“Society functions… this whole thing, everything around us… on the wheels of our own personal agendas. We all need the same things to live. Food. Water. Shelter. Clothing. When we all desire the same essential things, then we can work together to acquire them. So when each individual thinks only of their own needs, they are really thinking of the needs of the many. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes,” she sniffled. “Yes, of course it does. It’s the basis for the economics of any successful society.”
Claire was quoting, verbatim, from a book that everyone had read at one time or another. Naturally, this wasn’t the first time that the tenets of the Program had been put to question. There were heaps of books… exemplary literature, history, psychology… which were mandatory reading for every citizen of the Nation. Books that had been written since the General’s Revolution, in addition to some that were cherry-picked from the ages previous.
Owen didn’t need to mention these books to Claire or even consider her mindless plagiarism for a second. He, too, had been paraphrasing most of his speech to her. He just hoped it was as convincing leaving his mouth as it had been on the page. Truly, he hoped he had convinced her. He hoped it for her sake… even if he was not really convinced of it himself.
Chapter Thirteen
Gabriel worked the bag steadily. He was drilling combinations, throwing a fist into the canvas and following it with an elbow, setting up with the first strike and heaving his weight behind the second. He stepped back and cast his legs at the heavy sack, first low and then high, making contact not with his foot but rather his shin.
With each impact, Gabriel kept it mind not to strike at the surface of his target, but instead at a space roughly twenty centimeters behind the heavy bag, to push through it. There was a moment in the impact of each strike when Gabriel felt something. Some deep, bizarre satisfaction.
He grunted and pushed air through his teeth as he unleashed each blow, tightening the muscles in his core in defense against the counter-strikes of an imaginary combatant.
What was it that he felt in every strike he landed? Pride? No, it was something more than that. It was not merely the vanity of the act. It was not about proving something to himself, or to his trainer, or to Lamar. It was the sense of purpose, and, more to the point, of purpose fulfilled. This was something his body was meant to do. It was intended. With each crushing elbow, he felt that he was using himself appropriately.
His shins had hardened, as Owen had told him they would. This repetitive hard contact had encouraged an increase in his bone density. At the beginning of their sessions together, Gabriel’s shins had quickly become a sordid mess of bruises and lumps and tender flesh that he felt could barely support his wobbly frame. Now his legs were solid beneath him, and the rest of him balanced meaty and firm above them.
He liked this place. It was in the basement of an older residential highrise, and the door was locked and unlocked using an old-fashioned metal key. This alone was amazing to Gabriel, who had never even seen one of these relics before, but the room itself had become a sanctuary for him. It was a place for him to let down his guard, in one manner of speaking. And to learn to keep it up, in another.
There were no windows.
The walls were concrete that had been painted a stale putty-yellow color, and they were replete with small jagged holes and uneven stains. The ceiling was high but didn’t seem it on account of the exposed pipes that hung suspended overhead. A mingling scent of old sweat and mildew filled the room, which contained very little aside from some dumbbells, a weight bench, and the heavy bag that Gabriel was slamming himself into.
The bell rang as he was launching into one last combination. He rested his gloved hands on the top of his head while he regained his breath. Two minutes on. One minute off. Two minutes on. One minute off. This was his off-day routine, for these days between his lessons with Owen.
In place of Owen’s constant verbal abuse and critique, which Gabriel had actually come to be quite fond of, he would usually fill his ears with music. Heavy music. Music that Gabriel had never heard before meeting Owen. Music that was not approved by the National Board of the Arts.
This music was all rage and energy. Distorted guitars, repetitive throbbing basslines, and thunderous double-kick drumming. It was training music for soldiers, given to him by Owen, and it encouraged something primal within Gabriel. It was the perfect music for his work on the heavy bag, but it was not what he listened to today.
Today his earbuds piped in the meandering thoughts of an old man, lecturing and digressing and wandering. In a few spots there were even gaps of silence, about half an hour long, when Lamar would fall asleep while dictating.
At other points in his monologue, Lamar seemed to forget not only what he was talking about, but also the fact that he was dictating at all. Gabriel was both saddened and alarmed to witness his mentor slipping so quickly out of this world. It seemed strange that it should happen so fast after so many years of lucidity and physical capability.
Lamar’s rambling sermons were to be the companion piece to the other tasks that Gabriel was undertaking. The recordings were mostly anecdotal, and aimed at providing a bit of a back-story for the things that he would see and learn in his ‘studies’.
Over the last months, Gabriel had been busily learning as much as he could about the machines that truly held order in the Nation. From the hardware to the software, he was tasked with becoming comfortable with these computers, as managing these machines would be the principal task he was to inherit from Lamar.
He was acquainting himself with the municipal intranet, which opened countless avenues that were unavailable to the average citizen. Some of the portals he entered were accessible only with Lamar’s singular clearance code.
