Chapter 17
“Leave him be, Dirk,” the taller of the two Citizoneprotects muttered to his partner, adjusting his crisp grey uniform uncomfortably. “It’s like kicking a bloody puppy.”
The second man, short and blocky, glared at the first. “His bidaily account is blank for the last week, and there are only two entries from before that which even make sense. Have you looked at this thing? What do you have to say about that...” he glanced at the small handheld device to get the offender’s name. “Adam McLeod?”
Adam McLeod ran a hand through his thick mane of blonde hair and stared down at the Citizoneprotect with large, guileless blue eyes. His stooped shoulders meant that his eyes were only marginally above the shorter man’s head. A single tear ran down his pale cheek, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his faded leather jacket, cringing. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, his voice a bare whisper. “I mean to write down that stuff, but...” his expression slackened, and he suddenly glanced away. “Hey, do you play baseball? I always wanted to play baseball.”
“He’s just a Simple, Dirk,” the taller man muttered. “Look at him.”
Adam glanced back at the two officers, his eyes wide and a grin on his face. His hair, though clean, was unkempt and wild. The pants that he wore were as faded as the leather jacket, and were slightly too short for him. His boots, old military boots that he had probably gotten during his mandatory term with the District Militia, were scuffed and worn. His expression was gleefully vacuous. “Did you know that baseball was...”
“Shut up, McLeod,” the second Citizoneprotect snapped, and Adam flinched back, ducking his head. “Look, Pete, he’s on the street with an out-of-date bidaily account. That’s an offense.”
Pete frowned and shook his head. “I know you want to make a good showing in your first week on the force, Dirk, but arresting Adam isn’t the way to do it.” He turned to look at the awkward young man in front of them. “How was work today, Adam?”
Adam seemed to come alive, bouncing up and down on his toes. “I got to unload the big yellow truck!” he crowed, his eyes gleaming. “Casey says that if I keep it up, I might be able to drive it, some day. The last time I drove a truck it was green and I ran it into a tree. The sergeant was angry, but the sergeant was always angry, and not just at me. He made me walk the rest of the way around the ’Zone, but I liked it.” He glanced around, suddenly, his eyes seeming to lose focus. “Hey, what time is it? Am I late for work again?”
Pete gave Dirk an ‘I told you so’ glance and patted Adam with gentle familiarity on the shoulder. “It’s six o’clock, Adam. Work is done for today. You were heading home.”
Adam blinked his bright blue eyes slowly, processing the information. At last he nodded, slowly. “Okay, I’ll go home now.”
He started to walk away, and Dirk gaped after him. “What, we’re just going to let him go?”
Pete hesitated. “You’re right,” he agreed. He grabbed the small device Dirk was holding and hurried after Adam. “Hey, Adam! You forgot your bidaily.”
Adam turned around and grinned at him. “Hiya, Pete! Whatcha doin’?”
The Citizoneprotect handed Adam the bidaily account recorder and patted him on the shoulder again. “You go on home, Adam. I’ll tell the guys at the precinct you said hi.”
“Hi,” Adam repeated dutifully, staring at the bidaily device. “Hey, is this for me?” he asked. “I’ve got one that looks just like it. Thanks, Pete!”
“Have you been using it?” Pete asked softly, and Adam cringed slightly. He shook his head.
“I mean to write that stuff down, but...” Adam’s voice trailed off again, and he stared up at the clouds. “Do you think it’s gonna rain? I like the rain. It makes puddles.”
“I like the rain, too. Go home, Adam. I’m sure it was an exciting day for you.”
Adam brightened. “Did I tell you that I got to unload the big yellow truck?”
With a soft laugh, Pete turned Adam around. “Tell me about it tomorrow, Adam. You must be hungry. Go home.”
His feet shuffling in the dusty ground, Adam ambled away, humming discordantly to himself. Pete returned to stand beside his new partner. “You’ll get used to Adam, Dirk. He’s a local. He got shot in the head when he was a kid. It kind of messed him up. He tries so hard to fit in, though.”
Dirk glared at his partner. “So you let him get away with...”
Pete spun to face Dirk, his dark eyes cold. “He’s a Simple, Dirk. He doesn’t get it. You could arrest him every single day, and he’d just do the same thing the next day.”
“People like that ought to be euthanized,” Dirk grumbled.
“Shut the fuck up, Dirk,” Pete snapped. “Adam is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet. He just wants to go to work, go home, talk about baseball, and water his plant. He’s about as harmless as they get. I’m going to tell you this once: leave Adam alone. Mess with him, and damn near every Citizoneprotect at the precinct will find ways to make your life hell. He’s the only fucking person out here that smiles when he sees one of us, the only one who isn’t terrified we’re going to arrest him for looking down instead of up at the fucking cameras. It might not mean much to you just now, but after a year or two, you’ll realize just how much that kind of shit adds up. Having someone, even someone without a clue like Adam, say hi instead of walk quickly away is a fucking godsend.”
Dirk frowned at the retreating form of Adam McLeod. “Alright,” he agreed finally. “Leave the Simple alone.”
*
Adam paused at the door to his assigned apartment in the grey houseblock, placing his thumb on the pad beside the handle and leaning down to look into the cornea-scanner on the doorframe. The lock clicked open and he pushed the door open and tripped over the step as he shuffled in, falling to one knee. He heard the door click shut behind him, and he rose to his feet. He didn’t lock it. It was against the law to lock your door while you were home.
He stood in the middle of the entryway for a moment, his shoulders hunched and his gaze dully looking around the dim room. He reached over and flicked on the light. The fluorescent bulb hummed and flickered to life. He stood there for another moment, waiting in the silence. “Hello?” he asked, taking his jacket off and hanging it on a peg beside the door.
When no one answered, he shambled into the small flat. The apartment was about average, as apartments went. It was a single room with a low-slung armchair, a bed in one corner, a wardrobe, a small kitchen area separated by a waist-high counter, and a tiny bathroom beside the entrance. A battered stereo sat on the counter, and he walked haltingly over to it and flicked it on. Music from an earlier time filled the small apartment, and he glanced around one more time.
He was alone.
