by Rayya Deeb
It was no wonder they wanted to keep Seneca exclusive. After all, exclusivity is nothing new. But just like the American dream, the Senecan dream could only truly be declared by those who lived it most graciously and with liberty and justice.
Of course, there were minor bumps in the concept. For example, as far as I was concerned, my mom deserved to be here just as much as, if not more than, people like Gregory Zaffron or G.W. Wallingsford. There was no reason that she couldn't accompany me, if G.W. could be here with his sister and his father, Congressman Wallingsford, and seemed to be able to go back and forth between Seneca and the Aboves whenever he felt like it. I’d never liked the dismissive saying, "Life isn't fair." I believed in Seneca, but wasn't about to accept all of their arbitrary barriers so easily. This society was being developed, not just by the powerful, but equally by great minds of all classes and circumstances. Forward thinking was what really created the true potential of Seneca, not fear and power. No, fear and power just created unjust imaginary boundaries. Boundaries I had every intention of breaking.
That evening, after session, I decided to take a ride to the restaurant sector and pay Ty a visit. It was no different than any evening– his place was packed to the brim with elated patrons. There was just one empty seat at the sushi bar. I bee-lined for it, knowing it would be filled in a matter of seconds.
"Well, well, well. Look who's returned to the scene of the crime."
I knew that voice. Ellen Malone. Uh-oh. It was time to face up to the betrayal. "Ellen."
Ty leaned forward onto the sushi bar. "Hi Doro! You two know each other, yes?"
Ellen nodded as she gracefully nibbled at a piece of salmon wrapped around a melon spear.
"Very nice. Let me make your favorite."
"Thanks, Ty."
I didn't know what to say, but I needed to start somewhere. "You hate me."
"Hate is a strong word, Doro. I could think of a more apropos term to describe how I feel about what happened."
"I'm sorry, Ellen, I had to find a way. There are things going on that I had to try and get to the bottom of."
Ellen calmly sipped some tea. She wasn't someone I’d ever wanted to hurt and I hoped she would accept my apologies. I just hadn't been able to think of any other way to get out of S.E.R.C. while it was under lockdown.
"You know what, Doro? Friends don't take advantage of each other, no matter what the circumstances."
That stung. She was right. "I'm sorry for the way I went about things. From now on, I won't drag you into my shenanigans."
"You shouldn't even be into shenanigans here."
"I know. You're right. I really am sorry. I have so much respect for you and I just want to go back to how things were. Can we do that? How can I make it up to you?"
"Backwards is never an option for me, but going forward, of course I hope we can have a new understanding."
"We can." I don't know if I was more excited about the direction of this conversation or the plate of halibut that had just entered my line of sight. I pulled it from Ty's magic hands to the counter in front of me. He looked back and forth between Ellen and me, and then proceeded to say exactly what had been on my mind ever since that bogus B3 News report.
"What happened to Dom? I don't believe he would steal a flighter. Something’s not right. One of you has to know something."
Ellen and I looked at one another. Who would be the one to speak? Ellen put her tea down and took a deep breath–
"Look, I know you two must be wondering what happened to your friend. I get it. This whole thing is a complete mess. But, as far as I know, Dominic was meddling where he shouldn't have been, and he defied multiple warnings. I only have a certain level of clearance so I don't know exactly what he was doing, but I do know it was big enough that S.O.I.L. saw it as an immense security hazard to the society at large."
Ellen couldn't have known the truth about why Dom was messing around in the lab, but I couldn’t let this moment go without defending him. "I think S.O.I.L. is the one that creates a flaw in the Seneca Society security, not Dom."
"Well, unfortunately, Doro, you aren't the one running things around here."
"Maybe she should be."
"Thanks, Ty." I smiled.
"Maybe. But she's not."
Ty and I both hung our heads. Ellen was coming from a place of logic, and wasn’t trying to convince either of us of anything other than the facts.
"Maybe doesn't run societies. Maybe doesn't make things happen.
Ty and I got it. Someone we both respected had given us a reality check.
