Revolution in the Underground (34 page)

Daryl frowned.  He pushed a button, zapping Ember lengthwise along his spine, but between Ember’s screams and paroxysms was an indomitable smile.  It was the smile of one who was confident in one’s own world view—it was the smile of one who believed that current actions demonstrated and proved one’s point.  Naturally, Daryl shocked him until the smile faded.

“You need to be internally consistent, Ember.  What if you’re not real?  What if none if this happened?  Still you believe that your sister existed because she is within your mind?  What about the Eternal leader?  If you can believe that he created you—that he created this world—if it is in your mind then it must also be true.  You can’t just pick and choose.  Either the things in your mind are reality or they’re not.  If you reject the eternal leader you must necessarily reject the existence of your sister.”

Ember gasped for air as his body reeled from the aftershock.  “But I don’t believe in the ‘Eternal Leader.’  I don’t believe in your falsehoods!”

“You will!”

“Kara and my sister are real!”

“You can’t just pick and choose, Ember!” Daryl screamed, shocking him again.  “If you are prepared to accept the reality of Kara and Maggie regardless of the external, then you must be prepared to accept the Eternal Leader into your heart.”

“But I don’t believe in him!  Kara and my sister operate on my plane of existence—one that is superior to your imaginings.  They exist within and without me—internally and transcendentally beyond the realms of your control.  You are trying to introduce and internalize something external.  But it is not my own and it is not the truth of our plane.  It is not for you to do.  It doesn’t work like that!”

“Ember, Ember, Ember…” Daryl said slowly, resuming his methodical pace.  “You think that if you fight hard enough—that if you talk eloquently enough, that goodness will prevail…  Well, I got news for you Ember… there is no goodness… there is no evil…  and there certainly are no heroes.  You will die like all the rest.  You will be forgotten… and there is nothing you can do about it.  No amount of philosophizing will save you from that fate.”

“Why are you doing this, Daryl?  What do you hope to gain?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Ember…” Daryl said, ignoring his questions.  “I’m going to erase your memory of either Kara or Maggie, but I’m going to let you choose which?  How does that sound?  I’m going to stick this electrode through your eyes and into your brain,” he said, menacingly waving a small glass pipet in his left hand, “and I’m going to take all of the memories!”

“What happened to you!  You were a revolutionary, were you not?!  You know the cause, do you not believe in their ideals?!” Ember shouted in uncontrollable panic.

“And what ideals may that be?”

“Freedom!  The ability to express oneself!” he exclaimed, trying to buy himself time.  “The ability to move about as one pleases!  The ability to believe as one wants!  The ability to choose!  Don’t you want that?”

“I think, Ember, the question is, whether or not you want that.  These choices, they are the source of your misery.  These memories, they give you hope and ambition but they are also the source of loss and pain.”

“The commoners… the ones you oppress… they are not happy!  How can you do this to your people!”

“The people.  The people?  The people?!  Forget about them!  They are what we say they are!  They will feel the way we want them to feel.  They will
be
, by our definitions!” Daryl exclaimed, his face turning wildly sadistic.

“But why?  We are going to liberate this Underground!  It’s coming Daryl.  You cannot fight this forever.  And when that day comes, you will be exposed for the evil that you are!”

“If you noticed, Ember, I never asked you about your little plant—your little code.  I don’t care about that!  All I care about is you… convincing you—making you believe how wrong you were.  I have done it before Ember, don’t think that I haven’t.  But you…  I will take special pleasure in turning you…  I will relish in your transformation…  Now pick!”

“Stop it!  It doesn’t need to be this way! You can be free!  Everyone can be free!”

“Kara or Maggie?!”

“Go away, just leave me alone!  What did I do to you?!” Ember screamed violently.

“Pick one!” Daryl instructed, shocking Ember along his arms and legs, just enough to debilitate his body without completely incapacitating him or hindering his ability to speak.  “I’m going to delete her from existence!”

“I’ll say it… I’ll say that I love the Eternal Leader, just don’t take my memories!  Don’t harm them!” Ember shouted, foam returning to his mouth as he shook viciously against the shackles.

