by Kyle Andrews
Marti grew coy and turned away from Geo as though she were overstepping her position in the hospital. She wanted him to pursue her.
“You said that he was your boyfriend,” Geo said as Marti walked back to the tablet that she'd left on the other side of the room.
“I did.”
“Are you serious?”
Marti shrugged.
“Are you in love?”
“Love?” she smiled. “Love is for high school kids who don't know how the world really works. He suits me.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
The question caused Marti to hesitate before answering. She hated the fact that she hesitated before answering him, because it wasn't part of her act.
“Is this the part where you sweep me off my feet?” Marti asked him.
Geo shrugged a maybe.
Marti gave him another flash of that coy smile and said, “I don't love. Never have, never will.”
Geo grew quiet for a moment and looked down at a bandage on his arm before saying, “Me neither.”
“I should go. I have other patients.”
“You'll come back though, right?”
“Yes,” Marti nodded and Geo seemed to grow a little bit hopeful. She then held up the tablet and said, “It's my job.”
She gave him a quick wave goodbye as she walked toward the door, which he returned in kind.
As she closed the door behind her, Marti felt an avenue of opportunity opening before her. Geo might have been a player who flirted with all of the girls, but she was something of a player herself. If this were his game, she was more than happy to go along with it. After all, the Governor's son had to be worth something to Freedom.
17
Justin woke up on a gurney in a dark room, no longer wearing his HAND uniform. He was now wearing a hospital gown. At first, he had no idea why he was there or what had happened, but the day's events finally started to come back to him. He remembered the football game and the scared little girl. He remembered the violence and saving one of the VIPs, and then there was nothing.
His head was pounding. As he sat up, it pounded even harder, but that didn't stop Justin. He sat on the gurney and looked around the room. It wasn't a normal hospital room. There was a large machine in there with him, and one of the walls had a window that looked into an empty control room. Obviously, he had been sent for some sort of scan. He didn't know whether it had been taken already or not, and there was nobody around to tell him.
As he tried to move off of the gurney, a sharp pain shot through Justin's ribs. When he moved his hand over the ribs, a dull pain came over his shoulder. He could feel injuries on his face, but he couldn't see how bad the damage was.
He slowly moved his bare feet to the cold ground and stood up. He moved toward the window on that one wall, watching his own reflection and trying to get a handle on how badly injured he was. To his surprise, his face wasn't completely bruised and swollen. He had minor cuts, mostly to the left side of his face. He had one larger cut, with a nasty bruise on the right side, above his eyebrow. His bottom lip was slightly swollen as well.
He slid the hospital gown off of his left shoulder and saw a large and ugly bruise. He would have stripped entirely to assess the rest of the damage, but he didn't feel like putting on a show for anyone who happened to walk into the room. He would just assume that there were enough bruises to keep him in pain for a little while. Maybe a cracked rib or two. He could breathe easily enough without the pain stopping him, so he hoped that the injuries weren't bad enough to keep him out of the game for too long.
As he was pulling the gown back up, the door to that inner office opened and a short man with a mustache walked through it. The man jumped when he saw Justin standing there, looking at him.
“Whoa!” the man yelled, nearly falling over. “You're awake.”
“How long have I been here?” Justin asked.
“A while. We finished your scans and I sent them downstairs. I was just waiting for an orderly to come and take you back to your room.”
“Anything I need to be concerned about? On the scan?”
“Your doctor will have to look it over. I can't really—”
“I'm sure that my doctor will tell me everything, but you probably know these things well enough to get the gist. Anything I need to worry about?”
The man hesitated.
“I won't tell anyone that you told me. I just want to know,” Justin pushed.
The man hesitated for another moment, but finally said, “Your head is fine. No swelling. No bleeding. The ribs will need some TLC. For a few weeks, most likely. No breaks, but a nasty bruise. No internal bleeding. No broken limbs.”
“Thanks.”
The door to the scan room opened and Justin turned to see an orderly walk in.
Ignoring the orderly, Justin turned to the other man and asked, “My uniform?”
“They probably cut it off. Sorry.”
Justin couldn't suppress a sigh, which hurt his ribs a little. He didn't enjoy the idea of walking around in a hospital gown.
“You should get back on the gurney. I'll take you downstairs,” the orderly told him.
Justin really didn't want to go and sit in a hospital room, but he couldn't think of any other options at the moment either. He walked back to the gurney and carefully laid down.
The hallway was much brighter than the scan room. The light hurt Justin's eyes, but he tried his best to keep them open, because he wanted to see what was going on around him.
There were other HAND officers in the hallway, waiting to be scanned. Justin passed by a VIP or two as well, but he didn't recognize them.
“Have they said anything about what happened at the stadium?” Justin asked the orderly.
“You don't know?” the orderly replied.
“It wasn't my job to know. It was just my job to take care of the crowd.”
