The Last Uprising (Defectors Trilogy)
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Authors: Tarah Benner
The Last Uprising
A novel by Tarah Benner
Defectors Trilogy
Amazon Edition
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This book is a work of fiction, and any similarities to any person, living or dead, are coincidental and not intentional.
Copyright 2014 Tarah Benner
To my earliest readers. You are the ones who kept me going and made the rest of this series possible.
The only thing worse than fear is uncertainty.
In the simulation room, familiar images flashed before my eyes. The pictures still made my stomach clench with nausea, but it was getting better.
Now, I could look at the twisted, bloody remains of men strewn across the battlefield. I could look at the melting skin of the children in the pictures. I remembered those pictures from a documentary I had seen about Hiroshima. Crime scene photos were mixed in with the images of war. The blood and the peeling, burnt, broken, and twisted human beings blended with the images of destruction. I’d seen these pictures over and over again so many times that I had the order memorized.
What bothered me more than the images themselves was the nagging feeling of déjà vu. Yes, I’d seen this sequence twelve times a day every day for thirty-five days, but I felt as though I’d seen it more than that. Where had I seen it before?
Such a dangerous world requires a new generation of soldiers . . . a force for good to keep ordinary citizens safe from evildoers . . . safe from the violence of rebellion and the abominations created by the modern age.
A carrier appeared, and something in the back of my mind — an old fear — made me recoil.
The Private Military Company of the United States is always working to protect and serve, and World Corp International is committed to rebuilding a future from the ashes in this the New Northern Territory, where brothers and sisters work side by side for the common good.
Order. Compliance. Progress. This is our credo.
There are those who seek to disrupt our harmony and destroy our world. These menaces don’t deserve your sympathy. They are the true plague upon our world, and they must be defeated.
Go forth and do your duty, citizen. The New Republic needs you.
The sequence ended, and a robotic feminine tone sounded.
End of simulation.
The screen went black, and that feeling of boredom mixed with relief began to sink in. As awful as the simulations were, the strange dread that I was missing something important tormented me more.
Reluctantly, I got up to exit the theater, knocking one of the hundred identical white chairs out of place. There were exactly one hundred. I’d counted every day that first week. It seemed odd that there should be a hundred chairs when there was only one of me.
“Now, Haven . . .” taunted a familiar voice.
I jumped when I saw the man sitting in the back row. He was so tan he was practically orange, and he wore crisply pleated white pants and a blazer. His hair and goatee were the lightest silver, and he had cold, steely eyes like a shark.
“That’s a little . . . passive aggressive, don’t you think?” His thin lips curved into a smile I didn’t like.
“Just stumbled a little,” I said lightly, hoping he didn’t register the fear that lifted my voice an octave too high.
This man had visited me before during my first behavioral adjustment. He had stood and watched me through the clear, cold water in my hallucination, flashing that same smile as I cried out in anguish.
“I doubt that very much. You’re determined, that’s for sure. It’s taken us a long time to get here. But you’ve made tremendous progress.”
My nostrils flared, but I didn’t say anything. Yes, I had made progress, but it had been painful. Within the first two weeks here, I’d learned that I could avoid trips to that horrible room with the cold metal table if I stayed within the boundaries, ate my meals, and “responded” to the simulations. I’d gotten sixteen new HALLO burns for my trouble. They stood out more sharply than my old ones. For some reason, I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten those.
I was used to the HALLO tags by now — so used to them in fact that they’d had to go up to five on the last session before I passed out. The worst part about adjustments was that they increased the settings on my CID. Although I’d memorized the boundaries of the atrium — how far I could go before the pain started — occasionally, I would still look away from the screen during my sessions in the theater and receive a sharp shock to the back of my skull.
They wanted me to look.
“You could be a great asset, you know,” the man continued lazily. “Probably my greatest achievement.”
For some reason, that made my chest swell with pride. Despite the pain, the horror, and the silence that stretched the hours of each day, I desperately wanted to be useful to the Republic.
Sensing my receptiveness, he stood up, stepped around the chairs without touching them, and stopped just inches away from me. “If I can take the Republic’s most defiant and turn her into a force for good, then others will see it is pointless to resist. You and I . . . we could fix all this.”
“All of what?” I breathed, trying not to cringe as the sharp tang of ginseng lozenges reached my nostrils.
