Oculus (Oculus #1) (4 page)

It’s twenty-eight comfortable paces to Hattie’s front walk. We live in the same sector, only a few units apart. I’m in unit thirteen and Hattie lives in unit fifteen. I take another three steps up, two paces forward and her scanner is to the right. The biometric scanner is warm as always beneath my finger. The device chimes announcing my arrival in its mildly robotic, disembodied voice.

“Iris. Tierney.”

The door swings open and the scent of Hattie’s mother, Meryl gusts forward at me.

“Good morning, Mrs. Brighton.”

“Good morning, Iris.”

“It’s always strange how you do that,” Hattie joins us at the door, her perfume mixing with her mother’s. I smile, my useless eyes looking in the direction of the coat tree where Hattie is rustling with her jacket. The weather here at Fenra has already begun to turn chilly uncharacteristically early and Hattie is undoubtedly wearing her favorite jacket.

“Good luck,” Mrs. Brighton calls after us as we begin down the front walk.

“Can I drive your car?” I’d been asking Hattie the same question for two months since she got it after we graduated from Fenra First School.

“Not a chance.”

“It’s on a rail for crying out loud! I can hardly do damage.”

“You don’t have an operator’s license. If you get caught driving, the agents will fine my parents. This thing cost them five years as it is. They would strangle me if we got stopped by an agent.”

I huffed thinking that having an operator’s license is pointless anyway. Every vehicle in the city operates on a rail system erected by The Corp. You tell the computer where you’re going then sit, waiting to be delivered to your destination. You can’t go faster than the computer dictates and you can’t just go wherever you feel like so as far as I’m concerned, I can do no harm. Everything was erected, managed, invented and enforced by The Corp. Even authorized reading material was all written by the same author, O’Rhion C. Pratteo, though I’d more than once heard rumors of books written by other people long since dead. If those books do exist they are contraband and therefore strictly prohibited.

Things are kept in order thanks to Fenra. There are no variables. Even our day to day compound population is accounted for on the Fenra monitors throughout the compound. When someone dies the number goes down. When someone preauthorized for reproduction has a baby the number goes up, chiming loudly for everyone to hear. Yesterday the monitor near my father’s lab chimed loudly announcing that our population grew from 5,839 to 5,841 just that morning, a rare event for us. Two live births in the same morning. The work camps outside the compound house much larger numbers but it takes a lot of productivity for Fenra to be self-sustaining like we are. We have our own camps for smelting and processing, manufacturing, raw materials and utilities.

There are no unforeseen incidents and the whole of our society appreciates the safe, tidy order of life within our community, even if they are wage-slaves. There are much worse circumstances.

The only alternative is the Dark Lands and no one even entertains the idea of venturing beyond the safety of our walls unless you have a death wish… or you’re completely and utterly insane.

“One day you’ll let me drive it because you love me and I’m your very best friend.”

Hattie guffaws as she secures her seat restraints and sets us off in the direction of Fenra Second School where I plan on registering for my Propensity Screening.

My dad always says that bad things are like legal papers, always in triplicate. I never really understand what he means by that. It’s one of the many antiquated adages that he uses regularly. I can’t understand what he means by “legal papers” but I understand the triple part and it seems that he’s right.

Or maybe it’s just that people never truly take notice of misfortune until it shows up in various forms all at once. That’s how it happened all those years ago but in truth, there weren’t just three contributing factors to the destruction of the world as it was. It was more like a string of disasters happening so closely together that they blurred into one big event.

My dad’s stories about how things were before have always amazed me. When I was a kid, I’d curl up against my dad and listen to his stories while I tinkered with the cylindrical pendant on a thin chain around his neck or spin the metal band on his finger round and round. I’d sit and listen and wonder what it would have been like to live during the time of The Great Change. Then I got older and realized that I’m grateful for not having been alive to endure the catastrophe.

Whispers about how it all began have been circulating my entire life. Everyone has a different spin on things and who knows what the truth is. I wasn’t there for The Great Change and even if I had been alive all those years ago, I would not have been the most ideal witness.

The religious freaks called it The Reckoning, something from their book of worship. They all congregated in their places of worship for months on end as everything came to a boiling point. Efforts at converting “lost souls” became far more productive than ever. Everyone was looking for a reason for the events that were happening. Turning to religion must have seemed quite practical.

The political rebels and revolutionists blamed everything on corrupt politicians and a floundering system of government. They said that The Corporations would not have grown so powerful if the U.S. government would have stayed more powerful, wealthier and more equipped than The Corporations.

Personally, I think the free-spirited, nature-loving naturalists were closest to the mark. The earth’s population had swelled to an unsustainable number just before a natural disaster and it was simply too much. Billions upon billions crowded the Earth causing major cities to burst at their seams and spill out into previously uninhabited plains, mountains and even desert regions.

The agricultural industry couldn’t keep up. There wasn’t enough wheat, rice, produce, and livestock to feed over twelve billion hungry mouths.

The poor were the first to be challenged by the times. Flour was often mixed with plaster dust or any other kind of dust in order to makeup for lost volume. Then, eventually flour became a rarity.

The more poverty and shortages spread, the more desperate the citizens of this world became. They say that many countries began enforcing strict laws to limit families from having more than one child. Those who were found to have broken the laws faced cruel and inhumane consequences. They say that babies were murdered and left abandoned just anywhere. Women who were suspected of having broken the law were made sterile. Governments fought each other. Solutions were offered but they all failed.

Barely visible fissures became blatant fractures that eventually turned into chasms so wide they couldn’t be bridged by mere diplomacy. Instead, threats and force were used and subsequently civil upheaval and natural disaster changed the landscape of society.

The sun burned hotter than it ever had, sending disruptive magnetic waves hurling toward Earth. Wars broke out. Solar activity peaked, and then the lights went out. All of them. Everywhere. And over twelve billion modern human beings became desperate savages overnight.

The world as a whole was plunged into absolute mayhem under the cloak of perfect darkness. That’s when hell on earth was realized. At least, for those unlucky sects of society that were doomed to remain in darkness.

The downward spiral of humanity was slow and then abrupt. My father said a solar flare is what kicked off The Great Change. In 2023, well before I was even thought of, the sun was said to have been experiencing solar activity like never before. Then, everything went dark at the worst possible time in the history of humanity.

The Corps was the only saving grace. They had electricity. They had food. They had medicine and they had security against the violence that reigned supreme.

They were prepared. Too prepared. I had my own theories about how the lights went out and why they stayed out in certain parts, but open discussion of such things is an offense which if found guilty of could land a person in the Dark Lands… or worse.

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air." -
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

M
Y FIRST SPLASH KILL HAS
had more of an impact on The Corporations than even Anna could have suspected. To say that I kicked over a hornet’s nest is an understatement. The company that has been trying to annex more land was publicly revealed to be The Fenra Corporation. The death of The Corporate appointed supervisor, in such a messy and sensational way, has pushed The Corp into some very public action.

Once it was done, The Resistance transmitted all the gory details of the crime, including the name of The Corp that had appointed him, before Corp Security could lock the place down. Unable to cover the mess up, the Fenra Corporation has been forced to send a message about people killing their employees, while trying not to appear to condone his actions. Not that they likely give a damn about what he had been doing in his off time. But in the spirit of public relations they’re walking a delicate line between denouncing the actions of their deceased, scumbag supervisor, and finding out who has killed him.