Чет Уильямсон: Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against

I nod mutely. He looks like all the others. Exactly like all the others. I’m crying helplessly. I can’t help myself.

I don’t want to go to the City. I want to go home.

With the damp cloth he wipes my face, scrubbing away the stinging slurry of blood and sweat and dust. I can see better now but I still can’t quite see him. It’s like when I try to look at him — my eyes won’t focus. There’s this fuzziness. I can see the Seastead — how small it looks from here. I can see the sky and the clouds and the wheeling, screaming gulls, mad from the bloodshed. But I can’t see him any more clearly than I could before.

The whole time he’s talking. “You’re okay,” he says. “Stop crying. Okay?”

“What are you going to do to me?”

I already know what they’re going to do to me. They’re going to take me to the City. Shave my head so I look like them. Give me a pill to make me calm and turn off the part of my brain that questions. Send me to one of their education centers where they teach me again and again the things they want me to believe until I do believe them, until my mind belongs to them and I can recite their catechism without faltering.

“We just need some things, okay?” the soldier says. “Stuff your people have. You got parents, right? You look like you do. A nice family. They’ll give us what we need, and then we’ll give you back.”

“Need?” I say. “Like what?”

The pain in my head, it’s impossible. I can feel a black cloud gathering in my brain.

He’s looming in my vision, the soldier who was cleaning up my sick.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Renee.”

I try to see him. I feel dizzy, seasick — a Seasteader, seasick? I want to grab onto him, the boat, myself, anything. I’m pitching, tossing. Then for a second I do see him and he doesn’t look like what I thought. I catch a glimpse of long matted hair, brushing his shoulders. A patchy, curly beard, and rough tan skin and a scar across his cheek. I try to hold onto that vision and then it’s gone again.

It’s glitching in and out. I see and then I don’t.

It makes me sicker than ever. All I can do is close my eyes, squeeze them so tight all I see is black, and rock helplessly back and forth.

“Lukas said she’d get like that,” I hear one of the soldiers say. “Leaving the augmented reality field. They get out of range and get sick. He said it happens to the pirates every time.”

When I open my eyes again, everything is changed.

THE CITY PEOPLE are filthy and unkempt, their clothes tattered, a mismatch of styles I can’t place. Their faces are smeared with dirt, and heavily tanned by the equatorial sun. Their hair is not buzzed. They do not look alike.

The boat itself is barely more than a raft with a gas-spewing motor attached. An old boat that’s been patched and repaired so many times with so many mismatched pieces that in time it’s become a wholly different boat, nothing left of the original but a shape and a memory.

Now, as we round the peninsula, the City looms before me. It is a drowned city, the skyscrapers rising ghostlike from the waters, their glass windows all blown out like gaping black eyes, their frames rusting and disintegrating as the lesser structures collapse beneath the weight of rabid vines.

One of my captors laughs at my stunned expression. “Welcome to Miami,” he says.

“I don’t understand.”

I WATCH IN sick silence as they maneuver the boat among the wreckage. The gently lapping water is dark and tainted, viscous with algae and oil slicks. We edge up next to one of the tall buildings. They tie the boat off and then I see there is a narrow metal staircase, laden with salt crust and rust, zigzagging up the side of the building.

“We’re going to untie you now,” one of the women says. “So you can climb without hurting yourself. You’ll be good, right? You know there’s nowhere for you to go.”

I nod silently; she’s right. This world is so much different than I was taught and I don’t understand it at all. My survival depends on my captors.

I climb with them up the rickety stairs, several levels above the hungry water’s reach, and we enter a large space. There’s a blast of noise, laughing, shouting, music, and I think I hear a rooster crowing. As my eyes adjust to the dim I see there’s a crowd gathered. They fall silent when they see me. A baby cries. Everyone stares.

I start coughing at the smoky air; cooking fires smolder by the busted-out windows. A heavy stench hangs close, smelling of dirty fuel, unwashed bodies, stale urine, fried fish.

A man comes forward. He’s wearing suspenders and no shirt, his dark wavy hair tied back with a navy patterned bandana. He eyes me for a moment, then looks to my captors.

“We lost too many,” he says. Then I remember the two boats they abandoned at Free Mind, one on fire, the other capsizing, and all the bodies on the platform.

Why am I here?

LUKAS PULLS ME by the arm back to a corner of the space, where some dank cushions on the ground form a seating area.

“It’s not what you expected, is it?” he asks. His blue eyes are piercing, his dark eyebrows bushy. He has a long scar running up his left arm. I think he’s about thirty but his face is dirty and his dark beard is full of gray so it’s hard to tell.

I don’t say anything, and he continues. “I know. I come from Free Mind. I used to be one of your pirates. Oh, I know that’s not what you call them. You call them traders. We were pirates and looters, though. Setting sail from Free Mind, coming back with the stuff that keeps the Seastead’s whole economy afloat, so to speak. The first time I sailed beyond the field it was a real mindfuck.”

“But… why?” I don’t even know what I’m asking. Why the lie? Why is he here? Why am I here?

The second question is the one he answers. “Most of ‘em are happy to keep the story going because it pays so well. Not me though. Never liked Free Mind much anyway. Ran into some of these Mudlarks on a trip round the Gulf and just figured, what the hell.”

“Okay,” I say. Not sure what else there is to say, actually.

“Anyway, you look like the kind of girl who belongs on Free Mind, nice and safe and clean there, so I guess you’ll want to be heading back pretty soon, and that’s fine, long as your people don’t mind giving us some medicine. That seems like a fair trade, right? They get their girl back, we get some drugs so our babies don’t die.”

“Yes. That seems fair,” I say. My mind is whirling in a million different directions. How many people know the truth — that the City is a ruin? That Free Mind is the best place left? Did my teachers know? Do my parents know?

Then all at once it hits me. I’ve shot these people. I’ve killed them. The way they always waved their arms. Were they saying, “Don’t shoot?” Were they refugees, begging for medicine and food? Everyone around me is coughing and emaciated. The children are wailing. The smell of diarrhea hangs in the air. I killed them. I killed their parents.

The shudder that rips through my entire body leaves me nauseated and trembling. I want to be sick again, but there’s nothing left.

Lukas holds a radio. He’s thumbing through the static, calling out to Free Mind.

He finds our channel. Voices answer, and I want to think I recognize them, but I’m not sure I do. I listen, numb, as he offers his terms. Me. For the meds.