Rebecca hadn’t known what to think, it seemed; she stared blankly to the black man who had opened the conversation so blatantly with the name drop of a professor at the university, as though to dissuade any thoughts of him being something lesser.
“You know, that is just the brilliant concept that my friend and I—the ones who are actually having this conversation?—well, it’s something we just couldn’t have got to,” I said.
“Thanks.” He grinned in response, somehow picking up on my extremely subtle sarcasm.
“You know, I see your point. I mean, if I was sitting on the outside of a group, making decisions and judging who they are? Well, I might have seen that someone doing the same to me was completely unwarranted. I appreciate you keeping a man honest,” he said, bowing in our direction.
I smiled, and fuck if he didn’t have a point.
“I’m Pot,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.” He straightened in his seat, resting as suavely as he could in a hotdog print, short-sleeved button-up.
“Kettle. It’s nice to meet you too.”
CHAPTER THREE
Wednesday, May 10th 2034
23:16
“SO, ARE YOU going to quit then?” Cadet Ocasio, Ezekiel’s bunkmate asked, straining to keep his eyes open after a long, long day. Ezekiel hadn’t meant for the conversation to lead to something so absolute, as he sat on the hard slab of a bed in the housing quarters of the academy. Ezekiel had, one day before, made it two months longer than most of the washouts, but he nonetheless found himself only a few wrong words from the same end.
“I’m just starting to wonder, where the hell is all of this going?”
“You’re still pissed about the exercise earlier, aren’t you? That’s just what they do, E, this is just Boot Camp 101: get in your head, break you down, build you up.” Ocasio groaned, leaning back to what they dared call pillows.
“It’s not just the exercise, though it didn’t help. Judge Stein wasn’t teaching us anything today, he was trying to take something away. What the hell are we here to become then, hm? I wanted to be part of something, something that would—I don’t know. I do know I ain’t here for some voyeurism shit.”
The exercise weighed on him more than he was willing to admit, even to Ocasio. It wasn’t often they left the academy grounds, part of the philosophy being of course to control the narrative Fargo’s new avatars would be filled by.
No TV, recorded calls, a library filled only with approved texts devoid of any objective poisoning from any side: up, down, left or right. Even the food, which was the hardest thing for Ezekiel to swallow about it all, was specially designed for each cadet’s needs to gain muscle mass and lose the useless fat from a life they would never have again.
Earlier that day, Judge Stein took a class of twelve first-year cadets out. The world felt too bright in some places, too dark in others. Littered, cracked blacktops scarred by separation from the only thing that would hold it together. Judge Stein rode beside the bus on his Lawranger, dressed in the uniform they all sought to wear themselves one day.
Eventually, Stein sped up and crossed into the lane in front of the cadets, raising a fist to let the bus driver know to stop. The bus pulled over and crawled to a halt, and the cadets fell into a tense silence.
“Fall in, cadets,” Judge Stein ordered as they disembarked, and they all circled their superior, hands clasped behind their backs, standing exactly two feet apart from one another.
“What state is Academy 3 in, cadets?” Judge Stein called out, and the cadets bounced confused glances between one another. It seemed too simple as they were Academy 3, one of five camps established to teach the program.
“A… Alaska?” One of them called out finally.
“Correct. Now, why is that? Why would we have one of only five academies situated here, of all places?” Judge Stein asked, and then more murmurs, more nothing. For a while, at least, until one of them spoke up.
“W… Wyatt Earp… sir?” Cadet Simpson stuttered, and then another silence while Judge Stein gave a strange, huffing laugh and strode to the erudite cadet, and stopped a few inches from Simpson’s face.
“Wyatt. Fucking. Earp?” he asked, the laugh fading into something sharper. Just shut the hell up, Ezekiel thought, watching a grown man nearly simper in front of the Judge.
