by Gates, J.
At lunch, Ethan and I sit apart from the others. While they laugh and dine on pasta and sausage, I choke down four boiled eggs and a banana. Then, Ethan tells me with a grin, it’s time for fight training.
I learn stomp kicks and jabs, takedowns and sprawls, arm bars and chokes, left hooks, elbow strikes, eye gouges and head butts. Each new lesson in pain Ethan first demonstrates on me, so that by the time an hour has passed, I feel as if every inch of my skin should be purple with bruises. Probably, I would have quit within the first hour of running, before the sun even rose, except that Ethan endured each of these trials right along with me. During the runs, we went together, step for step. For every push-up, sit-up, or pull-up I did, he did three.
He ate the same lunch as me: four boiled eggs and some fruit, each and every day. By the third day of fight training, Ethan’s letting me use the moves I’ve learned on him.
I give him a black eye.
~~~
The third evening of my training, Ethan leads me into room full of books. The air is rich with the smell of their musty pages. We are at another camp now—this one is larger than the last, pitched inside an old oil refinery.
“Remember,” he tells me as he leaves, “body, mind, and soul.”
Alone now, I stand among piles of books higher than I am tall. A few of the titles I’ve seen before: Treasure Island, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Three Musketeers, the Bible. Most of them, though, I’m unfamiliar with. There are multiple copies of many titles—especially those dealing with American history, philosophy, and warfare. The sight amazes me. I’ve never seen so many books in one place—ever. My dad has a few shelves full of them in his office, but nothing like this.
Over the next few days, I read as much as I can.
At first, I read very slowly, almost painfully, having to stop every few minutes to walk around or look up from the page. I hardly read during my school days—N-Ed has much more efficient ways of teaching than merely having kids read books—and since then I haven’t done it at all. For adults, it’s easy to download a copy of the few dozen Company-approved books on your IC, but who has time to read when you have to work sixty-five hours a week? Even when I was in school, I mostly listened to audiobooks. The ability to absorb the words and let my imagination fly free takes time to re-learn, but soon, just as one develops sea legs onboard a ship, my eyes and mind once again acclimate to digesting the written word.
After a few days, Ethan no longer has to direct me to go into the room; I race there myself when my training is done. I spend hour after hour sprawled on the floor or leaning against stacks of moldering paperbacks, poring over biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, the writings of John Locke, the Dalai Lama, and Karl Marx, novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell, and books with titles like: 1776, Self-Defense for Dummies, and The U. S. Army Field Manual.
Occasionally, Ethan stops by to check on my progress or to suggest a title for me to read. Sometimes, we get into long discussions about philosophy or religion, about the nature of life or love or mankind itself. Every book I mention, he’s read. Often, especially if we disagree or if I am particularly adamant in opposition to one of his arguments, he pulls a book from the middle of one of the stacks and hands it to me.
“You’re still thinking Company thoughts,” he says, his face serious but his eyes smiling. “Look deeper.”
Once, during one of his brief visits, I ask him why I’ve never seen so many of these wonderful books before. “What happened?” I ask. “Did the government make them illegal? Did the Company round up copies and burn them?”
Ethan shakes his head. “No,” he says, “They didn’t have to do anything as dramatic as that. They just stopped printing them. They stopped promoting them, and they removed the downloadable copies from the Company network. Most of all, they distracted people with other, more flashy, less substantive forms of entertainment so that pretty soon nobody had the patience to read. And they keep everyone working so hard, nobody has time anyway.”
He’s right. I’m ashamed to think of how many nights I wasted staring at my imager, playing video games, or working at the office until well past midnight.
“The Company isn’t our real enemy, May,” he continues. “It’s complacency. Apathy. Fear. We destroy those emotions in the hearts of the workers and the Company won’t stand a chance.”
Now, I feel myself changing. Between chapters, I do push-ups or sit-ups. I do pull-ups on a dripping pipe that runs across the hallway just outside my little library. I feel myself getting leaner and stronger, feel my thoughts getting sharper, like I’m an image that’s coming into focus. I feel my entire self expanding, not just the lean muscles of my arms and shoulders, not just my mind, but my soul. My energy feels too big to fit inside me any longer. I take up more space than my physical body occupies. The other rebels, at meals or around the camp, smile warmly at me but give me a wide berth as I pass. One night, I find Ada and ask her to do me a favor—she finds a set of shears and cuts off my hair for me. The resulting hairstyle is a short, uneven, unfashionable mess that makes me look even more awkwardly masculine than usual. And I feel more like myself than I ever have in my life.
After the first seven days, Ethan expands my training, teaching me to shoot, to strategize, to wire explosives. He takes me to the hundreds of underground locations used as camps by the rebels and shows me maps and blueprints of tunnel networks all over the land that was once America.
“We’re always in danger,” he tells me, “but when we’re above ground, where the sats can see us, we’re completely exposed—like a mouse in a field with a hawk circling above. You have to know the underground.”