He blinked and ran a hand down his face. He shook his head once, as though clearing his mind. Slowly, he stretched his back and shoulders, standing up to his full height. His gaze, which had been dull and distant, seemed to grow sharper, and the muscles in his cheeks and around his eyes lost the slackness from moments before. He sighed and cracked his neck. He moved the chair to rest against the wall and knelt down in the middle of the room. Taking slow, deliberate breaths, he closed his eyes.
God, he hated the act he had to put on every day.
After a few moments of restful meditation, he rose, tossed his shirt on the chair, and began a short routine of stretches, followed by a more rigorous routine of kicks, blocks, and strikes. Martial arts had been a mandatory part of Militia training, though the course had been rudimentary at best. It had been difficult to practice the strikes and blocks accurately during the training while still seeming entirely incompetent at it. No one knew he had gone home every night and practiced for hours in the darkness.
Mind you, he mused, there was a lot about him that no one knew.
He finished his routine and grabbed a towel, wiping the sheen of sweat off his skin. He pulled the chair back into the middle of the room and sat down, staring at the wardrobe. A poster was pinned to the old wood; yellowed with age and tattered, it showed a young man, leaning against a brick wall. The man’s expression was cool, challenging. Adam stared at it. His grandfather had told him the man’s name, but Adam didn’t remember it. He knew it was James something. He only remembered that because his grandfather’s name had been James.
He shook his head. That had been a long time ago, but in some ways the days when his grandfather had been around were more real than anything else in this charade he lived. He stood up and walked into the kitchen. Beside the stereo sat a long-leafed plant, a gladiolus; he watered it and gently touched the long, narrow leaves. It had never bloomed, but he’d only had it for a season. He picked it up and walked over to place it on the ledge of the small window at the front of the room, hoping to allow it to catch the last few hours of light.
Returning to the kitchen, he rummaged under the counter and produced a small pot and a can of standard rations. Supposedly it was a beef stew, but secretly he believed it more likely to be rat or cat or dog. He poured the contents into the pot and placed it on the single element heater.
It had been a long day, and the encounter with the Citizoneprotects had thrown him through a loop. Usually he was able to begin unwinding on the walk home from the yard, but the new Citizoneprotect had forced him to hold on to his facade longer than was normal. It was exhausting. Some days he wished he could just relax, let the world see who he really was.
He’d been playing this part for so long.
He hadn’t really understood why he’d decided to begin the act. It wasn’t for sympathy, and it wasn’t out of fear... it had just seemed the smartest thing to do. His grandfather had always told him that people were predictable, and that the only way to succeed was to do the unexpected, to be different. While playing dumb had limited what he could actually accomplish, condemning him to menial labour, it had given him a degree of freedom that no one else seemed to enjoy. The bidaily accounts were only one example. While everyone else had to write down, in excruciating detail, the specifics of their days’ events twice daily, he no longer even bothered to make an effort. He could walk down any street, doing whatever he wanted, and the CPs just ignored him. It had been even more valuable during his school years. The teachers, who were really just there to indoctrinate the students, had invariably grown weary of having him ask the same stupid questions every class. He’d spent almost his entire time at school in the library. Everyone had assumed he couldn’t actually read the books he grabbed from the shelves, so when he began taking the older history books ‘to look at the pretty pictures’, no one had done anything. They had been pulled from curriculum years before, anyway. Of course, if any of the other students had taken out the same books, questions would have been raised, and people would have been arrested. While his classmates were busy being brainwashed, he had spent the years reading the very books the government had later banned from circulation and burned.
The stew on the heating element began to bubble, the rich smell cloying in the small room. He poured it into a bowl and ate standing at the counter. The song on the stereo changed, and he closed his eyes at the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Music was one of the few luxuries that they were still permitted. Television had become too expensive for anyone to own a television set long before he’d been born. Computers had been confiscated during the American Occupation, nearly eighty years before. After the paper drives nearly fifteen years back, when people had been promised a few dollars a book to turn their old books in, books had become scarce. He still owned a few, hidden in the bottom of his wardrobe, many of which would get him arrested if anyone ever found them. They had belonged to his grandfather, but he’d managed to keep them hidden over the years. Music was the only form of entertainment left, and even that was closely monitored.
He finished the stew and tossed the bowl in the sink to wash later. Outside, the curfew announcement echoed dully along the zonestreet. Attention, citizens. It is now eight o’clock, and the mandatory curfew is now in effect. Anyone on the streets after curfew will be detained by Citizoneprotects. Remain in your homes. Shaking his head, he walked silently over to sit on the corner of his bed.
His thoughts turned to his grandfather again, as they always seemed to. The old man had been an outspoken soul. He had railed against the various new rules and regulations, publicly denouncing the government initiatives until the day the CPs had dragged him out of their home the last time. He had always said that there was more to life than what They would permit the people to see. His trial had been short, and no one had been permitted to attend. The execution had taken place the following day. Attendance at criminal executions, particularly for sedition and treason, were mandatory. Adam had been forced to stand at the very front, his eyes fixed on his grandfather’s face. The old man’s piercing blue eyes had sought him out, and a fierce grin lit his face when he spotted Adam. The crowd jostled one another in the circle around his grandfather as the Chief Citizoneprotect had stepped forward with his service pistol.
Adam could still remember the defiant cry his grandfather had shouted as his executioner levelled the pistol to the back of his greying head. “Revolution!” he had screamed, his eyes fixed on Adam’s. People covered the ears of their children, trying to block out the word. There was a low murmur that was silenced by the pistol shot.
Adam didn’t remember anything after that until the hospital room.
Twenty years. He shook his head wearily. It had been almost twenty years since the day his grandfather had been shot, the day Adam had begun acting. It hadn’t been difficult, at first. The bullet that had killed his grandfather had ricocheted and had hit Adam, too. For months after that, he’d been in what the doctors had told his father and step-mother was a trauma-induced coma. They had been uncertain if he would ever wake up, let alone be ‘normal’ if he did. To ‘facilitate his care in the event of special needs’, They had assigned his father a new spouse, splitting the family up while Adam had lain immobile in the hospital bed. He could still remember his step-mother’s cries of protest as they dragged her from the room. The woman who had taken her place, Steffi, was one of the major reasons Adam had begun his act. He’d known what she was from the moment he finally opened his eyes and saw her staring intently at his father, her eyes darkly suspicious.
