by Schow, Ryan
“We saw what you did,” Ms. Yeung said, vague, but suspicious.
“I…uh…”
And this is where it all ends, he thought.
I’m dead.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” she asked, that awkward smile back on her severely angular face.
He shook his head in response. Words could be used against you, but gestures were a bit more obscure.
“You found proof that Harper Whitaker was part of the Resistance. You found us a traitor. You did good.”
I did good?
With the praise—which seemed sincere—Logan stood a little taller, then he cleared his throat and said, “I wasn’t sure, which is why I didn’t come to you. I didn’t want to accuse an innocent woman of treason. Plus, I understand the value of your time and your position, Ms. Yeung. I didn’t want to come to you unless I was sure.”
“While you were out, we accessed her offline activity and found compelling evidence that she is in the Resistance,” she said, patting his head. “You’re a good boy.”
Psychologically disturbed by being treated like a dog, he said, “What happened to Harper? Did you find her?”
She flipped a hand and said, “She’s gone. We’re looking for her.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?” he asked, knowing exactly where she was. The treasonous act of helping her escape nearly got him killed, but in the process, he found himself and his commitment to freedom from this oppression.
“Other people will find her,” Ms. Yeung said, waving a hand like it was nothing to fret over. “But if there’s one resistor, there’s more. We need to find them, Logan. Route them out. You need to find them.” She said this while stabbing his chest with a finger, her face stern, completely devoid of warmth.
“Do you want to show me to my closet, get me my credentials?” he asked.
Security Engineers like himself didn’t work at cubicles, they worked in dark closets the size of port-o-potties watching all the actual programmers working in live time. A Security Engineer was just another name for a snitch. The way it worked in the huge tech firm was on one monitor, they had the coder’s screen mirrored, but on the other they had the coder’s face as seen through the cameras mounted inside the monitor. Everyone was being recorded, even though they were told otherwise. He had been a monitor tasked with a subject—in this case, Harper Whitaker—but now that he’d outed Harper, and now that his friend Han was dead, it was his job to watch those monitoring the software engineers. He was top tier.
Well, just below Ms. Yeung.
To his statement about showing him his new office, the Cantonese nightmare said, “You know where his office is, you go yourself.”
“What about my credentials?”
“They are already in place and your assignment is on your desk.”
“Thank you, Ms. Yeung.”
Before leaving, she studied him a moment, then licked her finger and swiped it across his face. The pad came back with blood on it. She studied it, sniffed it, then put the finger in his face.
“Who’s blood is this?” she asked.
“Someone threw a Molotov Cocktail at a troop transport. It’s a bloodbath out there. I was close to some people who got shot.”
She shook her head and said, “Stupid Gweilos.”
Chapter Four
The road outside, where the blast that killed Han originated from, was still littered with the rubble of the incident. Crews had cleared the roadways of most of the debris, if you consider shoveling a bunch of street trash up against a seamstress shop, a barber shop and a small grocery store a proper clearing.
This was just disrespect. What they did with the dead bodies, well now, that was the message. It was a message meant for the Americans and the Resistance alike.
The Chicoms piled the corpses around the corner where they would degrade and draw flies. It was one thing to see a stack of dead strangers. It was another thing entirely when you had friends or family in that heap.
Logan was going after work to see if he could find Han. He wasn’t sure what he’d do with his friend, but he didn’t want him sitting in a rotting meat stack like something forgotten, something that never mattered in the first place.
According to unspoken and unsanctioned customs, the Chicoms liked to wait at least a week before body burns or body disposal. They wanted to make sure everyone saw what dissidents got for standing up for themselves. Seeing the lifeless faces, those slack jaws, the bloody limbs draped over each other, it was a horrifying sight to behold, certainly a lasting memory they associated with open rebellion.
Shoving the thought out of his mind, he went to Han’s “office” and sat down behind his desk. He hated that he was promoted this way. He hated that he could still see his dead friend in his mind, and that now he was sitting at his desk. His attention was drawn to a picture on the desk, a photograph of Han when he was a few years younger and new to America. Logan was surprised Ms. Yeung or the security staff hadn’t confiscated it.
The thing about the security closets was, the darkness was a double edged sword. On one hand you could hide from the world as it was, or hide things, but on the another hand, it really dulled your senses, made your job boring.
He turned on his cell phone’s flashlight feature, studied the picture. Han had been a typical looking man for both his Chinese race and his gender. That was to say, there was nothing outwardly special or unique about his appearance. Now, to look at this picture of him, one had to wonder what dreams he might have been chasing. To others, they might assume he was in America chasing the American Dream. He wasn’t. Han once told Logan he didn’t make the harrowing journey across the Pacific Ocean by choice. He’d fled here from Hong Kong. There the Chicoms were slaughtering hundreds of thousands of resistors. It became too dangerous. His parents grabbed him and together they fled the Chinese occupied city, running for their lives.
That’s why having that picture on his desk made no sense for either Han or the internal Chicom security force.