He tells me the history of the Protectorate, the fourth branch of the American government, formed in secret by George Washington himself. After playing a key but unpublicized role in the first American Revolution, the group that would become the Protectorate lay silent for years, training their leaders, staying few in number but never losing the collective knowledge of their forefathers. Often, posts were handed down from father to son to maintain the secrecy and integrity of the Order. For hundreds of years, the other three branches of government checked each other’s power, as the Constitution had envisioned, and there was no need for the Protectorate to come forward. Always, Ethan explained, the fear had been that one of the other branches of government would become too powerful, overstepping its bounds and forcing the Protectorate to rise and reestablish equilibrium. A few times in history, the executive branch became power hungry and managed to gain almost complete domination over the other two branches, to the point where the Protectorate elders were forced to convene and consider stepping in, but always balance was restored naturally, without their needing to take action.
Nobody envisioned that the sanctity of the government would be broken not by a power-hungry faction in the government itself, not by the army or the CIA or a fanatical political party, or even by an invading foreign state, but by the corrupted capitalist system itself.
“We should have seen it coming,” Ethan says with a sad shake of his head. “As soon as the big corporations took over the government and started writing their own regulations, it was over. The natural outcome of the rigged market they created is one Company, controlling everything.”
But they didn’t see it—not in time, anyway. The consolidation of power happened too gradually for anyone to notice in the beginning, and later, the Company’s usurpation of all government function happened too fast and was too complete for any effective reprisal. To make matters worse, many of the Protectorate elders were also major Company stockholders, either in N-Corp or B&S, and resisted any action that might hurt their own financial well-being until it was too late.
The result, eventually, was a schism in the Protectorate itself, which left Ethan—its youngest member at the time—along wit
h a handful of others, the only ones able to organize any meaningful resistance. Still, even with all the resources, the knowledge, and the training of the Protectorate at his disposal, Ethan found fighting the Company nearly impossible.
“George Washington and the others, when forming the Order of the Protectorate, believed that all forms of society, no matter how well organized or well-intentioned, would eventually fall into domination by a calculating and self-serving few. They were right. But there was one area in which they were wrong: they assumed that people would have the capacity to realize when they were no longer free. The Companies, in their genius, have manipulated and bribed the people into submission. They give them fancy toys to play with, expensive clothes to wear, luxurious places to live. They occupy them with jobs that eat away their time and their mental energy, wasting their days with endless menial tasks. The media division fills their minds with confusion, not by telling lies, but through a series of half truths, omissions and rhetorical tricks that slowly warp the public consciousness until even the most basic principles of the society are distorted. Perhaps most importantly, they give them stock, so the workers believe that they and the Company are one and the same. They hold out the examples of a few powerful people who’ve become Blackies—like your father—to perpetuate the false notion that if they work hard enough, they too can become a Blackie one day. They put their words in God’s mouth, so that even goodness and righteousness are commodities they control and benefits they can dole out or withhold as they please. They completed a centuries-long campaign of vilifying the government, so that in the end, the people were glad to see it go. And now, most of the fortunate ones are grateful slaves, happy to have lost their freedom, content to be cogs in the machine that converts human dignity into cash.”
“Wow,” I say. “Nice speech.”
“But do you understand?” Ethan presses.
“Yes . . . but . . . my father used to brag to me about all the good the Company was doing for people, you know? How much more they had now than when he was a kid, how technology was better and work was easier and life was safer and . . . I was proud of him. Proud to be a part of it.”
“People do have a lot of toys,” Ethan agrees. “They’ve mortgaged their lives for them.”
“What’s a mortgage?” I ask. Like every other debtor-worker, I rent my housing from the Company.
“I’ll wake you up early tomorrow,” he says. “And show you what I mean.”
~~~
The next day Ethan wakes me, shoves a protein bar into my hand, and leads me, blinking, out of our basement encampment and into the fresh morning light. We travel for quite a ways on foot—perhaps a mile—before coming upon what must’ve been a handsome, modest house at some time in the not-too-distant past. Now, the roof has fallen in and a stray dog, bone thin and mangy, watches us from the hole where a few splintered shards of a front door still hang from broken hinges. Ethan takes me into the garage attached to the house, where we find a motorcycle.
“Motorcycles are less likely to be spotted by the sat-watchers than larger vehicles,” he explains. “Still, we’re taking a risk where we’re going, so pay close attention to everything you see. I won’t be able to take you back there again.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I nod anyway. Mostly, my attention is taken up by the motorcycle. It’s impossible to tell how old it is, but it must be many years, since as far as I know neither N-Corp nor B&S make motorcycles any longer. The bike is sleek-looking and painted flat black, with no logos or placards to identify its maker.
Ethan fires up the engine. It gives a throaty roar that instantly subsides to a grumble.
“Come here,” he says, and paints a cross overtop the incision on my cheek with some dark gray, strangely metallic paint. “If anyone asks about the incision, tell them that your old cross implant stopped working and you got a new one a few days ago. Here, put this in your pocket.” He hands me a tiny, plastic chip, flat, smooth and small, like a dog’s tag.
