This story was planned to become a longer novel but probably this will never happen.

Part 1. Sorting

There was a quiet but uneasy atmosphere in the carriage. One of the light bulbs on the ceiling was flickering convulsively. It could burn out at any moment. John felt goosebumps crawling slowly down his spine, between his shoulder blades and further along his back... perhaps it was the sweat trickling. The train was crowded, stuffy, and hot from the human breath and body heat of the passengers. John wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, wiping away the sweat. Why was there so much damn sweat? It must be emanating from him like from a pig. The guy discreetly glanced at the woman sitting to his left. Her face was also wet, and she was breathing quickly, tiredly.

When the partition between the carriages opened and the sorters entered the carriage, the goosebumps had reached John's lower back. He wondered if they would continue moving downward or turn sideways. And most importantly, would they turn on the air conditioning in the carriage? That's what John was thinking about in one of the most serious moments of his life when the sorters reached the end of the carriage, set up their equipment, and disappeared behind the curtain, covering the sorting chair. They exchanged a couple of short, indistinct remarks and then got down to business.

"First one, come forward!" commanded the petite woman in a purple-brown uniform. "Faster, candidates in the next carriages are also waiting."

The thin, restless guy sitting closest to the curtain got up on unsteady legs. John noticed that the boy was barely holding back a smile, but at the same time, he frowned. Perhaps he had been waiting for this day for many years. He had dreamed of becoming a railway worker, and now, finally, the sorters would decide whether he was suitable or not for this undoubtedly hard and responsible job.

They led the boy behind the curtain and sat him down on the chair. The curtain was thick and impenetrable - not even a silhouette could be seen on it, not a hint of a shadow. John tried to orient himself by sound. He wanted to know what awaited him in a few minutes and thirsted for any, even the slightest, information. The rustle of clothing, the quiet squeak of the chair legs shifting. The boy sat down. Then the click of his boot heels on the floor. Then he took a loud breath: they had given him a special injection, and now he wouldn't be able to lie or pretend. His mind was fully open to questions and clarifications.

"What is your name?" the familiar voice of the sorter reached John's ears.

"Arnold Hopkins," the guy replied colorlessly, almost apathetically. Apparently, the drug was already taking effect.

Meanwhile, another sorter emerged from behind the curtain. He was an older man wearing the same purple-brown outfit as his partner.

"Citizens of Agmenpatria! You are probably already familiar with the upcoming procedure, and yet, as the senior sorter in the group, I am obliged to bring you up to speed. First, a medical worker will give you an injection. It is completely safe and is intended to make it harder for you to deceive the interviewer. The injection's effect lasts only an hour. After the injection, we will ask a few questions. Each of you will be fitted with a helmet containing sensors. We will monitor brain activity during your responses and gain telepathic access to your consciousness. This is necessary because with this approach, there is no need to ask questions verbally, and the results won't be tainted by bias or answers heard from other subjects being sorted. Additionally, the format of the procedure lends greater credibility to the words of the interviewee. After the sorting process is completed, you will be given a special envelope. You must proceed to the fourth carriage with this envelope, where a sorting service employee will be waiting for you. Hand the envelope to them. Further instructions will be given to you depending on its contents. Just as a reminder, it is strictly prohibited to open the envelope yourself! Any sorting results will be invalidated, and you will be assigned to unpaid, low-skilled work. In other words, almost hard labor," the man scoffed. "Does anyone have any questions?" He scanned the carriage with his gaze. Everyone remained silent. Some shook their heads. "Excellent! We can proceed!"

John sank into his chair, desperately straining to listen to the sounds behind the curtain. Nothing was happening. Moreover, many of the people rustled, whispered to each other, and fidgeted. Someone nervously scratched, someone twirled their hair. Ultimately, the extraneous noises drowned out the silence and any chance. But then John's ear caught a new rustle from the sorted boy, followed by another rustle and a quiet thud of his shoe soles against the metal floor.

"Done," said the sorter. "Proceed to the fourth carriage."

Behind the curtain appeared a completely calm young man, smiling slightly at the corners of his mouth. In his hands, he clutched the coveted envelope with a still-smoking wax seal. John closely scrutinized the features of the boy's face: there was something off about them, but he couldn't quite figure out what. Perhaps the drug was still working, and this inhuman benevolent calmness of the interviewed was the result of the substance coursing through his veins, John thought. Well, fine. Soon it would be his turn, and he would witness what was happening with his own eyes and learn what it was like to answer questions when your fate and the job you would toil at for the rest of your life were at stake.

"I hope it works," flashed through John's mind as he impatiently counted the minutes until the moment when he, too, would be seated on the sorting chair. Contrary to the common stereotype that all men and women dream of becoming railway workers, John wanted to be a farmer and work in the fields. The clatter of Faragonda's wheels did not mesmerize him like others, and the smells of trains made him cough and wrinkle his nose. Perhaps the sorters would see this and make the right choice.

