Render

by K A Riley

  “Seriously,” she says with a pleasant laugh. “At ease. We’re all on the same side here. I know you’ve been through some crazy times together. But those days are behind you. Time to look forward.”

  “You don’t know what he did to us in there,” Brohn growls as he stabs an accusing finger in Granden’s direction.

  “Actually, I do. Mr. Granden here has been very forthcoming about his role in the Processor, about its inner-workings and its mission, and more importantly, about the Eastern Order itself.”

  “We already know,” Cardyn says from his cross-armed pout. “The Order’s made up. It never existed.”

  “That’s true,” Wisp says. “Partly. You got some of the story. Let Mr. Granden tell you the rest.”

  “Convince us we should trust him,” Rain snarls in full battle mode.

  “He got you out of there,” Wisp says, looking at us from one to the next. “And he helped you get here. Obviously, you got his message back in the Valta. Nothing has been more important to me in all of this than you, Brohn. I started to tell you that I only survived because I had help. Well, you’re looking at the help I had. He was the one who found me when the Recruiters were sweeping the woods for survivors. He told me to stay where I was and not make any noise and not to worry. And then he disappeared and so did the Recruiters. Thanks to Granden, I can stand here, alive and well, and tell you all this in person.”

  The tension in the room drops a level, and the four of us who are standing sit back down on the couch with Manthy. Brohn hasn’t unclenched his fists or his jaw, though. And Rain still looks like she wants to see just how long Granden can keep up that angelic smile while she holds his head under molten lava. While it’s true that Granden didn’t seem to revel in torturing us the way Hiller, Trench, Kellerson, and Chucker did back in the Processor, his face—his very presence—calls to mind Terk, Karmine, Kella, and a whole host of memories I’ve spent a long time trying desperately to forget.

  Apparently sensing the dwindling remnants of our hostility, Granden gives us a gentle nod and clears his throat. “It’s good to…see you again. And yes, I’m glad you got my message and that you trusted it enough to follow it.”

  He’s addressing all of us, but he holds his gaze on me the longest. He wrings his hands like he’s nervous, which I guess makes sense. It wasn’t that long ago that he was in charge of us with a few dozen armed soldiers plus Hiller around to help keep us in line. Now, we’re free. Which means we’re free to get up and leave or else free to leap over the glass table and across the small space between us and make him pay for his part in what they did to us. Either way, any hold he had on us is gone.

  Granden looks over at Wisp who nods her approval for him to go on. “It sounds like Hiller told you the truth…,” he says at last.

  “But not all of it, right?” Brohn interrupts.

  “No, Brohn. Not all of it. Not the history of it. Not how it all happened and what led up to you being recruited every year.”

  “So what happened? What did she leave out?”

  Granden sighs and takes another long look at us. It’s not a patronizing look or even one of friendly recognition. It’s more like he’s relieved to be able to unburden himself. He takes a deep breath and seems to relax. He sits down on the arm of the couch next to Wisp. He puts one foot on the floor and the other one up on the couch with his forearm draped over his knee, like this is the most casual and normal moment in the world.

  “As you know,” he says after a brief pause, “the Freedom Wars started in 2028. The same year as the failed Telemachus mission to Mars. Most of you would have been around two years old.” He looks at us again as if expecting us to debate him on this point, but we all just sit and wait for him to continue. He shifts his gaze from Wisp to us and goes on. “Legitimate concerns like climate change, mass immigration, and rampant gun violence were manipulated by a few fear-mongers to stir up a wave of panic. A handful of corrupt people at the top of the government decided to ride that wave all the way to unlimited power and wealth. They called themselves the Patriot Party.”

  “We know about the Patriot Party,” Rain says, her voice laced with impatience. “That’s Krug’s party.”