Justin knew the basics of what had happened. He knew that the girl messed up the pledge. Shots were fired. The crowd rebelled. The question was, how much of that story had made it out of the stadium? How much did the general public know?
“Some sort of power surge, I think” the orderly told him. “The stadium went dark and the crowd didn't like it. At least, that's the rumor that's going around the halls here.”
Justin nodded, as though he accepted that answer. He didn't talk to the orderly for the rest of the trip to his hospital room.
The room he was rolled into wasn't one of the fancy private rooms. There were six beds lining the walls, and an injured HAND officer in each of those beds. There wasn't so much as a curtain for privacy between them.
Justin wasn't going to complain about the room. After all, it was better than being in one of the normal hospitals in the city. Even without privacy, Justin would still have access to technology and medication that most citizens would never even know existed.
Most of his roommates were sleeping when Justin was wheeled into the room. Each of them had bandages on different parts of their body. One of them had their leg in a cast, and another had both arms in them. One of the officers had bandages over his eyes, but even the parts of his face that Justin could see were bright red.
Justin only recognized two of the men in his room. One of them was named Braiden, and he seemed relatively well off, compared to some of the others. The other familiar face was an officer that Justin didn't know by name, but he'd seen the man around the city several times.
Justin might have known more of the officers if he had socialized with them more often, but he wasn't much for socializing. Every once in a while, he would force himself to sit down for beers with some of the guys, just so he would appear to be one of them. He would listen to their stories about taking down civilians and laughing about the slaughter of Freedom members and he would play along, while silently hating every moment of it.
Maybe his fellow officers would have given him a hard time for isolating himself so often, but they couldn't argue with the fac
t that Justin was one of the best they had. He could take down most of the other officers in hand-to-hand combat if he had to. He was a better shot than most of them. He had an impressive list of arrests, which was a fact that they enjoyed more than he did.
They laughed and drank beer in celebration of those arrests, while Justin usually just sat in his bathroom at home, with the shower running, so that he couldn't hear anything beyond that one room. While his coworkers cheered, he wondered how far down the road to Hell he was. Those arrests weren't justified.
Usually, Marti would try to comfort him and tell him that he was giving Freedom vital information. They had been able to do more good during his time in HAND than they had for decades prior, all because of him. Lives were saved, but Justin couldn't make the scales in his head balance out. All he saw was the bad that he was doing on a daily basis.
How did he let Aaron talk him into this? How had he never put an end to it? Things had to change. Justin had gotten into this situation believing that he would be serving his people and doing something good, but with each passing year it seemed more and more like he was just one of the bad guys.
Justin's bed was at the far end of the room, near a window. From it, he could see the city. It looked so peaceful and quiet. If it weren't for the dozen or two surveillance drones flying around the buildings, Justin could have almost imagined that city as being beautiful.
Of course, any beauty that it possessed came from the old buildings, constructed long before the world had fallen apart. Nothing built in the past seventy years had any beauty. Once the authorities started taking more and more control, anyone who could afford to leave the country did. Artists could create what they wanted elsewhere in the world. Scientists could go on inventing and making money without oppressive government officials breathing down their necks.
Even the drones that flew over the city were decades old. The private corporations which created those drones for the government had lost their motivation once the government took them over. Generations of great minds were lost, because those minds had either been assigned to jobs that didn't feed their imagination, or they had simply lacked the motivation to create anything brilliant, since whatever they created would automatically become the property of the government.
Most people lived in a world that was frozen in time. Nothing ever changed and the cycle never ended.
Justin lived one level above them. He had technology that they didn't. He had better food. Better living conditions. Yet everything that he had was but a fraction of what the world had to offer. He was only allowed to possess what the authorities approved of.
And of course, the authorities could have whatever they wanted. The elite class could pay for technology from other countries. They could visit other countries. They could even live in other countries if they chose to.
Looking out the window was making Justin bitter. His head still hurt and he wasn't in control of his thoughts. It was dangerous.
“I've seen worse,” Sim said, approaching Justin's bed and looking him over. “I mean, pretty was never your thing to begin with, so there's no great loss, right?”
Justin looked over at Sim and glared at him. He wasn't in the mood for making jokes, even with the one HAND officer he'd ever met who seemed to have a hint of a soul.
Why Sim wasn't like the rest, Justin had no idea. All he knew was that Sim was a breath of fresh air in Justin's otherwise repulsive life. Still, Justin never allowed himself to forget that Sim was the enemy. He wasn't like Justin, simply pretending to be evil. Sim did this for the same reasons as anyone else. He oppressed the people because he'd been ordered to do so.
Okay, so maybe he was like Justin, just with a different goal in mind and different bosses to answer to.
“Did everyone make it out?” Justin asked Sim, pretending to care about his fellow officers.
“Mostly. Sherman and Dale haven't checked in yet. They're either dead or AWOL.”