"Look, I really like both of you. You are two of my favorite recruits of the thousands I’ve been responsible for. I hope you’ll see Dominic as an example and not take the path he did. Seneca is a great chance for anyone to whom it’s granted. Don't throw it away trying to prove something or uncover some conspiracy. It's not worth it, you guys. Once they deem you to be a greater threat than an asset, it’s too late to reverse it."
I pondered that deeply.
Ty swallowed his dismay and slid on down the sushi bar to tend to others, as Ellen and I ate our sushi. As I took those last few bites, I was trampled by revelations— but not the ones that Ellen would have been happy about. I needed to get to the Aboves. I needed to get to my mom and Dominic. There was no more time for maybe. It was time for me to drop the maybe and take on the must.
It was time to make myself become the threat. The one they would never see coming.
34
LAST SESSION BEFORE lunch would be my launching pad. Seneca Civics and Ethics. It was life as usual for everyone else in the ethereal golden hallway at S.E.R.C. on this early mid-week afternoon, but not for me. I marched through the arched doorway and as the wall closed up behind me, I knew that it would be a long time before I experienced those amazing disappearing doors again, if ever.
My session leader was Richmond Shields. He, like our other session leaders, went by his last name. Shields had received his PhD in political science from Berkeley, and was later recruited to work in various think tanks on Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill before coming to Seneca to serve, not only as the civics and ethics session leader, but also on the advisory committee to the Seneca Senate. Shields told us he was originally from Utah, that he'd left behind the life he'd been born into, which (although he doesn't refer to it much) I surmise had been a strict Mormon upbringing. By the time I met him at Seneca he had catapulted himself to the other end of the political and spiritual spectrum. The Shields we knew was a 34-year-old atheist bachelor who never referenced his life outside of S.E.R.C., no matter how much we hassled him. He had that crushable, boy-next-door quality and was super intelligent and nice, to boot. And, like everyone else at Seneca, he was flying with that element of the unknown.
I couldn't let my nerves get the best of me. It was all on the line. I sat down in my usual seat, next to Jennifer Wallingsford. It was the only session we had together. Her other sessions were ones that would send her on a leadership path. She and her brother were both being groomed to be Seneca Senators one day. I’d once thought it would be a miracle if G.W. lived to see the light of day, let alone the day he would sit on the Senate of the most powerful society on Earth. But given the series of events over the last couple of weeks, I realized that here in Seneca the phrase, "anything is possible," was, in fact, nothing short of literal.
Session filled up. Far different from the normal high school atmosphere back in LA, my peers here were a copacetic student body by anyone's standards. No normal teasing, jokey chaos and incessant rumbling of gossip. People simply took their seats, prepared for session, or whatever was in front of them. Part of the cooperation I saw within session walls stemmed from the fact that this wasn’t just "school"– this was S.E.R.C. Being in Seneca was a privilege and that held a persuasive power which was applied to every facet of life here.
I was about to do something that would shake up all that calm and compliance. The only thing I could hear was my thumpi
ng heartbeat, resonating against my chest cavity. I felt like everyone else was in the pool, mindlessly playing Marco Polo while I was underwater. This was almost it. The moment when I would abandon "maybe." Drown it. Plunge to the surface with a fistful of "must."
Two dozen flexer notifications went off in sync. I sucked in a boundless breath. My lungs swelled with air like a helium balloon. I rose. My heartbeat dropped. Time stopped.
"You are all being controlled. There are forces at work here in Seneca that not all of us know about. They want us to believe certain things and they are manipulating our minds to think them. Untrue things, things that didn't happen. Dominic Ambrosia is not dead. He was not the one driving that flighter–"
Shields calmly inched towards me, "Dorothy, please take a seat. This isn't the time–"
"I'm sorry, sir, it is."
Shields was genuinely confused by my sudden eruption. I scanned the faces in the room. Everyone was. My gaze fell upon Jennifer Wallingsford. I liked her. I didn't want to hurt her. But, after Ellen Malone, she would be my next case of collateral damage.