“W… Wyatt Earp, he served as a lawman for 10 days in Alaska once, he was one of the most dangerous men to carry a gun, a fearless—”
“Revenge nut who hunted down the murderers who killed his brothers and lit ’em up. That what you here for, Simpson? To be an individual? You get a hard-on about being in the history books? Wyatt Earp… I could beat your lily ass for that shi—”
“Alaska, sir, like the other stateside bases for cadet training, holds one of the highest rates of violent crime in America,” Ezekiel chimed in, and immediately regretted when he realised he’d interrupted an increasingly annoyed superior. Judge Stein smiled but didn’t turn his eyes away from the cadet Simpson.
“Correct, Cadet-Who-Gives-A-Shit-About-Becoming-A-Judge. Why do you think that is?”
Trick question, Ezekiel thought, before what he’d wanted to say reached the top of his tongue. Before the consideration of the Native American population and its invisibility to the powers that be had, maybe, possibly, resulted in lackluster consideration for the overall epidemic of crime throughout. Shit, Ezekiel had been here before, the old white dude who only wants to hear you repeat his sage wisdom back to him, but at the Academy there were so many creeds they slung around he couldn’t keep track of them all.
Does he want,
Perception not affection!
or
We Are the Answer Not The Question!
Wait… wait maybe
We Are the Order!
“Judge Stein, it is not a cadet’s place to find the reason for the lawlessness, but to bring the hammer down on the lawless,” Ezekiel said squarely.
“Correct. You see that, cadets? That is the difference between a future Judge, and a future washout,” Judge Stein said, his eyes never leaving Cadet Simpson.
“Judge Fox! I think it’s time for our guest to join us, don’t you?” he finally belted out, turning his attention away from Cadet Simpson and towards the darker edges of the park. The rest of them, including Ezekiel, turned to see a Judge dragging out a cuffed man, bloody-nosed but otherwise fit enough, from the darkness. Judge Fox said nothing as he passed the cadets, shoving the reluctant, ragged civilian forward. Ezekiel couldn’t help but dig, to try and unearth whatever it was they were looking at. A drunk, that much was apparent by the reek of hooch as Judge Fox passed them, shoving the tied man forward, who spat obscenities the whole way.
They stopped when they reached the centre of the cadet circle. Judge Stein shook hands with Judge Fox, before Judge Fox wrangled some keys from a pouch at his side, readying to free the nameless man. Ezekiel squirmed. Was this a simulation? It had to be, Ezekiel resolved, and it helped quiet the shaking throughout, if only for a moment.
Judge Stein reached down to his boot, rolling up his trouser leg to snatch a short-bladed knife from an ankle strap. There was a flinch, a shudder straining from the criminal. What the shit is this? A smaller, terminal part of Ezekiel bubbled the thought. He let it scratch, let it bite and do all the things immaturity could before letting it settle down into the black of him.
“What’s the last news you remember, cadets? About Fargo’s progress with our little social experiment here? Hm?” Judge Stein asked. It wasn’t the easiest thing to remember, at least not where Ezekiel was concerned. When they’d arrived, it wasn’t without condition: it was stated, drilled, lectured, and delivered by any means necessary that the outside world was a pollution, a sickness. What would turn them into the face of a new society, a better society, was to trust emphatically in the one thing that couldn’t be marred by the affliction of sight.
There were times Ezekiel thought about his mother. He thought about the way she couldn’t
think about him, couldn’t think about his father—or maybe she could. Maybe if he would have stayed, never breaking from the light of her in the assisted care home, at her side while the darkness came, if she would know his name. It was childish, and as such belonged with the other things he packed away to barter with Fargo’s vision.
It was too much for some cadets, that separation from friends, from family, from the annual school gun fairs or Sunday mornings and the milky rot breath of everything laying with them in bed. Then there was of course entertainment, news, and the mangled line between them. Generally, those cadets washed out in week two or so, but it didn’t make it any less hard on those that remained.
“Sir! The ongoing debate against our cause, the plebeian’s struggle to retain due process! The ignorance of citizens, well-intentioned but obsolete, to fight the future!” This time it was Ezekiel’s bunkmate, Ocasio, who had spoken up. Ezekiel wanted to chuckle, but kept it inside. There was, perhaps, more than one occasion the two men would laugh about the anachronistic way their instructors would speak about the law. It at least made it easier to throw the words back at them upon request.
