by Jamie Davis
She wasn’t sure that was accurate but what else could they be doing with them other than letting them go? Cass couldn’t come up with a definite answer, so she offered up the only suggestion she could think of.
“Maybe they’re helping them to a first aid station.”
“That’s bull, Cass. Those people were the ones that beat them. They’re not going to help them get first aid.”
Cass spotted them again on the other side of the cluster of trees. They were much closer to the stage now. She used her telephoto ocular function to follow the group as they were dragged forward.
Her implant automatically recorded everything she saw on a looped recording chip. It constantly updated with the most recent two hours of visual images and sound picked up by her ocular and auditory implants.
It was a fun thing to have when coming and going from lectures since she could share and save files remotely via the Mantle.
Now, however, her recording documented horrible things. Cass wasn’t sure she wanted to keep any of this video, though she knew she probably had to. If anything happened to Eric and the others, they’d need evidence of what she saw below.
“Cass, we have to get down there. We have to do something to get Eric out of there.”
“We can’t go down there Shel. They’ll just pull us into the middle of their rally and beat us up, too. You call the police. I don’t know why there aren’t any around. I’ll continue to follow Eric and the others through the crowd. I can still see them from up here. I’ll send you the video feed over the Mantle so you can see what I’m seeing.”
Shelby nodded and concentrated as she started to place the call over her implant. Cass sent her girlfriend the link to the video feed while she listened.
“Hello, 911? I am at the Sapiens demonstration downtown. From where I’m standing, I can see several cyber-humans being beaten and dragged away by members of the rally. You need to send help to them. They’re being dragged towards City Hall and the stage erected there.”
Shelby went silent for a few seconds as she listened to the dispatcher respond on the other end. “No, you don’t understand. I think something awful is going to happen to them. They’re injured and need medical attention.”
Shelby paused again. “But I don’t see any police. That’s why I’m calling you. How can you tell me there’re plenty of police officers there when I don’t see any around?”
Another pause, then Shelby continued her plea, desperation causing her voice to crack, “You need to send more. I’m telling you, there aren’t enough. You have to stop this.”
Shelby went silent again and shook her head. She apparently wasn’t getting the response she wanted from the city’s emergency center. Her shoulders sagged and she shook her head one last time.
“She hung up on me. She told me they were doing all they can do and I had to clear the line for people with real emergencies. How could she do that to me?”
Cass didn’t know what to say. She wanted to turn and hug Shelby but she couldn’t lose sight of Eric and the others. She held her focus on the events going on over in the square.
Cass tried to comfort her girlfriend as she lost Eric in the crowd again. “Shel, we can’t go down there and do anything. I’ve lost sight of him. Let’s stay up here and see if we can find out where they took your brother. Then we can try again to get some help for him.”
The two of them scanned the crowded square below and tried to catch a glimpse of Eric.
Chapter 25
The street directly below them was now empty of anyone other than Sapiens demonstrators. The counter-demonstration had broken up and the people who could had run away. A small group of police officers finally arrived and gathered up the few wounded from both sides, clustering them on the sidewalk and tending to them with a few EMTs from an ambulance parked on the curb across the street from their perch.
Cass pointed to what the police were doing. “See, Shelby, the police are here taking charge and protecting the remaining people from the fight. That’s a good sign.”
Shelby didn’t even look. She continued to watch the square, trying to spot her brother. Cass recorded video of the police here treating some of the injured. She captured it all on her implant.
“Cass, what are we going to do?” Shelby asked. Cass heard the desperation in her girlfriend’s voice.
“If we leave now, we take a chance of getting roughed up by the crowd below. Even with those few officers down there, the safest place for us is up here.”
Cass turned and scanned the main crowd again. She had a clear view of the entire stage area and most of the rest of the square except for a few places where trees blocked her line of sight. The crowd in support of the Sapiens rally was bigger than she’d expected.
A small part of her mind wondered if her father was monitoring the size of the rally from home. He would be proud of what they’d accomplished here, as awful as it was from Cass’s standpoint.
Activity near the stage area caught her attention. She zoomed in on the platform. The person currently speaking finished their talk. As they left the stage, music played and there was some evidence that another speaker was getting ready to make their entrance. The song was a current pop hit and the crowd sang along with the peppy tune.
Cass searched the area around the stage. Eric had been pulled in that direction minutes before. Perhaps he’d been taken there. She scanned the side of the stage as the new speaker started his presentation.
The man’s words sent a chill down Cass’s spine and she shifted her view to the center of the stage. A man stood in front of the microphone wearing a black ski mask and a black t-shirt with the circled fist logo on it. He had a standard ink tattoo of the same black fist logo on his left forearm.
“People of the Sapiens movement, look up here and see what humanity might become if we’re not careful.”
