“And while they empty your pockets politely, they also keep your hands busy.Gaming, they call it—play, fun, relaxation—except it’s not play when the rules are written by a cashier.The little jackpots, the daily rewards, the flashing ‘limited-time’ offers: it’s a slot machine dressed up in cartoon skin.
“People don’t log off because they’re happy; they log on because the world outside is too loud and too expensive.The game becomes a second job where you pay to keep working.
“The internet was supposed to be a library, but it’s a carnival with mirrors that memorize your face. It knows what you want before you do, because it watches your pauses and your late-night searches and the way you hover over the ‘buy now’ button like it’s a confession.
“It sells you back to yourself in tiny slices—ads, feeds, trends—until you can’t tell the difference between your own thoughts and the thoughts that were planted there.Everyone is ‘connected’, and nobody is known.
“Sometimes I feel it like static in my teeth: the whole society humming at the same frequency, the debt humming, the screens humming, the endless scrolling humming—one big artificial heartbeat.They don’t even need guards anymore; we volunteer for the cages.
“We carry the tracking devices, we request the loans, we beg for new levels, we applaud the algorithms for ‘understanding’ us.And if you whisper that it’s wrong, they call you dramatic.Fine.I am dramatic.I am done being reasonable while the world is being quietly dismantled into subscriptions.
“So here is my promise, written plain and loud: I will not pray to plastic, I will not kneel to lenders, I will not offer my hours to games that eat daylight, and I will not surrender my mind to the wired chorus.I will make a life that cannot be ‘updated’, a life that doesn’t require a signal to be real.
“Let them keep their towers and their passwords and their glittering, fragile networks—when the noise finally collapses under its own weight, I will still be here with paper, fire, seeds, and names spoken out loud. No help from technology. The reset will be human, and it will start with me.”
“Holy shit,” muttered Ben.“I mean, it’s scary as fuck but she’s not wrong.This was written by Marilyn, right?”Dedmond smiled, shaking his head.
“No.It was written by her mother.The day before she died or was killed.Her death was an unsolved case.Marilyn was already out of college and it was at the cusp of all of this, everything she wrote in there, coming to fruition, becoming out of control.Credit cards, loans, banking, gaming, all of it.This woman saw the future and didn’t like it.”
“Is there a reason?” asked Wyatt.
“She needed a loan to buy a house.She’d worked hard, saved, had no bad debt but also had no debt at all,” he said.
“Isn’t that good?” asked Kiel.
“It can be good or bad.They had nothing to base her credit rating.She was refused time and time again and finally went to Cain Hampton asking for help.She was also concerned about her daughters interest in technology.She was afraid for her.
“Cain’s assistant is singing like a bird.Terrified that she’ll be jailed as well.She said she’d only learned that Marilyn was his daughter recently when she ‘accidentally’ overheard their conversations.But she remembered her coming to the office many times and remembered her mother coming to the office the day before her death.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” frowned Wyatt.“Why would Marilyn take up the cloak of pushing gaming, credit cards, all of it, if her mother was so against it?”
“I don’t think she knew.I don’t think she had any clue her mother wrote this.It’s actually quite good and accurate.I think Cain manipulated her into believing that her talents could help women like her mother.It’s so strange that we found it, that an intern found the letter in archives and printed it on this site.”
“Not so strange in our world.Just look around you, Dedmond.Angels are everywhere.You’re not going to fire the intern are you?” asked Ben.
“No,” smirked Dedmond.“We’re hiring him permanently.He’s great.I brought this to your attention because I think if Marilyn sees this, she’ll stop whatever she has planned.”
“What does all of this have to do with taking top secret files from the DOD and DOJ or selling secrets to foreign governments?” asked Ben.
“I know the answer to that,” said Kiel.Everyone turned to look at him.“If everything is blown to pieces, fried from the inside out, we start again.Clean.And she can be at the epi-center, designing and rebuilding her way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marilyn found a small house that she could rent by the week in Nags Head, North Carolina.The tiny beach community wasn’t yet in full swing for the summer months, so she was left to herself.Just what she wanted until she could complete her plan.
Everyone thought this was about military secrets.It wasn’t about military secrets.It was about the system being broken.Yes, she’d fed that system, flamed it, welcomed the fire.It was exciting to see, to watch.
Her mother had worked her fingers to the bone to give her a nice place to live her life.There was no privacy because they shared a bedroom but most nights her mother would sleep on the pull-out sofa to give her space to study and read.She encouraged her at every turn.
But when she needed help the most, when the landlord was selling the building and everyone was losing their apartment, her mother had nowhere to go.Nowhere except to Cain Hampton.
She didn’t know for certain what became of that meeting.She didn’t see her mother again.Found dead along the river near their home, it appeared to be a random act of violence.Marilyn never believed it.
Cain.Cain was always at the edge of their lives causing trouble for them.She just wanted to finish what she’d started.
She glanced up at the television, shocked by what she was seeing.Cain Hampton, in handcuffs, being carted away from the capitol.
“No,” she whispered.“No, this can’t be.”
