“Look at all the shares and likes,” a woman boasted.
Sam refreshed the page and the video’s title screen appeared. The whole room cheered. Sam glanced over to her mom and Clint who stood by the doorway, Jill with the baby and Clint, arms folded, hiding a satisfied smile.
“Alright,” Alix said. “We’re watching this offline for security purposes.”
People booed, but only out of jest. That was one of the biggest jokes about One Nation’s impossibly tight security—no internet meant no meaningful contact with the outside world. Sam got the feeling that most of the base’s residents were used to underground isolation and the protocols of anonymity.
“Okay, okay,” Alix said. The lights dimmed. People shook bags of popcorn, making the air smell buttery. It almost felt like a real theater.
“Everybody silence your phones,” a woman joked.
“Shhhh…,” sometwo hushed.
Even that got laughs.
Sam could barely sit still. Millions of eyes were about to be on her.
“With the net down, how are we going to know how many people viewed it tonight?” a person in the back row asked.
“I’ll get those stats through an encrypted line,” Alix said and clicked play. “From one of our hackers.”
“Shhhh…” a young guy hushed.
The room quieted.
Jill’s voiceover opened the second episode the same way it had opened the first, all blackness and just her voice. “We knew we were being followed. Hunted, really. All we could do was run and pray we got to safety before Gray Altar found us.”
This was the first mention of Gray Altar in the web series and Alix had prepared Sam and Jill and everytwo that the stakes would rise high enough now that there was no going back. Jill’s voice continued as the opening scene from episode one picked back up. Sam in the back of the RV, tears streaming down her face. Jill in labor, baring down as the vehicle rocked them back and forth. But now more emphasis was on Penny, laying unconscious, her shoulder blood-soaked and her left arm gone. “I had no idea Penny was hurt so badly. That she…” Jill’s voice wavered as she began to sniffle. “…was so close to dying.”
Sam knew this word for word. She had helped edit it with Alix and her team, but that didn’t make it any less emotional when other people in the room started to blot their eyes, even the few guys that she could see from her seat. Dixon, stone-faced as always, leaned against the wall.
A dash-cam showed a first-person perspective of the RV racing down the highway. When the clip of Clint appeared with his voiceover, the whole room cheered again. “We were desperate…” Slow-motion shots of Clint pressing Penny’s wound shut while telling Dixon where to drive would give the audience a balance for Jill’s emotional scenes, or so that’s what Alix had said. Sam agreed. Either way, the video had everytwo in the room gripped with tension.
Clint’s voice continued. “One Nation was the only neutral party we could turn to. All we wanted was our freedom. For me, my boys. For Jill and the girls. And the baby.”
A group in front of the room applauded, exciting others to do the same. That line was Sam’s first contribution to the series, a suggestion during Clint’s somewhat tedious interview. Her pride swelled as Alix nodded at her and mouthed good job and turned back to the projection.
Episode two had a similar format as the previous installment. Instead of the Jill and the girls’ backstory, Clint and the boys were revealed. Clint had prepared before they left that first night, grabbing family photos. Pictures of Mason and Dixon as toddlers and young teens cycled with Clint’s narration. “They’re just normal Sets, you know? Growing up, they wanted to be the same, like two of the same kid. Both roughhousing and breaking crap. At least they broke the same crap at the same time.”
That got a laugh. Even Sam chuckled though she had heard it a dozen times in editing. There were photos of them hunting together. Sam had even requested video footage of one year’s talent show where Mason and Dixon had sung The Undecided Girl, relying on Alix’s hackers to email it to them after taking it from the net. Dixon covered his face with his cap as the clip played, half the room turning to him and chuckling.
“Dude! We had no idea,” a man hollered, creating a second surge of chuckles. Dixon silently dismissed them with an irritated wave, but he side-glanced to Sam and she liked the little smirk he gave her.
