A single snowflake can start a huge avalanche

They came for me while I was at work, three days after Elsie disappeared. Everyone knew why I was being removed, which was unusual because cancellations were normally shrouded in secrecy. They followed the standard procedure, two security robots from the Department of Conduct and Conformity, accompanied by a grey-suited man with a clipboard.

The day after they took Elsie I had returned to a subdued atmosphere in the warehouse. It wasn’t related to my wife’s removal, though they’d all witnessed it, it was simply their reaction to the announcement by the Department of Financial Fitness that the curfew would be temporarily moved forward to ten pm to help citizens meet new workplace targets. It wasn’t something I cared about. I had no interest in going out to the Sparta owned bars where the weekday alcohol was diluted to prevent an adverse effect on the next day’s output, and the weekend alcohol was so potent you were unable to function by Sunday. There were no offers of sympathy or condolence for Elsie that day, I hadn’t expected it, it was taboo to talk about someone after they’d been cancelled. I could tell you that I moved through that day in the warehouse like an automaton, but it wouldn’t mean anything, I moved through every day like an automaton, we all did, it was the only way to meet the targets and survive the boredom.

I met Elsie when we were doing our national service in the early days of the new regime. The Freedom and Responsibility Party – born out of the giant data storage company known as Sparta – had brought back national service as part of their Traditional Values agenda. After ten years of government promoted culture wars, Sparta’s campaign slogan – Freedom of the majority can only be achieved by control of the minority – had struck a chord with the populace. The Party were elected before I reached my sixteenth birthday. 

In the years building up to the election, all the media channels had been subsumed into one Sparta-owned company, so the day after they had taken power the Benevolent Leader was able to appear on every channel to introduce the System of Collective Responsibility. He explained that only a comprehensive and severe enforcement of the new rules would permit the law-abiding majority to live in a state of liberty. There were no more explanations after that, only instructions and warnings in the form of the early morning Prepare and Progress announcements and the evening Reflect and Review Shows. Sparta, which had become the country’s sole employer, adopted the symbol of the worker bee to embody the spirit of surrender to the well-being of the collective. We were all issued with our personal BeeBands which, by monitoring our activity, would pick out the individualists – as the new terrorists came to be known – while enabling the achievements of true citizens to be recognised by the Spartan organisation.

I remember the day I realised there was something wrong with Elsie. We were taking our Sunday walk on a cold January morning when she stopped and stared up at the metallic-grey sky. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she said. Then she stretched out her arm, waiting for the first fat flake to fall onto it. When she turned to look at me, her expression was as full of wonder as if she’d just seen a miracle. Then she silently mouthed something, the way we’d learnt to do after we realised the BeeBands monitored our conversations. I frowned, thinking I had misheard her, so she repeated it in what was almost a whisper. ‘A single snowflake can start a huge avalanche.’

That must have been around the time she started to duck the weekly Eliminate the Individual sessions which were a requirement for employment with Sparta. The Ministry for Health and Happiness had introduced compulsory identity training to help us learn the personality subjugation exercises which taught us how to conform to the hive. Missing the training led to immediate dismissal with no hope of re-employment by Sparta – and if you weren’t employed by Sparta you weren’t employed. There was nowhere else to go. I didn’t know she’d stopped attending until I saw the non-compliance notice after her disappearance. That was when I realised that she had known exactly what she was doing and what was going to happen to her, long before she began the protests.

I assumed at the time that she was still upset about the rejection of our reproduction request earlier that year. It was a simple algorithm, balancing income and personal profiles with the required population numbers, or so the email said. This is nothing personal, it seemed to say. That wasn’t how Elsie saw it. Although she had often said that this was no world to bring a child into, her reaction was pure undiluted rage. She said later that it wasn’t about the decision, it was about them having the power to make the decision.

So, she began dabbling with individualism. I don’t know if she discussed her plans with anyone else. These people were obviously out there – else why were we fighting a war against them? But I sometimes hoped, in my meaner moments, that she hadn’t been working alongside them, because I couldn’t bear the idea of her having secrets with anyone but me.

It started in the elevator. When Elsie arrived in the hallway that morning the elevator had been near capacity. Fifteen faces stared ahead with blank expressions as she hopped in before the doors closed and squeezed through to the back. Then, instead of turning forward in the same direction as the others, she remained facing the back wall. And she stood like that all the way to the twenty-sixth floor while everyone else seemed to hold their breath, waiting for the thunderbolt to descend. She told me later that she had stared at her BeeBand all the way up, and her heart was racing so fast she thought she might faint as she waited for it to register an unauthorised action. She said that when it didn’t move, she felt such a surge of elation she wanted to shout her joy out loud.

That was all she did that day. She stood in the lift facing the wrong way. But by lunchtime the whole warehouse was talking about it.

Then she began to mess with the uniform. We were issued with two uniforms, one grey, one navy, the cost taken direct from our salary. But Elsie worked out that the warehouse security robots couldn’t distinguish between the colours and she began to mix them, wearing the blue jacket over the grey pants or vice-versa. A few of the other women began to imitate her. After that came the dancing. Her supervisor had to call her in to have a word about it. Dancing was of course prohibited under the new regime, as was music, but Elsie had begun to move around the warehouse in a way that people described as lyrical, as if her body was responding to tunes in her head. Her supervisor warned her that although her BeeBand hadn’t as yet registered any unauthorised movements, she risked being denounced for anti-freedom activities. I began to be afraid for her, but the warning made no difference. And on certain days it seemed that the staff, as they transported goods around the warehouse, often dressed in mis-matched colours, were all moving to a rhythm of their own, not quite dancing, but something.

The day before Elsie was taken, she brought home a pack of stick-it notes and began to write enigmatic phrases on them, like, Go against the grain, or We are human not insect.

The next day was perfectly normal until lunchtime. She worked efficiently through the morning, meeting all her targets, then she went to the canteen and ate her meal of spinach and rice. But when the rest of the workers got up to head back, she ignored the warning buzz of her BeeBand and went to get the notes from her locker. Then she walked back to the warehouse sticking up the notes as she went.

I went back and removed them all later. The unscheduled toilet break would cost me an hour’s pay, but it hardly mattered anymore.

At the time, I was more angry than sympathetic, but I still found myself unable to put Elsie’s notes in the shredder as I clearly should have done. I hid them in my locker instead, which was foolish since we all knew that management had duplicate keys. But the notes were somehow too much a part of her and she had risked so much in posting them.

My actions made no difference to the outcome. They came for her the next day.     

Two days later I woke from a nightmare I couldn’t recall, to a harsh light shining in my eyes. The power had gone off at eight the night before, I must have left the lights on. It was the kind of thing Elsie would have remembered to check. I showered then I dressed while the BeeBand started playing the Prepare and Progress Show. There was a celebration of a military success against a group of subversives followed by an announcement that the new transport service would be delayed due to the actions of the terrorist Neo-Individual group. The transport system had been one of the FRP’s election promises but fifteen years later the number of train crashes continued to rise and there was no sign that the work had ever begun. The final item was a warning that reports had been received about power failures between eight and midnight. These reports were false news, the presenter said in his stern hologramic tone, and those who were spreading the rumours would be hunted down and treated as enemies of freedom.

The elevator was full to its authorised capacity that morning and I was the last one in. Seventeen blank faces stared ahead as I squeezed through to the back. Then, instead of turning to face forward in the same direction as the others, I remained facing the back wall. I couldn’t see their expressions, but I heard the communal intake of breath.

The two robots and the man in a grey suit came for me the next morning.