He’d heard every word the doctors had said over him, how brain injuries could be unpredictable, how he might never recover. The doctors had described to his father, in minute detail, how he might act after he woke up.
He stared morosely across the small room. It had been easy to simply do exactly as the doctors had predicted, at first. It had gotten more difficult over the years.
It wasn’t the isolation that bothered him. While it was true that the concept of friends was alien to him, it wasn’t just because everyone around him thought he was an idiot. Everyone was isolated. The long work days and the early curfew ensured that. The weekly Counsel Days, mandatory since shortly after his grandfather’s execution, had made people unwilling to get too close to one another. No one knew what might be said to a Counsellor, whether intentionally or by accident. Arrest was the best you could hope for, if someone said the wrong thing. Arrest, and deportation to the Disreputable Zone, the dreaded DZ. More often, however, people just vanished from homes whose doors had been kicked in. Of course, the government claimed the Disappearances were the work of terrorist factions within the society, and invariably other people disappeared shortly afterwards. It gave the government reason to implement new rules, like the cornea scans and the zonestreet cameras.
It wasn’t the knowledge that he was better than he pretended that made his act more difficult with every passing day. He’d played the role long enough that he no longer cared that people looked at him like he was some kind of pariah, a leper that they couldn’t shuffle into the shadows. While it had made him weep silently when he was young – in the darkness of his room, late at night when he was certain no one was still awake – it no longer bothered him.
It wasn’t anything about himself that made keeping up the act so difficult. It was the look of despair he had begun to see on the faces of everyone around him, a look that everyone hid from everyone else but him. It was the hopelessness that he had seen in the way people walked, the way they hunched their shoulders. It was the sight of a broken-spirited people that made him wish he could be what his grandfather had always told him he must be.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling, tracing the spider web of cracks in the drywall with his eyes; the fluorescent light clung like a dying spider inside the web of cracked stipple, which had faded from white to the off-yellow of infected pus. Folding his hands behind his head on the thin pillow, he thought back to the stories his grandfather used to tell him about the way the world used to be. He hadn’t believed the old man, not really. Not until he’d been able to read for himself from the tattered, dog-eared books that he’d discovered in his grandfather’s trunk years after the old man’s death. In a world where everything was monitored, it seemed impossible to envision a world where you had the freedom to go and do what you wanted, to say what you wanted, without fear that you or someone you loved would be arrested or simply disappear.
His grandfather had always said that he had seen it coming. That much, Adam had always believed. It was impossible to doubt it when the old man would hear of whatever new rule or regulation the government had implemented. Invariably he’d glance over at his son, Adam’s father, with sad eyes and silently shake his head. He never said ‘I told you so’, but Adam’s father would always look away and find a reason to leave the room.
Adam remembered the nights before the old man had been taken away the last time, back when they had all lived in the same apartment. His father would always retire to bed early, leaving Adam and his step-brother sitting at his grandfather’s feet while the old man stared at the fireplace that provided the drafty rooms with heat in the winter. He had always told the stories in a whisper, too low for his step-mother to overhear from the kitchen. Sometimes, though, the old man had shifted away from being a story-teller and would speak directly to him and his step-brother. It was during those times that Adam had learned the most about his grandfather.
Almost invariably, at times like that, his grandfather had whispered a single word, the same word he had shouted the day he died. “Revolution,” he would whisper in the flickering light of the fire. “But people have to want it more than they want anything else. They have to be so scared, so angry, so lost that they cling to the idea even when things get ugly. I tried, boy, years ago. I tried to get them to see what was happening. I tried screaming it at people who were so afraid of what they had to lose that they wouldn’t listen. That isn’t the way it works. It has to begin as a whisper, boy. It won’t survive if it’s born as a shout.”
Adam had grown up listening to his grandfather whispering that forbidden word. It was a death sentence if it was ever overheard by the wrong person.
His father had heard the old man say the word aloud, once. Adam had crept out of his room and seen the two together in the kitchen, long after he was supposed to be in bed. The old man had growled it, louder than he meant to, and Adam’s father had punched the old man.
“Never say that word in this house, Dad,” his father had snarled. “It could kill us all.”
They hadn’t seen him standing there, and Adam remembered the look of fear on his father’s face. It was a look he had seen a million times since then: a million times in a million faces. Fear. It was the one emotion the government didn’t try to control or regulate through proper medication. Everything else, from depression to frustration, could be regulated by the Counsellors’ prescriptions. A drugged population was a malleable population.
He’d spent a lot of time, in the years since, considering the fear he’d seen in his father’s face that night, the fear he saw in the faces of virtually everyone these days. When he asked his grandfather about it, the old man had said that it had started out seemingly innocently enough. Back when televisions and radio were still available, commercials sponsored by the government had abounded. “Please report any suspicious activity in your neighborhood. It will make your neighborhood a friendlier, safer place.” It was said in a soft, concerned voice, like there was a friend hoping you, too, would watch over the fences for those imaginary dark faces.
“They were designed to make you feel like you weren’t alone,” his grandfather had told him. “To inspire fear and confidence at the same time… fear of what lay outside, confident that your friend ‘the government’ would be there beside you against the threat of the criminals that hid beyond the fence.
“The ads couldn’t have come at a better time. The rush of crime that had hit the cities directly after the American withdrawal was unlike anything anyone had ever imagined. Everyone was scared, and with the media attention on every little thing, it drove the people mad. Being afraid of a criminal in your neighbors yard became being afraid of your neighborhood, became being afraid of your neighbor, became ‘Be afraid’. But the government would fix it. And They did.” He had sounded bitter about the last bit.
People weren’t afraid of their neighbors, anymore. There was something much scarier out there than some burglar or mugger, and the most frightening thing about Them was that They knew everything you did or said... thanks to the mandatory Counsel Days, and the cameras on almost every lamp post, and the bidaily accounts.
Adam took a deep breath, shivering against the chill that had begun to creep into the small flat. The thermostat only worked when the temperature dropped below freezing, and then it was set at a standard temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. It made nights chilly, especially in the winter. While spring had arrived early, the nights still hovered around the zero mark outside. Rising, he walked over to the chair where his shirt lay crumpled against the threadbare cushion.
