by S Y Humphrey
The older woman paused, and she set her cup on its steel tray with finality. “One more mission, and then my work will be complete.”
“Advance Liberty?” Seren asked.
Another pause, as if she perused the words carefully in her mind before speaking. “Yes. To advance liberty.” Her words were slow tonight, and she sat statuesque. Seren had not seen her quite this solemn before. The woman’s gaze drifted across the mountains.
“I hope you feel like this was worth your sacrifice.”
“It will. I believe in you. You come from good stock, and I know you’ll do the right thing. And when you do, that will be true liberty.”
Seren thought about that answer. “Will do the right thing? You don’t think I’m doing what’s right now? Professor, what’s going on? I’ve been around you enough over the years to notice there must be something else you have to say,” Seren observed.
“And I’ve been around you long enough to know you’re not ready to hear it. Just know that you are rare. And you’re too special to acquiesce to simple minds. Never forget that.”
The younger woman laughed. “What does that even mean?”
“You try so hard to be Jernigan’s daughter. To show the world you’re just as good as him. Just as smart. Just as strong.”
Seren sighed, sipping tea from her cup. “Or maybe I was trying to show myself.”
“But what if you’re more?” the professor asked. “You’ve accomplished so much more than him already and you’re only seventeen. What if you’re more than him? Smarter. Greater.”
“With his money,” Seren laughed.
“With your brains,” Professor Michels shot back. “Dare I say it, what you really might fear is that, after you have had a chance to live, and see the world— the real world— you’ll develop your own views, and they may be different from his. And the very prospect terrifies you.”
The muscles inside Seren tightened around her bones. The thought had never crossed her mind. “Dad’s my best friend. He and I are practically the same. My parents are my best friends. We’ve never disagreed on anything. I wouldn’t be the person I am without him.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is only one other person I’ve known in my lifetime whose extraordinary mind matches yours. And it’s not Stephen Jernigan,” the professor said. Her eyes deepened, as if calling up something buried behind them.
Stunned, Seren grew stiff. “Who?”
The professor had never mentioned anything like this before. They’d never had a conversation so cryptic.
“Seren,” a third voice interrupted, and Seren’s personal bodyguard Tiny stepped into the small space between them. “You’ve been out here for a moment. We should get you back inside.”
He glared at the professor in a way that Seren had never seen.
“Just a moment, Tiny. We’re almost finished,” Seren said, waiting for this new sliver of light from Professor Michels’ past she had never shared.
The professor’s eyes squinted, and her lips shoved upward into a smile that her eyes didn’t match. “He’s right. You should go. Maybe down the road, once you’ve grown, discovered a little more.”
“Seren,” Tiny pressed. “Your jet is ready.”
The professor’s jaw hardened, defiantly. “Yes, Seren. Your jet is ready. And your next journey awaits you. I will truly miss you, dear.”
Seren’s mouth fell open. “Miss me? Where are you going?”
Tiny stood between them, and held out his arm to guide Seren away.
“Tiny, what’s happening? I said we’re not fin-”
“On orders from your father. You have urgent business waiting for you at home in Denver.”
Perplexed now, she felt a mixture of helplessness and anger. Seren got up to hug Professor Michels. However, a group of Guardians had quietly emerged, and surrounded the professor. Tiny stood so close to Seren that she could not see around him.
“Tiny, tell me what’s going on here. I insist. She’s done nothing,” Seren said. She heard her voice rising. Most of the time, she willingly followed Tiny’s commands, as he maneuvered to protect her from fans and Twos who disagreed with her parents’ policies. But this sudden rush against a woman she adored, and with whom she had spent a quarter of her life, had crossed a line.
“No goodbyes, dear,” the woman replied. Seren could no longer see her, but could only hear her voice now. “You are my final mission. And one of my greatest.”
“What? Professor, what do you mean? Just tell me. I’ll try to handle—”
Seren heard shuffling, as if a body had slumped. Instinctively, she tried to push Tiny aside to reach Professor Michels, but the six-foot, five-inch man would not budge.
“Tell me what’s going on,” she hissed, glaring up at him.
“Your father wants to be the one to tell you. Sorry, Seren, but it’s not my place.”
She’d only seen the Guardians sedate an arrestee once, after the hostage situation years before. But she remembered how it sounded to hear a person falling. Tiny led her away from the student union. They walked fast in the night, heading toward the landing tarmac. When she managed to look behind her, no trace of the famous astronaut remained.
Instead she saw Trane’s unmistakably tall figure standing just inside the door of the student union, against the backdrop of carefree, partying students. Trane! In the day’s chaos, she’d forgotten to follow up with him. She would make him her first item of business as soon as she returned. From the door of her father’s high-speed aeroplane, Seren raised her hand. Trane did not.