“This contains your electronic identity code for this mission. When the squadmen try to scan your cross, they’ll get this instead. Don’t lose it or we’re as good as dead. Your name is Elizabeth Ono. You work in retail, selling shoes. My name is Mike Prescott and I’m your boss—and your boyfriend. Got it?”
“Sure, baby.”
Ethan laughs. “Let’s go.”
I climb on behind him, arms around his waist, and in a spray of dirt we’re off. I quickly lose track of what direction we’re traveling. My mind is tangled in the serpentine curves of the road and blown to excited tatters by the wind in my hair. For this one fleeting instant, life is good.
The danger and gravity of our position hit hard again when we reach our destination, however. Ahead, over the leafless tops of stunted trees rise thick columns of black smoke. A second later, the scrawny foliage gives way to a vast area of brown, dry grass. Beyond, a high chain-linked fence with barbed wire looped at its top extends to the limits of my sight in both directions. The area enclosed here is much, much larger than any of the other secured complexes I’ve seen in America Division. This is an entire city.
In front of us, squadmen mill about, their black guns brandished and ready.
We approach them fast, then stutter to a stop.
“Slow down there,” says one of the squadmen, squinting at us as he steps out of a metal guard hut. He pulls a large, outdated-looking IC out of his pocket and it beeps twice.
“Ono and Prescott? Is that right?”
“Yeah,” says Ethan, “we’re consultants for the shoe division of N-Sport. We’re running late for a production meeting.”
The squad member blinks at his IC, scrolling through several screens, presumably.
“Alright,” he says. “You’re on the list. Head in and take a right on the first street. Follow it all the way around and the factory will be on the left. They’ll scan you there and let you in the gate. Just make sure you stay on the main road—this place is full of animals. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to your pretty friend.”
He shoots me a lecherous glance.
“Thanks,” says Ethan, revving the motorcycle impatiently.
“Where’d you get that bike?” asks the guard. Though he’s chewing gum, I can still smell the reek of contraband alcohol on his breath from six feet away. As usual, these squadmen are above the rules. “I haven’t seen one of those in ten years.”
“Family,” Ethan says, and he revs the motor again, rendering the guard’s response inaudible.
Realizing the conversation is over, the squad member slips his IC back into his shirt pocket, adjusts the rifle slung over his shoulder, and sits back down inside his hut.
Ahead, an electric motor buzzes to life and the corrugated steel gate pulls back. We sputter past it but are stopped by another, identical gate, this one maybe forty feet past the first. When the one behind us has closed, the one in front of us opens, and we lurch through it, the engine of our bike buzzing like a gigantic insect.
I lean forward to Ethan’s ear. “What is this place?” I whisper.
“Used to be called Indianapolis,” says Ethan. “I’ll explain later. Just keep your eyes open.”
Ethan shifts his weight, pulling us off the main, four-lane road (on which we are the only vehicle) and onto a narrow side street between two sagging apartment buildings.
The sights here are haunting. Clotheslines crisscross yards littered with old, rusting appliances. The houses all wear dingy coats of peeling paint. Hardly anywhere is a window unbroken. We pass a few men walking in a group. They wear red jumpsuits and stare at the ground, hardly even glancing up as we roar past. Their shoulders are hunched, their steps slow, their feet heavy, their limbs spindly, and their cheeks sunken. Even from a distance, I can tell they are broken men.
We pass children standing barefoot and still in a f
ew dirt yards. They stare at us with eyes as sharp as nails, then disappear behind us. Sometimes, we pass whole blocks of buildings that seem to have been burned to the ground; only charcoal outlines of their ruins remain. On and on the hellish vision continues. Other than the knot of sullen men, we pass no other adults and only a few children, but block after block, the desolation and squalor extends unbroken.
Finally, Ethan brings us around to another large street—or it could be the one we were on before, I have no way of knowing—and we speed off. We pass over a set of weed-choked railroad tracks and a brown, murky-looking river before at last approaching something familiar: this area looks like the industrial arc. But unlike the industrial arc in the Headquarters hub, this one is teeming with workers wearing red jumpsuits. Some face away from us. They’re lined up in cues that extend for hundreds of yards down both sides of the street and terminate in a complex of huge, menacing-looking factory buildings larger than any I’ve ever seen. In between the two lines, massive groups of workers spill out of the factories, heading toward us. I don’t know how many of them there are, but they must number in the thousands. There are so many of them that they choke the roadway and force us to kill the motorcycle’s engine and continue on foot, weaving our way upstream through the mass of milling bodies.
“Shift change,” Ethan explains.
Nobody will look me in the eye. They must see us, for they clear out of our way as soon as we approach, but none of them acknowledge our presence in any way. They simply wander past us, like reeking, exhausted zombies.
Above, I hear a deep roar and look up to see a huge airplane pass low overhead, descending toward a landing strip that must be very close by. To our right: a concrete guard tower filled with squadmen and bristling with guns.