As he stared at the stained, tattered shirt on the decrepit old chair, he wondered what his grandfather would think of what had happened since his death: the Great Purge, where the last of the older generation had been rounded up and executed for conspiracy against the State, though most of them were doddering old wrecks by that time, most of them no longer able to work; the First Merge, where families that had been broken apart because of the numerous disappearances had been ‘selectively reassigned’ to new spouses; the second Purge, which had come in the dead of night, leaving doorframes as shattered as the expressions on the faces of the children in his classes the following day... they had been called the Ghost Kids, the children who had been left behind after one or both of their parents were dragged away, screaming, in the darkness. None of those taken in the Second Purge had ever been heard from again. Some rumours claimed they had been relocated to the DZ, but it was generally believed that they had been murdered... though everyone said ‘executed’. It was a calculated euphemism. No one wanted the men who had shattered so many lives in a single night to come to their door next.
Most people had turned a blind eye, hoping that by working diligently they would be able to earn enough to get their families out of the city, move to a new place. But then the government had institutionalized the Credit System, whereby hard currency became obsolete. People worked for credits that they could use to purchase basic necessities. Of course, the credits were of no value anywhere but in the city. Anyone who still maintained a bank account discovered that their assets had been frozen. People who had planned to escape to a better life found themselves trapped. Most of them had been smart enough to realize that complaining would accomplish nothing. The few exceptions disappeared within a matter of days. No one really missed them.
The Zoning Regulation came next, and with that came the new name of the city: Calzone. The “Citizone” was divided into eight distinct Zones, not including the DZ, ostensibly for improved administrative co-ordination. Of course, that didn’t explain the chain link fences topped with razor wire, or the Zone gates guarded on either side by armed Citizoneprotects. Now, to pass from Zone to Zone, you required an extra-Zonal Pass, which cost enough credits to feed a family for a week. It essentially ensured that people remained where they were. Leaving your Zone was difficult enough; leaving the Citizone became next to impossible. Adam had been a teenager by that point, his act already well established.
He knew what his grandfather would say. He’d have had the guts to call the situation what it was: slavery. Oh, the chains weren’t visible or tangible, but that didn’t make them less real. People were prisoners, chattel to be traded from Zone to Zone, from family to family. Additional Purges and Merges had followed the Second Purge and the First Merge. Often, as had been the case with Adam’s own family, the government wouldn’t bother waiting for a Purge to split a family. His step-mother, Andrea, and his step-brother were relocated to a different Zone. It had completely broken his father.
His new step-mother, Steffi, had supposedly been selected because of Adam’s ‘special needs’. Adam had known better. He knew she’d been chosen to spy on his father. It was a smart move. His grandfather’s execution caused a distinct change in Adam’s father’s behavior. He began muttering. He never whispered to Adam, as the old man had. Instead he muttered to himself, often while Adam was around, and occasionally to others he thought he could trust.
It had been those same mutterings, spoken too often in front of Steffi, which had resulted in the last of Adam’s family vanishing when he was only fourteen years old.
Adam glanced at the clock on the wall. It read almost ten o’clock. He’d been reflecting on the past for nearly two hours. Shaking his head, he retreated back to the bed and flicked the remote light switch.
Lying there in the stygian darkness which enveloped him, he struggled vainly against the idea that was gradually building in the back of his mind. Shaking his head, he fought the quiet voice that whispered a forgotten, forbidden word into the forefront of his thoughts: Revolution.
It had been his grandfather’s dream, but the old man had always said that the people weren’t ready. Adam could hear the cry on the old man’s lips, echoing in the recesses of his memory, but he also remembered the horrified looks on the faces of those who had heard his final words. They hadn’t been ready. His father, before They had come for him in the dark hours before the dawn so long ago, had never had the courage to actually speak the word, though his comments near the end skirted dangerously close to the edges of it. The people who he had muttered to had turned away from him in shame and fear, and ultimately they had reported him. Again, the people hadn’t been ready.
It is time.
He imagined he could hear his grandfather’s voice in the stillness that enveloped him, whispering to him again.
Look at their faces, boy. You can still see the fear, but beneath it you can see something else, the one thing that they must have for this to work: hopelessness. Only when hope has been stolen do people realize its value; and the person who can give them new hope will hold their hearts in a way that all the fear in the world cannot. When all else has been taken, that faint flicker of hope becomes more powerful than fear, more powerful than terror... Give the hopeless something to hope for, boy, and they will follow you through the gates of Hell itself.
Adam felt a tear running down his cheek. He wiped it away and stared up into the darkness. His entire life, he’d imagined the day where he would step forward and scream out the secret, forbidden word. For twenty years, he had hidden behind a wall of self-imposed isolation, behind an identity he had constructed to fool the suspicious eyes he had known would watch him after his grandfather’s execution.
And now the time was right. He felt a shiver run down his spine, a mingled sense of fear and excitement that set his teeth chattering. A small part of his mind gibbered in frantic terror; he knew the consequences of failure. He’d seen them firsthand... but so had almost every man, woman, and child who lived in this cursed place. How many families had been shattered by the hidden violence, the death squads? How many children had been left behind to clean up the broken glass and blood, lonely ghosts knowing that they would never see their parents again? How many men had bitten their tongues and looked away when a Citizoneprotect ‘frisked’ their wife, their impotent fury ultimately turned inward because they had said nothing, done nothing? How many women had staggered home, weeping in silence beneath the averted gaze of their family and neighbours after being taken in for what passed as questioning by the people who were supposed to be there to protect them?
The gibbering voice in the back of his mind gradually subsided, replaced by a savage, primal snarl. Rage at the injustices, the inhumanity, crashed against the fear in his thoughts, smothering it. He fought back an urge to howl his defiance into the night.
It had to begin as a whisper.
Screaming that forbidden word would accomplish nothing, he knew. The government was well versed in dealing with those who opposed them vocally. They would find him, and he would vanish without a trace. No one would mourn his passing, and things would only continue to get worse. Besides, as his grandfather had warned him, people would hear a whisper, people who wouldn’t listen to a shout.