Without any more dillydallying, he got to work on his assignments. Every so often, however, he would turn his attention to the picture. There was something about the photo now glowing in the dual monitors’ bright light that bothered him.
He finally laid it face-down.
When it was eleven-thirty, the time Ming Yeung ate one of many of her famously disgusting lunches, he studied Han’s picture once more.
He only hoped the overhead cameras watching him weren’t being monitored. That was a role Ms. Yeung took on, or so Han had said. He said, “She watches me all day long, and others, but not during lunch. During lunch, I know for sure she shuts her monitor down.”
Logan listened for the cameras to either zoom in or adjust focus as he looked at the picture. He heard no such sounds. He didn’t bother looking behind him either, for he knew just where they were—in the upper corners of the room, where the wall met the ceiling.
Same as his old office.
Using inside sources to keep tabs on the Cantonese Nightmare, Logan was informed that Ms. Yeung ordered take-out every day. Everyone knew the food was disgusting, but what he appreciated about the woman was that she was predictable, both in her schedule and her palate.
Han told him that this was when he could loop his own server activity (including the camera built into his monitor) and do whatever he wanted. They were taking a big chance that Ms. Yeung wasn’t watching through the cameras, but then again, Logan walked a pretty straight line when it came to that sort of thing, so it was seldom that he took advantage of the opportunity.
As he looked at the picture frame on the desk, he thought of other things. Namely the men he killed, the soldiers who shot so many people, how he could make a difference out there, rather than in here. He was new to this world of mutineers and revolutionists, though. Not yet a hardened warrior like some of the people he’d recently met. Harper Whitaker was part of the Resistance. The woman he lived with, Skylar Madigan, was in the Resistance. Now he was i
n the Resistance. But what did that mean? He couldn’t just go out and indiscriminately start executing Chicoms, could he?
It wasn’t a bad idea, but then he’d be just like the Molotov Cocktail guy—rotting in some gutter, the sacrifice forgotten, not even a martyr to the cause.
This, however, is where his American brain interfered. He wasn’t a mass murderer. You can’t just kill everyone. On a deeper level, no matter the wars of men, all life had value, even if it had strayed from the just and moral path. Then again, that thought didn’t mean squat when you saw people getting slaughtered. And he had. He’d seen plenty of it lately.
To beat the enemy, he let himself think, you have to become the enemy. That’s what was rolling around in his mind, that thought. That and, how do you go from a regular guy, a software engineer-turned-snitch for the enemy, into the one to bring the entire power structure down?
He couldn’t even fathom such a thing. He wasn’t a leader, or even an organizer. He could fight now, but only enough to get by. Had he not snuck up on those men in the midst of chaos—them weak from attack, him with a proverbial sucker punch—they would have killed him. He would have been dead.
But he wasn’t.
I’m not.
Examining the frame on Han’s picture, he saw the cardboard backing had been opened recently. It was the loose fitting between the tiny metal arms screwed into the frame. He slid these floating tabs out, removed the cardboard and caught the slip of paper as it fell out.
His breath caught.
He listened for the zooming of the camera overhead, but didn’t hear anything. Drawing a deep breath, he told himself his privacy was still intact. He hadn’t been found out yet. That’s when he unfolded the slip of paper and located the secure email address to one of the most infamous hackers of all time, a hacker simply known as Tristan.
Tristan was the Cheshire Cat of the underground Resistance and a man famous for his eccentricities. The most famous, of course, was his refusal to eat whole bananas. He viewed any fruit shaped like a penis to misrepresent his sexuality, therefore, he would never eat dick-shaped fruit unless it was cut first. So when Logan saw the email address as [email protected], it made perfect sense.
Han, he’d recently learned, was tied to the Resistance as well.
Regardless of the hacker’s many peculiarities, dick-shaped fruit not withstanding, Tristan was a genius, a former car salesman, former gamer and a player with extreme mommy issues from what Logan had heard. Everything was third and fourth hand, though. It could be that all of it was true. Or none of it. Either way, he now had a direct point of contact.
He wasn’t sure if he’d need to email the hacker, but having an address made him feel that much better about life in general.
He slipped the paper into his pocket then shut everything down for lunch. A knock on his door startled him. He opened the door slowly, the bright lights hitting his eyes like hellfire. One of the girls was holding a Styrofoam container of take out.
“We’re not your delivery service,” she said with a frown.
“I’ll take you off the payroll then,” he said sarcastically as he took it from her.
Still frowning, she asked, “What really happened to Han?”
“Flying brick took off half his head.”
Her eyes started to well and then his eyes started to well and that’s when a sob jumped in her throat and she turned and walked away.
Get it together, he told himself as his own emotions began to bleed to the surface.
Chapter Five
Han wasn’t the first person he cared about who had died. Half of Logan’s family was dead. He lost friends, cousins, co-workers, women he liked, women he would have dated even if they wouldn’t have dated him at the time.