“That’s correct. So, as none of you cadets, you glorified plebs, have any idea what is happening in the world, I’d be remiss to waste such an… interesting opportunity. This squirming little shit you see in front of you? Judge Fox apprehended him two hours ago. This… scum, murdered a woman while mugging her—”
“Itwasanaccidentitwasanaccidentitwasan—I just… oh, god…” The criminal, the scum, rambled, he shook, he sobbed, and perfectly played the part of something more human than he deserved to be. Judge Stein grinned to Judge Fox, who only shrugged his shoulders in response.
“We are the order in this world, boys and girls,” Judge Stein started, before kneeling behind the criminal, using the knife to cut off the ties behind his back, and returning to his feet. “I, Judge Stein, hereby sentence you to death for the crime of murder.”
“You… you can’t just—what are you—?”
“I grant temporary authorisation to you cadets to carry out my order,” Judge Stein continued, pulling his weapon and aiming it at the criminal’s head, letting the cool of the steel barrel rest against his skull to deliver what would save everyone from the cursed, criminal drain on society.
“Which one of you is going to step up and execute my order?” Judge Stein called out to the group. No one moved. It wasn’t uncommon for a cadet to have a mental break, but for an Instructor Judge, to use the technical term, to lose his goddamned mind, was something new. Insane as it seemed, though, Judge Fox didn’t seem surprised in the least. This was real, Ezekiel realised; they want us to kill this man.
“Sir! I—I will complete your order!” Cadet Simpson said, walking up to the Judges in the centre of the circle, and the criminal shuddered at the sound of his approach. Judge Stein smiled, handing the weapon over to the cadet, who pushed it against the back of the weeping murderer’s head.
“What you maggots don’t know—well, that could fill the Justice Library—but what’s important to know is while you’ve been twiddling your dicks, the world keeps moving, and by executive order from President Gurney, we now have full autonomy to bypass the court system, and carry out judgement, trial, execution as we see fit. Trouble is, I guess… you have no real way to confirm this, do you… Simpson, right? You could be carrying out the request of a madman, you could be killing a very profitable tool in prison labour. Or… you could be disobeying the request of a Judge, and the new world order, the law. Got to say, kid, I don’t really envy your position.” Stein lathered the words with a kind of sweetness.
Cadet Simpson looked back to Judge Stein, then to Judge Fox, who only waited with crossed arms and straight eyes. The criminal felt it, then—the pause, pregnant and palpable—before taking his chance to turn around and latch two hands over the mile-long barrel.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, through salt and snot, but Simpson said nothing, not with his mouth anyway. Ezekiel and most of the other cadets could read the rest of him clearly enough. He was panicked; the sweat, the wordless part between his lips screamed.
“So, you’re not going to do it? Shit, kid, this one is easy, you didn’t even have to make the judgement. You get to do the easy part here; that is, of course, if I’m telling you the truth,” Judge Stein said, and for all the moments of hard-ass hell he would inflict, Ezekiel felt a fire for the first time in this one. He’s enjoying this, Ezekiel thought. Cadet life wasn’t filled with doves and chocolate fountains, sure, but the tether that kept Ezekiel—all of them, for that matter—from slinking into the old ways of life was that every breath could only be in the service of building something more.
Ezekiel broke from the circle, walking towards the centre, paying little mind to the other cadets, or to the Judges who eyed him cautiously. By the time Cadet Simpson turned to him, Ezekiel’s hand was already over his forearm.
“What are you doing?” Simpson whispered. Ezekiel stared down to the criminal. He swung the steel toed tip of his weighted boot into the man’s chest, making him flail backwards against the tall grass. It took little effort for Ezekiel to pull the weapon from Simpson’s hand, and it seemed even less so for him to place the flat of his foot over the criminal’s chest, to lean in with the weapon, and to pull the trigger.