“Revolution,” he whispered into the empty room, savoring the forbidden word as he breathed it aloud, tasting it like prisoners devour every detail about that first, excruciating moment when the doors of the prison open and they are told they are free.
The second man, short and blocky, glared at the first. “His bidaily account is blank for the last week, and there are only two entries from before that which even make sense. Have you looked at this thing? What do you have to say about that...” he glanced at the small handheld device to get the offender’s name. “Adam McLeod?”
Adam McLeod ran a hand through his thick mane of blonde hair and stared down at the Citizoneprotect with large, guileless blue eyes. His stooped shoulders meant that his eyes were only marginally above the shorter man’s head. A single tear ran down his pale cheek, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his faded leather jacket, cringing. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, his voice a bare whisper. “I mean to write down that stuff, but...” his expression slackened, and he suddenly glanced away. “Hey, do you play baseball? I always wanted to play baseball.”
“He’s just a Simple, Dirk,” the taller man muttered. “Look at him.”
Adam glanced back at the two officers, his eyes wide and a grin on his face. His hair, though clean, was unkempt and wild. The pants that he wore were as faded as the leather jacket, and were slightly too short for him. His boots, old military boots that he had probably gotten during his mandatory term with the District Militia, were scuffed and worn. His expression was gleefully vacuous. “Did you know that baseball was...”
“Shut up, McLeod,” the second Citizoneprotect snapped, and Adam flinched back, ducking his head. “Look, Pete, he’s on the street with an out-of-date bidaily account. That’s an offense.”
Pete frowned and shook his head. “I know you want to make a good showing in your first week on the force, Dirk, but arresting Adam isn’t the way to do it.” He turned to look at the awkward young man in front of them. “How was work today, Adam?”
Adam seemed to come alive, bouncing up and down on his toes. “I got to unload the big yellow truck!” he crowed, his eyes gleaming. “Casey says that if I keep it up, I might be able to drive it, some day. The last time I drove a truck it was green and I ran it into a tree. The sergeant was angry, but the sergeant was always angry, and not just at me. He made me walk the rest of the way around the ’Zone, but I liked it.” He glanced around, suddenly, his eyes seeming to lose focus. “Hey, what time is it? Am I late for work again?”
Pete gave Dirk an ‘I told you so’ glance and patted Adam with gentle familiarity on the shoulder. “It’s six o’clock, Adam. Work is done for today. You were heading home.”
Adam blinked his bright blue eyes slowly, processing the information. At last he nodded, slowly. “Okay, I’ll go home now.”
He started to walk away, and Dirk gaped after him. “What, we’re just going to let him go?”
Pete hesitated. “You’re right,” he agreed. He grabbed the small device Dirk was holding and hurried after Adam. “Hey, Adam! You forgot your bidaily.”
Adam turned around and grinned at him. “Hiya, Pete! Whatcha doin’?”
The Citizoneprotect handed Adam the bidaily account recorder and patted him on the shoulder again. “You go on home, Adam. I’ll tell the guys at the precinct you said hi.”
“Hi,” Adam repeated dutifully, staring at the bidaily device. “Hey, is this for me?” he asked. “I’ve got one that looks just like it. Thanks, Pete!”
“Have you been using it?” Pete asked softly, and Adam cringed slightly. He shook his head.
“I mean to write that stuff down, but...” Adam’s voice trailed off again, and he stared up at the clouds. “Do you think it’s gonna rain? I like the rain. It makes puddles.”
“I like the rain, too. Go home, Adam. I’m sure it was an exciting day for you.”
Adam brightened. “Did I tell you that I got to unload the big yellow truck?”
With a soft laugh, Pete turned Adam around. “Tell me about it tomorrow, Adam. You must be hungry. Go home.”
His feet shuffling in the dusty ground, Adam ambled away, humming discordantly to himself. Pete returned to stand beside his new partner. “You’ll get used to Adam, Dirk. He’s a local. He got shot in the head when he was a kid. It kind of messed him up. He tries so hard to fit in, though.”
Dirk glared at his partner. “So you let him get away with...”
Pete spun to face Dirk, his dark eyes cold. “He’s a Simple, Dirk. He doesn’t get it. You could arrest him every single day, and he’d just do the same thing the next day.”
“People like that ought to be euthanized,” Dirk grumbled.
“Shut the fuck up, Dirk,” Pete snapped. “Adam is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet. He just wants to go to work, go home, talk about baseball, and water his plant. He’s about as harmless as they get. I’m going to tell you this once: leave Adam alone. Mess with him, and damn near every Citizoneprotect at the precinct will find ways to make your life hell. He’s the only fucking person out here that smiles when he sees one of us, the only one who isn’t terrified we’re going to arrest him for looking down instead of up at the fucking cameras. It might not mean much to you just now, but after a year or two, you’ll realize just how much that kind of shit adds up. Having someone, even someone without a clue like Adam, say hi instead of walk quickly away is a fucking godsend.”
Dirk frowned at the retreating form of Adam McLeod. “Alright,” he agreed finally. “Leave the Simple alone.”
*
Adam paused at the door to his assigned apartment in the grey houseblock, placing his thumb on the pad beside the handle and leaning down to look into the cornea-scanner on the doorframe. The lock clicked open and he pushed the door open and tripped over the step as he shuffled in, falling to one knee. He heard the door click shut behind him, and he rose to his feet. He didn’t lock it. It was against the law to lock your door while you were home.
He stood in the middle of the entryway for a moment, his shoulders hunched and his gaze dully looking around the dim room. He reached over and flicked on the light. The fluorescent bulb hummed and flickered to life. He stood there for another moment, waiting in the silence. “Hello?” he asked, taking his jacket off and hanging it on a peg beside the door.
When no one answered, he shambled into the small flat. The apartment was about average, as apartments went. It was a single room with a low-slung armchair, a bed in one corner, a wardrobe, a small kitchen area separated by a waist-high counter, and a tiny bathroom beside the entrance. A battered stereo sat on the counter, and he walked haltingly over to it and flicked it on. Music from an earlier time filled the small apartment, and he glanced around one more time.
He was alone.
