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

I hold that thought and I also hold the thought that I’ll run from them as soon as I can. Two thoughts at once.

THE BOAT ROCKS precariously in the waves and I see it now for what it really is, a barely seaworthy vessel ravaged by rot and rust.

We’re approaching Free Mind: Lukas, me, three others. The Seastead emerges from the waters, a floating ziggurat, adorned with cantilevered terraces and platforms, the Free Mind flag waving proudly in the breeze. My breath catches. I do want to go home.

My stomach is flip-flopping. Afraid, nervous, hopeful. Let this work.

Lukas and I discussed whether we’d feel anything when he sets off the device. We still have the ocular implants, but they’re no longer connected; they’re dead hardware. We’ve been deleted from Free Mind’s augmented reality field, like so much else. What we see won’t change. But we might get a headache, he says. He isn’t sure.

We get closer. Soon the alarms will be going off in my sector. Someone else is working in the greenhouse where I used to fertilize the plants and thin the seedlings. They will hear the clang of the sirens and feel that adrenaline spike.

While I’m here on the boat with the City people, and now I know there is no adrenaline spike like the one you feel when you’re the one in the snipers’ scopes.

“Now,” I say. “We’re close enough. They’re going to start shooting soon. Now.”

“Not yet,” says Tom, peering through binoculars at the platform. “They’re not at the wall yet. Just a little closer.”

“Now.”

“Now!”

“Now,” says Lukas.

The blast spreads outwards, invisible but powerful. I feel it, a twinge that fades immediately into a dull ache, and I blink. I see the same.

“They’re puking,” Tom says, still looking through the binoculars. “I think it worked.”

But a minute later the guns are still coming through the notches, the sights trained on us. The first shot rings out. The bullet pierces the hull, above the water line, flowering metal.

I jump up and down and wave my arms, screaming so loud my throat immediately goes hoarse. “Stop! Don’t shoot! It’s me, Renee! I’m from Free Mind! It’s me!”

THEY SEE ME. My fellow Defenders—I recognize them, and they recognize me. They’re reeling, dizzy, confused from the shift, but the filter is down. I see it in their eyes. They know me.

“But you’re dead,” Jason says. He won’t let me board the platform. The rest glare at me suspiciously, their weapons still trained on me, on us, on the boat. I know that with the filter down, it will be harder for them to aim, but we’re still at pretty close range. “Who are those people?”

“They’re from the City,” I say. “But it’s not like how we thought. Look at them. There is no City. It’s just a ruin. Flooded out. They need help.”

“Of course there’s a City.”

I keep trying to explain but the words don’t help. My friends are looking straight at me and they don’t believe I’m alive; they’re staring at the dilapidated boat but they still imagine the City insignia that doesn’t exist. The filter is down but they still have their own.

Fuck it; I don’t know how long we have until the filter goes back up. I know I don’t have time for this. I lie because it’s easier for them to understand.

“I didn’t die, the City kidnapped me, but I escaped. We all did. From their mind control camps. We’ve been trying to get to Free Mind. Now can we board?”

“You can,” Jason says, still suspicious. “The rest stay down there until our backup arrives.”

I clamber up the ladder. The minute my feet hit the platform, I’m making a break for it—pushing past the Defenders, knocking their weapons aside, running toward the doors. I sprint down a hallway and then another; I’m heading toward the hospital and my feet know the way. Behind me I hear shouts but I don’t pay attention. I have to reach my mom.

I FIND HER in the maternity ward, as I knew I would. The usually busy hospital is quiet, the machinery down from the EMP blast.

She sees me.

A dozen expressions flit across her face: grief, rage, hope, despair, confusion, longing.

“I didn’t drown,” I say, and I throw myself into her arms. She hugs me back so hard and in that moment, I really do believe that everything is going to be okay. I’m stupid. I hope.

She pushes me back so she can look at me. “But we saw—”

“They lied. They made it look like that—”

“Of course,” she says, shaking her head, and in the corners of her mouth I see a flood of emotion I can’t yet unpack. “The filter. I knew it felt off. When we saw you. But— I was crying so hard—”

“You know about the filter.” The words fall from my mouth flat and dead. “That it’s not just maps and reminders and emergency exits. Did you know about the City, too? That it drowned?”

“It’s for the kids,” she says. “The filter. It’s for you. It makes it easier. Didn’t it?”

“But it’s all a lie!”

“No, it’s not,” she says. She’s flustered and defensive the way she used to get when my brother asked too many questions, but maybe it’s only because her daughter has just risen from the dead. “It’s true, basically. They do want to control our minds. They want to make us feel responsible for them, and make us feel guilty for not giving up what we have, just because our parents had the foresight to leave before things got so bad. They want to force us to feel sorry for them and if we don’t, they attack us. For not thinking what they want us to think.”

That’s when I make a split decision. Like Lukas. I know what Free Mind means now and I can’t go back.

There’s a chug and hum in the background. The systems returning online. The grid springing back to life. The filter going up.

My mom is still watching me. Her face is different. I don’t know what she sees but it isn’t me; I’m still deleted. She knows it’s me but she also trusts the filter. I understand. She is holding two ideas in her head, two parallel thoughts that don’t agree. Perhaps it gets easier with time.

I run from the room, down the hall, through the scrum and flurry of staff preoccupied by the glitch in the field. I shove through a swinging door and into the nurse’s station. There are meds, and I grab them, fistfuls of them, as many as will fit into the front of my shirt.

The sirens are screaming now. I race back to the boat.

THE MUDLARKS SURVIVE on salvage and scrap. The drowned city is dangerous in so many ways; toxic chemicals in the water, oil slicks that burn for days, rotted buildings collapsing onto narrow canals that once were streets. Alligators and sharks are always on the hunt. So I shouldn’t be happy when they let me on the salvage team, but I am. I stole the medicine, I leapt onto the boat. I escaped, I survived; we all did. I’ve caught the thrill. And the salvage team can use someone small and light to creep across the fragile beams.

I still sleep in the nursery most nights. They are kids without families and I feel most at home there.

There’s one little girl that keeps crawling onto my mat with me at night. She was sick, but she’s better now. She yanks on my arm with her strong little fingers until I put it around her. She has nightmares, she says. She misses her mom.