Cass broadened her view of the stage area and stiffened. Eric and six others were standing on the stage in a line behind the man who spoke. A pair of the masked thugs held each of them.
“This is what will allow the machines to take over. This is what will allow the Mantle to rule us. Some say it’s inevitable. We say it is not. We are your first line of defense. We, the members of Sapiens First will defend your rights and your families.”
Cass had told Shelby that the radical Sapiens First faction of the movement was a myth. She’d thought it was correct at the time. She now knew how wrong she was.
“Shelby, I see Eric.”
“Where? I dropped your feed. Is he all right?”
“He looks a little beaten up and bloody but he is alive. They have him along with six others up on the stage.”
Shelby gasped and leaned forward over the edge of the building to try and see better.
Cass tried to reassure her. “As long as he’s up there, the rest of the crowd can’t get to them. That’s a good thing. It looks like they’re just holding Eric and the others up as an example of what they hate. It’s not pretty, but he’s safe for now.”
“Cass, how are we going to get them down from there?”
“I don’t think we want to right now. That crowd is pretty worked up. They’re out for blood. I’m sure they’d like nothing more than to beat up on people like Eric and us.”
“But how is he going to get out of there?”
“I don’t know. But as long as he’s up on that stage right in front of City Hall, it’s probably the safest place he can be.”
The man on the stage continued speaking to the crowd. “A lot of you people ask, what can you do? A lot of you people ask, is a political movement enough? Well, I have the answer for you. No, a political movement is not enough. We have to fight back. We have to stand up for humanity because if we don’t, no one else will.”
The crowd cheered in response and shouted at the stage and a chill ran down Cass’s spine. She’d never seen this side of the Sapiens movement before. It had always been peaceful in her community. People talked about trying to kee
p their families safe. No one talked about doing so with violence or unrest.
“We, as Sapiens First,” the man on stage continued. “We, the ones who stand ready to defend your lives and your families, are hereby serving a notice to the subs who say all they want is to live peacefully among us. We don’t believe their lies and we’re not going to let them pretend they’re just like us. We are not going to allow it anymore.”
The speaker pulled the wireless microphone from the stand and walked along the line of prisoners. Cass zoomed in. Eric stood in the middle of the group of seven. He looked dazed, trying to comprehend what was going on.
“Cass, I can’t see what’s going on down there. What’s happening? I can see the stage, but everything looks so small.”
“Stop trying to see it with your eyes. I’m streaming it to you. I can see everything. Open your tablet and load the stream there if you want.”
Shelby pulled out her tablet from the purse on her shoulder and activated it.
A few seconds later Cass approved the connection between the device and her implant.
Shelby gasped as a close-up image of Eric and the others on the stage came into focus on her screen.
“Oh my God, Cass. He looks awful.”
“Yes, but he’s alive. That’s all that matters. If we can see him, so can the police and everyone else.”
“I’m going to stream this to the net via the Mantle. This has to go out to spread the word of what is happening here. We need to show what animals these Sapiens First bastards are.”
Cass had a momentary stab of fear. “Shel, this video can’t come from me. I can’t be the one who recorded this.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sending it from my device. It’ll go out anonymously. There’ll be no connection to you. As far as anyone will know, I’m streaming this from a standard webcam.”
Cass kept her face turned towards the stage, holding the magnified image in the frame as she watched what happened below.
The man walked back down the line of captives on stage. He’d continued ranting about the threat of the Mantle AI and its desire to take over of humanity. Cass had stopped listening to his words because he kept repeating himself.
Then he said something that drew her attention again. The man said something about a “final solution” and the “end game.” The words sounded ominous.
“People of the Sapiens movement, it is time for you to witness what must be the one and only final solution to this problem. The only way we can defend ourselves from what is to come is to eliminate it before it’s too late. We must begin the end game now.”
Some of this sounded strangely familiar to Cass. She’d heard it before. Her father and mother had talked about something they called the end game.
When she first heard it from them, she thought it was some sort of final political plan to get Sapiens members into the Congress or something. Coming from the masked leader on stage, it sounded much worse.
A hush fell over the crowd as the speaker paused with his hand held out in front of him. There seemed to be a sense of anticipation as everyone watched, their eyes riveted to the stage. The masked man reached down to his belt and pulled up a round metal tube.
It looked familiar. It took a second for Cass to place where she’d seen it before. Then it hit her. It was a device like the one the police used to disable implants on people in custody. This one was different. It had a coiled cord extending from it to a pouch on the man’s belt, like a battery pack. He spread his arms, holding the tube over his head. The coiled cord stretched up along his arm.
“Are you ready for the end game?”
The crowd responded with scattered cheers from various places across the square. The majority of the attendees seemed as confused as Cass was about what the man intended to do.
The masked speaker put his hand to his ear and said, “That didn’t sound very encouraging. I ask you again, are you ready for the end game?”
This time the cheers reverberated as more people joined in.
