Rosa, is your mother still alive? How’s Clara?
You’ve been dead inside for years, I tell myself.
They lied to you, Rosa; I never left you—
No—
I didn’t leave you—
Die,I remind myself. Die.
Surveillance is security, Rosa. Only criminals—
Mentally I fold my father into an envelope, push the envelope through a shredder, set the shredder on fire.
The sky ruptures.
The world seems to roar as it unleashes a violent torrent of rain, icy sheets pelting the ground so hard the deluge sounds like hail. I grit my teeth and tug my hood as far forward as it will go, resisting the impulse to wrap my armsaround myself for warmth. Much as it might provide me the illusion of comfort, I need to keep my hands free and my body ready; precious seconds could cost me everything.
I still haven’t sourced a proper weapon.
The clouds are moving quickly enough to shift around the sun erratically, shafts of illumination appearing and evaporating in dizzying flashes. I watch dark and light change hands with the bated breath of a gambler waiting to see how the dice will fall—
Without warning, the sun snuffs out.
I take the small win, exhaling as a vein of lightning streaks silently across the darkening sky. Cold numbs my extremities, windswept rain seeping more aggressively into the damp canvas of my tennis shoes. I peer through the downpour as a roll of thunder cracks in the distance. Uniformed personnel patrolling the airstrip are beginning to look around with increasing uncertainty. Most appear to have been called away by the recent security alert, and now the remaining few—six, by my count—appear to be considering shelter indoors.
I clench my teeth harder, refusing to acknowledge the fatigue in my bones or the loss of feeling in my toes. If I can be anything, I can be patient.
Patience is its own weapon.
It took longer than I’d hoped to orient myself after emerging from the maximum security prison—my calculations were close, but not exact—and I had to make some inadvisable choices in the pursuit of a map, a sense of direction, anda change of clothes—but more than that, the world of The New Republic was a piercing shock.
I don’t know what I was expecting.
Sharper teeth, perhaps.
Instead, I was offered a soft landing in a sea of unmanaged chaos. People and vehicles dotted everything like so much careless seasoning; I couldn’t figure out what they were doing or why. There didn’t appear to be any system governing their actions; no instructions or reminders were delivered over central comms. In fact, many people appeared to be outside for no reason at all: idling on sidewalks or else watching leashed animals defecate on patches of grass. There were no soldiers on patrol; no guards stationed at intervals; no checkpoints; no quiet zones—not a single armed officer already waiting to intercept me.
Worse: it wasloud, everywhere.
I’d thought it was just the patients at the rehab facility who acted without composure and restraint. I was wrong. Pedestrians everywhere spoke in unregulated tones all around me, with no apparent fear of being overheard or recorded or reported.
I felt like a time traveler to a land long extinct.
I soon realized that surveillance around the city was nearly nonexistent, particularly in residential zones.
High-density areas were better equipped, but these measures were consistent only in their inconsistency. Some streets had cameras; others did not. As I trekked across city blocks on foot, the cameras I did spot were often differentmakes and models, many originating from diverse manufacturers. Some were visibly old. Others newer. Some with audio-recording capacity, others without. Very few models were advanced enough to support facial recognition technology—and there appeared to be no great logic underpinning any of these decisions.
This was astonishing.
In the absence of a streamlined, cohesive system, there could be no centralized surveillance apparatus in The New Republic. No unilateral network responsible for monitoring civilians; no database accounting for every person; no single purveyor of security equipment; no principal organization devoted entirely to dissecting the micro movements of its citizens. Instead, civilians appeared to live their lives entirely unregulated.
It soon became clear to me that I was dealing with a level of incompetence so profound it was almost impossible to believe.
I simply stopped moving.
I stood stock-still as people walked past, their eyes glancing off my uncovered face and stolen clothes without consequence to any of us.
