Jay Budgett - The Indigo Thief

Miranda would have Hackner schedule a trash pickup with Maintenance for tomorrow morning. She wouldn’t need the extra ConSynth now that the Lost Boys had been found. There had never been any real threat. She’d just been overly cautious. The extra ConSynth could be safely destroyed. After all, she couldn’t have anyone getting any ideas, trying to pour their consciousness into an orb and achieve immortality like her.

She sighed. She had to admit, a part of her was disappointed. The Lost Boys had fallen more easily than she’d expected. She’d hoped for a bit more blood, maybe a few more bombs. They always needed extra justification for the Ministry of Defense & Patriotism’s exorbitant budget.

She eyed the papers sprawled across Hackner’s desk and reminded herself she was lucky the girl was blind, or else she could’ve learned the truth. The Indigo Report was not the first of its kind—not by a long shot. There were always idiots in R&D who figured out the system— people who put two and two together and realized what was really happening. They were always killed, of course. Except for Neevlor—the one who got away. Found Phoenix and the pesky Caravites and started this whole mess. The other ones hadn’t been so lucky. They’d found their ends in the megalodons’ mouths instead.

Miranda was lucky the beasts were always hungry.

Well, not lucky really, but genius. After all, she’d had them engineered to be that way.

We were still standing in the kitchen when the first wave of bombs dropped. The first thing I saw through the window were helicopters swarming on the horizon, and then the window’s glass pane shattered into a hundred pieces from force of the explosions. Mila shoved me down, but Phoenix remained standing in the doorway.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said as my chest hit the ground.

He pulled me up. “Of course it doesn’t.” Another bomb exploded on the beach. “Sense would imply that what I’ve told you is both reasonable and comprehensible, and I’m personally of the opinion that it is neither.”

The ground shook as the Feds dropped another round of bombs on the island. I imagined the plastic shoreline breaking off in pieces.

Phoenix flicked a speck of dirt from my shirt. “Have you ever entertained the possibility of a world without aluminum cans?” He’d lost it: the Feds were bombing the island and he was sitting here musing about aluminum cans.

I shook my head and glanced at the shattered glass on the floor. “Uh, not really?”

“And do you know approximately how long aluminum cans have been around?”

I shrugged. “Do you?”

“No idea,” he said, nodding excitedly, “and that’s precisely my point. We, as a society, have managed to invent television screens that can bubble, fizz, froth, shimmer, and sparkle like a bottle of champagne, but further innovation of something as common and simple as an aluminum can has evaded us.”

Mila glanced nervously out the window, scattered glass crunching underneath her shoes.

“What’s your point?”

“And the common cold? Let’s consider the paradox surrounding the common cold—a virus as old as mankind itself—and our inability to create a vaccine to eradicate it in even the loosest sense. We pride ourselves on maintaining the highest health and research standards—yet we’re completely unable to eradicate even the most common of viruses.

“And despite all that, the Feds expect us to believe that one day we were confronted with a wholly new and unfamiliar enemy—radioactive Carcinogens—and that they were able to concoct a mixture to stave off its effect in record time! Rather remarkable, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to think.

“If we’re seeking truth,” Phoenix went on, “perhaps we ought to look no further than the terminology itself. ‘Carcinogen’ is the absolute vaguest term the government could’ve provided. By definition, a carcinogen is any agent involved in causing cancer, which—when you think about it—is quite literally anything . Doesn’t living cause cancer? Each day you’re alive and healthy increases your risk of procuring cancer. But it’s not the cancer that kills children—it’s the Carcinogens. Are they viruses, bacteria—what are they, Kai Bradbury? Those are the sorts of questions the Feds don’t want you asking. Because then, you’d realize they don’t really exist… that there is no such thing as the Carcinogens.”

More bombs dropped, and the fort shook. Mila ran from the kitchen to get the others.

“It’s an illusion, Kai. Everything you know, everything you think you know, everything they’ve ever taught you, is an illusion. Because wouldn’t it be inconvenient if people lived past fifty? If they had time? Time to question things. Time to think about things. Time to think about the man behind the curtain.

“Because isn’t it convenient that every single person born with blue eyes had a genetic weakness to the Carcinogens? That the gene which made a person more resistant to the Carcinogens—allowed a person to survive instant death after exposure— happened to be on the same chromosome as the one for eye color? That, with Indigo, the government could pick out from a distance who had been vaccinated and who hadn’t? Doesn’t that seem convenient, Kai?”

More bombs. More explosions.

A bomb landed a little too close, and Phoenix pulled me into the other room as a kitchen wall was blown apart. “There was no natural selection—there was a deliberate genocide. And there’s another one happening today. Happening right at this very moment. Only this time, it’s different. It’s not a single group of people they’re after. No, that would be simple. They’ve already done that. They’ve already won that war. Every person who was ever born with blue eyes is dead. They killed them to make the ‘Carcinogens’ look convincing.

“No, now they’re after something bigger. They’re trying to eliminate something greater: the truth. They’re driving the truth to extinction.”

Mila appeared behind us and grabbed Phoenix’s hand. “We’ve gotta go, Phoenix. We’ve gotta get out of here—New Texas is toast.”

“Where are the others?”

“Bertha and Dove are getting ammunition. I can’t find Kindred and Sparky…” She was silent. “I—I think they’re gone.”

“Gone?” Phoenix choked.

Mila glanced at the ground. “We—we lost the left wing.”

“And you checked the control room?”

“Empty.”

Phoenix shook his head. “They’ve got be here somewhere. They have to be.”

Mila chewed her lip. “I don’t know how they found us. How the hell they found us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

Phoenix stared at me: he knew. He always knew everything. I bet he wished he’d already killed me. I sort of wished he had, too.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, still staring at me. He turned to Mila. “Go help Bertha with the guns.”

“But—”

“We’ll find Sparky and Kindred, Meels. I promise you.”

It was all coming to me in flashes now. The pages of the Indigo Report, the books in Neevlor’s library, the Chairman’s comments about a perfect system and an ordered world. The confused look Kindred gave Phoenix that first day, when he asked her to get me Indigo pills. There was no such thing. They’d probably given me sugar pills. And there was a reason he’d never had Mila or Bertha vaccinated, even though they had the supplies. He wasn’t killing them—he was saving their lives.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

In the midst of dropping bombs and explosions, Phoenix laughed. “Would you have believed me? You hardly trusted me when it came to a paper clip.”