by Kyle Andrews
As they prepared to charge into the building, HAND fired a combination of gas canisters and explosive charges. They continued to push their way through the building shooting people and setting even more fires. It was an unimaginable attack. Ruthless. Savage. By the time they were done, there was nothing left of the place. The people inside couldn't be recovered or given proper burials.
Two months later, the Mayor held a parade for the HAND officers involved in the raid, calling them 'heroes of the city'. The bomb that took out ten of those men was one of the few attacks attributed to Hate that had actually been carried out by Freedom. No civilians were lost in the blast. That didn't stop the news from reporting on the heavy loss of innocent lives because of Hate.
But something started to change after HAND attacked the Garden. Try as they might to spin the attack in the media, the citizens of the city didn't accept their excuses as easily as they once had. They had seen the drone flying over their own heads. Many heard the explosions and the gunshots. This happened too close for comfort. That's not to say that many didn't fall back in line. Time heals all wounds for some, but to others, the shine of the authorities had worn off. Faith had turned to fear.
Justin turned the channel. Another early morning news program was playing, though they were showing an interview that had been conducted the night before. It was an interview with President By Williams, who was running for reelection against Senator Larson.
As Justin tuned in, the President was tapping his finger on the table in front of him, declaring, “We are going to do everything we can to stop Hate from spreading any further. After the election, I plan to refocus on that task. I will not allow another Croy Fisker to die by their hands. Actually, I want to show you something...”
President Williams reached into his pocket and pulled out a photo. He held it up so that the camera could see that it was the image of Croy Fisker. Sweet. Innocent. It was the picture that the press always used when talking about the boy, but it was probably taken a good three or four years before Rose killed him. They never showed the pictures of the tall, muscular Croy who attacked Rose in the alley and who would have done God-knows-what to her if she hadn't been able to stop him. Truth was, the Croy Fisker that the public mourned was dead long before he ever encountered Rose.
“I keep this picture with me,” the President said. “I keep it in my pocket as a reminder of what's at stake. This child could be yours or mine. Any one of us could be killed in the street by those hateful, evil people. And I will fight to make sure that they won't have the chance to make any other families suffer the way that Croy's mothers and father have suffered.”
The middle-aged woman who was hosting this show seemed to be hanging on the President's every word. She was looking at him as though he had just walked on water, nodding along with what he was saying. Finally, she said, “Tell me about the MeID program. It's going into effect just in time for the election.”
“It is. And that's something that I've wanted for a long time, because it will allow us to reach the largest number of citizens at once.”
“How does this work? We turn in our old Civvies and what do we get in return?”
“More room in your wallet,” the President joked.
The host laughed far more generously than was really called for, given the fact that people had plenty of free space in their wallets as it was.
“But seriously, all you will need to carry with you in the future is your own DNA. It will tell us who you are, give us all of the records that we'd normally have to wait for and process. It will tell medical responders what victims are allergic to. This is a far more precise, more tailored system that makes each individual person more safe, more healthy and even more educated.”
“So you scan our DNA and the system runs it like a fingerprint?”
“Not at all. There is no database to connect to. All of our information will be stored within our own DNA.”
“How can DNA store... Criminal records, for example?”
“For a long time, that was the challenge. We could read information, but we couldn't write it. And actually, the technology for this system is decades old, but early tests resulted in all sorts of distorted results in test animals.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“I don't have the specifics on me, but the results were... unstable. What we've done is take that same technology and refine it so that we can encode data in human DNA. Essentially, we become our own hard drives.”
“How much data can be stored?”
“Far more than any human will ever need, I assure you.”
The President was having a good time, discussing the subject. But he was lying about not knowing the specifics of those early trials. Freedom's research suggested that the initial research and experimentation started roughly seventy years earlier. Dr. Norman Teller was the man who first experimented with ways of turning the human body into a data storage system, but several test animals developed cancer after being injected with Teller's encoded DNA. Others accepted the injection, but the altered DNA began to spread like a sexually transmitted disease, causing cancer in animals that were never injected, or causing their immune systems to attack their own altered DNA until it killed them.
Teller never told anyone that he had discovered a way to make the process work. He never told anyone how to do it themselves. Instead, he must have injected a library of valuable historical documents, literature, art and research into one of Uly and Libby's ancestors and that manipulated DNA was passed down through generations until the authorities killed off the last remaining carriers. What had become the fabled library of Freedom was probably just Teller's way of dumping as much data as possible into his test subjects, to see how much they could hold.
A year and a half of research and that was what Simon had discovered, mostly by reading old copies of scientific magazines that were stored in various Freedom bases. It didn't seem like enough to Justin. He wanted to know why it was done and how to make those deaths count for something even after their blood was gone, and the library along with it. But if there was one thing that Justin was getting good at, it was being denied.
