City Center, The (4 page)

“Hey,” a male’s voice called out.

Ava figured a guard had arrived to escort her home. She turned around. There wasn’t a single person outside. She scanned the area looking for the owner of the voice. Maybe it was the intercom? She caught a glimpse of a shadow next to the mammoth statue of Morray. She didn’t like that statue or any of the others placed throughout the city, his all-seeing eyes peering over everyone.

“Over here,” the voice called out again.

Ava glanced toward the statue where the voice seemed to have come from. Was the statue talking to her?

“Who is there?” Ava yelled out.

“Please, don’t run. I’m here to help you,” he called out. Then he edged his way around the giant foot of Morray’s statue. The man from the reports. Ava’s blood turned to ice.

“Stay where you are! Do not take another step,” Ava yelled.

“I’m not infected.”

“Remain still. I’m calling for help.” Ava pressed her index finger and thumb, but her internal microchip wouldn’t respond. She tried a few more times.

“No use. I blocked the mainframe,” he said.

“What do you want? Don’t you know you’ll be terminated?”

“I don’t care. This is my last chance to help all of you.”

The man moved to the front of Morray’s statue. He clutched a small black bag. Ava wondered why he sounded educated, and what he meant by blocking the mainframe. “Listen to me, I’m here to help you.”

“I’d rather not be helped by a toxic-ridden terrorist.” Ava stood in a warrior stance, preparing for battle.

“Look, I only have a few minutes. I really need you forget everything you’ve been told about the Outsiders. We aren’t terrorists.” He lowered himself to the grass to show submission. This could be a trick, Ava thought.

“Security will arrive in seconds,” she called out.

“Like I said, I’ve taken care of that. We’re running out of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m blocking Morray’s mainframe. No cameras.”

“I doubt the Outsiders have the technology to compete with Morray’s mainframe.”

“I don’t have time to argue with you. My name is Joseph. I’m not a terrorist. None of us are. We’ve been trying to help your people for decades.”

“Help us with what? We aren’t the ones with disease and death.”

“Lies. All lies.”

“How do I know you’re speaking the truth now?”

“I need you to take this bag. Read the book inside.”

“Book?” Ava asked, confused. She didn’t think books existed any more. She had seen them only in the movies.

“Yes, a book. I need you to read it.” Joseph tossed the bag toward Ava.

“How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

“Trust me,” he said.

She stood only ten feet away from the Outsider, but didn’t feel threatened by him. Every bit of information ingrained in her since inception vanished. The nagging questions she had accumulated in the back of her mind for years were somehow being answered. A voice inside told her to trust Joseph. She grabbed the bag and opened it with caution, removing a small brown book. She rubbed her fingers over the cover and inhaled the musty scent of old paper. A real book.

“First time holding a book?” Joseph’s voice interrupted.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Read it.”

“Why me?” she asked, flipping through the pages of senseless etchings.

“You’re the only one ignoring protocol.” Joseph looked down at the device strapped to his wrist.

“You have technology?” she asked.

“We’ve had it for years. More proof of their lies. Listen, the mainframe is rebooting. Read the book.”

“What then?”

“I’m sure you’ll figure out something.”

Ava stared at Joseph. She wanted to touch him to see if he was real. “My name is Ava,” she called out. “If you were wondering.”

He waved her onward. The City Center flashed on and the monitors switched back to the streaming reports. The mainframe was back up. She clutched the book and ran off to the transporter station just as hovercrafts circled overhead. The transporter door slid open and she jumped inside, tucking the book into her tracksuit.

When she stepped inside her dwelling unit, the door bolted shut and locked. She pressed her finger on the entry panel to boot up her system.

“Good afternoon, Ava Rhodes. Please note: we are in a state of lockdown.”

“Remove accent walls. Stream all reports.”

Ava walked to the middle of the main room and set the book down on the lounger. She removed her sweaty tracksuit and splashed cold water over her face while the reports streamed. The wall divided into multiple segments, each streaming a different report about the same thing—the terrorist attack on the City Center.

“Did they capture him?” Ava asked.

“Report loading.”