“That’s not enough!  You have to pick one!” Daryl said, sadistically shocking him again.  “Pick one or I’ll destroy both!  Pick one!  Pick one!” he said with a cruel laugh as he waved the electrode.

“I choose Maggie!  I choose her!  Okay?!  I choose her!  I choose her!  I want to keep my memories of her!  Are you happy?!  I choose my sister!  I want to keep the memories of my sister! Are you happy?!  You bastard!  I’ll kill you!  I will kill you!  I choose her!”

“Good,” Daryl said with a laugh as he waved the electrode near Ember’s eyes.  “Now tell me that you want me to remove all of your memories of Kara.  Tell me that you want me delete her from all existence!”

“You bastard!  Die! Die! Die!  You won’t get away with this!  After the Underground is liberated… we will kill you!  You will see then!”

“Say it, or I’ll erase both!”

“You don’t need to do this!  Please!  I love the Eternal Leader.  Come on, please!” Ember begged, tears dripping from his chin.

“I’ll give you one last chance.  Say it or I’ll erase both!” Daryl said, once more dangling the electrode suggestively.

“Fine!  Remove my memories of Kara!  Delete her!  Just leave my sister!  Is that what you wanted to hear?!  You monster!  Is that it?!  You want me to say that I love my sister more?!  You want me to say it?!  I love my sister more!  You monster.  I hope you die!  You monster!!”  Ember felt his whole world crashing down before him.  All his beliefs, all his hopes and ambitions, suddenly fell by the wayside.  He no longer had a desire to live.  He hated Daryl but he hated himself more.

Daryl used his left hand to force open Ember’s eyelids, and his right hand to hold the electrode, but just as he prepared to plunge it through Ember’s eye, there was a light knock at the door.

“Orders from General Ciro: release patient 8373b.  Any and all treatments are to be stopped immediately.  Report to the bridge at eighteen hundred hours.  That is all.”

Ember’s memories of Kara and Maggie were safe. Though he had been spared the mental erasure, Ember felt that it his deliverance had come about thirty seconds too late.  The real damage had been done.  Ember hung his head in shame, whimpering silently to himself as Daryl left the room.

Maggie stood bewilderedly before the jarring crowd, heart beating, mind racing.  The impalpable but ever-present knot-in-the-throat choked her every breath.  She closed her eyes, trying to recall everything in her life that that had led to this moment. 

The mornings, the nights. The smiles, the frowns.  The laughs, the tears.   The consequent rise, and the subsequent fall.  The ignorance, the knowledge.  The rumors, the truth.  The power, the powerlessness.  The leisure, the urgency.  The struggle, the submission.  The fight—the passion, the indomitable obsession, the inevitable compliance. The smallest nuances of the smallest jokes, the littlest details of the littlest relationships.  Innocuous, trivial—yet somehow inexpressibly and profoundly significant .  Each word, each action, instrumental in bringing about this inescapable fate.

How unfair life is,
she thought to herself as she was forced to center-stage. 
One can have countless victories, yet one defeat can mar it all.  There are no heroes.  I am no hero.  Oh, for it to end like this!  Why must it end this way?!  Can I not have dignity even now?  Oh, how a single defeat can ruin it all. 

Maggie opened her eyes, only to re-discover the hate in everyone else’s.  The sheer and unadulterated odium.  And at what? 
Of
what? 
For
what?!  She did not know such an iniquity existed within mankind.  But this wasn’t mankind, this was a mob, amongst which existed no individual thought or sentiment. 
I cannot be taken in by them.  I shall not and will not reciprocate their hate.  These are not people, therefore they cannot be hated.  They have lost their humanity a long time ago.  They do not know why they act.  They do not know better.

But it wasn’t hating the throng that troubled Maggie the most, it was hating herself.  After each jeer, and each contemptuous mock, she felt
her
identity slip away.  She felt herself becoming less and less a human being, and more and more an object of ridicule, a paragon of evil, the singular representation of all that ever was and ever will be wrong with the universe, and soon she even conceived the notion that her very death was a necessary sacrifice.  She was at once, two: a jeering participant in the multitude, and the prime prototype of evil incarnate.  A tear rolled under her closed eyelids as she thought how much better the universe would be without her there. 
If only I never have existed at all,
she began to think.

