The Liberty Box

by C. A. Gray

  The other five women were already in the garden when we approached, along with their children, who looked younger than school age. I counted twelve of them, all apparently under five. The toddlers played in the dirt, but the older ones helped their mamas. Now that I knew four year olds had been working to support me, I felt even worse.

  The garden was enormous: Jackson had said half a mile, but he must have meant half a square mile. I wondered how these simple people had managed to fell all the trees and repurpose the soil in such a wide area, let alone get all the seeds to cultivate different crops.

  Two of the women plucked weeds and tended the ground, while the other three picked ripe fruits and vegetables, filling their baskets with sod and produce. One woman glanced up at me as she picked. She had stringy blond hair tied back away from her youngish face, and she looked me up and down in the envious way women do when they’re sizing each other up. Then she turned away in disgust. I thought she was going to ignore me after that and focus on the potatoes she and her three year old were harvesting, but a few minutes later she called out to me disdainfully, “I’ll bet you’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Don’t mind Hannah,” Molly whispered to me. “None of us do.”

  In another life I might have tried to defend myself, but I hadn’t the energy. “No,” I told her with a deep sigh, “I never have.”

  “Back in the Republic when you were a celebrity, you had working classes to do it for you, didn’t you?”

  “Hannah!” hissed another woman, appalled.

  “Well, I’m just pointing out that she’s never had to do an honest day’s work in her life, has she?”

  Molly started to open her mouth, glaring at Hannah, but I put a hand on her arm and said, “No, it’s okay.” Then I turned to Hannah myself. “I did work. I just didn’t do this sort of thing.”

  “‘This sort of thing,’” Hannah repeated with an indignant huff.

  The other woman who had tried to stick up for me, a slight girl with a wide mouth and mousy brown hair, sidled up to me. “I’m Brittany, Ms. Brandeis. I’m sure we have a lot to learn from you. I know I’d love to know what it was like, working for the National News Syndicate! It sounds so glamorous.”

  I winced at the word. Glamorous. That was why they all hated me, wasn’t it? Because I was the Republic’s ‘It Girl’?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said vaguely, crouching down beside Molly to dig up carrots. I had no idea what I was doing, so I watched her… but it looked easy enough, pulling the things up by the stems, wrenching off the greenery, dusting off the sod and putting them in her basket.

  “Come on!” pressed Brittany. “Let us live vicariously through you!” She seemed genuine enough, like she really wanted to know, and not only so that she could judge me. I gave her a tentative smile.

  “Well,” I hesitated. “You have to understand, any glamour it might have had has been totally eclipsed by what’s happened in the last few days…”

  “I heard,” said Brittany soberly, with a glance at Molly. “About your fiancé. I’m so sorry.”

  “We all have stories like that unless we grew up here,” muttered Hannah.

  “But it’s fresh for her!” snapped Brittany. She turned back to me, absently petting the head of her curly haired daughter, who clutched at her skirt. “I did grow up here, essentially—I can’t remember what it’s like in the Republic. And I especially wouldn’t know for someone famous. So, what is it like?”

  “Um,” I laughed uncomfortably. “Fame? Or being in the Republic?”

  “Both!” cried one of the other women, with badly cut dark hair. “To be rich, to have servants—”

  “I didn’t have servants,” I cut her off, embarrassed. “I had an apartment, and a car, and I did my own grocery shopping. It was a nice apartment, but still, I wasn’t super wealthy. I was normal.”

  “You were wealthy,” said Molly quietly. “You just didn’t know it.”

  “No,” I argued with her, annoyed, “I wasn’t. I was just like everyone else.”

  Molly cleared her throat and said, her voice gentle, “Honey. When most citizens of the Republic find their way here, they’re emaciated. They look like they’re at death’s door, and they’re dressed in rags. They didn’t know they were like that until the very end, but that’s how it is. You were very ill because it took Nick so long to find you—but you were wearing a silk dress, and you were otherwise well nourished. Trust me. You were wealthy.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I felt defensive for some reason. “So what are you saying, that everyone in the Republic thinks they’re well off, but for me it was actually true?”