Click.
Silence. Then, from the Judges, applause.
“Good work, Cadet Jones,” Stein said, patting the back of Ezekiel’s shoulder.
“Sir! The only truth in this world is the law! The law cannot lie, the law is above fallacy, the law is—”
“—the Judges,” Judge Fox finished from behind. Ezekiel turned, giving a stuttered nod to his superior, before returning the weapon to him. Judge Stein helped the struggling perp to his feet and dragged him away.
While they rode back to the camp, swept away once more from the outside world to the only home that mattered, Ezekiel stared out the window to catch as much of it as he could. There was a beauty to it, but only by accident. As much as Judge Stein seemed more of a fraternity hazer than anything, Ezekiel couldn’t say, while they rode back, that he hadn’t learned more than one truth that night. He knew that Stein was a symptom of an old world, a superior that would one day need to be purged from the body of justice. He knew that Simpson wouldn’t be in the mess hall in the morning to follow. He knew that he was growing; that fear, day by day, would call out less and less, and in that existed a future without something so pedantic as beauty, but calm.
AALIYAH
“YOU KNOW I’LL never give up on you, Kettle,” he said, as if it meant a thing in that moment.
“You know our son never stopped not-knowing-who-you-are, Pot. You know neither of us deserve this? You know that—”
He slammed a hand against the wall to stop me. It worked, but not out of fear, Colin. I’d been dealing with little boys for about eleven and a half years, so I knew when they were struggling to use goddamn words.
“You know, more than anyone, what was taken from me. You know that I’d have never got here if not for expulsion, for losing my funding, for being lumped in with criminals for—I’m right. You don’t see it now but I’m—I’m just trying to get back what’s mine, Kettle. Is that so insane?”
“IT’S… I JUST don’t see why you enjoy these, is all.”
Colin walked beside me, an arm over my shoulder, the other holding his cane. He, moreso than I, was still reeling from the cinematic ‘masterpiece.’ His coat smelled of college-grade weed, nights in the winter curled up at home had let the skunky scent sink into his tweed blazer, but I was pretty high at the moment, so the fuck did I care?
He’d taken me to see a movie.
In May.
I’d not taken him as a superhero fan, but thinking back on it as you carry everything wrong with this world inside of you, Colin, I really should have. Since about 2021 it was impossible to find a movie from May through mid-September that didn’t stem from the same unive
rse. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself, but by the end of it I felt more like I’d chugged a two-litre of Mountain Dew, thirsty for another in the sad realisation that my quench was never the goal in the first place.
“Would you rather see some indy director wank off for two hours in an ‘original film’ that is a lengthy testimonial to all the directors they stalked through their life?” he said, and I could nearly see the many times that particular splooge of troll juice had been posted online.
“It’s not that, it’s just the action is so… empty. Hell, half of it is visual effects, I don’t know how the hell you like these things at all.” I stopped to throw away a half-eaten popcorn tub into the bin and slipped for a moment from Colin’s reach.
“Empty? You’re so wrong! They are consistent, always, with powers and fighting ability and—well, even down to the damn jokes! I don’t need to see to enjoy phenomenal storytelling.” I rolled my eyes just as unaware, just as unprepared for the eyes that hung over us as you were.
“I suppose I can concede that. I concede that you are no superhero and I should be conscious of your shortcomings as a human being and more importantly, a film critic.”
“You’re such an empath.”
“It’s… it’s a struggle, fam.”
I’ve been through the moments that followed far too many times, Colin. The men who were watching us, or watching me. The same shit I’d been through over and repeatedly when anyone recognised the girl who held a bullet up to the world and swallowed it whole. The thing is, I know their tactics, I knew their threats against my body or my life, and I knew when they were worth batting an eye at.
You knew something too. You knew that when they came with their thin threats, like tiny $13.99 tiki torches they thought could burn our world down, the only thing that mattered was their threat against what you thought was yours.
When the Light Lay Still Page 5