The Theta Prophecy

by Chris Dietzel

  “Matheson, I swear, sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking or serious. Maybe you’ve just plain lost your mind. You know we can’t let people stay on the streets if they break our laws. First off, what would that say to everyone else in our prisons, that it used to be illegal to break our laws but now it’s okay? There’d be a revolt. Do you know what would happen if we didn’t arrest every single person who broke even our most trivial law? People would think they could get away with anything!”

  “Well—”

  “Well, nothing,” the Ruler said, smacking his palm against the nearest wall. “Do you know what it would be like if we let people pollute the cities and towns the way we let the companies? There’d be trash everywhere. Sure, our rivers have thousand of tons of toxic sludge in them. Sure, millions of people have to have their drinking water trucked in because their local water can be lit on fire. That’s one thing. But can you imagine trash out in the streets? Garbage would be everywhere. Do you want to look out the window and see trash?”

  “When you put it that way,” Matheson said, letting the rest of the sentence go unspoken.

  All around him were painted portraits of other men who had faced similar problems and had found their own solutions. How had they responded? What answers had they come up with?

  “Maybe just one example, then,” he said, turning away from the window and facing the Ruler. “If we can’t hold the bankers accountable for supporting radicals and dictators, or the corporations for polluting our water and food, maybe we could make an example out of just one person so the average guy on the street sees we aren’t so bad.”

  The Ruler’s eyes sparkled. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Langhorn’s son, the one who got drunk and ran over the two pregnant women, maybe we could—”

  “No, Matheson. No. You know we can’t. If we go after his son, he’ll give his billions to someone else to become Ruler.”

  “Okay, not him. But there’s a kid, down south somewhere, sitting on death row because he fought back when some guy started punching him. We have footage of it from one of our AeroCams. The kid kept trying to keep the guy from hitting him—it was over a parking space or something—and then he hit the man one time, accidently killing him.”

  “That’s some bad luck.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, what’s your point?”

  “He’s going to die unless you do something about it. We can earn some of the people’s trust back.”

  “What can I do? He killed a man.”

  “Langhorn’s kid killed two people. Four, depending on how you look at it.”

  “That’s different,” the Ruler said, letting his chin drop to his chest. “And you know it’s different.”

  35 – A History Of Violence

  Year: 2048

  There was a knock on her door. When Amy looked up, she saw the intern standing there, his head withdrawn to his shoulders like a nervous turtle.

  “Yes?”

  “I got a bunch of information about what’s happened to the people the Tyranny arrested or killed.”

  She looked at him without emotion. “I told everyone to drop those stories.”

  “I know,” the intern said, his eyes looking down at his shoes. “It’s just that, I thought, I guess…”

  “It’s okay. Come on in and show me what you came up with.”

  “I went back through some of the more well-known shootings.” He pulled a photograph from a folder and showed it to her. A kid, dead, on the ground. “The Terrence Rust shooting, the kid that was shot and killed by the Security Service after they said he pointed a blaster at them.”

  She knew the case well. All of the onlookers who had witnessed the shooting said Terrence had never done anything threatening and had no weapon. They said he’d kept his hands in the air, just as the Security Service had ordered. They shot him anyway, though. The courts believed the testimony of the five men from the Tyranny rather than the forty witnesses.

  “And?”

  “Well,” the intern said, looking through his notes. “After being found not guilty of everything, they were all given paid time off. One has been promoted. One was transferred to another district. The other three are still working as if nothing ever happened.”

  “That’s it?”

  “They had to attend sensitivity training.”

  “How awful,” Amy said, her mouth curling into mock horror.

  The intern showed her a different photograph. An old man with a face full of wrinkles.

  “R. J. McCullister. He was being questioned in his home by the Security Service for a noise complaint. They said he tried to take one of their blasters and they had no choice but to kill him.”

  “That was the guy that needed a cane to walk around, right?”

  “Yeah. The authorities promised there would be an internal investigation.”

  “That makes me feel better,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “That shooting was a year ago.”

  “Long enough for people to forget about it.”

  “The internal investigation determined that the old man probably had thrown down his walker, sprinted at the Tyranny’s men, and lunged at one of them in an attempt to steal his blaster. The men being investigated were found to have been following proper procedures.”

  The intern had other cases. A homeless man was shot. Some kids, trying to catch the last bus of the night, were shot. A woman was shot in her own apartment. The friend of someone who had committed crimes was shot because he wouldn’t answer the Tyranny’s questions. A boy whose father had been shot was also shot because it was thought he might one day grow up wanting retribution on the men who had killed his dad.

  “What do you think we should do with all of this information?” she asked the intern.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t report it. My boss already called to make sure that was clear.”