  “Well—yes,” said Molly. “You were… important. They had to keep you healthy, didn’t they? Besides, cameras don’t lie the way our own minds can.”

  I wasn’t sure why that upset me so much. I think it must’ve had something to do with Hannah’s accusation that I was a spoiled brat.

  “I didn’t have servants,” I said again.

  “Didn’t you though?” snapped Hannah. “There were entire classes of people who grew your food for you, and classes who washed your clothes, and classes who cleaned your house—”

  “Yes, but that was true of everyone, it’s the way the Republic was set up!” I retorted. I flushed then, embarrassed at my outburst, and took a deep breath. “They gave us aptitude tests at twelve years old. The raw score determines whether or not you go on to higher education or apprentice for a trade. Scores in individual subjects determine which trade you apprentice, or which field you study. Education programs are all selected based on aptitude.”

  “By the Republic, I presume?” Hannah sneered.

  “Well, who decided that you were to wash clothes and prepare meals here? The Crone, I presume?” I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

  Molly stared at me, disappointment in her eyes, and she said, “The Crone and the Council determined the original categories for labor, yes, and when the caves were first formed, they assigned duties. But they are much too busy now to decide exactly which job each individual is fit for. Now they only get involved when a member refuses to choose an occupation at all.”

  I blushed, feeling shamed.

  Brittany laid a grubby hand on my arm and smiled at me kindly. “So your aptitude test when you were twelve said you should be a reporter for the News Syndicate?”

  “Not that specific,” I said, grateful to her for the subject change. “It said I should study journalism. I learned how to write and how to speak, apprenticed with the right people, and one thing led to another.”

  “I’m sure your looks don’t hurt, either,” Brittany smiled at me. “So… I mean, when you were in the system, what did you think then? I mean, how did you think about everything?”

  The question made me self-conscious. I tried to think how my answer could be used against me before I said it, but finally I just told her the truth. “I thought I lived a charmed life. I had everything. I honestly thought everyone had everything, and that we had the Potentate to thank for it.”

  “What about your family?” asked a woman with curly red hair. Jen, I thought I heard Molly call her. “You got any?”

  I paused, remembering the night Mr. Santiago came to drag me away with a shudder. I’d kicked and screamed the whole way, and neither my mom nor my dad lifted a finger to stop him. My brother Charlie watched, bemused. When I came back from reform school, even though I’d been successfully indoctrinated, for some reason I’d felt a deep aversion for all three of them. I guessed on some level, I must have remembered their betrayal.

  “I do,” I said finally. “I don’t see them very often though.”

  As if reading my thoughts, the woman with the dark hair and the bad cut whose name I overheard was Sam said, “I heard you’d been in reform school with Alec. Is that true?”

  I winced. Alec hated me too. “Yes. He knew me before I was… well… before the Republic got ahold of me.”<
br />
  Sam and Brittany exchanged an excited look with each other. “What was it like? Reform school, I mean?” asked Sam.

  A flash came to me of the first time I’d seen McCormick, and with it the stab of fear I’d felt at ten years old. A tall metal fence broke up a long expanse of black tarmac, the kind that bent inward at the top and had a row of coiled metal at its pinnacle. Beyond it was the ugliest place I’d ever seen. I couldn’t quite tell if it was white or gray in the darkness, but it was colorless and geometric. Boxes stacked upon boxes, and although it appeared that each room had its own window, the view was only of a wide expanse of black tarmac, surrounded by a metal fence.

  I realized I’d closed my eyes. When I didn’t answer right away, Sam prodded, “Alec said it was awful, it was like being in prison, and he broke out!”