  “They’re the only party, Rain. The others are just for show. Window-dressing. One of the many ways Krug keeps up the illusion of democracy. Those soldiers you see everywhere…the ones patrolling around outside, the ones you got to know so well in the Processor, that’s the Patriot Army. We used to know them by names like ‘Homeland Security’ and the ‘National Guard.’ Krug’s got the other military branches deployed overseas: Iran. North Korea. The New Congolese Republic. The Patriot Party is their cover. Their legitimacy. The Patriot Army is their insurance against dissent.”

  “So the Eastern Order…?” Rain starts to say, but Granden gives her a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “Is nothing. A ghost story. In 2032, your town was one of many attacked by an enemy you were told was the Eastern Order. What you didn’t know at the time was that there never was an Eastern Order. Not exactly, anyway. There never was an invading army. The Eastern Order was invented as a cover for all kinds of greed and atrocities committed by President Krug and his Patriot Party. If you’re looking for an enemy, they’re it.”

  Brohn’s cheek pulses under his clenched jaw. “So you’re saying it was Krug’s people, this Patriot Army, who bombed the Valta?”

  “Under instructions from Krug and his Patriot Party. Yes. Back East, they brought in an underground group of bio-geneticists called the Deenays to analyze and assess the possibility of incorporating certain gifted individuals into their plans. The goal was terrifying in its simplicity. Krug and his Patriot Party were determined to spread fear to enable them to keep their wealth while creating a permanent underclass and staying in power for, well, forever. The goal was total power and absolute wealth for a few and a life of poverty, fear, in-fighting, and slavery for everyone else. That’s what the Arcologies are for. For every one of those monstrosities that goes up, another individual gets rich and another ten million are consigned to the shanty-towns decaying in their shadow.”

  “We saw one of the Arcologies on the way here,” Cardyn concedes. “In Oakland. It must suck to have to look outside every day from your pile of garbage and see a nice big tower you can never hope to get into.”

  “It’s no accident, Cardyn. ‘Divide and conquer’ used to be a cliché. Now, it’s a way of life.”

  Rain’s mouth hangs open. “Then what we saw on the viz-screens was the military killing our own people?”

  “That was the ugly genius of it,” Granden says. He sounds impressed and depressed at the same time. “It was Krug’s master plan. The Order wound up being anyone you decided needed to be your enemy. If a new family moved into a neighborhood, the residents feared it was the Order. When thirty women in St. Louis chained themselves to a government installation to protest the use of nuclear weapons against the Congolese rebels, the women were accused of being members of the Order. When Canadian immigrants flooded into Minnesota and the Dakotas to escape the deadly effects of climate change sweeping through the southern provinces, they became the Order, and flying squads of vigilantes were formed in towns all along the border to take them down. Since Krug and the Patriot Party controlled the media, there was no way to question any of it. So it went on and on. All across the country until it was nothing but ‘us against them’ everywhere you went.”

  “Except that the ‘them’ was us,” I say.

  Granden frowns. “Exactly. It became a world of made up enemies who had to be exterminated at all costs.”

  “Why us, though? Why the Seventeens?”

  Granden stands up and paces in small steps next to the table between us. Even though he towers over Wisp who’s still sitting relaxed and cross-legged on the couch, he continues to glance over at her for approval as he talks.

  He says, “The Seventeens…” and scans the tiled ceiling like it somehow has all the answers. “The Seventee
ns started with the Deenays’ DEMo Program. That stands for DNA Evolution and Modification. You see, Krug and the Patriots weren’t satisfied with just regular political power. They wanted total domination over the future of humanity. And you were the key. You’re too young to remember the big wave of superhero movies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Well, that wasn’t just fiction. Certain people seemed to be developing actual superhuman abilities. Not the red cape flying kind of stuff. A lot of it tended to be a kind of techno-human connectedness no one had anticipated. Everyone thought technology would improve humanity. What they didn’t realize is that digital technologies weren’t just something invented by humans for the benefit of humans.”

  “Then what were they?” Manthy asks.

