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campus. It recruited directly from the College Students, but the Operators were a group apart, living and working away from the Student body.
    When Service had been set up globally, almost two centuries before, it quickly became clear that there were no benefits to Operators fraternising with Students or Civilians; it was not only pointless, but also counter-productive. Even entry-level Operators could not talk about Service, and they certainly couldn’t bend the rules for anyone, and that was what most Students and Civilians would want from them.
    Selection for Service worked in much the same way as any selection process. They were Drafted as Students to the School, but their family groups tended to be made up entirely of future Operators. They were, generally, the most private people, with the lowest natural adrenalin and cortisol levels, and the highest boredom thresholds. Most were solitary in their habits, but when they did form bonds it was invariably with others like them, so there was very little hardship in being segregated.
    Incoming Students never knew what they were being Drafted for, but all assumed that they were being groomed as Assistants and Companions, and that the remainder were wastage, fed back into the system, as Seniors, or moved on.
    The system had endured for two centuries, and the same pattern was employed in each of the 987 Colleges throughout the World. There had been a 1,000 Colleges originally, but one had famously failed, several had amalgamated, and others had become redundant. Service Central believed that survival depended on a little over half of the Colleges having an Active in residence at any given time. There were currently 742 Actives in residence with close to three hundred more in their teens.
    The lifespan of an Active could not be pre-determined, but genetic combinations were researched constantly, and potential Actives were being discovered at increasingly early ages. Breeding programs for selectable children had proven unpopular, but blood-testing all pregnant women had led to early detection of all group types. Balance did not need to be imposed. Initially, parents were told their likelihood of producing selectable offspring, and this had led to a certain pride in the status of their children, and a strong desire to provide balance. More children were being born selectable, and raised balanced than ever before, but the natural incidence of Actives seemed to be static.
     
     
    N AMED O PERATOR S TRAZINSKY wove his way across the Service floor, between equipment racks, heading for the Operator’s raised hands. The Service Floor was circular, the centre taken up with hardware, equipment racks for peripherals, and Techs, assessing and making repairs and replacements. The Service screens faced into the space, set eight feet apart, in an arc covering 270 degrees of the room. Operators did not often speak to each other, and could only see the screen in front of them: one Operator, one screen.
    Their job was to calibrate the system, check for anomalies, and send tones. One of the nine Workstations on this Service Floor monitored the resident Active. The other eight monitored, variously, four Masters, two Companions, one Assistant, and one neutral control from the Seniors. Only data for the Active was relevant, but part of the learning curve when the system was first run involved the Operators’ stress levels. Originally, Operators that had known they were working with Actives had high stress levels, despite their natural dispositions, so the system was set up to include non-Actives. As a consequence, Operators weren’t kept idle for long periods of time, but could work regular hours, rather than waiting in the wings for their big moment. It also meant that Operators lived in larger communities, rather than in twos and threes, which also improved mental health.
    With nips, and tucks over the two centuries since its inception, Service ran fairly smoothly across the globe. There were