The Line Read Online Free PDF

lessons. She went over each line, explaining how the original bill protected the people and kept the government from doing anything too bad. She told Rachel how the government kept adding new amendments and how they finally scrapped the whole thing, replacing it with the New Rights Bill. Vivian always called it the No Rights Bill .
    Now the government could do pretty much what they wanted, and sometimes what they wanted was not so nice. Rachel and Vivian were lucky, because living on The Property, they didn’t have to deal with most of the things that happened in the cities. Things like Identifications, or getting charged with a random tax and not having the creds to pay it. The government stopped collecting random taxes in rural areas when they stopped the road maintenance, but in the cities people were Identified all the time, hauled away for nonpayment or some other unexplained infraction, held until they came up with creds for the fine. If they couldn’t pay, they were sent to a Labor Pool.
    Everyone was in the Identification System, of course; individual genids were recorded at birth, so if someone’s name was flagged in the system and the government wanted to Identify that person, they could, even out in the rural areas. But it probably cost more for Enforcement Officers to come out to places like The Property to claim someone than they could collect in fines. Mostly they didn’t bother.
     
     
    THE GUESTHOUSE WAS small, but it was warm in the winter and the rent was part of Vivian’s salary. There was a tiny front room and an area off to one side of it that served as a kitchen. Vivian and Rachel shared the bedroom, and they had a little garden in the side yard where they raised their own vegetables. Vivian brought some things with her when they came, but not much. There was a woolly crocheted throw for the couch and an old-fashioned reading lamp, almost as old-fashioned as the stuff in Ms. Moore’s house. It had a real glass shade that was the same color as the daffodils that sprouted in the yard every spring. It sat on a little table next to the couch, where they read to each other at night, when Vivian wasn’t too tired. Sometimes Vivian ended up snoozing in front of the streamer. Rachel thought she worked too hard. She wished she could help in more ways than she did, but she wasn’t sure what else she could do.
    Until she started in the greenhouse, the only work Rachel did besides her regular chores was to study for the tests Vivian gave her as a part of her homeschooling. After a brief experience at the Bensen Council School, Vivian decided Rachel would be better off learning what she could teach her at home. Rachel barely remembered attending the Bensen School, only flashes of too many people and lots of other kids and how mean the teacher looked. One of her first homework assignments was to write a paper outlining how the New Rights Bill benefited the citizens of the Unified States. When Vivian saw that she pulled Rachel out of school.
    Vivian tried as hard as she could to get accurate information for Rachel to study, but it was difficult. She used library texts and printouts from streamer sites for lessons, but those were usually scrubbed pretty clean of the truth. She filled in information where she could, and she and Rachel had a lot of discussions about how the materials available were edited to show the government in a positive light.
    “You can’t always believe what you’re told, Rachel,” she would say. “Whenever you watch streamer coverage about some issue, remember who controls the media.”
    Rachel wondered how Vivian thought she could forget, the way she repeated that over and over. Sometimes Rachel would stare straight ahead and in the most robotic voice she could come up with she would chant, “The government controls the media, the government controls the media,” until she couldn’t help but laugh. Most of the time, Vivian laughed too. But she always said, “Remember