He told himself to stop thinking about Han, about those he lost. There was his food for starters. Who ordered it for him? Probably Skylar. She had a habit of sending him takeout when she needed to get him a message. He grabbed the food and headed for the break room. It was too packed. As in not one single table was free. He wasn’t excited about eating in the dark, but if he had to, he’d rather eat in his old office where there were no traces of Han around to depress him.
Thinking he couldn’t afford to be off his game, he shook his head and instead forced his attention back on the Resistance. He was new, but he didn’t exactly know what that meant, or who—other than Harper—was in charge. What did they really want from him? It was all too much. Maybe he would start his own Resistance. He killed those five soldiers earlier today. And he killed nine in the two days before that. It was an impressive body count for a newbie, if that was his thing. But it wasn’t. Or was it? Maybe it should be. Why? Because he did that. Not the Resistance. While they were playing war in underground and abandoned buildings, he was out on the front lines using what he learned to put their enemies into the ground.
When it came to Harper Whitaker, the unofficial leader of the Resistance, or so it seemed (even that was unclear), he’d been the one to take care of her. No one else. Him. And Skylar Madigan, his roommate, the woman he wanted to be in love with? She was doing her part, but she was also not his. She would never be his. Skylar was a daughter to the Resistance, a fighter before a lover, too hardcore to let herself become only a woman in love with a man looking forward to a future. He understood that and he was grateful for her, but she would be dead soon. They’d all be dead soon. Such were the ways of life in the Resistance.
This was what he had chosen. No, this was what he was choosing.
When he got to the bottom of his food, he saw the note wrapped in plastic. He was right that the emergency take-out was from Skylar.
Using his cell phone flashlight feature, he read the note. It said, “Peel back the nine, waste no time.”
“What the hell?” he mumbled.
At the end of the day, when he was leaving, Ming Yeung stopped him and said, “Why did you return to your old office?”
He thought the cameras had been shut down; apparently they were active.
“Han and I were friends,” he told the woman.
“That’s not your office anymore, so it is off limits. You want your pay docked?”
“No, Ms. Yeung.”
She frowned, looking at him with unblinking eyes and a penetrating stare. “Friends get you killed. Best to have no friends.”
“Do you have friends?” he asked. She scoffed at the comment, waved a hand at him. “Are you at least married?”
He knew she wasn’t.
“Marriage is for masochists,” she said, getting slightly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.
“So you have no one.”
“I don’t need anyone,” she said. “The day is done, time to leave.”
“Who makes you a better person?” he asked, not caring how this conversation was changing her, or if it would set her off.
“The state,” she said, plainly.
“Me, too,” he said, the lie cutting deep into his heart.
“Who else do you have?”
“I had Han.”
She nodded, like she understood. He wondered what kind of horrors she’d seen where she had come from. If half the rumors about mainland China were true, the woman’s head must have been an absolute wreck.
“Well now you have the state,” she said, as if this should be comforting.
He nodded, said good-night, then left, thinking about where he began with this company and where he was now. Working for SocioSphere started out as his dream job. Silicon Valley billionaire, Atticus van Duyn, started this company, but when he, his wife Margaret and their daughter Savannah disappeared, the company grew, even if morally it lost its way under a slew of corrupt comers and goers.
China spent decades creeping into the United States, eventually rising up, seemingly from the morning fog to take over the west coast. America spent decades in decline. Morally, socially, politically and spiritually. One could look back and see where everything went wrong, but he was
n’t one to revel in the past.
He walked downstairs to the lobby, had his belongings searched and had to turn out his pockets (kept his Karambit blade tucked away), then he went outside where there were emergency vehicles and a heightened security force.
He fell into the procession of going home traffic, then after an exhausting walk home, he walked into his grungy, state appointed apartment. Inside, the two bedroom, one bath abode was dark and empty. He didn’t look at the cameras he knew were in the smoke alarms, the TV, the laptop computer, and he didn’t act like anything was out of the ordinary.
Instead, he kicked off his shoes, put his phone on a loop timer—something Han taught him to do—then sat down in the recliner and closed his eyes for just a moment. He fell asleep, but then he jerked awake.
Shooting out of the chair, ripped out of his sleep, he saw the time, ran to his room, changed his clothes and put on a hat.
Where the hell was Skylar?
Chapter Six
It was concerning that Skylar wasn’t home. He grabbed a dummy phone, hurried out of the apartment, then walked downstairs with his head held low against the cameras and other residents. When he was outside, he walked the preplanned route, mindful of the cameras, alert for the Chicoms.
Security was everywhere. They were looking for more people like the Molotov Cocktail guy that morning. It was dangerous to be out.
Then again, it was always dangerous.
People were now being lined up against walls like criminals, searched without due process, pushed around like they were errant dogs rather than humans who once had rights.
Logan was about to turn away when he was spotted by one Chicom solider.
Dammit!
Without choice, he kept going into the gauntlet. When he got there, he was shoved into the side of a wall and patted down.