  “They were a natural next step of human evolution. Digital code was just another way of writing the human genetic code. Computers weren’t learning how to be human like everyone thought and feared might happen. Instead, humans were evolving, so the theory goes, to incorporate binary processing into our human brains. You’ve seen some of the results downstairs.”

  “You mean the Modifieds,” Manthy says through a menacing scowl.

  “That’s right, Manthy. There used to be more, but their mortality rates were, well, close to one-hundred percent. We take care of the rest as best we can. It turns out that the potential for binary-DNA sequencing kicked in full-force when the pituitary gland in some teenagers caused certain DNA strands to take what the geneticists called a ‘techno-evolutionary detour.’ It turns out that some of you have evolved without needing to be modified.”

  “And that’s why the Seventeens?” I ask.

  “Pretty much. No one knew for sure why it seemed to only affect people exactly your age. Up in their labs, some of the Deenays guessed it was because you were far enough away from the pollution and urban decay to allow for the evolution. Some of them suspected it was the altitude. Or sunspots. Or depletions in the ozone layer of the atmosphere. A couple of them even suggested that maybe you were all aliens sent here to study and mimic us before you decided to invade and destroy us. No one took that theory seriously, though. In the end, it started to look like it had something to do with the geography of the earth, itself. The locations tended to be clustered around the 40th parallels North. No one knows why. Maybe a geo-thermal phenomenon. Maybe bio-magnetic. Some actually said it wasn’t anything at all. That the so-called evolution was a hoax, a myth, something dreamed up by Krug who they figured had gone completely insane.”

  “But it turned out to be true,” Manthy mumbles. She sounds sad, like a little kid coming to terms with the death of a beloved family pet.

  Granden points to her and then to Brohn and finally to me. “And you’re the proof. The three of you. You’re not the only ones, either. They found others.”

  “Others like us?”

  “So there are others,” Rain says.

  “Yes. Krug pushed for the program in secret. Got all kinds of bills and laws passed that funded the Deenays’ experiments. If you were a weapon, he was going to be sure you were under his control. He was paranoid. Still is. Hiller was charged with setting the whole thing up. The idea was to set up Processors all over the country. They were multi-purpose: identify those with special abilities, recruit the pliant ones to work on behalf of the government, weed out the ones who might pose a threat, and brainwash or modify the rest into compliance.”

  Cardyn squints at Granden. “And by ‘weed out,’ you mean…?”

  “Kill us,” Rain finishes.

  Granden gives Rain and Cardyn a grim nod. “Once the tests identified you as having special abilities, if you were also determined to be Noncompliant, you were tagged as too dangerous to be kept alive.”

  I feel like I’m going to cry, but I swallow hard and manage to keep my composure. “I don’t understand why we spent all that time being trained in the Processor if we were just going to be….”

  “It was all for Krug’s benefit, not yours. There were others like your friend Terk who got maimed as part of the so-called training as guinea pigs for the Modified Program. You, Brohn, and Manthy were Gifteds but got scheduled for termination. Manthy because she represented a potential Asset for the government, but her temperament was deemed far too dangerous to risk taking a chance on. She showed all the signs of a free-thinker, someone who would never surrender her will for a cause like theirs. A textbook Noncompliant.”

  “And what about the rest of us?”

  “Only Karmine and Kella were to be spared originally. There were really only three categories: Noncompliants, Assets, and Gifteds.”

  We all must be giving Granden the same confused look because he stops abruptly.

  “I think you may be overloading them,” Wisp says. She gives Granden’s knee a motherly tap before turning her attention to us. “I know this is a lot to throw at you. But it really wasn’t all that complicated. The Deenays discovered that some kids were developing potential abilities. Krug figured he could exploit those abilities. Processors were built, and the Patriot Party put the Recruitment Program into place. Certain towns like ours were attacked and then sealed off. All access and knowledge of the outside world was strictly controlled through the viz-screens. Krug and the Deenays created three designations: Noncompliants, Assets, and Gifteds. Assets were those who bought into the war and could be incorporated into Krug’s Patriot Army. Gifteds were the ones with potential abilities who got sent to the Deenays for study or to be converted into Modifieds. Noncompliants were all the ones who couldn’t be turned. They were killed. No matter which category you fell into, though, there were only two outcomes: become a slave or become a corpse.”