The episode went on to reveal how Clint met Jill, their friendship through financial difficulty, trading deer meat for swiss chard and ugly potatoes, the natural way they remained friends without entertaining a romantic relationship though that was vague enough to leave the audience guessing if the baby—the not-yet-shown, mysterious Singular baby—belonged to both of them.
Questions had arisen about the real father and Jill said she didn’t get to know him well at all and that was for the better. She assumed, or prayed, he would want nothing to do with the child and if he did, One Nation was prepared to do whatever they needed to do to sway him to their side or silence him completely.
It wasn’t weird to think about her mother’s dating habits, but it was to envision her sex life and know that millions of people were doing the same thing. Speculating. Mulling details of who in their small New Hampshire town the father might be.
Alix leaned over to her and whispered. “I just got a text from our contacts. There’s over a three million people watching it live. Right now.”
Sam wasn’t sure if that was disappointing or great.
Alix leaned back in her chair. “By the end of the night, I bet we reach ten million views.”
“Is that good?” Sam asked.
Alix typed away at her phone. “It’s amazing, Sam. This would be impossible without you.”
A guard approached the open double doors where Clint was standing and cupped his hand over Clint’s ear. Sam seemed to be the only person besides her mom who saw the urgency in what was being said. Clint turned to Jill and whispered something to her that sparked a restrained panic in her eyes, but Clint hugged Jill’s shoulder and said something before leaving with the guard.
Clapping made Sam snap her attention back to the screen. Clint’s voiceover had just said something about helping friends when no two else would. In the video, the RV’s dash-cam showed her old house and the cam mounted on the side of the RV—the one that was hidden—showed her and Penny approaching the RV for the first time, carrying their bags, Sam’s ball cap hiding her newly buzzed hair.
The episode ended with an interview of Sam. It was the first time the videos showed her after the arrival to the base. Everytwo in the room clapped as she started to speak. “I mean, we didn’t have any idea what was going on. Mom came home and was like, we have to leave… now.” She spoke about the trip, sharing the back of the RV with Penny, being bored, and their stop at the Museum/Museum and how it all ended that night when Gray Altar ascended. The edit was startling. It showed footage of Emmitt Prince that she hadn’t seen in the final version, grainy scenes of him walking around the RV to confront Clint. The glow of the campfire. The folding chairs. Silence as Prince stalked her family. It looked straight out of a horror movie shot on a hand camera.
“We ran from the lake to the RV. Mason and Dixon… we didn’t know if they were going to die.” The video taken from the hacked drones showed Gray Altar operatives rushing through the wood, rifles glowing hot. Shaky footage of Dixon running for cover. Firing back. A drone flipped dead out of the sky. People in the room covered their mouths. All of them knew the story, but this video was making them feel it. Sam’s voiceover continued, “We didn’t know who he was… what he was doing. Just that he was here to kill us.”
Poisonous anger boiled in her. It was hard to listen to herself speak about the man who maimed her sister. Who would have taken her mother.
Alix leaned over. “Can I talk to you outside?”
“Sure,” Sam said and stood.
Jill hugged her with her free arm when they passed.
Outside the room, Alix too
k her partly down the hall for privacy. “It’s working,” she said, cautiously satisfied. “It’s really working.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, knowing the video was showing just bits of that night—Prince outside the RV—Prince leaning into the RV to speak to Jill—Prince speaking for the first time on video, “Where is the rest of your family, Miss Van Best?”
And then the screen went black.
There was a brief silence before the room exploded with applause. Alix hugged Sam and ushered her further down the hall, one arm around her shoulder. “I know we talked about it before, but we need to get your sister to agree to an interview.”
Sam felt her shoulders go rigid, saying, “She won’t.”
Alix let go and craned her neck to study the ceiling. “You can see what we’re going for, right? This is both your story. People are begging to see what happened to your sister. To know her side along with yours. Right?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, knowing that the series would be incomplete without Penny.
“Can you talk to her again?” Alix asked.
People streamed out of the lounge toward them.
