The Liberty Box

by C. A. Gray

  “Of course.” I kissed him again. “You be careful too.”

  “I will be.” He grinned at me, chucked me lightly under the chin, and tilted his collar upward against the wind as he descended the steps to the street.

  Chapter 3: Kate

  I looked at the clock after Will left; it was about two in the morning. I knew it was unlikely I’d get any sleep, but I had a few hours before I needed to get up for work. If I didn’t at least sleep a little bit, I knew I’d be useless for the rest of the day.

  I drew the blinds closed in my bedroom and crawled into my queen-sized bed, pulling the down comforter up around my neck. But even though the room was dark and the bed soft and my body felt like it was spent, my eyes refused to close. How could I sleep with something so potentially enormous hanging over me?

  I tried to remember more, but I was so tired.

  Also, if I were completely honest with myself, I didn’t want to remember any more. I was afraid of what I might find out.

  I tossed and turned, but my racing heart counterbalanced the heaviness of my eyelids, rendering sleep impossible. I listened to the whirr of the heater in my apartment, and the humming of the refrigerator.

  Then I rebuked myself.

  I, a former traitor, have been given professional success, all the money I need, a handsome and loving fiancé—all I could ever want, at such a young age! Am I seriously thinking of throwing it all away based on a database entry, and the stories of a traitor who no doubt deserved to die?

  Maybe I couldn’t explain these memories, but it didn’t really matter. They would make sense eventually. I could trust that.

  Couldn’t I?

  I rolled over, closed my eyes, and finally fell asleep.

  ***

  I was ten years old, playing hockey on the street in front of our house with some of the other kids. I was goalie. Larry, who was a year older than me, advanced with the puck. I positioned myself to block him, when suddenly the sky flickered.

  For an instant, the world around me changed. My playmates looked like skeletons. Our beautiful houses became matchstick boxes.

  I froze, first confused and then horrified. It happened so fast that I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen. In that split second, Larry scored.

  “Are you all right, Kate?” Larry asked me presently. “You didn’t even try to stop me.”

  I frowned at him, annoyed. “Did you see that?” I asked, pointing at the sky.

  My brother Charlie sidled up next to me and said with mild reproof, “Don’t be a poor sport, Kate. You missed it, fair and square.”

  “I’m not being a poor sport,” I insisted, heat rising to my face, “Did nobody else see what I just saw? For an instant, everything changed! Everything looked different!”

  Charlie exchanged a look with our team captain that clearly implied my insanity. Then the two of them shuffled off to their starting positions again without responding.

  I had the familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach of emotions roiling, and I threw down my stick.

  “I am not crazy and it’s not my fault I missed that goal! The world changed, I swear it did!” I shouted, running off the field.

  ***

  I woke with a start, breathing hard and drenched in cold sweat. I glanced at the clock: six am.

  Calm down! I ordered myself. It was just a dream, that’s all. Just a dream.

  But it had a funny quality to it—like déjà vu.

  Maybe I’ve had that dream before, I thought.

  But if that was the case… why? Why repeat that particular dream?

  On a sudden impulse, I reached over and turned on the lamp by my bedside, stretching out my arm. I inspected the flesh in the crook of my elbow one more time and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. No scar.

  The vision of Mr. Santiago and the horrible injection was just a nightmare, then.

  I paused, breathed slowly and deeply and tried to calm my racing heart. But a nagging doubt persisted in the back of my mind. I threw the covers off of my lower legs, swung them around to the edge of the bed, and headed for my bathroom, where I flipped on the much brighter lights from the vanity above my mirror. I stretched out my elbow again, and caught my breath.

  There, just beside the faint blue vein, was a tiny white mark, slightly raised.

  I’d never seen it before. Why had I never seen it before?

  My legs started trembling and I dropped to my knees, catching the rest of my weight on my palms. I gasped for air, and started to feel pins and needles in my fingers. My field of vision narrowed, and my heart beat much, much too fast.

  I remembered.

  Chapter 4: Kate

  When the first wave of panic passed, I staggered to my feet and grabbed my net screen. If Will was asleep I might just have to phone him, but I knew he didn’t like that because the phones were even less secure than comms.

  “Can you meet me this am before work?” I wrote. “More to say. Much more.”

  I waited, holding my breath, for all of twenty seconds before he wrote back, “Be at San Javier’s in ten.” San Javier’s was our favorite breakfast nook, halfway between his office and mine.

  “Perfect,” I wrote.

  I saw Will sitting alone at a booth through the window as I approached, nursing a cup of coffee. He caught my eye, but probably because he was worried, he did not smile in greeting. Instead, he tightened his lips. His eyes and mouth both did that when he was nervous, like he was making a great effort to keep himself contained.

  I slid into the booth across from him, and squeezed his hand in greeting.

  “Hey. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “You look pretty terrible,” he observed.

  “I love you too,” I said, trying to sound light. But I felt too scared to pull it off.