The typical resident of the Nation upon opening his or her tablet would be faced with the daily news. That is to say, they would be presented with the stories that the government had sanctioned; the stories it had seen fit to have its writers produce. Beyond that, there was unlimited access to a limited selection of books and movies. To be sure, there were more book titles than any man could read in all his days, but many pre-Revolution works were missing. Those that encouraged rebellion or supported alternative forms of government, those that were deemed too sympathetic to the people of the countries consumed by the Nation, those that professed or encouraged a belief in any religion, and those that were written in languages other than English, amongst others.
For Gabriel, logging in to the Frame with Lamar’s sovereign level of access, there was much, much more to take in. Millions of previously unavailable titles were now visible in his library. It was fascinating for him to see the works of his beloved Freud in their original German, although he was unable to divine anything from them as he scrolled through their pages. Each paragraph contained a lot of very long words and excessive consonant clusters, punctuated throughout by what seemed to be arbitrarily capitalized words.
Moving away from the vastness of the library, Gabriel was confronted with the news. The real news. Raw footage from the Nation’s campaigns overseas. Page after page of data detailing the casualties on each side of every battle, as well as the resource cost of these operations.
The video was crushing. Had Lamar not warned him in advance of the sorts of things he would come across in these video archives, Gabriel would have been crippled with disbelief. Much of it was too terrible to imagine. While the combat footage alone was hard to stomach, it was far from the unspeakable horror of the executions that would inevitably follow a successful conquest. Anyone deemed unsuitable for absorbance into the Nation was exterminated, and that turned out to be an alarmingly large percentage of these conquered populations.
Worst of all, though, was the footage from the military ships that transported the troops. Gabriel was speechless, watching as those whom were classified as enemies of the state, citizens one and all, were marched out onto the deck and lined up at the aft of the ship. These people,
their mouths gagged beneath the rough black fabric that covered their heads, were left to the soldiers who were en route to their first taste of combat. These green soldiers, all of them Grounders by rank, were free to apply their training as they saw fit, to dispatch of these muted captives in horridly imaginative ways before pushing them off the back of the boat. It was the military’s way of getting its rookies’ feet wet.
“Bing!” the bell rang again, and Gabriel moved in on the bag. He kept his feet moving and stayed off of his heels as he started to circle, throwing one-twos. One two. One two. Left right. Left right.
Owen’s voice was in his head somewhere behind Lamar’s. “Keep those hands up! You aren’t the only one throwing heat! Keep those hands up!” One two. “Keep that head moving! Move that pretty little head of yours! It’s a target, so make it a moving one!” Left right.
Minutes had passed since Lamar had spoken, but the reel was still running. Gabriel had adjusted the volume during his last minute-long break, thinking that maybe Lamar had been talking too softly to hear, or speaking too far from the microphone. All he could hear was high static fuzz and the whistling sound of Lamar breathing heavily through his nose.
“We lost the General that day.” The words shot abruptly into Gabriel’s ears, and he scrambled to lower the volume to its original level. “We lost him the first time we put someone on that boat. I remember that day like it was…” Lamar drifted away again for about a minute and a half before returning to his story, and Gabriel resumed his work on the bag.
“She was troubled, the first one. We didn’t know what else to do with her. At the time, we would typically sentence the criminals within our society to varying terms of agricultural labor, and it would be a genuine sentence, with a definite end. But this one… she was impulsive, and she would not cooperate. She couldn’t recognize the need for any order, for any discipline, because she had no desire for these things herself. And she did not scare. She lacked something common to most men, and that made her dangerous. She lacked empathy.
“Violent sociopath. That was the term we used, because that is term we were given by the shrinks that evaluated her.”
One two. One two. Left right. Left right. Gabriel kept sticking and moving, his head and shoulders swinging like a pendulum from left to right and back again, dipping down slightly in the middle of each movement and bobbing up again on the ends. Lamar kept on.
“With our well of thought running dry as to any other course of action, a proposal was made, and this time it was me who did the proposing. It was to be a one-time exception to our rule, the one rule we held above all others: never knowingly do harm to our citizens. I justified this one exception to that rule, arguing that to let this woman live within the bounds of our society… this troubled, troublesome, malicious woman… would only preserve a constant and very real danger to the rest of the citizens of our Nation.
“She had been a teacher in the Building Blocks program, and she had severely abused some of the children under her charge. While serving her five-year-sentence of agricultural labor, she was caught trying to poison a vat of apple juice at the orchard she had been assigned to. Well, we realized how foolish we had been to turn a blind eye to the potential danger of letting unstable people, dangerous criminals, come into contact with our food supplies.
“Twenty-four hands were quick to rise in approval of this particular one-time departure from our moral code. Twenty-four hands, as it had been with the proposal of the Coupling Program. Twenty-four hands, save that of the General, who just sat there with his fingers folded together on the table in front of him.
“‘Maybe there is logic in this decision that you are all so eager to make’, he said. ‘But it opens a gate that we swore not to open. It is a slippery slope, and a dangerous one. Let me ask all of you a question. What happens with the next person, or group of people, that we have no ready solution for? Who will that be? Rapists? Killers? Thieves? People charged with assault? Teenage shoplifters? People who take too many sick days? People who neglect to keep off of a freshly cut lawn? How quickly will we decide that we’ve exhausted all other possibilities for dealing with our criminals, save this one? This is an avenue that I cannot walk.’