  “And the Eastern Order?” I ask.

  “That was a distraction,” Granden says, plopping back down onto the arm of the couch and picking up again with his explanation. “The Eastern Order was the hand the magician waves so you won’t see what he’s doing with his other hand. Once the threat was established…”

  “It caught on,” Rain finishes for him. “Like wildfire.”

  Granden says, “Yes. Although more like a virus. This wasn’t something you could put out with a little water. The nation was consumed with the Order. You’ve seen it on the viz-screens. Okay, some of it was staged. But a lot of what you saw was real. Terrified neighbors killed each other while the Deenays continued with their experiments, and Krug sat back, accumulated more power, and laughed himself all the way to political immortality. In the Processor, Karmine and Kella were flagged as potential Assets. But you and your little feathered friend out there compromised those plans. So, you were all scheduled to be terminated.” Granden locks his eyes on mine. “You for what you thought was a simple neuro-link between you and Render—”

  “What is it really?” I ask. I want him to go on with his explanation, but I have a desperate need to know what Render and I really are to each other. “Cardyn calls it ‘telempathy.’”

  Granden beams a wide smile and points at Cardyn. “Not bad,” he says. “That’s about as close a term as I can imagine to describe your connection. Technically, it’s called an Interspecies Neuro-Tech Rapport, or, an INTR-link. That was your father’s term for it. He was a key architect in the Modified program. Of course, he didn’t know the extent of what he was working on and had no idea he was helping Krug and the Deenays to put what they hoped would be a stranglehold on absolute power for a long time to come. When your father found out what they were up to, he fled with you, your mother, and your brother to the Valta. He thought you’d all be safe there. No one knew where he was, and the Valta was the last place on earth Krug would go looking. Or so he thought. He underestimated his importance to them. He was the key to their success. That’s why he did what he did.”

  “What do you mean? What did he do?”

  Taking a deep breath, Granden looks from me to Wisp then back to me. “He took all the knowledge he had, condensed it into a few small micro-circuits, hid the program, and then he returned to his laboratory back eas
t, and destroyed what was left of his lab. Then, he…disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  Granden crosses the space between us and kneels down in front of me. “I’m sorry, Kress. I really am. Krug isn’t in the habit of letting people stick around who’ve crossed him.”

  Granden leans forward and runs his fingertips along my tattoos, just as he did all those months ago back in the Processor. “Kress, your father hid his program inside of you. The micro-circuitry in your tattoos contains all his secrets. His program is the key to Krug and the Deenays’ success, but it also makes you the key to bringing them down. Your father sacrificed himself for you. For all of us, really.”

  “You’re telling me the circuitry in my arm doesn’t have anything to do with my connection to Render?”

  “Exactly. He didn’t give you a gift. He just helped to release one you already had.”

  Suddenly, I can’t catch my breath. I feel like I’m underwater and swimming as hard as I can to the surface that just keeps getting farther away.”

  “How—how do you know all this?” I finally mange to ask.

  “I was on the inside for a long time.”

  “The inside?”

  “Of the Patriots. You’re not the only one who lost a father.”

  “What—your father disappeared, too?”

  “Well, his soul did. A long time ago.”

  Granden calls out for a holo-display. “News feed. Cycle one.”

  The glimmering image that materializes above the black glass table between us is a familiar one. Growing up in the Valta, it’s a face we saw countless times on the viz-screens. A face with chapped lips and crooked yellow teeth under a head of slicked-back hair.

  “President Krug.”