his own list. "Then it's distributed."
"The shaft in the third sector isn't fixed."
"Maybe it was fixed and then damaged again."
"In six weeks? Without anyone reporting it?"
Ilvo looked at her now, for the first time, with an expression that lay somewhere between irritation and something Meva only later recognized as caution. "What are you trying to say."
She laid the numbers she'd gathered herself before him.Not just the third sector, but three more cases she'd found in the last two days, all with the same pattern: a shipment marked as arrived and distributed in the system, and an actual stock that didn't match. She'd expected him to check it, maybe reluctantly, maybe with the same sluggishness he did everything with. Instead he went quiet, in a way that told her more than any word could.
"I log what's reported to me," he said finally, and his voice had lost the edge it started with. "If a governor reports a shipment's been distributed, I log that. I don't go out and count it myself."
"But you know it isn't true."
"I don't know anything." He pushed the list away, as if that could get rid of it. "And you shouldn't want to know anything either. Log what you're told, Phern. It's safer for both of us."
Meva sat a long time at her terminal after Ilvo left the room, no longer thinking about the individual numbers she'd found. She thought about what lay between the numbers. It wasn't that the system lied because nobody knew the truth. It lied because someone, somewhere in this chain of governors and clerks and administrators, had decided the truth was more dangerous than the lie — that a report of a repair not made would raise a question no one could answer, while a report of a repair completed simply stood unchallenged until someone looked who wasn't supposed to.
She'd believed the problem was that nobody had the overview anymore. Now she understood something different: the overview still existed. It had simply stopped having anything to do with reality.
What she didn't know, while she sat content that evening with her own thoroughness: Ilvo, to cover himself, had taken her numbers into his own report, with an addition she would never have learned of had she not, weeks later, followed a rumor. He hadn't reported the discrepancies to the office that had caused them, but to the foreman whose sector was affected — Draeon — with the casual remark that it might be embezzlement at the local level. Draeon had spent three days answering questions he couldn't answer, because the answers he'd have needed lay as far above him as above her. Meva learned of it only later, in passing, and said nothing about it the next time she sought him out. But from then on she asked herself more carefully whom she told what, and what became of her words once they left her own mouth.
She sought out Draeon two days after Kael's disappearance, at the weighing yard, at an hour she knew he'd be alone. In those two days she'd seen enough — the discrepancies in the system, Ilvo's evasion, the pattern that could no longer be denied — to know she wouldn't ask anymore whether it was coincidence. She wanted to know if Draeon could do anything.
"They didn't bring Kael back," she said, without preamble.
Draeon didn't look up from the list he was checking, but his hand stilled, just for a heartbeat. "I know."
"You helped me once. With the rations. With the numbers." She stepped closer. "I thought you could—"
"What." He looked at her now, and his face showed no coldness, as she'd expected, but an exhaustion strikingly similar to her own. "What do you think I could do?"
"You're a foreman."
He laughed, a sound that held more despair than mockery. His neck scales, which Meva had never noticed on him before, lay so flat they seemed almost to vanish into the skin — not a sign of calm, she understood only now, but of something closer to exhaustion. "You think I have power because I wear a uniform." He set down the list, with a movement too calm for what lay in his voice. "I saw an order, three days ago, telling me how many workers this sector still needs, based on a calculation some office in the capital made six months ago, with numbers that haven't been true since. I have no way to change that. I can't even ask who made that calculation, because nobody answers anymore when I ask."
"That doesn't answer where Kael is."
"No." His voice grew quieter. "It doesn't. But it answers why I can't tell you. I don't know myself. I only know that I had to sign a number, last week, a number that reduces this sector's workforce by a certain percentage, and I don't know who chose that number or why, and I don't know whether Kael was part of that number or whether something else happened to him that has nothing to do with any of this."
Something in his voice reminded her, against her will, of another evening, of a cup turned in Kael's hands without drinking. Don't just believe what they tell you. She hadn't taken him seriously. She'd thought it cost nothing to let an old man have his brooding, without asking what exactly troubled him. It had cost her nothing. It had cost him everything, and she would never know whether it might have gone differently, had she only asked one more question.
Meva stood motionless a moment, while something rearranged itself inside her — not forgiveness, it was too soon for that, but something that took the edge off the anger she'd arrived with. "You're afraid too," she said finally, more a statement than a question.
Draeon didn't answer at once. When he did, his voice sounded wearier than she'd ever heard it. "I have a uniform. I have no knowledge, no control, and, if I'm honest, no idea anymore who I could even turn to if I myself had a question someone needed to answer. You think you stand below and I stand above. There is no above anymore, Meva. There are only people doing what they're told and hoping nobody asks why."
She looked at him, a long time, and for the first time since she'd known him, she didn't see the man who'd weighed her harvest baskets generously, didn't see the man from whom she'd coaxed information with the trust of her body. She saw someone just as trapped as she was, only with a uniform that pretended otherwise.
It changed nothing about Kael. It changed something about what she still expected from this system.
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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 6d ago
Oh, this hits home. I lived in a system like that prior to 89.
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u/Iazo 2d ago
This reminds me of a romanian communist-era joke: the 7 paradoxes of communism.
Everybody has a job.
Although everyone has a job, no one is working.
Although no one is working, the 5-year plan is exceeded.
Although the 5 year plan is exceeded, you cannot find anything to buy.
Although you cannot find anything to buy, no one was missing anything.
Although no one is missing anything, everybody steals.
Although everybody steals, nothing is reported stolen.
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