The Theta Prophecy (21 page)

Year: 2048

“Okay everyone, I want to start off by apologizing for my outburst earlier.”

The same men and women who had been told to scrap their previous stories in favor of ones Amy selected were once again sitting in the conference room. The intern looked gratified to have been invited to a second meeting just because it was more exciting than stapling papers together or standing by the photocopier all day.

“I just got off the phone with the station manager. You can all scrap whatever you had on the three stories we discussed earlier.” She scanned the room for signs of someone who was more uncomfortable than they should be. “Whichever one of you called and told him about the stories I wanted to run will be happy. He won’t let us air any of them.”

A reporter at the far end of the table raised his hand. When Amy sighed and nodded her head, the man asked, “So, does this mean I can cover the Wildsmith-Hutchins wedding now?”

“No,” she said, looking at the portraits of the legends on the wall around her. They had made their careers on war stories and corruption. None of them had won Pulitzers or any other award for covering the wedding of two famous people. “Did you go to school to learn how to cover celebrity weddings?” Before he could answer, she added, “We can’t do the stories I just mentioned, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep working on the same fluff pieces as usual.”

She waited for someone to complain. No one did. Probably, she thought, whoever had gone behind her back and called the station manager to get her in trouble would do so again after this meeting was finished.

“George, I want you to start preparing a story about the fine that the First Tyranny Bank has to pay for laundering money for drug cartels.”

“Man, and to think my roommate’s in jail for selling pot,” the intern grumbled.

Amy said, “They laundered billions of dollars to support some of the very people the Tyranny is supposedly fighting and all they got was a fine equal to two weeks’ worth of their profits.”

One of the reporters said, “Imagine if everyone who was caught with drugs was fined two weeks’ worth of whatever was left in their paychecks after food and rent. The jails would be empty.”

“And that’s exactly why the Tyranny doesn’t do it,” Amy almost said, but she knew that whoever called her boss earlier would be looking for other things to say about her.

“Debbie, I want your team to start a story on how Faith Industries is dumping thousands of tons of chemicals into our drinking water without being fined a single penny.”

Picking at one of his nails, Jerry said, “One of the guys from the Security Service almost cracked my skull open the other day for tossing the pickle from my burger on the sidewalk. I really thought he was going to kill me.”

“Jerry, start getting an update together on the status of that women who defended herself from her abusive boyfriend by swinging a knife at him. Last I heard she was sitting in a prison somewhere. See if she’s still alive. At the same time, I want an update on the mercenaries that the Tyranny used who slit the throats of those twelve women during the last war. Last we heard, they were all given promotions. See if they’ve done anything else since then.”

A reporter in the back of the room raised her hand. When Amy nodded the woman said, “My niece killed a boy when he ran out in front of her car. She was a year too young to be driving and didn’t have a license. Now she’s in prison. But the son of Provincial Technologies just ran over four people while drinking and driving, then went shopping afterwards as if nothing had happened. He didn’t even have his license taken away. Mind if I cover it? It’s the least I can do for my sister.”

“I love it,” Amy said. “Get right on it.” And then, to the entire room, “Okay, get going.”

“These stories are going to get you in just as much trouble as the last ones,” Jerry said, walking beside her as they made their way back down the hall toward their offices. When she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, he said, “Relax, I wasn’t the one who snitched. I’m just concerned for you.”

“There have to be limits,” she said. “What’s next? I’m executed for killing a spider while one of the Tyranny’s friends is rewarded with a new billion dollar contract after killing some kids?”

“If there were limits, someone would just pay the leaders to pass a new law and have them extend the limits even further.” When Amy didn’t laugh, he added, “It was just a joke.”

“It’s not funny. It has to stop sometime. Even when there’s no specific law to say whether or not a company’s actions are legal, the courts still rule in their favor.”

“The judges and officials are all former employees of those companies.”

“That doesn’t make it right!”

“I know, I was just saying.”

“I used to have this neighbor,” Amy said, “a really old guy, looked like a skeleton. He planted some flowers on the sidewalk outside his home and the Tyranny took him away for littering. I haven’t seen him since. That same week, S.K. Computers was found to have been dumping toxins into the river for the past decade. They didn’t even get a fine. Where does it end?”

“I don’t know,” he said. And this time, he did put his hand on her shoulder. His palm rested there only for a brief moment, just long enough to offer some reassurance. Then it was gone before anyone else could see it.

But a simple touch wasn’t enough to make her feel better. “What will it take? Women and children developing sicknesses they’ve never had before? The entire world turned into one giant mushroom cloud? When will these people be held accountable for what the leaders let them get away with?”

Everyone around them was looking at her.

“Come on,” Jerry said, pulling her into her office and closing her door. Once they were alone he said, “God damn it, you can’t keep talking like this. You know the Tyranny will come get you if you keep it up. People are already whispering that you might be”—his voice turned to a whisper—“a Thinker.”