Two S.O.I.L. guards entered the session room.
"G.W. Wallingsford was piloting that flighter!"
Jennifer's lips parted and her jaw fell. Her brow tightened. Her eyes shrunk. But with all that, she didn’t look shocked. Her face splashed with fascination, like she sensed something was up but needed to hear more.
The two S.O.I.L. guards stormed in my direction. I put my hands up. That was all I needed to do.
35
I WOKE UP freezing cold in a white room wrapped in blue mirrored windows. Thousands of one inch white tiles made up the floor, and flat white paint covered the ceiling. No blemishes. It was just like the last time, only this time I wasn't alone. From my horizontal perspective, I spotted several figures. Everyone was blurry. Slowly, I craned my neck. While I was fully expecting to be paralyzed, I was pleasantly relieved to find my body fully functioning. They had only knocked me out this time. Thank goodness. I emerged from the brain haze and recognized that there were five... or six people present. I was on a hospital bed, in a hospital gown. Gregory, a couple of S.O.I.L. officers, two women I never had seen before in doctors' coats and... Reba?
Reba's eyes were pinned to the ground in front of him. I didn't allow my gaze to linger on him for too long because I knew what they had done. I had to go with the flow because they had tried to wipe out my memory. I couldn't let on that I knew who Reba was and it appeared that he was helping me do that. Normally I would have been shocked to see him here, but these days I was shockproof.
Gregory stood up. "Hi, Dorothy. I'm Dr. Wes Stanton. You have experienced a bad fall but don't you worry. You're going to be fine. You can go ahead and sit up whenever you feel ready. Everything looks good, so we're going to send you on your way, we just need to ask you a few questions to confirm there hasn't been any memory impairment. Okay, sweetie?"
I wanted to jump out of my seat and get right up in his smiling, lying face.
"Okay." Wow. They really had gone through with it. They were purging me from society. At least, they were trying.
I sat up. Looked at Reba. He was watching me intently, but quickly shifted his eyes away to avoid eye contact.
"Dorothy Campbell?" One of the two women I had never seen before wore eyeglasses that she focused with a tiny nob on the side as she looked up from a tablet in her hands. Her lenses reflected a charged silvery glare from her screen so I couldn't see her eyes.
"Yes."
"Do you know where you are?"
I swallowed. I swallowed my pride. I swallowed my fear. I swallowed my sense of rebellion. "No."
She smiled sympathetically, "You were on a trip to the Capitol with your second cousins from Ireland. You slipped on a candy wrapper and hit your head pretty badly. You are in the infirmary at the Smithsonian."
The woman next to the interviewer typed feverishly on an identical tablet. She didn't even look up. They both had their hair in buns. They could have been twins, except that only one of them wore glasses.
The interviewer cocked her head and spoke in a warm, relaxed tone. "Dorothy can you tell us where you are now?"
"The infirmary at the Smithsonian."
"Good."
Gregory looked to Reba.
Reba's whole body was tight like he was under a dentist's drill. He blinked about a mile a minute. "Affirmative."
This was unreal. They used Reba to determine truth in exit interviews for exiled Senecans.
Gregory nodded to the interviewer.
"Dorothy, can you tell us the last person you saw?"
I squinted and rubbed my forehead as if trying to think through the pain of my fall at the Smithsonian. "Well, before my cousins, it would have been my mom and my dog."
Gregory waited on Reba. "Affirmative."
Reba knew that the brainwashing was not working on me, but he provided an "affirmative" for every answer I gave. For two hours we went through a list of things that I’d supposedly done. The interviewer planted in my mind bits and pieces of facts from my alleged travels with my second cousins. The twisted part was, they knew all about my second cousins. Even more than I ever did. The woman next to the interviewer worked the tablet like a stenographer. I knew exactly what she thought she was doing. She thought she was re-calibrating my neurological processes via the mainframe to which I was supposedly entangled. They were attempting to implant false memories.