He blinked and ran a hand down his face. He shook his head once, as though clearing his mind. Slowly, he stretched his back and shoulders, standing up to his full height. His gaze, which had been dull and distant, seemed to grow sharper, and the muscles in his cheeks and around his eyes lost the slackness from moments before. He sighed and cracked his neck. He moved the chair to rest against the wall and knelt down in the middle of the room. Taking slow, deliberate breaths, he closed his eyes.
God, he hated the act he had to put on every day.
After a few moments of restful meditation, he rose, tossed his shirt on the chair, and began a short routine of stretches, followed by a more rigorous routine of kicks, blocks, and strikes. Martial arts had been a mandatory part of Militia training, though the course had been rudimentary at best. It had been difficult to practice the strikes and blocks accurately during the training while still seeming entirely incompetent at it. No one knew he had gone home every night and practiced for hours in the darkness.
Mind you, he mused, there was a lot about him that no one knew.
He finished his routine and grabbed a towel, wiping the sheen of sweat off his skin. He pulled the chair back into the middle of the room and sat down, staring at the wardrobe. A poster was pinned to the old wood; yellowed with age and tattered, it showed a young man, leaning against a brick wall. The man’s expression was cool, challenging. Adam stared at it. His grandfather had told him the man’s name, but Adam didn’t remember it. He knew it was James something. He only remembered that because his grandfather’s name had been James.
He shook his head. That had been a long time ago, but in some ways the days when his grandfather had been around were more real than anything else in this charade he lived. He stood up and walked into the kitchen. Beside the stereo sat a long-leafed plant, a gladiolus; he watered it and gently touched the long, narrow leaves. It had never bloomed, but he’d only had it for a season. He picked it up and walked over to place it on the ledge of the small window at the front of the room, hoping to allow it to catch the last few hours of light.
Returning to the kitchen, he rummaged under the counter and produced a small pot and a can of standard rations. Supposedly it was a beef stew, but secretly he believed it more likely to be rat or cat or dog. He poured the contents into the pot and placed it on the single element heater.
It had been a long day, and the encounter with the Citizoneprotects had thrown him through a loop. Usually he was able to begin unwinding on the walk home from the yard, but the new Citizoneprotect had forced him to hold on to his facade longer than was normal. It was exhausting. Some days he wished he could just relax, let the world see who he really was.
He’d been playing this part for so long.
He hadn’t really understood why he’d decided to begin the act. It wasn’t for sympathy, and it wasn’t out of fear... it had just seemed the smartest thing to do. His grandfather had always told him that people were predictable, and that the only way to succeed was to do the unexpected, to be different. While playing dumb had limited what he could actually accomplish, condemning him to menial labour, it had given him a degree of freedom that no one else seemed to enjoy. The bidaily accounts were only one example. While everyone else had to write down, in excruciating detail, the specifics of their days’ events twice daily, he no longer even bothered to make an effort. He could walk down any street, doing whatever he wanted, and the CPs just ignored him. It had been even more valuable during his school years. The teachers, who were really just there to indoctrinate the students, had invariably grown weary of having him ask the same stupid questions every class. He’d spent almost his entire time at school in the library. Everyone had assumed he couldn’t actually read the books he grabbed from the shelves, so when he began taking the older history books ‘to look at the pretty pictures’, no one had done anything. They had been pulled from curriculum years before, anyway. Of course, if any of the other students had taken out the same books, questions would have been raised, and people would have been arrested. While his classmates were busy being brainwashed, he had spent the years reading the very books the government had later banned from circulation and burned.
The stew on the heating element began to bubble, the rich smell cloying in the small room. He poured it into a bowl and ate standing at the counter. The song on the stereo changed, and he closed his eyes at the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Music was one of the few luxuries that they were still permitted. Television had become too expensive for anyone to own a television set long before he’d been born. Computers had been confiscated during the American Occupation, nearly eighty years before. After the paper drives nearly fifteen years back, when people had been promised a few dollars a book to turn their old books in, books had become scarce. He still owned a few, hidden in the bottom of his wardrobe, many of which would get him arrested if anyone ever found them. They had belonged to his grandfather, but he’d managed to keep them hidden over the years. Music was the only form of entertainment left, and even that was closely monitored.
He finished the stew and tossed the bowl in the sink to wash later. Outside, the curfew announcement echoed dully along the zonestreet. Attention, citizens. It is now eight o’clock, and the mandatory curfew is now in effect. Anyone on the streets after curfew will be detained by Citizoneprotects. Remain in your homes. Shaking his head, he walked silently over to sit on the corner of his bed.
His thoughts turned to his grandfather again, as they always seemed to. The old man had been an outspoken soul. He had railed against the various new rules and regulations, publicly denouncing the government initiatives until the day the CPs had dragged him out of their home the last time. He had always said that there was more to life than what They would permit the people to see. His trial had been short, and no one had been permitted to attend. The execution had taken place the following day. Attendance at criminal executions, particularly for sedition and treason, were mandatory. Adam had been forced to stand at the very front, his eyes fixed on his grandfather’s face. The old man’s piercing blue eyes had sought him out, and a fierce grin lit his face when he spotted Adam. The crowd jostled one another in the circle around his grandfather as the Chief Citizoneprotect had stepped forward with his service pistol.
Adam could still remember the defiant cry his grandfather had shouted as his executioner levelled the pistol to the back of his greying head. “Revolution!” he had screamed, his eyes fixed on Adam’s. People covered the ears of their children, trying to block out the word. There was a low murmur that was silenced by the pistol shot.
Adam didn’t remember anything after that until the hospital room.
Twenty years. He shook his head wearily. It had been almost twenty years since the day his grandfather had been shot, the day Adam had begun acting. It hadn’t been difficult, at first. The bullet that had killed his grandfather had ricocheted and had hit Adam, too. For months after that, he’d been in what the doctors had told his father and step-mother was a trauma-induced coma. They had been uncertain if he would ever wake up, let alone be ‘normal’ if he did. To ‘facilitate his care in the event of special needs’, They had assigned his father a new spouse, splitting the family up while Adam had lain immobile in the hospital bed. He could still remember his step-mother’s cries of protest as they dragged her from the room. The woman who had taken her place, Steffi, was one of the major reasons Adam had begun his act. He’d known what she was from the moment he finally opened his eyes and saw her staring intently at his father, her eyes darkly suspicious.