The master of ceremony walked before her, speaking provocatively to the already-provoked crowd.  Each word, each gesticulation adding to the uncontainable uproar.  One of the more enraged audience members took it upon herself to throw rotten fruit at Maggie, but even in her singular outburst, she was not alone.  She was no more an individual than a leaf upon a tree—a merely convenient hand for the rest of the whole.

Maggie stood behind the master of ceremony as he read off a list of grievances and leveled ever increasing and ever more fabricated accusations upon her.  She crossed her legs, and hung her head in shame, accepting each allegation with a nod, as she had been instructed.  And as the speaker droned on, Maggie began to believe him—not that she was
actually
guilty of the charges, but rather that she could be made, in effect, guilty of the charges by virtue of mass perception.

She thought about how she might appear to a distant observer.  She thought how her voluntary march would be perceived by the masses.  How her death, even in memory, would be tainted. 
To voluntarily accept—to beg for my own execution?  To apologize for my very existence and plead for my demise?  To make them believe—to make them all believe.  To convince them, and myself?  Such a death is one hundred deaths.  And I am to believe they are to spare my brother?  And what evidence do I have?  Oh, but to spare him this fate, even if only in part—if only in probability!  If only there existed a better universe where things that could go right did go right!  Life is but a cruel joke.  There are no heroes.

As she climbed the steps, she considered once more the injustice of it all. 
Luna, Styles, where are you now?  How unfair that I must die now when you are so close—forbidden to see the liberation.  And Ember, how you may perhaps still live.  How you may, perhaps, live more…  But oh, how you will be haunted by my memory…  How you may never understand for what I died or even how I died…  How posterity will continue long after my death, and oh, how I might one day be completely forgotten—no more a blip on this universe than a pile of dirt.  And yet… is it possible, to find some sort of moral victory even now?

“Do you have any final words?” the master of ceremonies asked Maggie, but facing the crowd, as the executioner slid the noose around her neck.  She gulped as she felt the rough fibers of the rope against her skin.

“I apologize for existing.  I see now that the Eternal Leader only wanted to help me.”

“Louder,” the master of ceremonies instructed with a delighted smile and outstretched hands.

“I know now that I was wrong!  I believe now that the Eternal Leader is all I ever needed!” she screamed passionately.  “My one regret is that I didn’t love him more!” she added for good measure.

“You
believe
, but do you
know?”

“I know!  I know!” Maggie exclaimed, searching deep down to find the means to express herself authentically while remaining self-aware of her own lie.  “The Eternal Leader is everything to me!  Without him, I am nothing!  I do not deserve his love, and it is for that reason, that I want, more than anything else, to be eradicated.”

“Do you believe her?!” the master of ceremonies asked the riotous but assenting crowd, which, on this particular occasion, had more thirst for blood than effusive rhetoric.  “So be it.  As you wish, we will put you out of your misery.” 

The executioner put a heavy burlap bag over Maggie’s head, moving her to the final raised platform.  Maggie looked around at her new dark universe and found it surprisingly peaceful.  An eerie tingly feeling came to her lower abdomen as she considered how a single act of defiance, even now, might forever ripple in the universe’s endless sea.  She breathed in heavily as the tickling sensation faded.  Giving up was so easy.

“Hault!” cried a tall middle-aged woman, dressed in the apparel of a commanding officer.  Her long, straight, silver hair, bounced in the wind as she ran up to the executioner.  “This execution has been postponed, by order of the fifth tribunal.”

“My lady?  Uh… but of course…” the master of ceremony expressed hesitantly.  The executioner motioned to remove the burlap sac from Maggie’s head but the woman waved him off.  “Leave it,” she commanded.  Two guards promptly seized Maggie and handed her over to the woman. 

Beyond the brink of despair, Maggie was a shell of a person.  She had gone far enough to know in full the ambiguity between life and death, and now resided in neither.