I hope to be in time to join the weekly challenge that The Ink Well Community has opened to literature at Hive. If you don't know the call, check this out, it's amazing!. It's about to close the second week, with the promt "We were wrong about ...".
I greatly appreciate your work, your beauty, and all that may come, as well as the hosting of my publication.
For @Logiczombie,
who once, not long ago,
made me think again about how close
we have dystopias
She sat on a bench and waited. When an hour had passed, it became clear that his contact would not arrive. So she picked up her suitcase and went to look for a connection center.
In that small town, as in the East, the eastern faction of The Alliance had control of the telecommunications. The Resistance had foreseen this, of course, and had placed some notes with false coded messages in their copy of the Codex. The real codes had been tattooed for months in a pattern of moles on her scalp. Now she would have a pleasant and pious holographic chat with brother Jacob and would know which temple to go to for the delivery.
Things were beginning to have a purpose, at last, since she was recruited by the Resistance at the rehabilitation center of the East Chapter of the Quantum Church of the Multiple States Absolutes, when she was seventeen. Barely a year after her father was shot.
Quantum church diplomacy had remained firmly neutral during the Great War. When the Alliance won the victory and the precarious peace in which they lived was established, it had known how to place itself on the side of power. State and Church thus legitimized and consolidated their false libertarian discourse. Even so, the middle hierarchy and the numerous base of the church was well regarded by most people. Working for the Resistance from the shelter had many advantages, although, as the Alliance knew it was easy to supplant the identity of the brothers, requisitions were usually thorough and vigilance was constant.That is why her training had been hard and long: she had been in the shelter for ten years. Ten years attending their services, praying in their churches, blessing penitents, keeping the secrets of the Pastor....
And while her atheistic convictions were strong, the tics of guilt kept coming. Her skirt irritated her waist and her boots suffocated her. Her first external mission (this was only her second) had been a torment for that cause. It was as if the clothes guessed her imposture and began to oppress her. As she walked, she began to pray for calm. She found comfort in these acts of hypocritical balancing act.
She used to play with the ideas with which the brothers had educated her. For example, she would buy an apple at one store and then go to another and buy an apple too, but return it. With the money returned, she would buy the fruit on display on her right, even if it was an apple. These puerile acts of faith in chance, even if feigned, would plunge her into a joyful and strange state, and she would eat her fruit with a perverse feeling of ecstasy. She also used to pray to the Multiple Absolute States while spying on the Pastor's archives. Her ideas had been educated in the lodge, but her mind had been trained by the Resistance.
When her convictions faltered, she would ask the Pastor to visit her mother. Pain sharpened his soul.
She sat in that little room naked with the supervisors flanking the monitors. While her mother spat her hatred to the Pastor, the Church and the whole allied crowd, she uttered pious sentences about the Neutrality of the Universe, Balance of States and Divine Serenity of the Worlds... At night she would weep reviewing the memory of her father begging forgiveness from the Allied General Staff in front of the firing squad. She wept for her mother, consumed by psychotropics and resentment. She wept for herself, and had all sorts of dark and ungodly thoughts denying the Alternative Universes, with her heart concentrated on a burning, One Present. Doubts were disappearing. Her senses grew cold. The machine was again ready to do the works of hate.
A boy of no more than fifteen years old went over it with the hand scanner and took advantage of the requisition to palpate her ass. She showed the appropriate dose of silent surprise and covered her forehead a little more with the veil, as befitted a sister's modesty. The boy was brazen enough to ask her blessing, which she gave with humility and all the courtesy she owed to the Eastern caste.
The standard cabin, like all cabins in connection centers, was infiltrated, but here the mechanisms were crude and the white noise invaded the audio at intervals. When she got the pass, she blessed brother Jacob according to the custom: "Blessed are you, brother, in this and in all Possible Universes". Then the communication continued frugal, practical, as expected. It was customary for the pastors to give each other codices as a token of respect, and sometimes copies of valuable bookbinding served to give compensation and bribes disguised as courtesy.
Brother Jacob provided her with the coordinates of the temple and she felt a little lighter. After the very small initial setback, things were going well. She rushed to leave the cabin. The boy still had the same insolent look on his face when he charged the bill.
"Wait, sister," he called as she set foot on the road. "Give a little service to a penitent." She sighed and concentrated on keeping the mask of immobility on her face. Stinking little shits like this boy enjoyed the Holy Dispensation of Blessings to the Penitent as much as she was repulsed by them. Among their important reasons for wanting to devastate the Allied system, there was the sick popularity they had fostered around the Dispensation... And the Church had known how to take advantage of it, despite their speech against the banalization caused by social networks.
The penitent was a bit beyond. The dust was sticking to his sweat and sores, and it was evident that he had been beaten. A boy was keeping him on the ground by nailing the heel of a boot to his ribs. People were already running around with their cell phones ready to record and a small drone was spinning restlessly. All that unnecessary cruelty hurt her. As much as she hated the wounds the penitents inflicted on themselves, and as much as she hated their stupidity, she detested the humiliations they were exposed to. Penitents were meek people, who voluntarily went to the Dispensation, for they had their faith that the holy suffering of blessings would be expressed in the proliferation of the Multiple Universes, for the Glory of the Universal Order in Infinite Expansion.
She decided to end quickly the misery of the penitent and sank her finger with precision and strength on the wound of the man's forehead. She declared his pain sanctified and put the stinking plasma on her own forehead, which she covered again with modesty. She held the drone so close to her face that she could hear its vibration. She turned and withdrew, perhaps too violently, and the people moved away, respecting the custom of the Dispensation.
She almost came to see herself free from embarrassment.
Then the foot of the insolent boy extended and she fell with barely enough time to cushion the blow with her forearms. The batons of a couple of Allied Forces militia officers made the electric current flow through her ribs. She swallowed dust as she squirmed. Before she passed out, she saw the terrified and pitiful look on the penitent's face and wondered how similar they would look now.
Her body was a mass of pain that her soul rejected. Even so, he loved the little piece of life offered to him in the icy form of the contact of the steel table against her buttocks. She could still see something out of her left eye. A door. A holographic projector. She was alone. Perhaps they thought she had died that time.
She had said everything. She had invented what she could not have known. She had given up the code tattooed on her skull. She had given up her mother, who had nothing to do with it.He had given up all his contacts in the Resistance and all his contacts in the Church, but even so it seemed that something was missing, that he was forgetting some important fact, because the officials kept repeating the rounds of torture.
She was aware of how wrong she had been during all those years and how wrong they had been in the Resistance. It was obvious. They manipulated her pain and sadness to make her sin against the Holy Order.
She prayed the Dispensation prayer. She declared her suffering sanctified for Infinite Proliferation.
Then she frantically searched her memory from the day of her recruitment for the piece of information she was forgetting. Perhaps he recovered it before they returned.