She thought to run back to him right then. Maybe he had needed to tell her of the professor’s arrest. Seren knew the two of them were close as well. Or maybe yet, should she have called Guardians to go search him and his room, to make sure some plot wasn’t unfolding? The conflict tortured her— trust her Two teammate, or enforce strict security reporting? .
“Tiny,” she called. Better safe than sorry, she figured. “Trane said he had something to tell me. Maybe you should check him out and make sure things are alright.”
She felt awful to report it. But what if she didn’t, and wound up regretting it? Loyalty to her parents took priority. Loyalty to Tier One. No matter the cost. To perfect our strength is to advance our liberty.
“I already have. We’ve got him under watch,” the large black man replied, settling into one of the back seats.
Confused and upset now, she turned to seek him out again, but now Trane also had disappeared.
In marched Agnethe and Dax as Maura corralled them.
“Dude, what’s going on?” Dax said, bursting in. “You just disappeared in there. You had the greatest day ever, and then nobody could find you.”
“It’s that reporter thing,” Agnethe said, following him inside. “I think it shook her up.”
Seren told them what had just happened.
“Oh, wow! You’ve had a day. In other news, I just got a couple phone numbers in there, for anybody who cares about my quest to marry somebody richer than my father so I can get away from my mother.”
“Agnethe, seriously?” Seren replied with dry anger.
“Look, you’re my bestie and I love you, but you have got to start acting like your Tier. Your presentation today did what you wanted it to — established Seren as a badass in her own right. You can do whatever you want now. Lighten up. So what if you’ve got a stupid mark? You’re rich. Get it taken off or covered up,” Agnethe chastised.
Dax clapped. “I second that. All of it.”
Agnethe continued, while ordering up snacks, “Your professor getting arrested is sad, sure. But there must be a good reason. She seems super smart and all, but she always struck me as having another side to her. Not totally invested in the cause.”
“That’s not true. She’s more committed to the spaceship than anybody. There with me so many nights when—”
“I’m not talking about
the spaceship. I mean Tier One. Perfect Society. Like, when I fly down here sometimes, I rarely ever see her at any loyalty concerts or rallies. And the two times I’ve seen her around your father, they barely spoke. She doesn’t kiss his ass, the way the other professors do. It was just… weird in that way you can’t put your finger on.”
“I agree.” Dax chewed on licorice and sat back in one of the leather seats. “This is totally like one of my fave thriller movies, where the culprit is the one you trust most. I’m willing to bet you she betrayed you to that reporter.”
“Dax!” Seren cried. “Take it back. She would never. She’s a woman of integrity.”
“Un-unh, nope,” he shot back. “Just think. How would that reporter have known something so intimate about you? That you have a mark on your freaking right thigh? Unless they had gotten that information from someone close enough, who cared enough to have really paid attention. Has she ever seen you… you know… naked?”
Seren thought. Of course, many women in the space program had been naked in the changing rooms. They’d spent numerous long days and nights together, sometimes after coming to the Dome from workouts, and then showering. But she didn’t want to talk about her body anymore, especially when she still did not know what was on it.
“Your dad is probably cleaning house. Anybody not fully invested in Perfect Society has to go. We don’t need fakes and pretenders lurking among us at such a critical time,” Agnethe declared. “Don’t worry. She’ll find a school in the Fottom and teach there.”
Seren quieted down, deciding not to share the professor’s final words. You were my final mission.
She didn’t know at whom to direct her feelings of betrayal. At the professor— whatever she’d done— or at her parents for not coming to her. Medicine Bow was to be her turf, where she could have free reign and work for her own identity. She would deal with her crews, be the captain of her own space ship, and engage with the professors and other Tier One leaders as she saw fit. It was the only way she could assert her independence, lead the program, and have people take her seriously. So if someone had a problem with the professor, they should have come to her. At the very least, her parents should have involved her. They had promised. The studious, introverted astronaut had always been happy to leave security details to the strong people surrounding her, so she could just work. But these last few hours of helplessness had once again rendered her a lost child.
She would figure out a way to see her mentor again. That would require serious covert movements, operating without her parents’ knowledge, something she had never done. Without Tiny knowing, and without the electronic chip in her arm sending intel back to her parents.
After flying into the secluded compound built inside the mountains of Denver, Seren said goodbye to Agnethe and Dax.
“Go easy on them, Seren, they just want to protect—” Agnethe’s words were cut off, as the elevator door slammed shut between them.
Quickly hugging the family’s live-in servants, she marched past her parents’ business offices, staff, and the media and conference rooms. Finally, she reached the War Room.
“She survived her first press grilling!”
Rapturous applause greeted her from her parents’ fellow colleagues and staffers in the high-tech control room. Some of the biggest politicians and business people in Tier One, beamed at Seren with smiles right then.
Some of the most important people in the nation, including American President Spence Grogan, and Lieutenant Duke Scarborough, who had always been her father’s tactical and strategic muscle.
Her mother, Mariel Jernigan, came to throw her arms around Seren, and the two of them embraced. “You looked so confident and in command, hon. You knocked it out of the park.”
