by Darr, Brian
The
Troll
by Brian Darr
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. If any of what I've depicted the future to look like actually happens, it is a coincidence.
Copyright © 2015 by Brian Darr.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the author, Brian Darr. Feel free to ask. I may let you plagiarize the whole thing.
Library of Congress Control Number: 1-2453982391
ISBN-13: 978-1511407205
ISBN-10: 1511407205
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition United States
This book would not have been possible without my step-daughter, who inspired me to write a story that she might like. Thanks for reminding me how to be young.
-To Iris-
Part 1
Chapter 1
The only faces of what little revolution was left belonged to The Surfer and Wigeon. In fact, they were probably the only two people left on the planet that cared at all. Word was they had a small gathering of people who worked behind the scenes, but even if that were true, their belief that the world could ever be restored was laughable to everyone else.
No one really cared that the world was taken over anymore. They did at first, but after awhile, the population got used to how things were and adjusted. Everyone is afraid of the apocalyptic scenario: The world rips apart and falls into complete anarchy and the underdogs have to battle the hostile primitive evils that conquered. When the world came to an end, it was soon discovered that the new version wasn’t so bad.
The new world was pretty simple. All complex and useful things that man made were suddenly gone. There were no longer vehicles, weapons, phones; Even electricity was scarce. Twenty years ago, anyone reading this would have said “no way Jose. Couldn’t deal with that,” but before all those things existed, people got by just fine, and when those things were gone, they figured out how to function, and in some ways, better than before.
The Surfer and Wigeon never recovered from the fall though. They could never forget the intentions of the guys who ran things and all the casualties in the beginning. No one disagreed that their takeover wasn’t just a greedy power move, but what they did was intelligent and a lot of people believed that the world actually improved when it got simpler—even with great sacrifice.
No weapons were used in the takeover. There was no militia, bombs, blackmail or threats. It was just a group of guys who worked for a company called “Circular Prime Technologies”.
A circular prime is a prime number that when the numbers rearrange, is still a prime number, an example being 1931, which can be reconfigured as 9311, or 3119 or any other combination and remain prime. It symbolized the idea that everything is built from things that already exist—that every new invention and idea is a rearrangement of what we already have.
What Circular Prime specialized in was the advancement of cellular technologies. The generation before had only heard of rotary phones, which had advanced into hand-held phones, and then the cell phones with the apps and games. Eventually, no one used phones for their intended purpose. Instead, it was all about organizing life and connecting without really connecting. The powers that be at Circular Prime were the first to launch what had been inevitable, but until it hit the market, had only been talked about as an experiment: The Fibonacci Drive, which was nicknamed simply: Psi.
Psi was a mind-blowing piece of technology. To purchase Psi meant having a quick procedure done, tantamount to getting your ear pierced. You walk into any retail store’s Pharmacy and for nearly $400.00, you could have Psi injected right into your brain, and voila! You were connected to the Web. Navigating websites was as simple as thinking about them. Suddenly, a world of information was in the heads of anyone who purchased Psi. It was the tiniest microchip—not visible to the naked eye—embedded in plasma and placed right into people’s brains. Texting, tweeting, social networking, and blogging were all done by arranging sequences using only thoughts. It was so awesome at the time, it was scary. Movie plots of robots forming personalities and taking over were suddenly very real threats, but nothing like that happened. Robots didn’t do a damn thing. It was people.
The people at Circular Prime who built Psi, to be exact.
No one knew if it was a long planned attack or if they just became disgruntled, but someone in the company had an idea in their head and a small band of followers, and one warm June evening, the whole world changed with the push of a button and about a dozen guys at the controls.
By then, Psi had gotten cheap to inject and it was as much a necessity as cell phones were before that. You’d be hard pressed to find someone without Psi, but there were some who saw the dangers of technology so advanced. The Surfer and Wigeon were good examples of that. The fact was, on that June evening, to NOT have Psi meant being the rare individual who would not be enslaved by this small group of hackers.
For them, it was simple. Everyone had a microchip in their brain and they used it to control the net. Why couldn’t they tap into the mainframe and turn Psi around on the users? That’s what they ultimately decided to do.
The main developer, a man named Michael Hogan, refused to pack a box and avoid letting the door hit him on the way out. Now, Michael goes by The Moderator, a nickname he basically gave himself. The Moderator and his entourage of hackers and crackers shut down the whole system and rebooted with different coding. When they did this, everyone with Psi shut down for two minutes, aware of their surroundings but unable to respond or react. Millions of people died—people in cars or planes or out for a swim or climbing trees. Everyone was shut down for two minutes and when the system rebooted, chaos broke out. It didn’t last long. It lasted as long as it took to realize that someone else had control over the population and could murder any one of us at any moment by typing in an individual identification number and frying the circuit. That would result in something like a stroke, and then a paralyzed state. They were allowed to mourn, but revenge was prohibited and anytime a group of people huddled together to start plotting against the folks led by The Moderator, the leader of the group would suddenly wind up dead. Soon, people got the message and submitting became the only way to survive.
