by Sean Kennedy
The students were scattered about the room like terrified animals at a watering hole, their eyes darting about suspiciously. They all wore the same nervous expression, except for a young redheaded girl that slumped at her small desk. Jacob recognized the numbed look of tetrazine in her posture as she stared at the floor.
Jacob smiled at them, but their expressions were cold as they stared back. It was as though they’d never seen a smile before, or maybe, he thought, this is no place for one. Jacob sat in a lecture seat with a small armrest along the front row and tried to quiet his heart’s hammering.
The large red digits of the clock changed from 07:59 to 08:00. As it did, a short, slightly round little man came through the door, closing it behind him with a loud clap.
The sound echoed through the scattered bodies in the small amphitheater crowd. He took up his place behind the podium with his fading gray cardigan over a simple white shirt. Beneath his balding head and augmented half moon glasses, Jacob saw that the little man wore the same sad, shattered expression as everyone else at Alcazar.
He reached into his gray slacks and fished out a small cube that he put on the top of the podium. Large holographic letters were projected from it to float in the air, glowing red like a hazard sign: “Orientation”.
His eyes swept the room from behind his tiny AR glasses. Jacob thought he was about to say something, but then the classroom vanished as burning pain flooded his system.
It was like a thousand needles were jammed into his body to inject suffering all at once. He felt the agony exploring him, finding his spine and chasing it into his skull. Then the pain stopped as suddenly as it started, and Jacob slumped forwards against the small desk’s armrest, barely able to stay in his seat. He heard others gasping around the room.
“My name is Mr. Petrov, and you have just had a tiny taste of what awaits you here.” The man behind the podium had a strange accent that made him space out some words and slur others together.
“That was ten seconds on level five. Mr. Crew, who is your facility administrator, never hands out a dosage less than thirty seconds, and never less than level seven.” Petrov’s round face gave a pitiful smile.
“I did this to you not to be cruel, you will get enough of that here for sure. I did this so you are not afraid, so you know what pain is, and what to expect.”
“But we didn’t do anything!” A voice called from behind Jacob. He turned to see a boy with a strong build, wearing blue jeans and an animated screen t-shirt. He looked as though he should be on a sports field somewhere rather than in this place.
The boy was angry, and it mixed with a wild fear in his eyes. “You can’t just...”
He was silenced. Jacob saw the boy’s body contort as his wrist strap broadcast pain through his system. His body locked and trembled from the invisible pulsing pain for long seconds. When it stopped, the boy was gasping as sweat and tears mixed on his face and he struggled to hold himself in the desk.
Mr. Petrov’s eyes were placid as he watched the muscular boy catch his breath to speak. “....We have rights...”
Another pain storm wracked the boy's system, making him kick and curl his hands like twisted claws against his chest. Jacob looked away as foam formed at the corner of the boy's mouth.
It went on longer than before, and when it finally did stop the boy fell out of his seat, but caught himself on a wooden book rest as gasps shook his body.
A thundering silence closed in on the small amphitheater classroom. Only the labored sounds of the boy’s breath could be heard as the terrified inductees stared at Mr. Petrov.
The word Orientation faded away and new text appeared floating in it’s place: Rights Are Lies.
“You have no rights.” Petrov pointed to the hovering red letters. “None! You never had them, they were always a lie.” He spoke with a sincere, almost sorrowful calm, and looked into each of them to be sure they understood.
“Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement. It is ridiculous to believe in rights here, or any other place.” His voice sounded weathered, like wind against an abandoned church.
“Where are the rights of the dying as the vultures circle in the desert? Where are they for the wounded swimmer in the open sea?” Petrov met their eyes.
“In this way, the pain will be helpful, because pain has a way of dissolving lies we tell ourselves.” When Petrov looked at Jacob, he saw pleading in the old man’s gaze. “You must stop believing these lies. If you leave this classroom and think that you have rights, you will suffer, and you already must suffer in life. Why make it worse?” Petrov shrugged.
“The pain of reality is always waiting, whether or not you wear these bracelets. The truth is always lurking like a dagger beneath the cloak of lies.”
Silence filled the classroom. Petrov waited for someone to speak, but no one did. Jacob turned to look behind him and saw the blue-jeaned boy now wore the same fearful expression as the others.
“Please,” Petrov spoke with tired yearning in his voice, “please listen to what I am telling you, because it is the truth and you must hear it.” He braced his arms on the podium as the old man’s gaze shifted over each student.
He stopped at Jacob. Through the shifting light of his nose tip AR glasses, Jacob felt Petrov’s eyes studying him with unseen data.
“You are an arcology child?”
Jacob nodded.
Petrov softened his face for just a moment, “If someone asks you a question Jacob, it's best to answer short, and say sir, ma'am, or the person's name at the end.”
“Yes, sir.” Jacob said, and Petrov nodded, giving a little smile before addressing the class again.
“You all will find this place very, very hard.” he nodded sadly. “You have all lived lives full of lies up until now. You have been manipulated, made to share and believe false ideas that were never your own. But now,” Petrov lowered his voice “now you are at Alcazar.’