Justin turned off the TV. The sun was rising. This was the first day of the rest of his life. The day he would be assigned to HAND.
34
There was a subway station that, while functioning, had become a meeting spot for older school kids and younger adults when they wanted to blow off steam. Music was usually playing loudly. Drugs and alcohol weren't uncommon. Talking led to petting, and petting led to stupid drunk kids making stupid drunk mistakes. At least, this was how Rose saw it. The subway station was about a block away from the restaurant where she worked and it was the only way for her to get across town in a hurry unless she wanted to grab a new car every day, and that might attract attention.
In the old days, Rose worked and lived in the same area. Technically, she still had an apartment but with the Garden gone, she and many others had been forced to find new bases to operate out of. Fortunately, she liked her new base. A lot.
If she grabbed the train after work, she could ride it all the way down to Elana Station. It was the last stop, named after the mother of modern transportation. The woman who took the old subway system and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making it look like a somewhat newer subway system. This was usually accomplished by hiding old, crumbling walls behind shiny new walls.
Rose thought it funny that the Elana Station was one of the most rundown stations on the line. The train had to go through the station in order to turn around and go back the other way, but nobody ever waited to get off there. The lights didn't work. The walls were covered in graffiti. The tiling was falling off of the walls, leaving sharp shards on the ground.
The place was overrun by hardcore drug addicts, prostitutes and other unsavory types. Rose viewed the people that she saw as she exited the train as the natural evolution of those kids that she saw when she got on the train. The good news was that, m
uch like the people who used to populate the abandoned streets around the Garden, those people didn't want the authorities in their business any more than Rose did. She could come and go as often as she wished and nobody ever questioned her.
Off to the side of the steps which led up to the street, there were restrooms and a maintenance office. The door to the office didn't close very well and a leaking pipe prevented anyone from taking the room over as their own private suite. Beyond that office was an access tunnel that workers once used to maintain the plumbing and electrical work, behind the once-beautiful walls and away from passengers.
The maintenance tunnel connected to a ventilation tunnel, which, for some reason, connected to a drainage pipe that Rose followed under the streets of the city, to her new base, known as the Underground.
The Underground was an old city street that had been built over once people realized that their part of town was below sea level and prone to flooding. For a while, in the 1980's, the street had been a hip underground mall with trendy shops, arcades and eateries, but as time went on, it lost its popularity. Eventually, it was forgotten and buildings were constructed over it, closing off the main entrances and leaving the place empty until Freedom moved in.
This was Collin Powers' old base, before he was taken by HAND. It had once been known as the Station, but after the Garden was destroyed, the base had been repurposed and renamed.
It was bigger than the Garden, and it had everything that Rose needed for not just her own training, but for the training of the army that she was slowly building. Mek lived there now, and used his skills to teach Rose and others how to fight with their hands and with weapons that they'd obtained through various means. They even created a shooting range in an old bowling alley, after heavily soundproofing the walls in order to keep anyone on the street above from hearing what they were doing.
If anyone upstairs heard gunshots, there would be no end to the amount of hellfire that would rain down upon the Underground, because of the location of the base. This was, in Rose's opinion, the best part of the story. The street above them was called Federal Way. The HAND building was about a half a mile away. As Rose walked through the Underground, she often stopped to look up at the ceiling above her, wondering exactly where it was that Libby died that night. Had her blood washed through those drains and into those tunnels?
More often than not, Rose didn't want to make the trek back to her own apartment. Though the way she came in was not the main entrance by any means, the front door to the Underground was meant to be approached from the wrong side for her. Either way was an annoyance that she would rather not have to go through any more than necessary, so if anyone in her apartment building ever asked her, she just told them that she was sleeping with one of her boyfriends. Nobody ever seemed to question the excuse, so she could sleep in the Underground as often as she liked. That was where she woke up on Election Day, with Ammo sticking his nose in her face, demanding to be fed and taken for a walk.
“It's a holiday. Let me sleep,” she told Ammo, pulling her pillow over her face.
Ammo responded by jumping onto the bed and sticking his face under her pillow. The dog knew what he wanted and he wasn't about to be denied.
Rose was eventually forced to grab Ammo's leash and walk him through the Underground, toward one of the more popular exits. On her way, she passed by the gym where Mek was giving his newer students lessons in hand-to-hand combat. These weren't the people that HAND would have chosen to train. Most of Mek's students were the smart kids or the loner kids who would be overlooked by the system. They would probably wind up being officially assigned to work that they hated, but in Freedom they had the choice to be something else. HAND might not view them as valuable soldiers, but that was a mistake that the authorities would live to regret.
As Rose passed by the gym, she saw a woman in her mid-forties flip a teenage boy to the ground. In their ongoing war, every soldier would make a difference. HAND would never see them coming.