  As soon as the waitress poured me a cup of coffee, handed us both menus, and was out of earshot, Will said, “Okay. Out with it.”

  I bit my lip and closed my eyes. “It’s true, Will. All of it.”

  He tilted his head to the side and watched me, waiting for me to go on.

  “It started when I was ten. I started seeing flashes. The world just… changed. I mean, one minute it looked one way, and then suddenly it was all different. Like I was seeing behind a movie set or something.

  “Nobody believed me that time, so I tried to forget about it. But it happened again a few days later. I was in the middle of an arithmetic lesson, trying to concentrate on my homework. I guess because I was paying more attention than usual, I heard these thoughts in my head. Thoughts I didn’t put there.”

  “Thoughts in your head? What do you mean, what kind of thoughts?” Will demanded, lowering his voice.

  “I—I don’t know, it was as if there was white noise in my head before, and I finally tuned in to something that was there all the time. That’s how it felt. The thoughts said stuff like, ‘Our nation is wealthy, we have everything we could ever need,’ and ‘above all, we must be obedient. Our leaders are looking out for our well-being. The government is good.’ That sort of thing.”

  Will’s expression did not change, but I saw his eyes and mouth tighten even more. “Kate, do you know what you’re—”

  “I’m not done,” I blurted. I was afraid that if I stopped talking now, I wouldn’t have the courage to keep going. “I guess I had a panic attack then. The teacher sent me to the nurse’s office, and the nurse asked me what happened—so I told her. I didn’t know any better. She made a call, and that night Mr. Santiago and another man showed up at my house. They told my parents I was being sent to McCormick. They called it a school for ‘gifted children.’ My parents went along with it. I was screaming my head off, but they were totally calm, like they didn’t even hear me. Within twenty minutes, they’d packed up my things and Mr. Santiago dragged me out to the car and took me there. That’s when he gave me the virus: in the car, on the way over. I fought him off, and that’s how I ended up with the scar.”

  I gulped for air and felt the press
ure of Will’s hand squeezing mine so much it hurt. The waitress set our plates in front of us and gave us both coffee and water refills. I waited until she was gone before continuing. I wasn’t a bit hungry.

  “And when you got to McCormick?” Will prodded. I saw the little muscle in his jaw twitch, he was reining himself in so tight.

  “It… wasn’t at all like what I told you last night,” I whispered. “I didn’t see it that way until much later. When I first got there it looked like a prison: gray and boxy and surrounded by a metal fence with barbed wire on top. They kept us busy all day long so we didn’t have time to think about anything else. I was so exhausted, all the time.”

  “You were anemic,” Will observed.

  “And sleep deprived, and working harder than I’d ever worked in my life,” I added.

  He nodded, expressionless. “Perfect for crushing any tendency toward rebellion.”

  “Oh Will!” I whispered, feeling my lungs begin to constrict again.

  “I’m here,” he said, his voice firm and reassuring. He squeezed my hand again. “What about Maggie?”

  I pursed my lips and tried not to cry. This was the hardest part. “She… she was my friend.” I looked out the window too, at the bustling street corner, and finally pulled myself together enough to go on. “She didn’t trust me at first. But she caught me speaking my mind a little too loudly once and pulled me aside. She warned me that I’d be in danger if I kept that up. She said students who were too outspoken or resistant to the brainwashing got sent to something called ‘special projects.’ She didn’t know what it was and neither did I, but she talked about it like it was a death camp or something.”

  “Was it?” Will asked sharply.

  “We never found out. All we knew is the kids who got sent there never came back.”

  Will bit his lip. After a long pause, he glanced at my plate. “Eat your eggs,” he reminded me. “They’re getting cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll need to eat something.”

  I pulled my hand away from him in response to this, annoyed. Will was always telling me what to do. He changed the subject.

  “What did Maggie tell you about why all this was happening, anything?”

  “She tried to,” I said, “but I never really understood until she introduced me to this older boy named Alec. He snuck into our room one night because we’d never have found time or privacy to talk anywhere else. He told me he knew the story because his parents had been rebels, but his dad got caught and the Potentate…” I dropped my voice at this, and tried to suppress the terror that came with the words, “had… both of his parents… executed.” Saying this out loud felt like I was legitimizing them somehow, making them real, when before they were only ideas. I took a deep breath. “The government sent him and his sister to reform schools after that, but they sent her to a different one, called Herring. He said it was because it’s harder to brainwash people if they can stick together and remind each other of the truth.”

  “Makes sense,” said Will stiffly. “Go on. What else did he say?”

  I took another deep breath. “He said the United States fell because of economic collapse. The people who seized power believed that the nation collapsed because of greed, and because of the resentment between the rich and the poor. They decided to rebuild a new nation where the government made sure everything was equal. They thought the government had to impose this upon us, though, because they couldn’t trust us to do it ourselves.