  The intern looked her square in the eyes, his eyebrows raised in hope. “Maybe if enough people know, they’ll get angry and do something about it.”

  “Did people march in the streets when the killings actually took place?” she said. The intern shook his head. “If they were going to march, don’t you think they would have done so back then?” The intern nodded. “People are accustomed to this stuff now. They’re desensitized to it.”

  “Then why did you want to do stories on them?”

  “Listen,” she said, her voice the same tone as the one she used when her daughters thought they were in trouble but she wanted to remind them they were also loved. “You have to be careful with stuff like this.”

  “But you—”

  “It’s different with me. Ten years ago, I wasn’t calling for my reporters to run the stories nobody else would cover. But things change. My husband is gone. My girls are out of college. They don’t need me anymore. When I was younger, I couldn’t risk having my girls grow up without their mom. You,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “You have your entire life ahead of you. That’s why it’s different.”

  “The Tyranny’s men shot my dog,” the intern said. “Not recently, back when I was a kid. They shot it right in front of me just because it was barking when they came by to ask my dad questions.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They weren’t even given a reprimand.”

  “A neighbor of mine was shot in her own bedroom,” she told him. “You wouldn’t have found it in your research; this was ten years ago. The man from the Security Service had been drunk, stumbled into the wrong home, and thought he was getting into his own bed when my friend began hitting him. During his trial, he said he had thought she was a burglar. After being cleared of all charges, he was given paid leave so he could take his family on vacation.”

  “The same thing happened at my college,” the intern said. “A security guard walked up to a line of students who were holding a peaceful sit-in and, one by one, tasered all of them. He wasn’t even fired from his job, let alone
arrested.”

  “Let me guess: there were no more protests after that because none of the students wanted fifty thousand volts shot into them.”

  Ashamed, the intern focused on popping his knuckles.

  She was going to tell him about a piece she had done early in her career—before she knew better—about how the authorities were no longer there to protect and serve but to make sure people quietly went about their business and kept their mouths shut. At the end of the story, she had commented that with each new war and new law, it was important to remind the people that they shouldn’t be too afraid to rise up and do something about their circumstances. The story had almost killed her career before it could even start. The only thing that had saved her was getting an exclusive on the divorce between Ricky Owen and Charlotte Noble, two of the biggest movie stars at the time.

  Just then, Jerry burst into her office, started to say something, saw the intern sitting in the corner of her office, and motioned for him to get out.

  “We need to talk,” he said, closing Amy’s door after the intern was gone. “Something huge just happened.”

  36 – Just Forget It

  Year: 2048

  Matheson got up from the sofa and returned to the very window where, only an hour earlier, he had seen a protestor’s limp body get tossed into a van because he had been holding a sign the Tyranny didn’t like. The Ruler, staring off into space, stood at the next window over.

  “No one cares,” the Ruler said softly, not bothering to mention if he was referring to how the man had died, or perhaps how no one seemed to care about anything anymore.

  Two generations ago, the act of brutality they had witnessed would have been plastered all over the television. Every news show would have been screaming for justice or at least replaying the part where the man went into convulsions because it would have made for good television and offered a nice ratings boost. Even back then, the Tyranny’s thugs wouldn’t have been held accountable for what they did, but people would have united in their outrage. A wave of similar killings had occurred in various places around the Tyranny, each more gruesome and unforgiveable than the previous, and yet each one received less airtime and less outrage because people had grown accustomed to it, the way the Tyranny knew people could become accustomed to anything if they were forced to.

  “This one was nowhere near as bad as the McClusky incident,” Matheson said, observing how, after only an hour, people were already laughing with each other on the very same spot where the man had been killed. A group of children on a field trip, all wearing matching navy blue uniforms, stood in a puddle of the man’s blood as they posed for a souvenir photograph for their yearbook.

  “Which one was that?”

  “The killings from last month where the Security Service went to a girl’s sweet sixteen party and blasted everyone there, without asking any questions first. Our guys had the wrong address. Turns out they were supposed to go to the next building over.”

  “Oh yeah,” the Ruler said, shaking his head. “That was a rough one. I had to spend the entire week going on news shows to defend our guys’ actions and insist those girls were suspected Thinkers.”

  “It wouldn’t have been so bad,” Matheson said, “if one of the Thinkers hadn’t managed to get the security footage and post it online. Millions of people saw the video of our guys shooting girls in sparkly dresses and boys in suits.”

  “Those damn Thinkers,” the Ruler said. “I swear, I think we could kill as many people as we wanted and no one would care as long as the Thinkers stopped pointing out that anyone could be our next victim. So our guys went to the wrong house? So what? It happens to everyone.”

  “At least you won’t have to go on television and apologize for this one.”