  “He did,” I murmured. “I remember that day.” I’d almost filled Molly’s basket with carrots, so I sat back on my heels and wiped the sweat rolling down my brow with the back of my hand. I wondered if I should mention Maggie at all. If Sam and Alec were friends, Alec had probably mentioned her, but she didn’t seem to be a very safe subject. I decided against it. “He was right, it did seem like prison at first. But once the injections and the brainwashing worked, it looked… totally different.” Like the Potentate’s palace, to be exact. White columns, phrases written over the arches in Latin and Greek, paintings of the Potentate and the Tribunal with gilt golden frames hung in the hallways, perfectly manicured gardens lining every walkway.

  The memories of this version of McCormick felt sharper, but almost garish by comparison. Like they’d been tampered with.

  I looked around, tired of being the center of attention. “Weren’t any of you in the Republic? Have you all grown up here?”

  Brittany shook her head, and Sam shrugged.

  “I remember what it was like,” said an older woman named Karen quietly. “Being brainwashed. In the beginning, we knew it was happening. We volunteered for it.”

  “What?” I spluttered. That was the last thing I’d expected.

  “Yes,” she repeated as she looked at the faces of the other women. Her expression became suddenly defiant, daring us to judge her. “You don’t understand how bad it was. It was… this feeling of absolute and total helplessness. I don’t know how to describe it. There was the rioting and the constant threat of death, but even if you ran, where would you go? Everything we relied on to sustain us was suddenly gone. No money. No jobs. No grocery stores even. No hospitals. No running water, or electricity, because the plants didn’t have the money or the workers to keep them going.” Her eyes glazed over, as if she were looking back in time. “Even if Voltolini hadn’t been a criminal… even if he really had intended to put the country back together, I don’t know how he could have done it any other way. There just weren’t enough resources.”

  “But you agreed to that?” I demanded.

  Karen looked stung, like she’d thought I of all people would understand. “We had no choice!”

  “But you just said you volunteered for it!”

  Karen sighed. “It… well, it wasn’t that simple. I learned when I got here that he calmed the rioting by infecting us with a virus that caused anemia. I didn’t know that’s what it was then, though, I just thought I was getting sick because I was starving. The next thing we knew, he put out this propaganda campaign of how great the government was, and how all our problems would end if we’d just go and register our brain waves at the check points. The ‘Liberty Boxes,’ he called them.” She laughed humorlessly.

  “I remember that term,” murmured Jen, and the others nodded too.

  “I don’t think they still exist now,” said Karen. “After the initial population showed up to have their brain waves recorded, they installed them in hospitals and babies now get recorded as soon as they’re born.”

  “Liberty Boxes do exist,” Molly corrected. “The agent who picked Jackson up took him to one of them. I guess now they only use them for foreigners, or people who slip through the cracks.”

  Karen turned back to me, pleading now, like I was the one to convince. “But you have to understand how desperate we were. We had nothing. None of us felt like we had any options! It wasn’t like going to the Liberty Box exactly promised us prosperity, but it promised us that we’d believe in prosperity again at least… and that in the meantime, we’d have our basic needs provided for us. Most of us weren’t like Nick, or Alec, or Jackson—we couldn’t hunt, or live off the land, or take care of ourselves. Voltolini gave us a choice between life and death. We chose life, meager though it was.”

  I felt something in me harden. Maybe I’d been a puppet of the Republic, but at least I hadn’t chosen it.

  “So you’d rather believe a lie and be happy than know the truth?” I snarled.

  “And be starving and miserable? Yes!” Karen shot back, the tears welling up again. Then she whispered, “My sister is still in there. She used to be so beautiful… or at least I’d always thought she was. By the time I left I saw she was nothing but a scarecrow, though. Maybe she’s died of starvation by now—all the while thinking her thighs were too fat.” She laughed bitterly.

  “That’s exactly why you should have fought! For her!” I cried, my hands shaking. It was the first real spark of raw emotion I’d felt since waking up here, and something in me relished it, intentionally stoking the flames.