  “The problem was, ‘equal’ didn’t mean everyone had their needs met and we could all happily share. That’s only what they wanted us to think. In reality, it just meant the people in power confiscated all the profits from our work and made us their starving slaves. But they did everything they could to keep us from seeing it that way.”

  Will’s face was practically etched in stone at this point. “I don’t understand. How could the government make people see and think things that weren’t real?”

  “Alec said… they found what he called the human’s common carrier brain wave, and they altered it. I never did really get what that meant, though.”

  For the first time, Will’s eyes widened, like he was having a eureka moment. “I think I do,” he murmured. “Wow. That’s… brilliant. In a really messed up way, I mean.” I stared at him until he explained, “It’s like this. If there’s a common carrier wave for human thought, then they can send out a message with an altered version of it. The carrier wave is stronger than our individual ones, so wherever there are similarities between it and ours, theirs wins out and our thoughts just… conform.” He shook his head slowly and gave a low whistle. “If this is all true, then that would be the way to do it.” Then he fell silent, covering his mouth with his hand and wiping it across his face. It was the closest I’d ever seen him to speechless. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and shook his head slowly.

  I looked at Will’s plate, which was mostly untouched. After a long pause, I gave him a light kick under the table. “Eat your eggs,” I scolded him weakly. But neither of us smiled.

  “Kate,” Will murmured, and squeezed my fingers. But he didn’t say anything else.

  “So what now?” I asked finally.

  I saw the familiar look of resolve harden across his pale face. “Forget the crisis at work. I’m taking a vacation day,” he announced.

  That was not what I’d expected. “What? Why?”

  “Because I’ve got to pursue this. Find out if it’s real.” He made a fist and propped his chin up with it, looking out the window with gritted teeth. He pulled out his wallet, paid with cash, and pulled on his coat.

  “Then what though?” I pressed. “If it turns out it is?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, and tried to give me a reassuring smile. “Maybe we’ll become rebels.”

  Chapter 5: Kate

  My office was the height of chic: on the twenty-first floor of a steel and glass skyscraper, all geometric and ergonomic and filled with natural light. I looked around and, for a moment, tried to concentrate on what it really looked like—almost expecting to see the flash, for the world to change for an instant. When it didn’t come, I felt a brief surge of desperate hope.

  Maybe everything will stay the same as it’s always been. Maybe Will and I will just forget about all of this.

  I passed Nancy, who leaned back in her swivel-chair and barked at me, “Brandeis! Where are the profile pieces on the latest executions?”

  I jumped. “They’re coming,” I promised, “you’ll have most of them by lunch.”

  “The boss wants you to do a spotlight piece on two or three of them for tonight’s newscast,” she called after me, “so I’d better have them by eleven!”

  Two or three of them—that should be easy enough. I’ll just leave Maggie out of it, I decided.

  Even as I thought this, though, I felt a stab of guilt. Most likely, none of these people deserved to die.

  I tried not to think about it.

  I powered up my net screen and began to cobble together pieces on a few of the traitors whose next-of-kin had sent me voice comm interviews.

  Sean Kennedy: 29-year old drug addict. Hallucinations that the Republic was not what it seemed to be. Made threats against the capitol. Executed for conspiracy against the government.

  I tried not to wonder if his hallucinations, weren’t.

  Of course they were hallucinations, they were probably brought on by narcotics.

  Jennifer Olmstead: 54-year old mother of three grown children and wife of a former government official who was killed in the line of duty last year. Became convinced her husband was murdered for obstructing public policy. Killed while attempting to flee the country.

  I swallowed and read on.

  Jack Green: 34-year old masquerading as a government agent, discovered to be a spy for New Estonia.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Here was a real traitor.

  Caught sending classified information to EO
S.

  What kind of classified information, I wondered. Data from the control centers?

  Suddenly my net screen blinked with a comm: a message from Will. “Found more info. Tell you tonight.”

  I stared at the screen, and felt slightly nauseous. After a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Ok. Would you bring takeout? Have to do a newscast tonight, probably won’t have time to cook.”

  “You got it.”

  I glanced at the clock: ten-thirty. In half an hour I had to give Nancy my three stories, and I’d have to know them well enough to present a spotlight for the newscast this afternoon… and to sound convincing when I presented them as traitors.

  I probably have huge dark circles under my eyes, I thought. Makeup would have a heck of a time making me look presentable. But that was the least of my worries.

  The day flew by in a blur. I wrote the profile pieces, with the obligatory spin making the government look saintly and the deceased, both guilty and dangerous. Nancy accepted them almost as-is, but did insist I add a few lines at the end of the script about how the average viewer is safer now that these criminals have been brought to justice.

  I added them, silently asking Maggie to forgive me.

  It took hair and makeup almost forty-five minutes to erase the bruise-like circles under my eyes and the red blood vessels in the whites of them. My makeup artist, Heather, raised her perfectly plucked brows at me and commented, “You all right? You seem more nervous than usual. Sick or something?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I assured her, grinning too brightly. “Just distracted about… a personal matter.”