A couple years later, though everyone had lost loved ones, the world became peaceful and sensible. There was no threat of war, no hate crimes, homicides, or anything that ruined lives. The Moderator and his men swept in and confiscated everything. Guns, vehicles, communication devices: All destroyed. The Moderator said it was time to prioritize—that these luxuries should have never been so widespread. People had become lazy and entitled. The world had been made too easy. So he took it all away and it was suddenly primitive again.
Tribes formed and soon hunting, fishing, and gardening were the main source of sustenance. Everything became simple and people learned to work together again without having to text, and that life worked for many. Those who couldn’t adapt but who complied by the rules, people who made up a good sized chunk of the population, were still allowed to use computers, but not for information. They worked in large warehouses where the extent of their time at the keyboard was spent on message boards, chatting with others like them.
Everyone either contributed, or stayed out of the way without qualms. There were a lot of rules that if broken, The Moderator would catch onto and shut a person down without thinking twice.
Every now and then, someone would get it in their head to rebel or play against the rules, but since The Moderator
knew where everyone was at all times and could communicate with anyone through Psi, he’d warn the individual breaking the rule, and if they continued, their life was cut short. A couple years ago, there was a sort of mass suicide when a group of people got together and tried to storm Circular Prime. They didn’t even get within a mile of the city before they were all dead.
Circular Prime was built in what was once Chicago, which is one of the few cities left with any activity. It housed everything that kept the world running. Every connection ran through that area from one of the tallest buildings in the city. No one was allowed to enter the city, which was rumored to be a sort of paradise for those few men. Chicago kept canned foods and TV dinners coming from the city too. The Moderator ate much better than everyone else did, but he also made sure no one starved and he didn’t provoke trouble—he only punished those who caused it. It was easy to make people share because the monetary system was extinguished completely. The only value that existed came from individual contributions.
And it kept the world peaceful.
The very minimal revolution of The Surfer and Wigeon was a small exception to that rule, and since they were a few of the only people who didn’t have Psi in their heads, they had been fugitives for a long time. They were envied for having the unique distinction of not having to fear being zapped. Still, their cause wasn’t taken all too seriously.
Most of the males of the world viewed Wigeon as just a poster girl—a fantasy—and boy did they fantasize about her. When a man decided to join the rebels, it was usually because she recruited them and they wanted her. She was an absolutely beautiful Amazonian, tall, clear eyed, flowing dark haired, full lipped woman. She was most definitely a looker and her capture and death were so tragically inevitable that people tried to pretend like she was a figment of their imagination.
Wigeon was hard to avoid, with posters and sightings and every now and then, The Surfer and Wigeon would hack into the airwaves for a minute or two and try to recruit people into an uprising—which never worked—but holy cow the men in the world went crazy for her. She would always be sporting a tight shirt and flaunting cleavage. Maybe that was part of their marketing plan, and maybe people did join them for that reason, but she was nothing more than a fantasy for most, because to join them and be caught, meant death. Many were caught because some with Psi tried to join up and led The Moderator right to the rebels. Wigeon, while she was the personification of the perfect woman, was unobtainable.
The Surfer had a similar story. He somehow managed to look well-groomed but primitive at the same time. He had the build of a man who climbed and swam and jumped everything in his path, but with a clean shaved face and shapely jaw on his chiseled face. Sometimes people wondered if they really were in charge of a revolution, or if they were placed there as eye candy.
The Surfer and Wigeon didn’t successfully rally the people, and so their revolution remained small and inevitably on the path to oblivion, but they lasted longer than expected, and on the day they were caught, a lot of people felt something they didn’t think they would: Sadness.
The broadcast and air waves were controlled by The Moderator. The only broadcast towers remaining all were controlled by Circular Prime, but there were towers all over the land so if they had something to say, they transmitted and the screens were impossible to avoid. During a broadcast, you could look into the sky and see hundreds of screens projecting the image of the Moderator. When The Moderator had something to say, everyone saw it. Other than that, TV was just another thing of the past. Every now and then, a rebel would be caught and they would broadcast the trial and execution for all to see, which served as reminders not to go against the men in Circular Prime. The last thing anyone wanted was to be publicly captured and murdered on TV, but that was the fate of refusing to accept reality.
And so they did. At first, by force. Eventually, because it was all they knew. In the course of a decade, most forgot the day everyone blacked out for two minutes. Relatives were no longer mourned and history was only word of mouth without the emotional attachment.
