by Gates, J.
“Fine,” he says. He grunts as he takes an IC from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Checking on the other Protectorate groups.”
Staring at the screen, his expression grows even darker.
“How are they doing?” I ask.
He snorts. “No worse than us.”
Above, the drones roar past again. This time when the bombs fall, dust rains down on us.
Suddenly, I realize something.
“Ethan,” I say, “let me see that IC. Randal gave me a data stick—”
Ethan’s eyes widen. “The Protectorate Education Initiative. He must have finished it.” I hold my hand out for his IC, but he shakes his head. “It won’t work on this thing—it has to be tied into the Company network, and this one isn’t. Besides, Randal betrayed us. That damn data stick probably doesn’t even work.”
One more flicker of hope, lost. I shove the data stick back into my pocket, and Ethan and I fall silent again. As the minutes drag on, I find myself thinking of Randal. I remember his cryptic and feverish talk of digital coding, of reducing all things to their common denominator. Were his words empty, just the product of his brilliant but drug-addled mind, or was there meaning behind them? Was he talking about the human propensity for creating abstract systems: language, mathematics, digital coding? Or was he referring to the codes inherent in nature, like those in DNA? Was his message one of bleak empiricism, a reminder that in the end, we’re all just a combination of molecular elements, stuck together in semi-unique combinations? Or—my mind returns to the writings I’ve read from the first Revolutionary War—did he mean that in the end, when reduced to our common denominator, we’re all actually the same. Equal. Could Randal have meant that after final analysis, when all the codes are broken and the variables reduced, we are all truly alike? Truly one? Could he, in his troubled, gifted mind, have found the proof of a real God after all?
I think again of the tiny card in my pocket. Despite Ethan’s skepticism, maybe Randal did leave us a final scrap of hope. . . .
We hear the drones coming around again. This time, they’re even louder than before.
Reflexively, I look up. “Uh-oh,” I say.
That’s when the ceiling caves in.
~~~
When the dust settles, all that remains above us is a sky of the purest blue.
“Ethan!”
I am buried in the rubble, immobilized, staring heavenward.
The sound of the explosion still rings in my ears. Tiny bits of shattered masonry and drywall dribble down my arms, tickling like the march of ants across my skin.
Trapped.
“May.”
The sun, warm on my face, is eclipsed. The silhouetted figure above me stoops, grunts as it heaves away pieces of rubble. The pressure on my body lessens.
“How bad are you hurt?”
When he stoops to pick up another brick, I see Ethan’s face above me, black with dust, streaked with sweat and blood.
“I don’t know. Everything is tingling.”
Above, I can see that most of the building is still intact—it was just the lobby roof and the marquis that tumbled down onto our heads. Still, it’s a miracle that we’re alive. If we’re still here when the next drone pass happens, we won’t be. . . .
“May Fields,” Ethan says, casually tossing a brick. “Your name has always cracked me up. Sounds like a scent for laundry detergent.”
“Bite me,” I say. “You want to hurry up?”
After a minute, Ethan has cleared most of the debris off me and offers me a hand. I wince as he pulls me up and the last bits of rubble fall away from my body.
“I feel like I’ve been sleeping in a waffle iron,” I mutter, but neither of us has the energy to laugh. As if to punctuate my sentence, the sound of sirens rises, first to our left, then to our right. I hear a helicopter coming up from behind us, though it’s not yet visible over the buildings.
I struggle to my feet. Automatically, my hand goes to my holster but finds it empty. I’ve lost my gun.
Clumsily, I climb down from the heap of rubble, ready to run. But when I look over for Ethan, he’s no longer at my side. I find him sitting on the top of the rubble heap, lighting a cigar.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He looks at me. “Smoking.”
Smoking, a violation of Company policy. He’s a rebel to the end.
Ethan reaches over and gingerly pulls the flag that had been draped over my shoulders from the rubble. He presses it against the wound on his side, wincing. Instantly, it is soaked through with blood.
I climb back up toward him.
“Let me see.”
He waves me off. “I’m fine,” he says. “Go on. Run. Who knows, maybe Randal’s program will work after all, right?”
All around, the sirens grow louder. I glance over my shoulder, desperate to keep moving.
“Go,” he repeats.
“I’m not leaving you,” I say.
He smiles. “Well you don’t want to go where I’m going, believe me.”
He takes another drag off his cigar and clenches the flag tighter to his side.
“You can’t give up!” I say. “This isn’t about you, or me, or McCann or Clair! This is about the Protectorate! Since seventeen eighty-three—”
Ethan laughs bitterly.
“What?”
He smiles at me, shakes his head. “Of all the strong, brave, jaded people I know, you have the biggest heart of them all, you know that?” He pauses. “George Washington didn’t start the Protectorate, May. Randal and I did.”
The silence that passes between us is filled by the chuckling approach of a still-unseen chopper. I suddenly feel ill.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Ethan sighs. “I was with the N-Corp psych evaluation division. We decided which criminals were unprofitables and which were redeemable,” he says, looking off into the distance, remembering. “Every day, people would tell me these stories of all the horrible things the Company did to them. After a while, I had to do something about it. Randal was my friend. He felt the same way. We wanted to find a way to rally people to the cause. I guess the story of the Protectorate just sounded better than the truth.”