Ava sat in her lounger and clutched the book against her chest. She needed to know what happened to Joseph before she could focus on the book. The report downloaded and the shimmering face of the female Info-tainer spoke. “The terrorist has been captured. He is now being detained under Planner Dickson’s division until Chief Morray has been thoroughly briefed. The technical glitch in the mainframe was absolutely not due to terrorist activity. The ITs are looking into the cause of the power outage.”

“Have consequences been determined?”

“Stipulations will be determined by Chief Morray. Trial to be set at later time.”

“Are there any additional threats from the Outside?”

“Conditions on the Outside continue to worsen. Security along the perimeter continues to hold a Level-5.”

“Will this affect Graduation Day ceremonies?” Ava hoped for a delay. Anything to give her more time.

“Graduation Day ceremonies are in full swing. The agenda is being finalized and will be distributed later in the week. We’ll stream footage and interviews throughout the week. Would you like to view predictions for this year’s top ten?”

“Exit report,” Ava instructed.

She knew Joseph would be dead by morning. She wondered if Morray would even bother with conducting the ritual trial. He’d most likely go straight to execution. She looked at the book, wondering what could’ve been so important he risked his life to pass it along. She flipped through the pages, knowing she’d never be able to decipher the contents. City Center residents weren’t taught to read. All information was either downloaded directly into their personal microchips or streamed from reports. Reading was considered uncivilized. She’d have to learn how to read. The only way would be to download reading instruction software. Older programs were obsolete and unavailable. She glanced at the book, knowing she couldn’t let Joseph die in vain. There was one option. Delilah could obtain files off the dark-market.

“Contact Delilah,” Ava instructed.

She waited until Delilah’s hologram appeared. “Happy to see you made it home.”

“I need to speak with you,” Ava said. “In private.”

“How’s that supposed to happen? We’re on lockdown.”

“We can do a, you know, one of those things we do?”

“Now? That could get both of us marked for questioning.”

“We’ll be fine. They don’t care about two eighteen-year-old girls.”

“This isn’t like in the movies, Ava. This is serious.”

“Which is precisely why I need you.”

“Fine. But if I get caught, you better pull your rank.”

“Of course.”

Ava logged off the internal system. She went to her sleep pod where she kept her digital tablet hidden; a relic from the days before that she had gotten off the dark-market. Tablets were no longer permitted on the Inside. She tucked herself inside her sleep pod and switched on the tablet. The monitor lit up. An invitation to chat popped up on the screen. Ava accepted and Delilah’s face appeared in 2D.

“What’s so important you’re willing to break the law?” Delilah asked.

“I saw him.”

“Who?”

“The guy the reports were talking about. Him…”

“You mean, the…”

“Yes. I can’t go into details, but I promise to explain everything.”

“I think your pre-grad stress is causing mental delusions,” Delilah said.

“I’m fine. Actually I feel better than ever. I feel awake. Alive.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I need your help getting software on reading instruction.”

“Are you serious?”

“Very.”

“Ava, this doesn’t sound good.”

“You have to trust me. Please get me the software.”

“Fine. I’ll help, but you better fill me in later. Check your inbox in a bit.”

Ava took a shower while she waited for the software to download. The purification water massaged her body. She thought about her encounter with Joseph. The few minutes they had together weren’t enough to make a sound assessment, but she knew there was something more to him than what the reports said. She had always suspected something was off with the information the Planners inundated them with. Her instincts told her something was off and she had learned to pay attention to the way her body reacted to things, rather than her mind. Delilah was taking longer than usual and Ava’s nervous stomach tightened up. She wanted to read the book and get to the bottom of whatever it was. Maybe there was something in there that could save Joseph from termination? Or maybe it was just a fact-finding mission. She checked the time, wishing Delilah would hurry up. The dark-market might have slowed down because of the crisis.

Ava’s tablet dinged, letting her know she had a message. She wirelessly downloaded the reading instruction software onto her internal microchip and sat in the lounger with the book. She didn’t want to rush through the pages. They could hold valuable information that could change everything. She wanted to savor every single written word, so she waited for her heartbeat to slow down before she opened to the first page.

This Journal Belongs to
L
illian Strader

The year the Planners set the New Agenda into motion was the worst year of my life. Worse than when my best friend moved away to San Francisco. Worse than when I fell off the jungle gym and broke both of my arms in fifth grade. And worse than getting stood up for the 9th grade homecoming dance by that jerk Brian. They advertised it as “The Repatterning” to give it a positive spin, but like all advertisers, they lied to us.