“I can try,” Sam said. “But I already…”
“Here.” Alix took a tiny black square out of her pocket and pinned it to Sam’s shirt. “This will record two hours at a time. Just audio.”
“What?” Sam said, looking down at it.
“It’s just for backup, in case we need her testimony. Can you do that?” Alix shook hands with a captain of One Nation, accepting his congratulations for the video.
“Even I teared up,” he said.
Alix grinned. “Sam had a lot to do with the editing.”
“Record my sister?” Sam whispered to her.
When Alix was done shaking more hands she turned back to Sam. “Just get her to open up. I’m already getting feedback from the hackers that post the videos for us.” She showed Sam her phone, but not fast enough to read the message. “Most of the comments from viewers are about Penny. They want to know more. You can get her to talk, right? Even if we don’t film her, we can use the audio. It’ll be good for her to get it out.”
This was something that had been repeated to her as well. You need to talk about it all. Share the burden. You’ll begin to heal.
Alix hugged her again, tighter this time. “You’re internet famous now. You realize that, right?”
Sam nodded, unsure if the term internet famous was trustworthy, especially coming from a Singular. She tried so hard not to be prejudiced, but Sets were vocal about their place in the world. Even if they didn’t come out and say they were superior to Singulars, the common resentment was unavoidable. They simply walked in two separate worlds.
Sam looked at Alix. “What are people saying, though? Do they think I’m going to stop the mutation? Are they blaming me?”
“No,” Alix assured. “No way. Right now, they don’t even know our intensions with the cure. We’ll reveal that at the end of the series.”
“How many views we got, Alix?” a man yelled over the crowding heads.
Alix held up her phone. “I’ll check. Hold on.” She squeezed Sam’s shoulder. “I want to give you an official title now that you’re a key part of this. You’ll be a producer. And I want you to be paid like all the other media analysts here. Yeah?”
Sam nearly forgot about the tiny recording device pinned to her shirt. “Really?”
“Yes. Really. Lemme work out the details. In the meantime, you work on your sister. I want her interview for episode three because,” Alix leaned in and whispered, “…we’re showing her getting shot.”
“Oh… Okay,” Sam said, not understanding at first.
“The world needs to see that.” And Alix was whisked away by her staff before Sam could ask anything else. People high-fived Sam and repeated how brave she was and asked what was planned for the next episode.
“Can’t talk about that,” she joked, but it wasn’t much of a joke when much of the new content relied on her getting her sister to talk. Sam understood how impossible that was. If Penny had woken up the same Penny she had been before that night, then maybe, but she was a shadow of herself now. People could sense Penny’s ferociousness for revenge just by looking at her. The robotic arm, that was visual proof that the one thing Penny cared about was never being vulnerable again.
Sam made her way through the common areas to the living quarters, most of which were shared dorm-like rooms. She knew she was lucky to have her own private space. More people congratulated her and asked about Penny and how she was doing. Sam deflected them with one word answers and a smile. She even thought one guy might have flirted with her, but she was too distracted by what Alix had said to pay him any attention.
The overhead loudspeaker was above her when the base’s alarm sounded. Loud and honking. Sam cringed as she scampered further down the hall.
“Orange alert.” the voice said with a stern calm. “The perimeter fence has been breached. All guards to your stations.”
“Oh shit,” Sam said, hurrying to Penny’s room. She knocked, calling. “Penny? Hey.”
Mason turned the corner, out of breath, asking, “Is she in there?”
Sam shrugged and knocked louder. “Pen? Wait, wasn’t she just in physical therapy?”
Mason took off his ball cap and held his forehead as if to suppress a headache. “She got out early. We were outside, hanging out. She destroyed a tree.”
“Okay…” Sam said. “Why?”
“She’s pissed, obviously.”
Sam tilted her head. “At…?”
Mason twisted his boot heel into the floor. “Me. You. Every fuckin’ two. What do you think?”
Sam smirked, turing away from him to pretend to focus on Penny’s door. Mason didn’t have to elaborate. Penny had every reason to be upset. If she didn’t like the videos then there was no reason to pretend she did. The alarm continued droning. “God, turn that thing off!”