"Next!" a little girl with long red braids and a face sprinkled with freckles joyfully flew behind the curtain. She didn't even flinch when they gave her the injection.

Gradually, it was John's turn. He had stopped getting nervous: he was too tired for that. The energy that had previously gone into anxious thoughts had completely drained away. If they were to tell John right now that he would be a mechanic on the railroad, he would nod and say, "Okay." But now, the carriage was almost a third empty, and the sorter's index finger stopped on him.

"Young man, you're next."

John rose from his seat. His knees trembled a bit. Unpleasantly, he didn't want the sorters to consider him too nervous or at least slightly mentally unstable. A farmer should be hardworking, composed, and determined. A good farmer is patient and doesn't get angry at wheat for slow growth; and, even more so, doesn't worry about the outcome of a ceremony that won't lie.

"Take a seat," the woman in purple and chestnut said softly to John. "Get comfortable."

The man in the white lab coat, who had been hiding behind the curtain all this time, broke the ampoule and filled a syringe with the "truth serum." John relaxed his muscles to make the injection less painful. Surprisingly, the substance turned out to be not burning at all: it almost imperceptibly permeated his body, causing only slight numbness at the injection site.

Nothing was happening. John began to suspect that they had tricked him. He tried to lie in his own thoughts, and the lie sounded in his head as effortlessly as usual. Nevertheless, his thoughts began to slow down a little, and his senses dulled, not to the point of completely erasing his confusion and anxiety, but enough to notice.

"What is your name?"

"John Riot," he looked questioningly at the sorter.

She smiled, took hold of his chin, and looked into his eyes intently. It was a strange, inappropriate touch, but John didn't dare recoil or look away. In the woman's eyes, he read a menacing, dangerous curiosity. John preferred to pretend that everything was fine—something in her deep black pupils frightened him.

The sorter nodded to her partner in the medical coat, who handed her a bulky metal helmet, which was immediately placed on John's head. Small tentacles with wires attached themselves to his temples. The woman in the purple-brown attire fastened a strap under the interviewee's chin, and John felt his skull fill with unbearable heaviness. If his mind were a dam, the water held back by it was on the verge of breaking through.

And then, after several agonizing seconds, that besieged dam began to give way, and water gushed through the cracks in thin streams. He heard the thoughts of the sorter. The sorters were having a telepathic conversation, John realized, which was why they had spoken so little all this time. Well, where were the questions?

"I think he's not suggestible," the sorter said mentally to her colleague. "Shall we give him 'Chibus'?"

"Let's try implanting the Agent anyway," the sorter replied mysteriously. "Initiate the tendrils. If he hasn't shut down yet, we'll detect it."

John's excitement grew. What other tendrils?

"Extend your arm," John heard in his mind. "Yes, like that, go ahead. Well done."

To that shoulder where he had received the injection, they brought a syringe of peculiar appearance, with a frighteningly thick needle. From the handle of the syringe extended a cord as extraordinarily wide in diameter as the needle, wrapped in red and black fabric. The cord was connected to a silver box with an inconspicuous label that read "Faragonda's Biological." Underneath, there were more large orange letters: "Attention, danger!!! Do not open!"

"What kind of tendrils are they going to inject into me?" John thought anxiously. "And why aren't they asking any questions? They must know what they're doing, and everything is going according to plan. At least, their faces don't show any signs of doubt or difficulty," and he fell silent once again.

As he would later understand, this decision saved his life.

"Initiating the tendrils."

"Yes, initiate."

The needle pierced his shoulder. John barely managed to hold back a cry of pain. Something large entered his muscle and, methodically using thin thread-like limbs, slid up his shoulder. It felt like he was sleeping and having a nightmare, but he still kept himself together. He clenched his teeth, avoiding any facial muscle movement. Something had obviously gone wrong, now for sure. He had not heard anything about these "tendrils" or pain during the sorting procedure, but it couldn't be that he was so unique and the procedure affected him differently while others were unaffected! It meant that books and articles about sorting somehow failed to mention the "tendrils" and the pain. And people didn't talk about it either, and the senior sorter in the group concealed a crucial, perhaps even key, detail.

Thinking became difficult. John was overwhelmed by an animalistic, irrational fear of going insane. He was literally teetering on the edge of madness, holding his consciousness back from plunging into the dense black liquid of uncontrollable panic with sheer willpower.