“I’m only going to ask one more time. Are you ready for us to begin the end game?”
This time the entire crowd erupted in cheers and shouts of encouragement.
Cass struggled to understand what was happening. What was the end game? She scanned back-and-forth across the stage. She’d zoomed in as tightly as she could so that each of the seven figures and their captors were retained in focus in the center of the frame of her vision.
“That’s better. Let the end game begin.”
The man walked to the end of the line where a woman with thick fiber-optic tendrils flowing from her head instead of hair stood struggling between two masked figures. The woman stared wide-eyed as the leader approached her with the metal tube in his hand.
“The only solution we have is to make these people human again. The only solution we have is to give them back their humanity if only in the last moments of their misguided lives.”
Cass understood what was about to happen now. Horror filled her. A scream sounded in her ears, one she only later realized was her own.
“No!”
The leader jabbed the tube against the metal implant in the side of the woman’s head. The silvery, fiberoptic tendrils of cyber-hair stood straight out from her head for an instant as the electrical charge from the powerful battery pack on the men’s belt fired into her implant frying the electronics and circuits inside.
“Be human again and be saved,” the man shouted over his microphone as the powerful electric jolt destroyed the woman’s brain along with the electronics in the implants. Her body spasmed and collapsed to the stage as the people on either side of her let go.
Cass screamed again. “No!”
Next to her, watching on the tablet, Shelby sobbed and muttered, “No, no, no,” as the man continued down the line to the next person.
The second cyber-human struggled violently against the hold of his captors, but he could not break free. Once again, the man in the mask jabbed that metal tube against the man’s implanted cerebral control center.
Once again, the body spasmed and fell lifeless to the stage. Cass watched, tears streaming from her one human eye as she watched and recorded what happened. The third cyber-human was killed just like the first two.
Eric was next.
He was still weak from his stay in the hospital and his struggles looked feeble and completely ineffective as the two muscular figures on either side held him while the man with the tube approached.
Shelby screamed. She dropped her tablet and ran to the edge of the rooftop. “Eric, no!”
It was too late. In a split second, as the tube tapped against the side of Eric’s implant, he was gone.
Cass froze. She could not record this any longer. She wanted more than anything to stop, but she couldn’t look away. Eric lay in a heap on the stage as the man continued down the line, finishing off the other three captives. The crowd cheered for each death, applauded each kill. When the seven people lay dead on the stage, the masked leader slid the tube back into the pouch on his belt and raised his hands over his head until the crowd fell silent.
“This is the only acceptable solution for anyone who considers themselves a human being. We, the members of Sapiens First, are your front-line defenders. We’re here to protect you from the horror that is the Mantle AI’s attempt to take over the world. Fight back or die.”
With that final statement, the masked man placed the microphone back in the clip on the stand at the center of the stage. He turned with his followers and left the stage, blending back into the crowd. Other masked people came up and dragged the seven limp bodies offstage as well.
Cass could no longer watch. She cut the connection and slumped down to the rooftop, her back resting against the brick parapet. Shelby sobbed next to her, rocking back-and-forth with her knees hugged to her chest, calling out her brother’s name.
Cass’s mind spun with questions. Was this what her parents had meant when they referred to the end game? How cou
ld they condone such brutality? Cass wanted to ask her parents the question directly, although a small voice in the back of her mind told her she already knew the answer.
A chime pinged her implant, followed by another, and another, and another. She looked at the incoming messages. They were all from local and national net newsfeeds.
Cass checked the pings as a matter of course and gasped.
All over the country, the video Shelby streamed from her tablet was being picked up and reported on by news organizations across the country.
The videos played on the news feeds over and over again. The deaths of the seven people on that stage were witnessed again and again, as millions tuned in to watch the horrible display as it replayed countless times.
Cass sobbed and turned off her connection to the Mantle. She didn’t want additional alerts of its viewing. She didn’t need to see the video recording, she’d never forget the images as long as she lived.
Chapter 26
The two women huddled together on the rooftop for a long time, crouched down behind the parapet in fear they might be found or seen if they tried to leave their hiding place. What would stop the same thing from happening to them?
While they remained hidden, they reopened their Mantle connection and watched as the news media carried the video of the deaths on all the channels.
The reporters and experts talked about how the Sapiens leadership were implicated in the deaths witnessed in the recording. Some others, friendly to the movement, proposed it was a staged event and the people weren’t really dead. It was all an act.
Cass pulled Shelby close and hugged her tight. Shelby’s sobbing continued unabated, her face pressed against Cass’s shoulder.
“Shel, we need to get out of here. I know it’s going to be risky to exit the building right now with all the Sapiens demonstrators down there, but I’m afraid if we stay here we’re going to be discovered.”
“So what?” Shelby asked. “I don’t want to go down there. Call the police we saw earlier to come up and get us.”