He nodded as he looked around the room. "I know what you're thinking, it is the same thing all newcomers think here. You are thinking they cannot do this to us! But here we are all victims.”
Petrov's eyes lost focus for just a moment and he stared off the side of the podium watching a memory. It passed and he brought his attention back.
“For whatever reason, you are here now. Maybe your mother didn’t sleep with the right person, or maybe your father slept with the wrong one. Perhaps your family has gotten sick, and they tell you that there is no cure, and so you must come, but however you got here does... not... matter.”
“The way to get out of the zone, is to take the tests, learn what you are told, and if you are selected, you will be able to go beyond the wire to places where these lies about your rights will return, but they will still be lies.” He shifted at the podium.
“Think! Before you all came here, who let you live where you did? You must realize someone did allow it: you need to know that you are only alive because you have potential uses to others.”
Petrov took off his glasses and began cleaning them with a red cloth he produced from the cardigan’s pocket. “The sooner you realize this, the sooner you will be able to make good decisions. Perhaps one day this will change, but for now,” he shrugged “here we are.”
The old man's eyes swept across the room and stopped at Jacob’s hand held high in the air.
“Yes, Jacob?”
He took his hand down and spoke so that his voice was clear in the stillness of the lecture room
“Why, Sir?”
“Why what, Jacob?”
“Well sir, if we have no rights, why tell us? If it’s hopeless I mean...Sir.” Jacob watched as a thin-lipped smile crossed Petrov’s face as he replaced his glasses. Jacob prepared himself against the pain that he knew must be coming.
“You should not ask too many questions here Jacob, but this is a good one.” Petrov looked across the room to the other students.
“It’s because of a dream.”
Petrov’s statement was met with blank stares. “I am sure Mr. Crew will give you a version of this story in your foundations class, but there was once a dream that rights were given to us because we all carried a piece of the divine within our beings, but slowly the country became corporate territory, and that respect for life vanished. There are still those so-called ‘American Extremists’ who still preach these ideas, but to be called an extremist is the fate of all those with conviction.”
“Puppet robotics and rights rioters have society so confused that we believe a picture of a person is a person. It’s a social insanity that leads us to where all sickness leads, to camps and quarantine zones.”
“Rights?” Petrov raised his hands to wave the word away. “Bah! Rights only exist if you have the means to protect them. We have all been made helpless by social pressures, slowly and gradually eating away at our sense of self.”
“Did you not reach out your arm to accept the very bracelet we use to hurt you? You chose this; remember that. This is your choice to be a part of this system, it is the truely sacred oath you make to yourself each day.”
There was a light far off in Petrov’s eyes, like a beacon on a distant shore. “Any group can be manipulated; democracy is media rule. Everything becomes flexible, until we we wake up one day to find ourselves here.”
Petrov turned his attention back to Jacob. “So to answer you, Jacob, the why is so that once you know the truth, perhaps you will have a chance.”
The silence of the lecture hall thundered as Petrov watched the small group. When no one spoke, he continued.
“It is technology that keeps us in our place. We have made the chains of our social captivity, but it is my hope that if some of you get away from this place, you will find a way to reforge these chains or abandon them forever.”
The lettering disappeared above Petrov's head, and a large map of the Alcazar Reorientation Facility appeared with a red dot pulsing where the classroom was located.
Petrov spent the remainder of the class in a rehearsed speech, going over details of where to go and where not to go, and Jacob realized that if the little arrow on the pain cuff didn’t tell him to go there, he shouldn’t go there.
He learned the quarantine zone was really a garbage dump, and each day barges, trains, and trucks would bring the waste of Deep City to be processed on the rancid shores of the Pacific Northwest.
He learned managing garbage takes labor, and even with the enhanced technology and telepresence droids, it was cheaper to keep the quarantine zones population as a captive workforce.
He learned that if he was in the top 10% on his scores, there was a chance he could be picked up and taken out of the zone, providing his bioscans came back clean. If not, his fate was to handle the toxic waste of a distracted and enslaved culture.
A klaxon buzzer sounded, and Jacob jumped in his seat as Petrov snatched the cube away from the podium.
“I will not make you late for your next class,” Petrov said as the buzzer faded, “I wish you luck and resilience. Dismissed.”
Chapter 8
Vincent Slate pulled the brain interface from his head. He rolled from where he lay into a kneeling crouch, moving like a serpent dropped from a sack. As his mind processed the reestablished information, he reached up and wiped the scaled vomit from the side of his face.
The sun was streaming through the kitchen window illuminating a stove clock that read 9:45 am.
“Jacob...” He whispered and took hurried breaths, waiting for his energy to inflate him. Four breaths later, he risked standing and grabbed the back of the kitchen chair to help the transition. Six more breaths and he felt strong enough to take a step, and with the wall’s support, he was successful.
He pushed out of the kitchen to the old bathroom. He stumbled and almost fell through the bathroom door, but he managed to steady himself by grabbing on to the immaculate porcelain of the pedestal sink.
He turned the chrome taps and let the water run cold before splashing it up over his face.