The man turned away, seemingly lost in thought. “When I was a child, we lived out in the country. Fresh air, good exercise . . . it was a great place to grow up, as a young boy. My family lived so far out that we weren’t on city water. We drank well water. It didn’t taste very good, but what we didn’t know, of course, was that the water was tainted.”
I swallowed, willing myself to nod.
“Until, when I was twelve, my mother was diagnosed with cancer.”
He gripped the back of one of the chairs, and I watched his tan knuckles whiten. “A chemical company was dumping toxic waste illegally, and there was nothing we could do about it. We couldn’t afford to take the company to
court.
We could barely afford to keep our house.”
“That’s awful,” I said, just so he would know I was still listening. I wasn’t really sure why he was telling me this.
“The world is a terrible place, Haven. It always has been.”
“Unless we change things,” I said slowly, echoing what he had told me before, just wishing he would leave.
“Exactly, Haven! Exactly!” he said, clapping his hands together in delight. “When I was younger, I told myself I would never be so powerless again. I wanted to be richer than God himself so no one — no one — could ever ignore me again. I thought I could make them listen if I had wealth and power . . . if I created an American dynasty.”
He turned to face me. “But that’s not the solution, is it? There will always be people who get
shit
on. Maybe not me, but someone. The key to change isn’t money; it’s control. People need the Republic to tell them what to do — to tell them what’s right. Otherwise, given half the chance, humanity will destroy everything we have worked for.”
I nodded numbly.
“We’re doing it, Haven. You and me.”
I closed my eyes, fighting the nausea that was churning in my stomach. I hated this man with every fiber of my being, yet I had no idea why. Everything he said sent a ripple of sickness and wrongness through my body, and his voice filled me with a sense of dread.
When I opened my eyes, I was alone in the simulation room — alone as always. I dragged myself into the main atrium and headed for the dining room. I’d memorized where all the white doors went, and they no longer had to send a nurse to escort me. I knew what would happen if I tried to run.
Everything here was white: the walls, the chairs, the floor, my scrubs. Even the room where I slept and the room where I was allowed to eat was white. I hated it.
The food wasn’t supposed to be white, but the bland, muted vegetables turned to ash in my mouth. I’d lost a lot of weight in the first two weeks I was here, and they forced the white, flavorless food down my throat with a tube. I didn’t like that.
Now I ate on my own.
When I entered the dining room, my meal was waiting on a flimsy white silicon tray just as always. No one had to come serve my meals. The table was pushed up against the wall at just the right height to receive my tray through a tiny slot in the wall. Sometimes I waited by the slot to see the little window open up and catch a glimpse of the person on the other side, but it was completely dark.
By now, I knew there
was
no person on the other side — just a conveyer belt that ran the frozen meal through an oven, through the slot, and onto my table.
Today, dinner was a tofu brick with sweet potatoes and dark gray green beans. That meant it was day five. I had no idea what day of the week I first came here, so I considered my first day number one. I noticed they used the same seven breakfasts, the same seven lunches, and the same seven dinners on a repeated rotation, so that was how I remembered how many days I’d been here. I suspected that day seven was Sunday, because that was the only day I got actual meat: a lukewarm cube of meatloaf with bits of confetti inside masquerading as dehydrated onions.
I didn’t mind. The only thing that really bothered me was how my entire meal had to be either hot or cold, confirming my suspicions that a machine ran the entire frozen meal through an oven.
I glared at the clear, round pill sitting in its own little indentation on my tray — so harmless looking. They’d been giving it to me since I’d arrived. I couldn’t remember what they had drugged me with when I was in the hospital. It had been an endless parade of doctors poking and prodding, horrible sweating fevers, and nausea. I’d thought I was dying, but then they had cured me.
This little clear pill was almost worse. It made me tired and careless and foggy, but if I did not take it, they would send in a nurse with a syringe, and I would be sent to the adjustment room. I picked it up between my thumb and index finger, made eye contact with the camera pointed at my table, and dry-swallowed the smooth tablet dramatically. I could almost feel my willpower draining.
Just as I was about to stick my fork into the sharp corner of my tofu brick, I heard the bang of a door. I sat up straight.
Why were they sending a nurse?
I’d been on good behavior today. It didn’t seem fair that they would haul me off for an adjustment when I hadn’t done anything to warrant it. I bent my head over my tofu, hoping that if she saw me contentedly eating as I was supposed to, maybe she would see that I didn’t need to be adjusted.