“Then the General rose out of his seat and made for the door without waiting for the meeting to adjourn. He pulled the door open and stood there in the doorframe for a second before turning to us. He said, ‘There is still time. Still time to change your minds. We have not yet done anything that we can’t undo. I still have hope.’
“As he left the council chamber, something dropped in the core of me. The General was disappointed in us. In me. And I was disappointed in myself. I like to think that we all felt it, but still we could yield no viable alternative.
“We refused to open institutions such as prisons. We had seen what came of that. We saw no good in keeping people locked up until they died. It seemed inhumane to prolong an unfixable situation such as this, and to retain within our walls incurable minds with destructive hands. And it wouldn’t be fair to those tasked with taking care of these lost souls, not to mention the utter waste of resources it would involve.”
“Bing!” Gabriel’s final two-minute round had come to an end. Out of breath, he peeled the gloves from his hands and snuck a quick sniff of his palms before resting them once more atop his head, panting heavily. He wasn’t sure why he did this. It was not a pleasant scent, months’ worth of old sweat trapped inside thick synthetic leather, but it smelled like hard work and Gabriel liked that. He liked all of the smells in this basement. His own flat was too fresh, he thought. Too sterile.
He stood there breathing rapid, deep breaths through his teeth, saliva spraying out from between them on each exhalation. Lamar’s voice, however, was not concerned with Gabriel’s current state of fatigue, and so it pressed on with the story.
“Three months passed all too quickly, and the twenty-five of us found ourselves once more in the Big Room. A strange quiet filled the chamber that day. At least, it seemed strange on that afternoon, although it is in fact the same harsh silence that still fills that room today.
“We had all seen the video, the first of its kind. The woman I mentioned, Allie was her name, was walked to the back of the boat, shot unceremoniously in the head, and nudged off, down into the sea. They didn’t make a sick game of it, as they do these days, and it was not a Grounder, but rather a ranking officer that did the deed. It was done without flair or zeal or malice. But it was done, nonetheless.
“That day, when every member of the council had taken their seats, but before the Chairman had called the meeting to order, the General walked slowly over to the windows and drew the shades closed, one by one. No one said a word. When he had drawn all of the shades, and the sunlight struggled to make its way into the room between the edges of those blinds and the wood of the window frames, he returned to his seat at the far end of the table. He did not sit. He just stared each of us in the eyes, good and long, and then he spoke.
“‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury’, he said. It was a mocking combination of words, to be sure, but he spoke them in an undeniably dry and serious voice. ‘I would like to propose the elimination of one more citizen of this Nation.” Once more there was only silence. A terrible, fearful silence.
“‘And that person is myself’, he said. ‘I have failed all of you, and in doing so have placed millions of civilian lives in harm’s path. This cannot be tolerated. I must be put to death. A show of hands, all in favor.’
“Not a hand was raised, save the General’s own.
“‘Let the record show that the motion has been denied,’ he said.
“No one knew what to say, let alone what to think. This was all unimaginably odd and all of us just sat paralyzed. He continued without pause. He had planned this.
“‘I have known you all for some time, some longer than others. I will let there be no doubt in your minds that I love you. I want you all to remember yourselves and turn back from this dark path
you are embarking on, but I won’t be here to play shepherd.’
“He drew a small black pistol from his coat pocket. The room was all gasps and breath but still nobody could find any words.
“‘No man is so poor as when he dreams of great fortune.’
“That’s what the man said.
“Then he put the gun to his temple and he painted half the room.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Kale, come in. Sit down.”
Kale slid through the door and stood at attention a meter’s distance from the desk. It was a solid wooden bureau, crafted by a sturdy hand, sanded by a patient mind, and lacquered even and thorough.
There were two armchairs before the desk, behind the spot where Kale now stood. One of these chairs was filled by a young woman in a black and white suit. She had neither risen nor turned to greet him as he had entered, and she seemed entirely undisturbed by his presence now.
The old man stood there, the window behind him making a dark silhouette of his husky figure.
“Please, sit down.”
Kale obliged, centering himself neatly on the cushion of the one vacant seat, making contact with neither the armrests nor the back cushion.
Cecil slithered down into his own seat. It was a high-backed black leather affair, and even though it was on wheels he did not pull himself forward to his desk, remaining instead some two meters back from it. He leaned forward, placing both elbows on the rests but keeping his back straight, his thumb running down his short grey beard for a few strokes before coming to a rest beneath his chin.
“Kale, Kale, Kale…” His voice was stern, like a father torn between his duty to dole out a reprimand and his own pride in the stubbornness and willpower of his son. “You don’t make it easy to keep you around, do you?” He turned his head to the young woman. “What do you think, Geena? Is he a problem?”
Keeping Luna Page 13