  “I guess I have that to be thankful for.”

  The McClusky sweet sixteen slaughter wasn’t the only time the Ruler had to go on television and promise that changes would be made so the same thing didn’t happen again. Every time there was a particularly gruesome killing, whichever Ruler was in charge at the time would go on television and tell people that an investigation would be conducted and measures taken to remedy the situation. But no measures were ever taken, and the same thing did happen again. Over and over. The public learned to ignore the killings and the apologies that followed. Most people thought that if they focused on loving their family and not on a stranger’s brutal death, maybe they could go on believing the same thing wouldn’t happen to them. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “I guess I could go on television anyway,” the Ruler said. “You know, earn points with the people. Appear sympathetic to their plight, that sort of thing.”

  Matheson looked away from the scenery on the other side of the window, looked at his friend and chuckled. “I don’t think that would go over well.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  The people’s ambivalence, combined with the Tyranny’s cunning and savagery, and its audacious insistence that a review panel analyzed each killing and found that no procedures had been violated and that all of the officers had acted responsibly, made the population realize it didn’t matter what the Tyranny did. It would always find a way to excuse its own actions.

  That was why no one had joined the man in whatever he had been protesting; the Tyranny didn’t care what the people complained about or what happened to the dissidents. Anyway, joining in the protest only meant your family would never see you again. It was also why no one had come to the man’s defense when he was being beaten, because the Tyranny would excuse its officers for whatever they did. And it was why no news crew would arrive to film the red stain on the pavement.

  “What do you think the guy was protesting?” Matheson said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “It just seems like if he was willing to hold a sign like that, knowing it’s illegal and knowing our guys would give him a severe beating at the very least, that it might be worth knowing what was so important to him.”

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  “No, maybe not.”

  A man had died just on the other side of the fence, and yet life continued around them as if nothing had happened.

  “Don’t let it bother you,” the Ruler said, looking over at his friend. “He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. Just think of all the other places we walk every day where people have probably died and yet you never even realize it. We all have short memories.”

  “Everyone except the Thinkers,” Matheson wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, he smiled and said, “Very true.” Then he turned away from the window and resettled his gaze on the table full of documents they were supposed to be talking about before the experts came in and told the Ruler which stance he was to take and why. “Very true indeed.“

  37 – The Worst Time And The Worst Place

  Year: 2048

  “What’s going on?” Amy said.

  Decades of working with Jerry had taught her that he was always the level-headed voice of reason, the calm and collected member of the newsroom who kept everyone else grounded when the stress of the job got to be too much. For him to barge into her office and kick the intern out, something urgent really must be happening.

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said, his eyes wide like a maniac’s. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

  “Okay,” she said in a soothing monotone. “I’m all ears.” Leaning back in her chair, she waited to hear what was so important.

  “Someone just appeared out of the sky!”

  “The Tyranny threw another guy out of a plane?” she said, smiling. “They—”

  But Jerry shook his head and smacked his hands together. “No, no, you’re not listening. He didn’t fall from a plane or anything else. He appeared right in the middle of the air, out of a burst of light, and fell to the ground.” He paused for only a brief moment, just long enough to see if Amy would take all of this as a joke. When she didn’t laugh or roll her eyes he said, “There was
a burst of white light, about a hundred feet off the ground. Right in the middle of the day. The guy appeared out of it and hit the ground.”

  “Maybe some sort of new AeroCam—”

  “No!” he said, almost shouting now. “Listen, this is important. The guy was hurt after he hit the ground, both of his legs were broken, but he was still alert enough to talk with a guy who ran up to him and asked if he was okay. The guy who fell out of the sky ignored the questions and asked what year it was. When he was told it was 2048, he started yelling and smacking the ground. Already, the Tyranny’s sirens were approaching. The guy knew he only had a limited amount of time. He asked what the date was. When the onlooker told him, the guy closed his eyes and began to cry. ‘I was only sent back a single day,’ he said.”

  Amy looked out the window at the AeroCams all over the sky. “What does it mean?”

  “The guy said he was from the future, that he had been sent back in time to prevent the Tyranny. But instead of being sent back fifty or a hundred years, he was only sent back a single day. That was when the Security Service ran up to him. The poor guy must have known he was going to be tortured into telling everything he knew because the first thing he did was push the onlooker away so he wasn’t hurt, then he reached under his shirt as if he had a blaster, and the Tyranny’s men killed him right there.”

  After a moment of silence, one in which she stared at her senior reporter and friend without blinking, Amy said, “And how did you happen to hear about this?” It was a nicer question than “Do you have any proof at all that this fanciful story actually happened?”

  “A guy who saw it all told my buddy. And my buddy, knowing I worked for a news station, called me right away.”