by Kyle Andrews
Right as Tracy came to that conclusion, a swarm of HAND officers ran past her. Something was happening. This was it.
҂
Justin held out his right hand. He felt his chest tightening as the man moved the scanner closer and closer to him. It wasn't nervousness exactly; more like cautious anticipation, but he didn't allow even a hint of it to show on his face.
“This will just take a second. Don't worry. I was scanned yesterday,” the man said to Justin.
He scanned Justin's hand and then pulled the scanner back to look at the data that was appearing on the screen. The man's expression went blank as he saw the screen.
“I don't... What is happening?” the man asked, putting the scanner on the desk and grabbing an instruction manual from the stack of papers next to him.
As the man read the manual, Justin looked down at the tablet and saw that the screen was completely blank, except for a red blinking light in one of the corners.
He became suddenly very aware of the spot on his arm where Marti had drawn his blood, but it didn't make sense. How could this be possible?
The door to the office burst open and Justin turned to find a group of HAND officers standing behind him.
҂
It sounded like a fire alarm. Chaos broke out after that. HAND officers were running toward her. The woman behind the table stared at the blank scanner in her hand and then looked at Via, not knowing what was going on.
She opened her mouth to say something, but before the woman could make so much as a sound, a HAND officer was grabbing Via's arm.
“Come with me,” the officer said to her.
Via had no idea what was going on. She thought that she might have won some sort of prize, but that didn't make sense once she saw a man at one of the other tables being approached by a HAND officer. Then another. And another.
“Shut it down!” she heard from the back of the room. “Shut the whole system down, now!”
҂
Tracy stood in the assignment building, watching the frenzy erupt. HAND officers were heading from office to office, some were pulling assignees out. Others were waiting, as though they weren't sure what to do next. They put their fingers to their ears, listening to their orders come in and shaking their heads with confusion.
Tracy had no idea what was happening. She expected to see Justin hauled from one of the offices and shot right in front of her, but that didn't happen. This was something else. Something bigger.
҂
“Reports are coming into the newsroom now that the MeID rollout has been put on hold. Witnesses are reporting that the scanners have somehow malfunctioned,” the reporter on the TV said.
Rose moved closer, to watch the story unfold. She could feel that something big was happening and that this day truly would go down in the history books. But why?
“The scanner worked fine at first,” said the woman that Rose had seen on the news earlier. Via. “But as soon as they scanned me, the machine just went crazy and died.”
That was when Rose realized what happened. The scanner had detected something in that woman's blood. Maybe the anomalies that Aaron had told her about. Maybe the encrypted data that Libby and Uly carried in their DNA. Either way, this was big news because it was happening in public, for the whole world to see. The rolling out of the MeID system was a debacle.
“And then other machines went nuts,” Via continued. “Five or six of them...”
A smile formed on Rose's face.
҂
As more HAND officers began to walk through the front door of the assignment building, Tracy knew that this wasn't simply about Justin. If they wanted him taken care of, he would be taken care of without the need to draw this much attention.
But he wasn't killed. He wasn't arrested. And then she saw the HAND officers taking the MeID scanners out of those offices and she knew that there was still a chance for him.
In that moment, Tracy had to make a decision. She could stand in the building where she had no business being and draw attention to herself and possibly to Justin, or she could let this play out and see what happened next.
She had no idea what was going on, but Tracy did the only rational thing. She calmly and quietly walked out of the building and disappeared into the crowd.
҂
At first, Justin thought that he was dead. He thought that whatever happened with the scanner would be the end of him. That his mission had failed before it ever started. That thought quickly faded when the HAND officers left him alone and took the MeID scanner out of the office.
He sat quietly, watching this happen. Then, when the HAND officers left the room, the man behind the desk looked at Justin and said, “I guess we'll have to do this the old fashioned way.”
҂
That day, Justin was assigned to HAND and entered their training program.
The MeID program was terminated indefinitely.
In the Campus, Aaron and Simon poured over the seemingly endless files that they had found encrypted in Justin's blood. Documents. Books. Images. Everything that the authorities had systematically stolen from the citizens over the course of decades had been restored.
At first, nobody knew how it happened. Those files were discovered in the systems of countless citizens around the city. Despite the best efforts of the authorities, the library refused to die. The harder they tried to keep it down, the more it fought back. Over the course of the next several months, the files encrypted in that library began to leak out to the public. The past would remain silent no longer.
In time it was discovered that each person who carried the library within them had been infected by the flu outbreak that had occurred a year and a half earlier. Somehow, at some point, someone with that flu virus received the library, most likely through direct contact with Uly or Libby's blood. While this new data could have been rejected by that person's body, or possibly caused any number of mutations to occur, the flu virus itself accepted this new information. It became a part of that virus and it spread throughout the city, remaining even after the virus had run its course and changing the DNA of the infected forever.
The library could no longer be destroyed. Whether they knew it or not, thousands of people around the city were now backup copies of that data. In their attempts to seize the very foundation of human life, the authorities had exposed their own greatest weakness. There was no going back now. There was no way to stop the spread of those documents. The people of the country would see it all. Their past was a part of them now.
It was in their blood.
TO BE CONTINUED IN…
BATTLE CRY
COMING MARCH 2017
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Copyright © 2016, Kyle Andrews. All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews.
Cover Art by S. Kersey
Some textures and images courtesy of Textures.com and Pixabay.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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