He’d heard every word the doctors had said over him, how brain injuries could be unpredictable, how he might never recover. The doctors had described to his father, in minute detail, how he might act after he woke up.
He stared morosely across the small room. It had been easy to simply do exactly as the doctors had predicted, at first. It had gotten more difficult over the years.
It wasn’t the isolation that bothered him. While it was true that the concept of friends was alien to him, it wasn’t just because everyone around him thought he was an idiot. Everyone was isolated. The long work days and the early curfew ensured that. The weekly Counsel Days, mandatory since shortly after his grandfather’s execution, had made people unwilling to get too close to one another. No one knew what might be said to a Counsellor, whether intentionally or by accident. Arrest was the best you could hope for, if someone said the wrong thing. Arrest, and deportation to the Disreputable Zone, the dreaded DZ. More often, however, people just vanished from homes whose doors had been kicked in. Of course, the government claimed the Disappearances were the work of terrorist factions within the society, and invariably other people disappeared shortly afterwards. It gave the government reason to implement new rules, like the cornea scans and the zonestreet cameras.
It wasn’t the knowledge that he was better than he pretended that made his act more difficult with every passing day. He’d played the role long enough that he no longer cared that people looked at him like he was some kind of pariah, a leper that they couldn’t shuffle into the shadows. While it had made him weep silently when he was young – in the darkness of his room, late at night when he was certain no one was still awake – it no longer bothered him.
It wasn’t anything about himself that made keeping up the act so difficult. It was the look of despair he had begun to see on the faces of everyone around him, a look that everyone hid from everyone else but him. It was the hopelessness that he had seen in the way people walked, the way they hunched their shoulders. It was the sight of a broken-spirited people that made him wish he could be what his grandfather had always told him he must be.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling, tracing the spider web of cracks in the drywall with his eyes; the fluorescent light clung like a dying spider inside the web of cracked stipple, which had faded from white to the off-yellow of infected pus. Folding his hands behind his head on the thin pillow, he thought back to the stories his grandfather used to tell him about the way the world used to be. He hadn’t believed the old man, not really. Not until he’d been able to read for himself from the tattered, dog-eared books that he’d discovered in his grandfather’s trunk years after the old man’s death. In a world where everything was monitored, it seemed impossible to envision a world where you had the freedom to go and do what you wanted, to say what you wanted, without fear that you or someone you loved would be arrested or simply disappear.
His grandfather had always said that he had seen it coming. That much, Adam had always believed. It was impossible to doubt it when the old man would hear of whatever new rule or regulation the government had implemented. Invariably he’d glance over at his son, Adam’s father, with sad eyes and silently shake his head. He never said ‘I told you so’, but Adam’s father would always look away and find a reason to leave the room.
Adam remembered the nights before the old man had been taken away the last time, back when they had all lived in the same apartment. His father would always retire to bed early, leaving Adam and his step-brother sitting at his grandfather’s feet while the old man stared at the fireplace that provided the drafty rooms with heat in the winter. He had always told the stories in a whisper, too low for his step-mother to overhear from the kitchen. Sometimes, though, the old man had shifted away from being a story-teller and would speak directly to him and his step-brother. It was during those times that Adam had learned the most about his grandfather.
Almost invariably, at times like that, his grandfather had whispered a single word, the same word he had shouted the day he died. “Revolution,” he would whisper in the flickering light of the fire. “But people have to want it more than they want anything else. They have to be so scared, so angry, so lost that they cling to the idea even when things get ugly. I tried, boy, years ago. I tried to get them to see what was happening. I tried screaming it at people who were so afraid of what they had to lose that they wouldn’t listen. That isn’t the way it works. It has to begin as a whisper, boy. It won’t survive if it’s born as a shout.”
Adam had grown up listening to his grandfather whispering that forbidden word. It was a death sentence if it was ever overheard by the wrong person.
His father had heard the old man say the word aloud, once. Adam had crept out of his room and seen the two together in the kitchen, long after he was supposed to be in bed. The old man had growled it, louder than he meant to, and Adam’s father had punched the old man.
“Never say that word in this house, Dad,” his father had snarled. “It could kill us all.”
They hadn’t seen him standing there, and Adam remembered the look of fear on his father’s face. It was a look he had seen a million times since then: a million times in a million faces. Fear. It was the one emotion the government didn’t try to control or regulate through proper medication. Everything else, from depression to frustration, could be regulated by the Counsellors’ prescriptions. A drugged population was a malleable population.
He’d spent a lot of time, in the years since, considering the fear he’d seen in his father’s face that night, the fear he saw in the faces of virtually everyone these days. When he asked his grandfather about it, the old man had said that it had started out seemingly innocently enough. Back when televisions and radio were still available, commercials sponsored by the government had abounded. “Please report any suspicious activity in your neighborhood. It will make your neighborhood a friendlier, safer place.” It was said in a soft, concerned voice, like there was a friend hoping you, too, would watch over the fences for those imaginary dark faces.
“They were designed to make you feel like you weren’t alone,” his grandfather had told him. “To inspire fear and confidence at the same time… fear of what lay outside, confident that your friend ‘the government’ would be there beside you against the threat of the criminals that hid beyond the fence.
“The ads couldn’t have come at a better time. The rush of crime that had hit the cities directly after the American withdrawal was unlike anything anyone had ever imagined. Everyone was scared, and with the media attention on every little thing, it drove the people mad. Being afraid of a criminal in your neighbors yard became being afraid of your neighborhood, became being afraid of your neighbor, became ‘Be afraid’. But the government would fix it. And They did.” He had sounded bitter about the last bit.
People weren’t afraid of their neighbors, anymore. There was something much scarier out there than some burglar or mugger, and the most frightening thing about Them was that They knew everything you did or said... thanks to the mandatory Counsel Days, and the cameras on almost every lamp post, and the bidaily accounts.
Adam took a deep breath, shivering against the chill that had begun to creep into the small flat. The thermostat only worked when the temperature dropped below freezing, and then it was set at a standard temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. It made nights chilly, especially in the winter. While spring had arrived early, the nights still hovered around the zero mark outside. Rising, he walked over to the chair where his shirt lay crumpled against the threadbare cushion.