“Sherman's probably dead. Dale could go either way.”
Sim smiled at Justin's joke. Justin wasn't suggesting that Dale was Freedom. He was saying that Dale was a coward who always hung back, behind other officers. Justin and Sim always suspected that he might run off if he were ever in any real danger.
“I saw Marti downstairs,” Sim told Justin, sounding a bit more serious. “She knows you're alive. She'll be up when she gets off of work.”
“She doesn't have to.”
“She's your girlfriend.”
“I don't think that I'm up for girlfriend visits at the moment.”
Faking a relationship was always tricky. Justin's instinct was to protect the ones he cared about. To him, a relationship would be about love and closeness, but when he pretended to be in a relationship for the sake of his cover, he had to think like a normal citizen. There was no family. There was no love. Self came before all, except for the authorities. It was the job of the authorities to protect the people and care about them.
The supplements that the authorities fed to the people helped the citizens to keep properly detached. Even Justin was back on the supplements. He had no choice. Yet he remembered what it was like to feel the full force of his emotions. He remembered what it was like to eat a hamburger while laughing with someone that he cared about.
The relationship with Marti was the hardest part for him to fake, believe it or not. He had to pretend to want her, but without caring for her in any meaningful way. It was something completely unnatural for Justin.
Sim walked to the window and looked outside. He was silent for a moment, watching the drones fly around buildings like flies around a carcass.
“Do you love her?” Sim finally asked Justin.
Justin thought carefully about his answer before asking, “What is love?”
Sim turned back to Justin and smiled. He looked deep in thought. This was what made Sim different than the others. There was something about him that Justin didn't understand. All of the others were just robots, easy to understand. Sim was more than the sum of his programming.
Sim sat on the edge of Justin's bed and said, “I think we should burst into song.”
“Probably won't do that.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Only a lot.”
“Suck it up. Be a man.”
A woman in a HAND uniform walked into the room, holding a tablet. She was too small to be a normal officer. More likely, she was one of the office workers. She approached one of the beds on the other side of the room. Justin and Sim both watched her as she spoke to one of the other wounded officers and took notes when he answered.
“Debriefing?” Justin asked.
“Looks like. I already reported in. I have a bunch of paperwork to do in the morning.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Not all of us can have the luxury of getting the crap beaten out of us.”
“That's what makes me better than you.”
“You keep believing that,” Sim grinned. Then he turned back to the woman who was interviewing officers and asked, “Think she's single?”
Justin found the comment funny for some reason. Maybe he would have laughed at the joke if he weren't living in a haze of supplements and pain medication.
18
Collin's mind was racing with possibilities. Simon had explained the situation to him a couple of times, and shown him some very complex-looking computer code that made absolutely no sense to Collin at all.
From what he understood, the program that Dor had installed on the TV station's computer gave him access to all of the station's vital systems. Freedom could now access those computers and upload videos of their own. They could broadcast to the entire city. They could even cut off the signal entirely, if they wanted to shut down KCTY.
“But for how long?” Collin asked. “How long will we be able to do this before they pull the plug?”
Simon nodded and said, “Maybe not long. I can try to lock them out of the system, but if they just cut power to the antenna, th
ere's not much I can do.”
“But we still have access to their satellite, right?” Aaron asked.
Aaron and Mig were hovering around Simon's computer. Collin and Dor were hanging back, near a TV that was hanging on one of the walls. Tracy was leaning on the wall by the closed door, while pretty much everyone else in the Campus was waiting outside, to see what would come of this latest development.
“We do have satellite access. And I can see what they're seeing without them even knowing that I'm in there. We'll get the raw feeds that the station gets. Even their weekly briefing from the President's office.”
“Can we send anything back through the satellite?” Mig asked.
“Like what?” Simon asked.
“A broadcast? Can we reach people in other cities? Other states? Can we communicate with the rest of the world?”
Simon shook his head and said, “We could probably send a file back through, even if they cut power to the station, but it would only get as far as the National Press Authority. And if they spotted it, we'd probably be booted from the system entirely.”
“So, it's just local. That's still more than we've ever had before,” Tracy cut in.
“Absolutely,” Collin agreed.
Dor nodded and said,“We should put together an address to the city. A video explaining who we are and what we are. People won't have a choice but to see it if they're on that channel. Even the ones who wouldn't go near the paper normally. We can talk to them.”
Collin shook his head and said, “I don't want to just repeat myself.”
“The stadium footage?” Aaron asked. “We show them what the authorities wouldn't.”
“We could,” Collin nodded, still thinking.
This was happening very quickly and there were too many people trying to offer suggestions. He couldn't get his mind to clear so that he could think of the best way to go about talking to the people.
Simon pulled up the video again, and played it on the TV that Collin and Dor were standing near. Everyone once again watched the little girl mess up her pledge and the chaos that ensued.