Reba was so focused on keeping his gaze locked on the floor, he could have burned a hole in it with his eyes.
Gregory approached me and patted my shoulder, just as he had when he and Ellen had stopped by to see me with the Dominic warning. "The gentlemen and I are going to be going now. This nice woman will help you get dressed in the clothes we found you in. You go ahead and make yourself comfortable here, sweetie. Later this morning, these two nice Smithsonian liaisons will be accompanying you on a flight back to Los Angeles."
Smithsonian liaisons! Gregory was proving himself to be quite a piece of work.
"You'll be home with your mom by dinnertime."
"Thank you." I purred pathetically, like an injured kitty to a pro-bono veterinarian. And, voila, my work here was done.
36
WEDGED BETWEEN TWO civilian dressed S.O.I.L. officers on my flight back to LA, I sweated buckets and fidgeted the whole time, unable to find any sort of comfort as the searing heat in my feet radiated up my legs. People think I'm a chill person. I do a good job of radiating that vibe on the outside, but I have the tendency to be high strung. They, on the other hand, were as static as a dial tone the whole time.
We landed at LAX. As we made our way into baggage claim, we were welcomed by a chauffeur holding a "Dorothy Campbell" sign. He was a middle-aged, Iranian gentleman with a thinning hairline and deep wrinkles in his weathered skin. He quietly offered to get my bags, but I had nothing and was unsure of what had happened to the case of belongings I’d had at Seneca. I just kept the hope alive that one day, some way, somehow, my vinyl and I would come back together.
As we moved with the crowd across the dull cream and gray speckled tile, I soaked in the airport arrival atmosphere: people calling out to one another, kids on the loose, business travelers looking distracted, elderly folks being pushed in wheelchairs, lovers hugging, laughter, tears, sneezes, teases, happiness, frustration, tattered and bourgeois luggage side by side on squeaky conveyer belts, the buzz of outdated, unflattering lights, the faint smell of cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes wafting in from outside the automated sliding glass doors.
Ah, the airport. On this late afternoon at LAX, it all made me feel somber. Saddened by the naïveté of everyone around me. My heart palpitated, conflicted. Joyous and excited to see my mom and Killer, troubled in the realization that all these people who surrounded me would not be afforded the same opportunities as those in Seneca. I saw a man in a wheelchair missing his leg from the knee down. Shouldn't everyone have access to regenerative medicine? A Senecan educati
on? Clean air? The duality disgusted me. I felt helpless. I hated that feeling.
It was a relief to be back in a car. I hadn't been in one since I had left LA, months before. Traffic on the 405 had never felt so good. Northbound, amidst an ocean of road-raged Los Angelenos, I finally felt content. The setting sun bathed my left cheek from the west. No matter how chill I tried to be, there was a hint of nervousness underneath, but dang, it felt good to be back in my city– The City of Angels.
A twenty-minute ride and we pulled up to my building. Everything felt right. S.O.I.L. shadowed me up to my apartment. When we got to the front door, there it was, music to my ears. Killer's yappy bark. I crouched down in anticipation of his welcome. The muffled sound of the 405 and my mom's hurried footsteps. What a precious symphony. And then she opened the door. Like a jack-in-the-box, Killer sprang into my arms. His tiny, wet tongue pelted my arm like a cyclone as he squealed with happiness.
"Killer! My baby, my love, I missed you so much. I'm so sorry I left you for so long." Finally. I squeezed him against my heart. My hands disappeared into his soft black fur.
Tears of happiness streamed down my mom's cheekbones. I stood up, cradling Killer with one arm, and threw the other around her, burying my face into the nook between her shoulder and neck. She held the back of my head. "Doro," she whispered. I never wanted to let go, never again. Neither did she. I clenched my eyes shut, letting the aroma of roasted coffee in her hair bring me back. There's no place like home. But it didn't matter where we were. It was all about how we were. Together. The S.O.I.L. officers stood silently by, erect like metal flagpoles, but it didn't matter to us. Nobody else was there.
We stayed like that for a long time before they interrupted us.