“I know,” she said, sitting down. Her face dropped into her palms. Her head was enveloped within the gray hair that made her feel as if this job, the conditions she had to work in, were making her shrivel to nothing. “I know.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “You know what happened to my brother? On his son’s sixteenth birthday, he gave his boy the same blaster his father handed down to him. A family tradition. The Tyranny came and took him away. I’ll never see him again. But you know what I do? Instead of focusing on that, I thank God that at least the Security Services didn’t shoot my nephew the way they shot that little kid last year who was holding a fake plastic blaster.”

He didn’t care if the AeroCam heard these things because he was fairly sure whichever of the Tyranny’s men listened to it would interpret everything as a strange sort of compliment.

“Do you hear yourself?” she said, raising her head and looking up at him. “Have you lost your mind? Your brother is either dead or rotting in a prison and you’re thankful your nephew is still alive?”

“Amy, if you let the madness overwhelm you, you won’t have anything.”

“You have to pick a side,” she said. “Are you just going to sit around and accept every new tax the Tyranny tells you to pay so it can finance its next war or another batch of checkpoints?”

His eyes darted to the window and to the army of AeroCams hovering over every part of the city. “Amy, don’t.”

“My daughter’s friend owed a couple thousand dollars,” she said. “Her home was taken. She was thrown out on the street. When the banks make bad investments, they’re reimbursed. Is that fair?”

“Of course not.”

“And what are we doing about it?”

“What can we do? They’ll drag us away if we speak up. Just like they’ll drag you away if you keep talking like this.” He looked toward the office at the array of reporters, interns, lawyers, and secretaries. All of them were whispering about something or other. Most of them were probably saying Amy was a Thinker. And he was the one sticking up for her, being seen alone with her in her office. What would that mean for him when the Tyranny’s men arrived?

Year: 2048

“Maybe if we start treating everyone the same,” Matheson said.

The Ruler turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if we can’t stop the wars and all the masses of people being sent to prison, maybe we could make things better with the public, earn their trust back in a way, if we gave the same types of sentences to the owners and their friends as we give to everyone else.”

“Now you’re just making a mockery of this whole thing, Matheson. You know there’s no way we could send any of them to jail. No way.”

“Some of them are supporting the very people we claim are our enemies in other countries and nothing happens. Meanwhile, we’re throwing people in jail for jaywalking. We’re blasting entire families when we suspect just one of them might be a Thinker. People see this stuff and they know we’re playing favorites.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? But you know what will happen if I send the first billionaire to prison? They’ll all turn on me. I won’t get re-elected, that’s for sure. They’ll find a leader who will do anything they want and they’ll make him Ruler. We have to let them do what they want. We have to.”

“Well, then maybe we could do it the other way around.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we can’t send the elite to jail for supporting radicals or the corporations for all the crimes they commit, maybe we could stop sending everyone else to prison for their more minor crimes.”

“This is the dumbest—”

“Just hear me out. If a bank can help drug cartels, maybe we should let the average citizen do the same thing. What’s the harm? The drugs they buy or sell would be infinitesimally small compared to the amount of drugs that the banks are helping pass through our borders. And if we have companies poisoning people and ripping them off, maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on people who commit minor infractions.

“Matheson, I swear, sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking or serious. Maybe you’ve just plain lost your mind. You know we can’t let people stay on the streets if they break our laws. First off, what would that say to everyone else in our prisons, that it used to be illegal to break our laws but now it’s okay? There’d be a revolt. Do you know what would happen if we didn’t arrest every single person who broke even our most trivial law? People would think they could get away with anything!”

“Well—”

“Well, nothing,” the Ruler said, smacking his palm against the nearest wall. “Do you know what it would be like if we let people pollute the cities and towns the way we let the companies? There’d be trash everywhere. Sure, our rivers have thousand of tons of toxic sludge in them. Sure, millions of people have to have their drinking water trucked in because their local water can be lit on fire. That’s one thing. But can you imagine trash out in the streets? Garbage would be everywhere. Do you want to look out the window and see trash?”

“When you put it that way,” Matheson said, letting the rest of the sentence go unspoken.

All around him were painted portraits of other men who had faced similar problems and had found their own solutions. How had they responded? What answers had they come up with?

“Maybe just one example, then,” he said, turning away from the window and facing the Ruler. “If we can’t hold the bankers accountable for supporting radicals and dictators, or the corporations for polluting our water and food, maybe we could make an example out of just one person so the average guy on the street sees we aren’t so bad.”

The Ruler’s eyes sparkled. “What did you have in mind?”

“Langhorn’s son, the one who got drunk and ran over the two pregnant women, maybe we could—”

“No, Matheson. No. You know we can’t. If we go after his son, he’ll give his billions to someone else to become Ruler.”

“Okay, not him. But there’s a kid, down south somewhere, sitting on death row because he fought back when some guy started punching him. We have footage of it from one of our AeroCams. The kid kept trying to keep the guy from hitting him—it was over a parking space or something—and then he hit the man one time, accidently killing him.”

“That’s some bad luck.”

“Yes.”

“So, what’s your point?”

“He’s going to die unless you do something about it. We can earn some of the people’s trust back.”