  Two tears slipped down Karen’s face, and she looked away from me abruptly. An uncomfortable silence fell; nobody seemed to know how to respond. We’d all forgotten our baskets of vegetables by this point.

  “But you risked your life to come here eventually,” Molly pointed out to Karen gently.

  Karen nodded and wiped her face, her eyes flashing at me. “Only because I was one of the resistant ones. If I could have stayed and believed… even if I’d been believing a lie… well, I wouldn’t have known that, would I?”

  “Not until you died of starvation,” I snapped. “Or got shot for waking up to the truth!”

  “Kate,” Molly scolded me.

  “Can any of you deny it?” I shot back. “The man I love is dead! They’re hunting me now, and if they ever find me and find out what I know, you can bet I’ll be one of the executions they broadcast live across the nation. And my parents and my brother are still in there, maybe starving as we speak!”

  “But if they still believe they’re well off, then they’re doing better than we are!” Karen declared fiercely.

  This met with stunned silence. Even I had no retort.

  Finally, Molly murmured to Karen in her matronly way, “You don’t mean that. You don’t really think it’s better to be deceived.”

  “Deceived and happy?” cried Karen, springing to her feet. “I sure do! What’s better than being happy? Nothing!” She clutched her basket of potatoes in one arm and grabbed the hand of her little girl by the other, and the two of them hurried off.

  None of the rest of the women said another word, but I noticed that Hannah now regarded me with respect.

  In a strange way, I felt like the person who’d spoken those harsh words to Karen had been sleeping inside of me ever since she’d been brainwashed and turned docile at eleven years old. Despite everything else that had happened, it was like the real me was finally waking up again.

  It felt good.

  Chapter 17: Jackson

  I crunched dead leaves beneath my boots, making my way through the forest without any real direction. I guessed from the position of the sun that it was probably around 10:30 by the time I’d left Kate, which meant the hunters had been gone for hours. I could find them if I wanted to, but I was still distracted by our conversation.

  If all it took was knowledge that the programming existed to see through it, then the agents should have seen the truth just like I did. But Agent Dunne seemed to sincerely believe his own press. He really thought the Republic was a utopia and the Potentate was generous and kind. Surely if anybody knew about the programming, it w
as one of the guys whose job it was to collect brain scans.

  If Nick or Molly or Alec went back ‘on the grid’ now, would they see a perfect society—and have to remind themselves that it was a lie? Or now that they knew the truth, would they see it for what it really was?

  Something about this question was very important, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. For the first time since finding out that the Republic wasn’t what I thought it was, I felt a glimmer of hope again—that maybe, just maybe, I had a purpose here after all.

  For the time being, though, I supposed I could find purpose in helping to feed the community. So I set out to track the hunters, finding a muddy footprint here, a broken twig there. They hadn’t been subtle, and I always had been one of the best trackers in Frjósöm. I let my mind wander even as I followed the signs.

  Uncle Patrick once told me the very idea of purpose, in terms of what I should “do” with my life, was itself a lie. A “chasing after the wind,” he called it.

  “When you ask about purpose, Jackson, you seem to have this idea of doing something grand that affects a lot of people in an unusual way. Something they’d write about in the history books. You want to invent a spectacular new technology, create a revolution, or save a nation.” The way he said it sounded like he thought it was self-evident that this was foolish, even amusing.

  I didn’t want to be arrogant… but the truth was, I did think that. I thought precisely that, and Uncle Patrick knew it. Well, except maybe for the inventing part.

  “But what I can do is unusual,” I argued, “You have to admit that! Even if everyone else technically has the ability to do the same thing, Grandfather and even you are always telling me how special I am. Wouldn’t it be a waste if I didn’t do something with it? If I spent my whole life just fishing, what would be the point?”

  Uncle Patrick shook his head at me. “That’s your problem, Jackson. ‘Just fishing.’ Like that isn’t a valuable occupation in and of itself.”