Past the gym and the food court, there was another classroom. In it, Paul was giving students the basics of driving a car. Simple things, like how to break into and hot-wire a ride without attracting too much attention.
He was doing that thing again, vanishing from Rose's life just as she thought they were getting somewhere. After the Garden was destroyed, they had started talking. They had meals together. They found a way to laugh in the midst of chaos, and helped each other learn how to hit a distant target using the weapons that they stole from HAND.
One evening, there was a moment where silence fell between the two of them, and Rose was sure that he was finally going to kiss her. Instead, he made an excuse to leave, and he'd been making up excuses ever since.
As Rose moved past his classroom, she watched him teach. She loved the way that he effortlessly related to his students and made big gestures with his hands as he told them stories of his most thrilling escapes. This didn't stop her from wanting to run him down with one of those cars that he taught her how to hot-wire.
Just as she turned to walk away, Rose could have sworn that she saw him shift his eyes toward her, but when she looked back, he was turning in another direction.
Amanda once told Rose to give Paul his space. She assured Rose that Paul loved her, and insisted that if Rose gave him enough time, he would come around. It sounded like good advice at the time, but months had passed and no progress had been made. Now Rose was wondering how wise it had been to take the advice of a heavily medicated woman who sometimes thought that Rose was her dead daughter.
Amanda eventually lost her battle with cancer. She survived another eight months after the Garden was destroyed, and she never came around to Rose's way of thinking, but that didn't stop Rose from mourning just the same. Amanda was a friend. Another on the long list of people that Rose had lost.
When Rose finally reached the fresh morning air, she stopped to let Ammo do whatever it was that he needed to do, and she looked up to the tops of the buildings around her. The sunlight was reflecting off of a hundred different windows. A cool breeze blew past her. If she allowed herself to clear her mind, Rose could appreciate the beauty of the autumn morning.
The beauty only lasted for a second or two before the weight of the day was once again pressing down on her. Rose couldn't afford to appreciate the bright blue sky. This wasn't just an ordinary day in the city, after all. It was Election Day.
35
“It isn't enough,” Collin said, reading through a story that one of his newer reporters had handed him.
It had been a long year. The Secret Citizen wasn't just a few pages stapled together anymore. It was a newspaper, reporting on a wide variety of topics, with reporters from several different bases sending stories to him. His job was to make sure that the facts reached the people of the city in a way that they would relate to and understand, but there was never any teacher explaining to him how it all worked. Half of the time, Collin was just pretending to know what he was doing and hoping that it worked; hoping that his instincts were telling him what was right and what was wrong. Everyone was looking to him, expecting him to lead the way. They believed that he had the answers, and for the people outside of the Campus, he had to maintain that image. He couldn't just be Collin anymore, he had to be 'Collin Powers', the man who stood up to HAND and walked away stronger than ever.
It was exhausting, but someone had to be the face of Freedom. In the sixty-plus years that the organization had existed, he was the only one who seemed willing to put himself out there and dare HAND to stop him.
“What do you mean? How is it not enough?” Tracy asked, sitting across from Collin at his desk. He'd been working all night, reading submissions. She had just walked into the room sipping a cup of Coffite. This was how most days started.
Collin slid the story across the desk to her and said, “It's all facts. Numbers. Statistics. Philosophy.”
“And it's not sound?”
“It's great. It's absolutely spot on and a
nyone who already agrees with what we're saying would wave this story in the air like the new damn flag of America,” Collin replied, slumping back in his chair and rubbing his temples. “But do you know what anyone outside of Freedom is going to see when they look at this? They will see excuses and rationalization.”
“Facts are excuses?”
Collin took a deep breath and said, “You couldn't bring me a cup of Coffite while you were on your way in?”
“Probably could have. Sorry.”
Tracy picked up the story and started to read it, taking another sip of her drink and savoring the flavor as she swallowed. There were times when Collin could have sworn that she was trying to drive him crazy. All he could think about at that point was getting a cup, so he stood up and said, “Walk with me.”
“Sure.”
He led the way out of the office and down the hall while Tracy kept up, reading and sipping as they went.
“There was this book, back in my old base. I forget the title, but it involved con artists, back in the day. These guys were experts at manipulating people into believing whatever they wanted them to believe. The book compared them to magicians, because in the end, it was all the same thing. Sleight of hand. The assistant was never really sawed in half, they just made people believe it.”
“Who was sawing who in what now?” Tracy blurted, looking up from the article.
Magic shows weren't very common anymore. Unless you were a fan of late night TV, you would have probably never even seen that trick performed, so it shouldn't have surprised Collin that Tracy had no idea what he was talking about. Still, he couldn't help but feel as though she had missed out on a vital part of the human experience. Something that every person needed to at least know about, if they didn't get to see it first hand.