And the incomprehensible something that entered his body through the needle had already made its way through the muscles of his neck and embedded itself somewhere beneath his jaw. It held his breath for several seconds, sharply accelerated his pulse, and John involuntarily blinked rapidly. Tears welled up in his eyes. A void formed in his mind. Thoughts disintegrated into pieces, and he, like a drowning person, instinctively clung to each fragment, trying to gather himself into a whole. "I am John Riot!" John shouted desperately in his mind. "John! Riot! I wanted to be a farmer! I want to be a farmer! I have a family, a mother, father, grandfather!" Sparks ignited somewhere on the edge of his sanity, attempting to seize the space, to burn it to ashes, but John made a final, titanic effort, and the sparks subsided.

"Well, what?" he heard a new thought from the sorter. "So, is he suggestible or not? I don't understand. I don't see any latent signs of suggestibility, nor the opposite."

"If he weren't a hypnotic, he would be either crying from pain or screaming in horror. Or asking questions," commented the medic.

"And if he were, we would have some evidence of his connection," the woman countered.

John listened to his inner self. He unquestionably felt some influence of the alien element. Somewhere deep in his brain, a suppressed, ugly whisper writhed, and the boy desperately pushed away the shocking suspicion about its origin, vehemently rejecting the seemingly insane but equally absurd explanation for what was happening.

However, John was far from being a fool. He suspected that something was expected of him, so he focused, paying attention to the whisper.

"We serve Faragonda," the whisper said insidiously. The words rustled smoothly. The speech melded into a sticky verbal porridge. "We all serve Her Majesty. Let us bow to Faragonda, show humility, we all serve with faith and truth."

John stood up from the chair, still wearing the helmet, and carefully bowed his head. Not a single emotion showed on his face. He looked up at the sorters and responded to the whisper with tension:

"I serve Faragonda."

"We serve Faragonda."

"We serve Faragonda," John repeated.

And he softly, absurdly smiled at the sorters.

"It seems he's ready," the senior sorter in the group said telepathically. "But I can barely hear his words. Nothing more than feeble attempts to speak, and it seems there's interference on the educated channel."

"He might have some impairment. But overall, the boy has connected, I believe. We should observe him for a while longer."

"Yes, give him a referral to the post-sorting psychologist," the medic interjected. "If anything goes wrong, we can always reassign this citizen to 'Chibus'."

"Yes, correct. Final check?"

"Let's do it."

John felt a new sensation. Where the whisper had been, there was now pressure, gentle but insistent, like a rhythmic knocking on a door. And he, as far as it seemed possible, gave a command and helped the one knocking, pulling the door toward himself.

"You have successfully passed the sorting," a voice in his head, with a tone different from when speaking to her colleague, sounded from the sorter. "You will now be given an envelope. Head to the fourth carriage. Can you hear me?"

"Yes," John thought, trying to shut out all other thoughts and feelings. "I hear you."

The sorter raised an eyebrow. It seemed she was still expecting a response. John nodded slowly, maintaining that same serene, almost servile expression on his face. Yes, servile, that was the right word. That was what was wrong with the boy and the other people emerging from behind the curtain. Submissiveness, detachment, sycophancy!

The sorter clicked her tongue in satisfaction. She took out a fresh red envelope from the packaging, grabbed a pen, and wrote a few words on a small piece of plain white paper. She placed the paper inside the envelope and sealed it shut. She held a container of melted wax over the envelope, let a drop fall, and pressed the wax with a seal.

When John took the envelope in his hands, the wax had not completely solidified yet. It was slightly deformed, still soft, but the impression of the stamp was discernible:

"Successful sorting. To be opened only by a sorting service employee."

Well, then.

Still not fully understanding what was happening, John stepped out from behind the curtain and headed toward the door at the opposite end of the carriage. It felt like a small but cruel war had taken place in his mind, leaving nothing but trenches dug into his convolutions and fields littered with mines that were once his consciousness. A ridiculous, foolish feeling, as if some pranksters had entered your house through the window while you slept and rearranged all the furniture. But John's house was not like other houses. There was a monster under his bed, and it almost managed to devour the jokers—or did it fail? And now they lurked as enemies on different sides of the barricades, waiting for an opportunity to attack.

He shook his head slightly, using the force of his will to interrupt the stream of thoughts. This was neither the place nor the time for reflection. There was something more important, and it was in John's best interest to quickly fulfill the task ahead of him.

John had to make his way through a series of other carriages, now probably empty, towards the front of the train, to the fourth carriage. Many questions hung on the tip of his tongue. He didn't dare ask them to the people behind the curtain. There was no doubt that he had clearly detected something unpleasant in the gaze of the employee, and deep down, he felt that he was risking things far more important than his reputation or the choice between being a farmer or a mechanic. The frenzied pounding of his heart gradually subsided. The whisper in the recesses of his mind resurfaced, but John, frightened and exhausted, forced it to shut up.

And the whisper obeyed. It was cooperative enough if pressed. Maybe even too compliant for whispers of its kind.