As he stared at the stained, tattered shirt on the decrepit old chair, he wondered what his grandfather would think of what had happened since his death: the Great Purge, where the last of the older generation had been rounded up and executed for conspiracy against the State, though most of them were doddering old wrecks by that time, most of them no longer able to work; the First Merge, where families that had been broken apart because of the numerous disappearances had been ‘selectively reassigned’ to new spouses; the second Purge, which had come in the dead of night, leaving doorframes as shattered as the expressions on the faces of the children in his classes the following day... they had been called the Ghost Kids, the children who had been left behind after one or both of their parents were dragged away, screaming, in the darkness. None of those taken in the Second Purge had ever been heard from again. Some rumours claimed they had been relocated to the DZ, but it was generally believed that they had been murdered... though everyone said ‘executed’. It was a calculated euphemism. No one wanted the men who had shattered so many lives in a single night to come to their door next.
Most people had turned a blind eye, hoping that by working diligently they would be able to earn enough to get their families out of the city, move to a new place. But then the government had institutionalized the Credit System, whereby hard currency became obsolete. People worked for credits that they could use to purchase basic necessities. Of course, the credits were of no value anywhere but in the city. Anyone who still maintained a bank account discovered that their assets had been frozen. People who had planned to escape to a better life found themselves trapped. Most of them had been smart enough to realize that complaining would accomplish nothing. The few exceptions disappeared within a matter of days. No one really missed them.
The Zoning Regulation came next, and with that came the new name of the city: Calzone. The “Citizone” was divided into eight distinct Zones, not including the DZ, ostensibly for improved administrative co-ordination. Of course, that didn’t explain the chain link fences topped with razor wire, or the Zone gates guarded on either side by armed Citizoneprotects. Now, to pass from Zone to Zone, you required an extra-Zonal Pass, which cost enough credits to feed a family for a week. It essentially ensured that people remained where they were. Leaving your Zone was difficult enough; leaving the Citizone became next to impossible. Adam had been a teenager by that point, his act already well established.
He knew what his grandfather would say. He’d have had the guts to call the situation what it was: slavery. Oh, the chains weren’t visible or tangible, but that didn’t make them less real. People were prisoners, chattel to be traded from Zone to Zone, from family to family. Additional Purges and Merges had followed the Second Purge and the First Merge. Often, as had been the case with Adam’s own family, the government wouldn’t bother waiting for a Purge to split a family. His step-mother, Andrea, and his step-brother were relocated to a different Zone. It had completely broken his father.
His new step-mother, Steffi, had supposedly been selected because of Adam’s ‘special needs’. Adam had known better. He knew she’d been chosen to spy on his father. It was a smart move. His grandfather’s execution caused a distinct change in Adam’s father’s behavior. He began muttering. He never whispered to Adam, as the old man had. Instead he muttered to himself, often while Adam was around, and occasionally to others he thought he could trust.
It had been those same mutterings, spoken too often in front of Steffi, which had resulted in the last of Adam’s family vanishing when he was only fourteen years old.
Adam glanced at the clock on the wall. It read almost ten o’clock. He’d been reflecting on the past for nearly two hours. Shaking his head, he retreated back to the bed and flicked the remote light switch.
Lying there in the stygian darkness which enveloped him, he struggled vainly against the idea that was gradually building in the back of his mind. Shaking his head, he fought the quiet voice that whispered a forgotten, forbidden word into the forefront of his thoughts: Revolution.
It had been his grandfather’s dream, but the old man had always said that the people weren’t ready. Adam could hear the cry on the old man’s lips, echoing in the recesses of his memory, but he also remembered the horrified looks on the faces of those who had heard his final words. They hadn’t been ready. His father, before They had come for him in the dark hours before the dawn so long ago, had never had the courage to actually speak the word, though his comments near the end skirted dangerously close to the edges of it. The people who he had muttered to had turned away from him in shame and fear, and ultimately they had reported him. Again, the people hadn’t been ready.
It is time.
He imagined he could hear his grandfather’s voice in the stillness that enveloped him, whispering to him again.
Look at their faces, boy. You can still see the fear, but beneath it you can see something else, the one thing that they must have for this to work: hopelessness. Only when hope has been stolen do people realize its value; and the person who can give them new hope will hold their hearts in a way that all the fear in the world cannot. When all else has been taken, that faint flicker of hope becomes more powerful than fear, more powerful than terror... Give the hopeless something to hope for, boy, and they will follow you through the gates of Hell itself.
Adam felt a tear running down his cheek. He wiped it away and stared up into the darkness. His entire life, he’d imagined the day where he would step forward and scream out the secret, forbidden word. For twenty years, he had hidden behind a wall of self-imposed isolation, behind an identity he had constructed to fool the suspicious eyes he had known would watch him after his grandfather’s execution.
And now the time was right. He felt a shiver run down his spine, a mingled sense of fear and excitement that set his teeth chattering. A small part of his mind gibbered in frantic terror; he knew the consequences of failure. He’d seen them firsthand... but so had almost every man, woman, and child who lived in this cursed place. How many families had been shattered by the hidden violence, the death squads? How many children had been left behind to clean up the broken glass and blood, lonely ghosts knowing that they would never see their parents again? How many men had bitten their tongues and looked away when a Citizoneprotect ‘frisked’ their wife, their impotent fury ultimately turned inward because they had said nothing, done nothing? How many women had staggered home, weeping in silence beneath the averted gaze of their family and neighbours after being taken in for what passed as questioning by the people who were supposed to be there to protect them?
The gibbering voice in the back of his mind gradually subsided, replaced by a savage, primal snarl. Rage at the injustices, the inhumanity, crashed against the fear in his thoughts, smothering it. He fought back an urge to howl his defiance into the night.
It had to begin as a whisper.
Screaming that forbidden word would accomplish nothing, he knew. The government was well versed in dealing with those who opposed them vocally. They would find him, and he would vanish without a trace. No one would mourn his passing, and things would only continue to get worse. Besides, as his grandfather had warned him, people would hear a whisper, people who wouldn’t listen to a shout.
“Revolution,” he whispered into the empty room, savoring the forbidden word as he breathed it aloud, tasting it like prisoners devour every detail about that first, excruciating moment when the doors of the prison open and they are told they are free.