The Wasteland
Chapter III
"My mom?" AC's voice was like the cry of a dying kitten, weak, tenuous. Her eyes grew wide as a tropical moon on a hot night, and then she crumpled to her knees, weeping inconsolably. Her father swiftly stooped to her side, and enveloped her in his arms. Her shudders and sobs quickly infected him as well, and, although he did so silently, he wept also. Their tears mingled their sorrow like rain in the sea.
No one else spoke. There was nothing to say. Gerald, the stout fellow, fidgeted uncomfortably, and all their gazes tried to be somewhere else as unutterable sorrow permeated the room, and their own hearts. Mabel, her face chiseled from granite, made shooing motions at them, and their instant compliance in turning for the exits betrayed their desire, their need, to be somewhere else. Somewhere where a little girl's grief at the loss of her mother didn't threaten to drown them in the limitless pool of hopelessness with her.
As the men left Mabel and the bereft family the room, Mabel stepped closer to the huddled pair and spoke in tones far softer than her mien. "Your mother set you free, AC. When she discovered the illusions that were being sold in place of the promises of the CFS, she told your father. Together they found out how to contact The Twelve, and worked with them to get you out, free." The sobbing never stopped, but AC was struggling to keep her gasps quiet enough to hear Mabel. Her hands writhed, clutching at her father's shoulders, releasing, grasping and pulling, as if trying to draw her mother's love out of him, yet ever empty-handed.
Mabel continued. "The CFS found out, but she concealed that she had let your father know. Somehow..." Now, Mabel paused, a crack in the stone face briefly revealed her own woe, yet without further delay, she went on. "Somehow, even the scans weren't able to pry that out of her."
"When the CFS came for your father, he was crushed, but, like her, knew he had to believe his own lies, and they, they were all too eager to keep the experiment going. They told him she'd died in an accident, but that you weren't to know, because their plans for you were to make you the outlier, the limit of rebellion in your peer group, and knowing would have broken their grip on your thoughts."
"Your mother loved you like nobody's business. She was so proud of you, so hopeful the CFS would make your life better than she and your father could ever do alone. She died so that you could be free, and your daddy almost did too." At that, Mabel gently put a hand on Vick's back; just a suggestion of support, of solidarity.
"I'm sorry AC." Without ceremony, Mabel turned to go, to leave father and daughter alone to comprehend their loss together, who, alone, could even know it. The stone of her face was revealed then to be a mask of fortitude, and the great grief she herself knew was, for a moment, apparent. The door closed behind her silently, but for the soft click of the latch.
AC never paused in her weeping. Vick, himself barely able to think, gathered her unprotesting, limp form in his arms and carried her over to a sofa near the kitchen, it's worn cushions of strong, abrasive material deep blue in hue. He sat her down, and took up station in her arms again, planting a brief kiss on the top of her head, and enfolding her in a gentle embrace.
It was some minutes before AC could try to speak, words mingled with sobs burbling forth. "Daddy... daddy, she was here... there, I mean..." Vick knew what she meant. Only yesterday, AC's mother was still alive to her, although she had died over a year ago.
"The corneals showed her AC. Her voice, her touches, came from a construct. They didn't want you to know, and I couldn't let you know. It was so hard, to keep from telling you, but if I told you, you might die, too." Vick's voice cracked a bit, betraying his own emotion. Tears continuously welled up and overflowed AC's eyes, hardly having dried from the pain of removing the corneals just hours ago. She paid no heed.
"Aaahhaha... " She tried to speak, but could only sob more. Vick quit trying, waiting for AC. He'd had a year to recover from his own grief, that he never could show, until now, and to prepare for this hurdle his daughter had to vault. She would need time, he knew. They had loved one another, the whole family, and AC had every right - she needed - to grieve, before moving forward.
But, he knew, she would move forward. He'd made sure she could.
After his frightened wife had shown him her handwritten notes, surreptitiously passed under his dinner plate, he'd grasped the situation, and together they had planned for escape.
Only, she hadn't escaped. Sarah had been beautiful, smart, and kind. Her work with children had been the cause of their inclusion in the CFS experimental arcology, designed to entrain children almost from birth in the illusory world the CFS wanted them to think they lived in. They'd told Vick he was being promoted, but, really, it was Sarah who was promoted.
She'd been so excited about the arcology project, and how she thought it would work, enabling kids to never have to suffer bullying, prejudice, or mistreatment at the hands of their peers, their parents, or institutions. She had worked really hard to design aspects of the interpersonal communications, and features of the curricula taught to the kids.