That was the year Mom and Dad lost their jobs, my brother was drafted into the army, and my Dad and little sister contracted a deadly virus. California suffered record-breaking unemployment rates. The entertainment industry went bankrupt. The moneymakers disappeared to their homes outside of Los Angeles. In a matter of months, the rates went from single digits to an astronomical high of 83%. Big banks took over smaller banks, and then they took over the last remaining corporations, then homes. The stock market dropped lower than the historical crash of 1929, and then the market just disappeared, obliterating commerce altogether. Businesses became obsolete. Products and services all of us had been using for decades vanished into a vortex of nothingness. Only a handful of establishments survived the catastrophic economic collapse: big banking, pharmaceutical cartels and the Planners—a new division of high-level government officials who were supposed to rebuild the country, but who annihilated every last decent fiber.

The one remaining network aired 24-hour news reports. My brother said they were feeding us lies. We weren’t clear on the accuracy of the reports, but Mom said we could decipher the real news by reading in between the lines. The channel reported an onslaught of gun-related murders and massive shootings in public forums. The Planners forced people to hand in their guns. Anyone who refused got killed. I stopped watching the news. It was too depressing.

Before my brother shipped off to train for the Final War, never to be seen again, he told us the economic disaster was strategically engineered. He warned us more would come.

“The decline of civilization starts with vaporizing the economy. Then we have a civil war, then a global war so behemoth it’ll take us back to ground zero,” he said.

He went on and on about the elite class. “Their main objective is to extinguish 90% of the planet’s population and gain absolute power.”

At first we laughed at his inane ranting until the day he and every single male in the country ages 17−36 were sent off to undisclosed locations under the Executive Order of Conscription.

Mom and Dad couldn’t get work anywhere, not even cleaning homes for the wealthy that remained, not even pumping gas, because gas was running out. They kept some food on the table for a little while, but we had to sacrifice other amenities. Eventually they shut off our gas and electricity. We lived by candlelight and recharged our battery-operated electronics at local drug stores, or wherever we could find outlets. We tried to sell one of our cars for extra cash, but gas prices climbed so high people stopped driving. People abandoned the cars on the sides of neighborhood streets, or along the freeway shoulders. Things reached a new low when people looted shopping malls and stores, emptying the shelves. We found a few underground surplus stores to buy the bare essentials like clean water and canned goods, but those resources trickled out.

Crime rates skyrocketed and a new breed of Officer policed the streets, snatching up the homeless. We don’t know where they took them, but we suspected they weren’t going to a shelter. The Officers began searching foreclosed homes and removing “freeloading” families. The majority of our neighbors, in our once-safe Santa Monica community, either left everything behind and went to Emergency Crisis Camps, or the police removed them. They never returned. Since animals weren’t permitted in the camps, the police started a campaign to put down any pets left behind.

“They won’t hurt you, Rags, I promise. I’ll run to the canyons before I let anyone put you to sleep.” I had rescued the scruffy white terrier mix when I was ten years old, and she was my best friend. She rescued me during those dark days, and I promised to never let her out of my sight.

The Planners instituted a new security protocol: delete all records of historical and current information. They worked non-stop to retract and destroy everything from the Internet by blowing up servers. They burned down local libraries, universities and the Library of Congress. We became the non-information age; except for the media channel I couldn’t stand watching. We stopped relying on the news reports. Dad used his outlawed ham radio and discovered an underground radio station airing on pirated frequencies. The angry voices streaming into our home reported the gritty details about the treachery being inflicted by our corrupt government. They informed us of the latest regions under attack, and the fires. We learned about a new strand of a deadly airborne virus spreading so rapidly the pharmaceutical companies couldn’t provide vaccines fast enough. Health officials visited homes to give inoculations. The day they arrived at our house, Mom and I were out pilfering nearby houses for food and supplies. Not long after their visit, my sister and Dad got deathly ill. Just like the underground radio station warned. The Planners created the vaccines to infect us. Hundreds of millions of Americans died. The death toll rose to unfathomable heights. And then it hit our home.