A moment passes while I try to process this new realization.
“So . . . you lied to us? There was no Protectorate?”
“Not until we started it.”
I’m shaking, furious. I open my mouth, but it takes a second for me to make words come out. “So you lied to us,” I say again.
To my surprise, a glimmer of hurt passes through Ethan’s face, and he inhales on his cigar, long and slow. An instant later, his expression becomes unreadable again. Sirens are all around us now. Any minute now, they’ll be upon us.
“If you’re telling me this to make me leave,” I say, “it won’t work.”
Ethan seems hardly to hear me. He winces in pain. “All those lives,” he murmurs to himself. “Who’s even going to remember them?”
He looks up at me suddenly, a hint of a smile crossing his lips. “At least we tried,” he says. “We did something, May. That’s a lot more than most people can say.”
Even if I knew what to say, I would have no chance to respond.
Shadows pass overhead and a swarm of Ravers wheels and dips toward us. The screech of sirens becomes deafening as, from around the corners of buildings on both sides of us, squad trucks appear, rumbling and skidding to at halt.
Neither Ethan nor I run as the doors of the black trucks open and the squadmen pour out. The Ravers swoop down and encircle us, hovering. Despair clamps my heart and nausea twists my stomach.
Ethan gives a mighty sigh as he rises to his feet. “Here we go,
” he says wearily.
With one hand, he nonchalantly slides his gun to his back and raises his hands—the American flag hanging from one, his cigar in the other.
From among the ranks of squadmen, Blackwell appears. “Don’t hit the woman,” he calls out. “They want her alive. Take the other one out on my order.”
This, of course, infuriates me. I step in front of Ethan.
“No!” I shout at Blackwell. “You want him, you shoot me first! Go ahead, Blackwell! Do it!”
A hundred gun barrels gape at us.
“Do it!”
From behind, I feel Ethan’s hand on my shoulder. Gently, he turns me around to face him. His face is pale. Blood drenches his shirt. He smiles at me wanly.
“Step aside, Blackie,” he says.
I open my mouth to protest, but he shakes his head. “That’s an order.”
This time, I obey and move away from him.
“Standby for the kill order,” Blackwell says, then puts one finger to his ear, listening intently for the order from his unseen commander.
Ethan steps slowly forward, his expression a cipher. He takes one last drag from his cigar, then flicks it away. With the other hand, he raises the bloodstained flag high over his head. It stirs in the breeze.
Ethan’s voice booms over the silent squadmen: “In the words of Patrick Henry,” he says, “Give me liberty, or give me—”
With incredible speed, he draws his gun and fires one shot. Below, Blackwell stumbles and falls.
Instantly, then squadmen open fire.
Ethan falls backward, his body already limp, and slides down a few feet before coming to rest in a pocket of debris. The flag, still clutched in his fist, settles down over his head and face.
Not a bird calls. No one speaks. No one moves. My mouth is open, but I haven’t the breath to scream.
Ethan is dead.
All now is indistinct, the world blurred with my rage. I jump forward, snatch a hovering Raver from the air and fling it down on the bricks, stomp on it once, then sprint toward the squad trucks.
From the corner of my eye, I see Blackwell rising, waving off a squad member who tries to help him. “I’m fine,” Blackwell mutters. “Hold your fire!”
I am pure fury. I slam into the nearest squad member, sending him sprawling to the concrete. My hands are already gripping his heavy, black gun, yanking it, trying to tear it free with desperate force, but its strap holds. I squeeze the trigger, but the weapon won’t recognize my palm print and refuses to fire, so instead I slam the butt into the squad member’s startled face.
Then, breath departs my lungs as I’m tackled to the pavement.
Several huge squadmen are on top of me now, crushing me with their weight. I struggle to get free, to push myself up to my knees and fight, but strong hands grab my wrists and twist my hands behind my back. I scream, bite, spit like an animal, but it’s no use. They lift me, drag me, throw me in the backseat of a squad truck and slam the door in my face.
No matter how hard I kick the window, it will not budge.
The Protectorate never existed.
Kali, Ethan, McCann, Randal, Michel, Ada, all dead.
Even I, all that I have been and all that I ever hoped to be, have passed away.
It’s all over.
—Chapter Ø24—
This is where the revolution ends.
Here, in this holding cell that smells like rancid ass—or maybe that’s just the stink of my own sweat. Of course I haven’t showered. I haven’t even eaten in three days, but it doesn’t matter. The hunger pangs haven’t come today. Today, I feel nothing at all. I don’t lift my arm, don’t flex a single muscle. The only part of me that’s still alive is my eyes, and they roam about the room, from the dirty steel crapper to the blaring imager on the far wall, outside my cell. Maddeningly, it’s too distant for me to smash it, so I have to listen every few hours when they announce details about my soon-to-be televised execution.