“C’mon,” Mason said. “Main gate.”
Sam jogged behind him, passing frantic security guards and well-armed troops. Without giving it much thought, Sam took out her phone and started recording video of what she saw, focusing the shaking camera forward, making sure the alarm’s urgency came through. In her heart, she hoped Penny was safe—that she wasn’t putting herself in harm’s way. But a part of her wanted footage that wouldn’t just please Alix, she wanted to capture something so epic and entertaining and completely dangerous that an online audience wouldn’t be able to look away.
CHAPTER 6
Prince sat on the floor, in the middle of his room. He found it hard to sip his bourbon with the Medieval helmet on, even with the faceplate flipped up and his mouth exposed, but the overall effect was worth the annoyance. All he had to do was carefully protrude his chin and pucker. The 20 year Pappy V., dashed with two drops of distilled water, tasted so much sweeter inside a 600-year-old piece of English armor. Prince wasn’t sure what was worth more, the Pappy, a “get well soon” gift from his father, or the borrowed helmet. He was tempted to take the thing off and tip it upside down so he could dump the entire bottle in and drink directly from it like a giant metal goblet.
He was drunk when episode two of One Nation’s series ended. The scroll bar stopped and a countdown to episode one began. Prince motioned at the wall to pause the video.
One Nation had shown grainy footage of him, though the shot was taken from a drone hovering above and his face wasn’t visible. He stood outside the RV—leaned into the RV to speak to Jill Van Best—spoke, “Where is the rest of your family, Miss Van Best?”
This, of course, was no surprise. Why wouldn’t One Nation play this card? Prince breathed in so deeply, it hurt. Exhaling, he lifted the bottle of Pappy V to his lips and drank.
“Fuuuck.”
They were slowly, piece by ugly piece, letting the cat out of the bag.
Prince set the bottle down and surveyed his room. Surrounded by all of the Van Best girls’ personal items—Sam’s clothe
s folded and sorted on one side of the room, Penny’s on the other—Sam’s art supplies and drawings and paintings and old sketchbooks in one corner—Penny’s novels and running gear and makeup stacked close by. Instead of gesturing at the wall, Prince hit replay on his datasheet and crossed his legs after uncrossing them a minute ago and sipped from his glass.
He had decided, over the last few days, after watching episode one several times and now restarting this new episode, that he no longer hated the Van Best twins. This didn’t mean that he liked them either. All it meant was that, when he would finally kill them, he would find no pleasure in it. Watching Sam’s testimonial, he found her assertiveness attractive and could see why One Nation was using her as a mascot for their cause.
He stood and walked to the half of the room where her stuff was piled. Gray Altar had boxes everything neatly, sorting purses and accessories into a plastic container and clothes into a larger one. It was immediately obvious that the two girls were different. It wasn’t just the odd haircut or mismatched outfits they were wearing that night. But as he listened to the new video, there was no indication that Sam or Penny were products of the gene therapy experiments. If they were, then One Nation hadn’t revealed it yet.
For this reason, Prince had ordered DNA samples taken from both girl’s belongings. Using found hairs, Gray Altar technicians were analyzing if they shared the Set Mutation. If they didn’t and were indeed the only pure, natural twins on the planet, this meant two things. Gray Altar could legally lay claim to the cure because Sam and Penny had attacked and almost killed a Gray Altar employee. This meant they were fugitives and, if caught, property of the government and therefore Gray Altar itself. There was no distinguishing between the two—Gray Altar was the government. What was inside the girls was an asset owned by the corporate entity of which we was an heir. The mother too, her rights were nullified. They had given up their bodies when they pulled those triggers.
The other thing Sam and Penny’s non-Set purity would mean is that they were the only women under twenty years old that would be genetically compatible with his ethics. In this way, they were both meant for him, but completely off bounds, legally and ethically. The paradox was intoxicating.
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