No one knew what The Moderator did with Wigeon. She disappeared from the news stories. Instead, the story became the upcoming trial of The Surfer. They publicized the trial aggressively and encouraged all to watch. Everyone already knew what the outcome would be: Like all rebels before him, he would be executed for everyone to see, but they’d make a fool of him first. When he was gone, one of the last symbols of the world pre-Psi would disappear forever.
Chapter 2
What little remained of the revolution numbered in the hundreds. With the population so disconnected, there could be multiple groups of people who didn’t carry Psi, but these groups would have no way of finding each other.
Surfer and Wigeon belonged to a group outside of Chicago, which was dangerously close to The Moderator, but necessary for when the day came that a plan had to be carried out.
They holed up in what was once an elementary school that was long abandoned. They maintained the outside of the building to look unoccupied, covering the grounds with weeds and dirt. On the inside, they’d scattered broken glass and other alarm systems to alert those inside of anyone’s presence. In the center of the school was a gymnasium where they met on occasion, but mostly they’d grouped into their own families and stayed in the classrooms together, living life in seclusion until the day their leader needed them.
That day hadn’t come in a dozen years. Initially, those who joined believed they would be a sort of army that would stomp into Chicago and fight until The Moderator fell and they could remove Psi from the people. There had never been much organization, but what they never fully understood was that The Surfer and Wigeon HAD worked hard to find an attack strategy, but there had never been much optimism in their position.
In the beginning, The Surfer didn’t have many leaders in the group. He needed a candidate that could train to be strong and lead an army. What he found was a man who he named The Guide. The Guide wanted to be something more: The Assassin or The Eliminator, but The Surfer told him that to be victorious, he needed to be a good leader, and to have a leader label.
The Guide trained and became strong, as he promised he would, and soon, he was the ultimate warrior. He was a fighter and he taught others to fight. On the battlefield, he could lead any group to a fight, but he wasn’t an expert tactician. The Surfer hoped he would be, but he never quiet picked up on the strategic art of war. Instead, he was a soldier, and perfect as a soldier in every way.
The days began to blend together. He constantly waited for The Surfer and Wigeon to come to him with the ultimate plan, but they usually met privately and discussed strategy, though he suspected they never made any progress. It seemed the guys running the world from Chicago had a fairly solid advantage that didn't leave room to be conquered. The Guide waited for his moment, assuming it would ever come, building the resistance from his end while wondering if they would ever even be called on.
Their army was about 75 people strong, which was a weak army when going into a city blind—a city designed to keep people out. Even without Psi, they wouldn't even come face to face with The Moderator. He had too many fancy gadgets, booby traps, and bounty hunters with special abilities of their own. The need for an army became a second thought, which had become more apparent as The Surfer and Wigeon conducted more closed-door meetings.
Then, one day while The Guide was training, a friend delivered the message: The Surfer and Wigeon were captured trying to get into Chicago. Apparently Wigeon had intel that provided a way in without being detected, but the mission backfired and both were taken.
The Guide was a mix of emotions. He was sad that his friends were captured and knew they would be put on trial and killed, but he couldn't help but feel angry too. His set of skills would have been beneficial to their mission, but they hadn't even told him they were leaving. He didn't even get to say goodbye.
Instead of reacting or calling a meeting, he trained harder, until he cramp
ed up and could no longer breath. He threw up, and then trained until he threw up again. The second time, he stayed in the bathroom, heaving over the sink and catching himself in the mirror. It was then that he forced himself to accept a harsh reality: The resistance no longer existed.
When The Guide entered the arena and scanned the crowd, he released a breath of defeat. There were maybe two hundred people remaining, half of their group before The Surfer and Wigeon were caught. He’d expected a drop, but nothing this drastic. Without their leaders, there wasn’t much hope left. The torch was passed to The Guide and apparently, no one had faith in that fact.
Joey Dakota was a cab driver before the day of the takeover. His life was boring, without purpose, heading nowhere, but he was content. He was old fashioned, and therefore couldn’t care less when Psi rolled out and never had it implanted. After the takeover, he could no longer drive his cab, most of the people he knew were dead, and his lack of purpose was suddenly very real.
When The Surfer hacked into the television for the first time and told everyone to rise up against The Moderator and his gang, The Guide joined because he had nothing better to do and he was one of a small population immune to the power The Moderator held. They came together and The Guide quickly proved himself an expert tactician and became Surfer’s friend and adviser. They had been close, but now his friend was captured, and very likely soon to be dead.
He looked up at a large television screen which would ordinarily have been off. Instead, it had a countdown: FIVE MINUTES UNTIL THE TRIAL OF THE SURFER.