Even as she thanked her mom, and politely received the pats on the back and handshakes, her eyes sought out one person.
The tall, quite handsome man in his sixties finally stood in front of her. Energetic and broad, appearing more like an action movie hero than the Secretary of War and Weaponry, she wanted to fling her arms around him. She shoved her finger into the chest of her best friend.
“You took my professor,” Seren accused instead, without hugging him.
“Nice to see you too, rocket scientist. Be glad that’s all I did,” he said, handing her a 3Pad. A projection displayed a long chain of emails and calls that popped up against a map, one after another. Criss-crossing different states in the Southern and Eastern parts of the country, primarily remote places located in the Fottom, they turned into dots, which digital lines then mapped together.
“I don’t understand what all that means.”
His finger waved across the 3Pad, enlarging locations in Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Mississippi before he minimized them again. “These are the contacts she’s had linking her back to that reporter, through the use of people in Tiers Two and Five. She fed them information that they gave to that reporter who came after you today.”
“No,” she breathed. “It’s a mistake.”
Tier Five was the criminal tier.
She knew little else about that region, other than it was Tier Five. And that it stretched somewhere along the Gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the deepest parts of the South.
“It’s no mistake. You want to know the information she provided back to that reporter?” Her eyes darted back to his green ones, and she waited in silence. “That our family has a history of skin cancer we’ve always treated you for. We never told you because we never needed to. We always watched it and it never became a problem, so why bother? But they were planning to use this information to discredit you, the program and Perfect Society, with lies that you’re a sick person who belongs in Tier Three. That you shouldn’t be heading up a program in space.”
“But the reporter asked if I belonged in Tier Two with the average working class.”
“Sick people from Three can bump up to Two with a TIE though.”
“Professor’s been in our program helping us for so long.”
“Only so she could feed intel back to her true cohorts. We’ve been tracking her for years, and for a long time, I wasn’t sure if she had crossed a line. She’s been using a false digital identity, and at times she scrambles the chip in her wrist, or even takes it out. So we couldn’t confirm it until today, when that reporter finally used the info.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Dad?” she asked.
“I did, in small ways. I always told you never to get too personal with her. But I didn’t want you to know we didn’t trust her, or you would have been guarded around her, and tipped her off.”
“You used me as bait?”
“I gave you the freedom to run your program. You wouldn’t have had it any other way. So I let you learn from one of the best astronauts in history, while maintaining a wait-and-see position, as every parent does with the crazy things their kids insist on doing,” her father pushed back.
She chuckled, finally falling into his arms, relieved even in her disappointment. Now it all made sense, why neither he nor Tiny said anything. As well as the professor’s stoic demeanor and cryptic conversation that evening. You were my final mission. Seren was simply too busy working and studying to handle misconduct at this level.
“Sorry, Dad.”
“Yah,” he smirked. His arm wrapped around her.
She leaned her tired forehead against his chest and he squeezed her. The familiar smell of his woodsy cologne, from a designer they knew, comforted her. How could she have ever doubted him?
“It’s alright,” he whispered against her hair. “That’s why your old man is the mean guy and you’re the rocket scientist who’ll save us from all this. Who’s rockstar are you?”
“Yours.”
3
American Advancement Day
“Happy… American… Advancement… Day!” Stephen Jernigan yelled. “The sky is the limit!” Her father’s rebellious fist punched into the air.
With that, Thom
as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was no more. Now a relic, replaced with the new, twenty-first century Declaration of American Advancement.
The moment concluded nearly ten years of her parents flying back and forth from Denver to Washington, D.C. They’d fought off congressional and state leaders in lawsuit challenges and statewide referendum elections across the nation, long weekends of drafting and research, numerous debates, and media wars. It had been as if they were in campaign mode that entire time, until Tier One voters in enough states finally passed it.
Now, champagne soared fifteen feet into the air, before it cascaded down into the pool in the center of the new, underground Library of Congress. Seren posed for photos in a metal and mesh gown Agnethe had designed. It was stitched together with thousands of metal pieces in which she squirmed, trying to get comfortable. She had even let the artists stick a metal appliqué mask around her forehead to make her look like some futuristic goddess. The different look had sent her boyfriend Lyndon into humorous seizures.
You represent the future of this great nation, the North Star. Look like it, her mother had said. Stupid couldn’t begin to describe how she really felt. Finally, Seren and her father got a few moments alone at the top of the third floor balcony. He looked her up and down, once again, before chuckling himself.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Seren laughed with him. “The North Star. Can’t you tell?”
The two of them looked down at the people below. Seren caught a glimpse of a few Tier One classmates, who peered at her and waved. She smiled and waved back.
“I’m really proud of you for staying strong yesterday, and not caving when that reporter caught you off guard,” he said.
“That’s what you all prepared me for,” Seren said with a shrug.