“What can I do? He killed a man.”

“Langhorn’s kid killed two people. Four, depending on how you look at it.”

“That’s different,” the Ruler said, letting his chin drop to his chest. “And you know it’s different.”

Year: 2048

There was a knock on her door. When Amy looked up, she saw the intern standing there, his head withdrawn to his shoulders like a nervous turtle.

“Yes?”

“I got a bunch of information about what’s happened to the people the Tyranny arrested or killed.”

She looked at him without emotion. “I told everyone to drop those stories.”

“I know,” the intern said, his eyes looking down at his shoes. “It’s just that, I thought, I guess…”

“It’s okay. Come on in and show me what you came up with.”

“I went back through some of the more well-known shootings.” He pulled a photograph from a folder and showed it to her. A kid, dead, on the ground. “The Terrence Rust shooting, the kid that was shot and killed by the Security Service after they said he pointed a blaster at them.”

She knew the case well. All of the onlookers who had witnessed the shooting said Terrence had never done anything threatening and had no weapon. They said he’d kept his hands in the air, just as the Security Service had ordered. They shot him anyway, though. The courts believed the testimony of the five men from the Tyranny rather than the forty witnesses.

“And?”

“Well,” the intern said, looking through his notes. “After being found not guilty of everything, they were all given paid time off. One has been promoted. One was transferred to another district. The other three are still working as if nothing ever happened.”

“That’s it?”

“They had to attend sensitivity training.”

“How awful,” Amy said, her mouth curling into mock horror.

The intern showed her a different photograph. An old man with a face full of wrinkles.

“R. J. McCullister. He was being questioned in his home by the Security Service for a noise complaint. They said he tried to take one of their blasters and they had no choice but to kill him.”

“That was the guy that needed a cane to walk around, right?”

“Yeah. The authorities promised there would be an internal investigation.”

“That makes me feel better,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“That shooting was a year ago.”

“Long enough for people to forget about it.”

“The internal investigation determined that the old man probably had thrown down his walker, sprinted at the Tyranny’s men, and lunged at one of them in an attempt to steal his blaster. The men being investigated were found to have been following proper procedures.”

The intern had other cases. A homeless man was shot. Some kids, trying to catch the last bus of the night, were shot. A woman was shot in her own apartment. The friend of someone who had committed crimes was shot because he wouldn’t answer the Tyranny’s questions. A boy whose father had been shot was also shot because it was thought he might one day grow up wanting retribution on the men who had killed his dad.

“What do you think we should do with all of this information?” she asked the intern.

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t report it. My boss already called to make sure that was clear.”

The intern looked her square in the eyes, his eyebrows raised in hope. “Maybe if enough people know, they’ll get angry and do something about it.”

“Did people march in the streets when the killings actually took place?” she said. The intern shook his head. “If they were going to march, don’t you think they would have done so back then?” The intern nodded. “People are accustomed to this stuff now. They’re desensitized to it.”

“Then why did you want to do stories on them?”

“Listen,” she said, her voice the same tone as the one she used when her daughters thought they were in trouble but she wanted to remind them they were also loved. “You have to be careful with stuff like this.”

“But you—”

“It’s different with me. Ten years ago, I wasn’t calling for my reporters to run the stories nobody else would cover. But things change. My husband is gone. My girls are out of college. They don’t need me anymore. When I was younger, I couldn’t risk having my girls grow up without their mom. You,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “You have your entire life ahead of you. That’s why it’s different.”

“The Tyranny’s men shot my dog,” the intern said. “Not recently, back when I was a kid. They shot it right in front of me just because it was barking when they came by to ask my dad questions.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They weren’t even given a reprimand.”

“A neighbor of mine was shot in her own bedroom,” she told him. “You wouldn’t have found it in your research; this was ten years ago. The man from the Security Service had been drunk, stumbled into the wrong home, and thought he was getting into his own bed when my friend began hitting him. During his trial, he said he had thought she was a burglar. After being cleared of all charges, he was given paid leave so he could take his family on vacation.”

“The same thing happened at my college,” the intern said. “A security guard walked up to a line of students who were holding a peaceful sit-in and, one by one, tasered all of them. He wasn’t even fired from his job, let alone arrested.”

“Let me guess: there were no more protests after that because none of the students wanted fifty thousand volts shot into them.”

Ashamed, the intern focused on popping his knuckles.

She was going to tell him about a piece she had done early in her career—before she knew better—about how the authorities were no longer there to protect and serve but to make sure people quietly went about their business and kept their mouths shut. At the end of the story, she had commented that with each new war and new law, it was important to remind the people that they shouldn’t be too afraid to rise up and do something about their circumstances. The story had almost killed her career before it could even start. The only thing that had saved her was getting an exclusive on the divorce between Ricky Owen and Charlotte Noble, two of the biggest movie stars at the time.

Just then, Jerry burst into her office, started to say something, saw the intern sitting in the corner of her office, and motioned for him to get out.

“We need to talk,” he said, closing Amy’s door after the intern was gone. “Something huge just happened.”