She was a true believer, once, honestly hating all the cruelty and pecking order aggressions 'old school' institutions engendered; devoutly, faithfully drinking the koolaid, certain that the benevolent CFS would usher in an utopian society based on the experiment she whole-heartedly endorsed.
Until the kids started being abused.
She had noticed that some of her charges, 11 and 12 years old, equivalent to middle school students in the old system, were increasingly withdrawn, going through the motions of participating in class, but failing miserably. When she tried to reach out to them, their blank stares and silence scared her more than the warning from Sal Fiori, her administrator.
She was told they were a 'special' experiment, and she was not to interfere, so, a true believer, she stayed out of it. Nonetheless, her heart pounded a message out that her brain could hardly ignore. Something was terribly, terribly wrong, and she didn't know what.
Then one of the little girls accidentally revealed bruising, and burn marks, on her back, when her blouse snagged on a bit of rough trim the illusions hid, and she couldn't not ask Viola what had happened. Viola had been terrified, and swiftly pulled her shirt over the wounds, stating "Nothing! I'm fine.", but the desperate fear in her eyes wasn't able to be covered up.
Ice had flowed in Sarah's heart then. She knew Viola's parents had been 'removed' for betraying the principles of the experiment - she herself had insisted on it - and Viola had been being raised in a foster care family, ostensibly. Sarah knew that the 'family' were CFS specialists, and that Viola had been a focus of particular experimental designs, in order to compensate for her real families' failure to conform.
That meant that the marks and bruises - and the terror - she'd just seen, however briefly, were being inflicted by those specialists, in whose care Viola was entrusted, and not some shady family members. None of the children in the Arcology were ever unsupervised, all of them were at all times under surveillance, she knew. She'd used such surveillance to tailor her own curricula, and the amazing totality of the monitoring left no hidden cracks.
Suddenly, everything had changed for Sarah. The warning from the administrator served her well, and she continued a pretense of true belief, devoted advocacy for the project, giving no clue to her surreptitious investigation of just what kind of Hell she had been tricked into making for these kids. She made certain sure to NOT look at surveillance of 'those' kids, because she knew she was under surveillance, too. She'd been clever.
She had begun pestering Vick for explanations of his own work, on the remote entrainment via electronics signalling the children were subjected to, but his part in the technology was limited to the electronics themselves, and he had little understanding of the actual entrainment software, or the protocols (in terms of mental control, itself) that were being applied.
And, when she'd found a source for that information Vick couldn't provide, that's when she passed him the note. Their lives had been ripped open. She discovered some CFS agents were turning children into sex slaves, and Sal knew. Sal was covering for them, and that meant it was a conspiracy far deeper in the CFS than just some sick, rogue agents. Her discovery had inserted both of them into a double life, first ensuring AC wasn't being harmed, and then trying to discover the extent of the abuse, and accompanying fraud, while he also set about learning more about the software that was applied via the circuits and devices he helped to design.
The further they dug, the deeper the plot seemed to lead, and, while his own queries and investigations of the software side of his work with the entrainment and surveillance electronics was easy to justify, due to it's relation to his work, her snooping had ultimately betrayed her.
He still wasn't sure exactly who, or how, she'd been detected, but she had been, and she'd been killed because of it. How she'd been able to not even envision him mentally as a co-conspirator under the torment - he dared not think of that now - they'd surely subjected her to, he could not fathom, but his own understanding of the design and inherent flaws of the mental scanning he'd been subjected to had enabled him to feign total ignorance.
He'd never seen his beautiful, brilliant, too-loving Sarah, again, and his daughter's grief threatened to set off his own, which he'd hoped was safely suppressed in some dark place in his heart where he never went. She was dragging him there, with her, and his grief threatened to also overwhelm him, as it did AC.
Gradually, the sobs relented, and then something else began to be evident. Her hands quit grasping and releasing him, and took ahold of him firmly. She pushed back, and looked up into his eyes, a fierceness there he had never seen, never imbued in her, never even detected in his delicate work to hack the entrainment that was being used on her.
The unexpected intensity of her stare, the strength of purpose in it, in eyes he'd only seen ordinary pains, joys, and emotion in, truly startled him, even awed him. There was no doubt as to what she was feeling, and what would come of it.
Hate was all she knew, and Hell was to pay.