Was this the fifth reorientation? The sixth? He thought as the room spiraled around the sink drain. That meant he’d had another nanite booster to bypass the keloids building in his nerves.
He coughed, spitting crimson into the sink. Slate felt a stab in his chest as he watched the bright red glob vanish down the drain.
There was only so much brain elasticity you could demand before the neurons wear and nerves snap. It was a miracle he was still standing, the last reorientation probably should have killed him.
Lucky guy, he thought as he cupped his hands and slapped more water on his face. Each slap drove in more life-giving consciousness.
He swung his head under the tap and let the cool water fill his cheeks. He gulped, feeling the cold traveling to tips of his scraggly beard. Grabbing a precisely folded towel from the rack to dry his whiskers, he glanced up at the stranger’s reflection in the polished mirror.
He was so much older, the deep lines and tired blue eyes were almost as gray as what was left of his hair, and he had at least two months of beard growth.
His hands found the edge of the mirror, and it swung open. Soft light illuminated stacks of pill bottles in the medicine cabinet behind. Rows upon rows of multicolored chemicals meant to make his slow death an easier transition.
Pain management makes it easy to hand over control of your life in a dignified way. A veteran for a nation that no longer existed. The pain started him mixing the meds and alcohol, and over time the urgency of the Rainwalker Mission was lost in the haze.
He’d earned this chemical comfort, he deserved these pills. He fought the urge and reached below the bottle rows for scissors and a disposable razor, still in its plastic packaging.
The nanites from the booster were a mental accelerant, but he would need to maintain it. Once the fairy dust wore off, his body would deal with the cost of the booster injection. But for now, he would be a young man again, if only for a few days.
It wasn’t long before the mirror reflected Vincent Slate’s clean shaven face with his beard laying shredded in the pedestal sink. The air currents around his shaved head made it feel new and clean, and the rest of his body felt like it was encased in years of grease.
After wiping the hair from the sink, He activated the shower and stepped inside still wearing his jeans.
How did it get this far?
He peeled off his pants, letting them fall in a wet splatter and kicked them to the corner of the shower. He closed his eyes and cautiously breathed in the steam, trying not to trigger another deep cough. It took a dozen rotations of lather and scrubbing before he felt clean.
Three sets of working overalls hung on hooks behind the bathroom door. After toweling himself off, he slipped into a set with fold creases running in squares through the fabric.
The mirror showed he was still old and out of fighting shape, but at least he’d regained control of his physical perimeter, and that was a position to fight from.
He opened the bathroom door and walked across the quilt of polished hardwood flooring. Everything was becoming more familiar now, the software was settling in.
Checking behind a wooden door, he found his own room across from Mac’s, his bed still unslept in. Mac usually slept in the shop, and Slate felt reassured he remembered that.
Jacob had to be upstairs, the attic was the most likely spot for Mac to put him, and Slate went to the narrow turret stairs.
He willed his legs to lift him up the narrow staircase but stopped at the open door.
“Jacob?” He called out and knocked on the door frame, but there was no response. He pushed through and stepped into the room. The open attic floor was spotless, with the citrus smell of cleaner coming from freshly scrubbed white walls.
A small bunk made to Space Corps standard had been slept on, but not in. Following the lines of the blanket’s hospital corners, his eyes fell on something impossible and he stopped breathing.
His old space locker from his bas
ic training was just under the foot of the bunk. All recruits were given only this tiny locker for personal effects. In a world with no privacy, the lockers became sacred space.
He knelt beside it. His hands found latches on the front and sides, and the lid popped loose. As the morning sun sent a stained glass beam through the attic window to warm him, Vincent slowly lifted the lid.
The light landed on a collection of trinkets surrounding a boxed set of hardcover books. A complete eight-volume set of “Space Corps Adventures”. He pulled the fourth volume from the set, leaving a rectangular slot between books and flipped open the cover to find the name “Slate” written in his own teenage handwriting.
He snapped it closed. A man and woman were on the cover, standing back to back on a barren asteroid, their rifles at the ready as the Space Corps flag fluttered in an impossible space breeze behind them.
Grimacing at the lies they sold him so long ago, Slate slid the book gently back into place. A picture frame wrapped in a white sheer scarf lay in the cluttered space around the books.
He unwrapped the frame and saw his sister Margaret and her husband Jonah, standing behind a small boy as they posed in their white Cornucopia clothing. A trademark family with a boy he hadn’t met; a boy who must be Jacob.
Margaret hated his decision to join the Space Corps, and he remembered how they fought when she learned he’d joined. As soon as she could, and perhaps to spite him, she went the opposite direction by joining an early arcology commune.
Slate believed his locker was lost in transport a short while after his first assignment. Evidently, it had been found and sent back to his listed next of kin. He took a deep breath to ease the tension in his chest, but a sudden pain shot like an arrow through his lungs.
He coughed hard and tasted copper in his mouth, swallowing it rather than spitting blood on the floor. He took a gasping breath and heard a noise behind him, recognizing Mac’s footfalls on the stairs. He laid the picture back on the arcology scarf.