A ring of anarchists was broken up and several unprofitables killed when the security squad raided an anarchist camp yesterday in the old city of Detroit, according to an HR department spokesman. While there was no official word on what crimes were perpetrated by this particular group of anarchists, an unnamed squad source says they may be connected to the August 16 attack on N-Corp headquarters that killed seven people. Well, we’ll all certainly breathe a lot easier with those criminals off the streets. Hallelujah!
In financial news, the release of the new IC has earned the Company record sales, adding an exclamation point this historic week marked by the N-Corp/B&S merger. A statement released by N-Corp CFO Bernice Yao today confirms that the Company is now once again on track to report a profit for the coming year. . . .
Somehow, through the genius of digital image manipulation and simple lies, everything, from the headquarters attacks to high interest rates, has been blamed on me and my anarchist friends. And why not? At this point, what does it matter anyway?
I’ve made my peace with things. Sort of.
I do not hate Randal. He was simply weak. I do not hate Kali/Clair for not telling me who she was. She did what she had to do to survive. And I don’t hate Ethan, either, though the hurt of his lie and the suddenness of his death still make my gut feel sour—or maybe that’s just the feeling of my stomach eating itself as I starve to death.
Footsteps approach and I look up. It’s the Reverend Jimmy Shaw, with Blackwell in tow.
“Time for your debriefing,” says Blackwell cheerfully. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him cheerful. One arm is in a sling, but otherwise he appears to be in perfect health. The bastard. He sets his suitcase down on the concrete floor and takes out a device that looks something like a black traffic cone.
“Your performance as a spy was quite disheartening, May,” says Shaw, shaking his head. He leans heavily, almost wearily on his cane. “There’s nothing left but to make an example of you, I’m afraid.”
A litany of colorful retorts fill my mind, but I discard them all. It’s too late for wisecracks. It’s too late for anything.
Blackwell points the traffic cone at me and nods to Shaw.
“Now,” Shaw says, “what can you tell us about your good friends the anarchists?”
“For starters, they weren’t anarchists,” I say, “and they’re all dead.”
When I speak, I can hardly feel my lips. Maybe it’s the dehydration. It’s a strange sensation.
“Do I really have to explain to you that we’ll be torturing you if you aren’t forthcoming?” Shaw says. “That should be obvious, my dear.”
Blackwell makes a movement and the device in his hand clicks on.
Suddenly, my head feels like it’s a hive filled with a million furious wasps. My vision blurs. My skull might collapse at any second; the pain is tremendous. Have to get it out, out of my skin, out of my mind, I’m dying—then it stops.
There’s a sound, a terrible gurgling, which I discover is me, puking and screaming at once. My face is pressed against the concrete wall behind my cot. My fingertips throb, bleeding. Apparently, I was trying to claw my way out of the cinderblock cell. Slowly, my skull regains its previous dimension and my brain ceases to feel crushed.
Blackwell is nodding, “See? Works pretty well, right?”
Shaw waves a hand dismissively, looking at me. “It’s a beam weapon of some sort. What did you say, Blackwell? Long wavelength microwaves? Anyway, it has enough battery power to last for four hours, so we can keep it on you for as long as you want, May—but I have a meeting at noon, so I’d rather keep it brief. What can you tell us?”
I glare at Shaw.
“You know it all,” I say, wiping vomit and sweat from my face with the bottom of my T-shirt. “We lived in the tunnels and basements in the industrial arc. Randal u
sed his inside knowledge of Company security systems to keep us safe and informed. And . . . what else? I’ll tell you anything. It doesn’t matter. They’re all dead, everyone’s dead. It’s over. ”
“What about the leader?” says Shaw.
“Ethan? He worked for N-Psych then started the Protectorate. He was just a regular guy,” I say.
Shaw nods, “What else?”
“Nothing. He never told me anything else. You can cook me with that thing until I’m black.”
Blackwell raises the weapon again, but Shaw waves him off. “It’s okay. I believe her. The leader of that group was too smart to trust the likes of her.” Shaw turns back to me. “And what about the group, the organization?”
“The Protectorate,” I say.
“How strong are they now?”
I’m about to answer, I told you they’re all dead, but I hesitate. Suddenly, a thought dawns on me: maybe Ethan wasn’t really lying after all. Maybe founding fathers did envision a fourth branch of government, one designed to fight for democracy against any element of government, or foreign military, or greed-blinded corporation that might come to threaten it.
There has always been a Protectorate. It’s the people.
Shaw repeats: “How strong is this Protectorate now?”
A smile curls on my lips. “Strong.”
“Well, that’s funny, Miss Fields. You just said they’re all dead.”
Blackwell brandishes the cone of death, but Shaw stays him again.
“They’re strong anyway,” I say. “Stronger than before, if anyone will remember them.”
“I assure you, they won’t.” Shaw smiles. “But that was an interesting bit of rhetoric. Really, May, did you think you’d change the world? There are forces much larger than you, or anyone, at work here. Money is power, and power consolidates. The biggest fish gobbles up the rest. A child could understand that. It’s not evil; it’s evolution, nature. It’s inevitable, that’s what you people don’t understand! Money is the only power there is, it always has been, and the lure of it is unstoppable. Even if you killed us now, May, there’d still be a million more just like us fighting to take our place.”