The Theta Prophecy (19 page)

“There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”

The Beautiful and the Damned
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Year: 2048

“Did anyone see the Security Service beating that guy outside our building?” the intern said, putting down two trays of coffee for everyone to take.

Only a month earlier, the same intern, fresh out of school from a small college in the middle of farm country, had gone running into the conference room to tell everyone that he had just seen a lady pulled out of one of the checkpoint lines. The woman had broken into screams as the Tyranny’s men dragged her away.

“She probably just happened to have the same name as someone the Tyranny is looking for,” one of the veteran reporters had said, trying to calm the intern down. “I’m sure she’ll be fine if she answers their questions and doesn’t have the bad luck of being alone in a room with one of the agents with a criminal history.”

It hadn’t made the intern feel much better about what he’d seen. But now, only a month later, he had gotten used to seeing people dragged away, beaten—even shot—because it happened every day.

Someone asked if the guy the intern had seen receiving a beating looked to be over or under forty years of age.

“Older,” the intern said.

“Damn it,” another reporter said, taking out five dollars and sliding it across the table to the guy who had won this round of the office pool.

“Okay, everyone,” Amy said, entering the room and taking the chair at the head of the table. “What do we have?”

One by one, the people seated around the large oak table told her the stories they were working on for open slots in that week’s news broadcast schedule. All around them on the walls were framed portraits of legendary reporters who had won awards for their investigative reporting.

One said, “The wedding between Tom Wildsmith and Julie Hutchins. Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there.”

The man who lost the bet said, “The flooding in the Midwest.”

Another said, “A piece on what the former Ruler is up to these days.”

“Okay,” Amy said. “I get the idea.” Then she looked at the youngest person in the room, the lowly intern, and said, “Shouldn’t we cover all the people who were killed in the streets by the Tyranny’s men?”

One woman groaned and forced her eyes shut in revulsion. The reporter who won the bet and was now five dollars richer actually chuckled. Everyone else stared at their hands without saying a word, each of them doing their best to wait until the punchline was delivered so they could laugh. When Amy, who had held the position of news editor at the station longer than anyone else, didn’t laugh, but only looked at the intern and waited for his response, everyone held their breath.

“Maybe?” the intern said, looking to all the other people gathered around him, wishing one of them would blink once if he was supposed to say yes or blink twice if he was supposed to say no.

“Maybe?” Amy said. “Then why don’t we normally cover that type of news?”

A man on the opposite side of the table, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, let his head rest on one of his hands and closed his eyes but said nothing. Jerry had known Amy longer than anyone else, was one of the only people who could tell her when she was wrong. Everyone else around the table depended on him to speak up now, but instead he listened to what the intern had to say.

“Because it’s not news?” the kid said.

Amy wanted to put her head in her hands and cry. Not news? It was the only thing mentioned so far that
was
news. She wanted to yell at all of them that they hadn’t studied journalism to do stories on celebrity weddings or any of the other things they tried to pass off as worthwhile stories.

“If it were your mother or father who was beaten to death,” she said, “wouldn’t you think it was newsworthy?”

Afraid to say anything else stupid, the intern merely nodded.

Jerry rolled his sleeves even further up his forearm and said, “Leave the poor boy alone.” He smiled and gave the kid a friendly nod.

Thirty years ago, Amy would have made the entire room tremble in their seats by roaring about what was news and what wasn’t, that they were there to provide a service to the people, that they were the one mechanism in place to keep the leaders honest. Her fire, though, had been had been put out a little bit at a time. A story that her editor refused to approve. Another story that was so thoroughly edited that the original intention of her piece was lost. For decades, she had learned what type of news was allowed and what type wasn’t, and she had put up with the game. Now, though, with two kids who were out of college and starting careers of their own, her husband dead three years earlier from a stroke, she could only shake her head and sigh.

“Two candidates running for 3
rd
District Leader are airing smear campaigns against each other in which they each accuse the other of being a Thinker. Why? Because they’re hoping that will give the Tyranny enough reason to drag their opponent away, or at least get no one to vote for them. Why aren’t we covering that?”

“Politics has always been dirty,” said the man with a fresh five dollar bill in his pocket.

“Yes,” Amy agreed. “But where does this end? I’m sure each of you knows someone who has been taken away by the Tyranny for being a Thinker. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. But if two leaders can accuse each other in the hope that it gets their opponent imprisoned or killed, what’s to stop Jerry”—she smiled at the man with thinning grey hair who had come to the intern’s defense—“from accusing me of being a Thinker just so he can become the news editor?”

The room was silent. Someone’s pocket beeped, a missed call or email. She waited to see whose it was so she could kick them out of the meeting, the one place they weren’t allowed to take calls or be interrupted. No one took the bait, though.

“George, scrap the story on the celebrity wedding, you’re—”

“But it’s going to be the biggest wedding of the decade!”

“You’re going to do a piece on all the beatings and killings that have taken place over, let’s say, the past month. Tell us how many of them turned out to be radicals and how many were just ordinary people accused of something they didn’t do.”

“I can’t do that. The Tyranny will think I’m against them.”

“Tell them your boss told you to do it.” Then, to the guy sitting next to her, she said, “Scrap the story on the flooding in the Midwest. People can find out the weather whenever they want. You’re going to put together a piece on how many people have been accused of being Thinkers, who accused them, why, and what happened to all of these people. Are they sitting in prison? Are they even alive anymore?”

The guy scribbled notes onto a piece of paper without saying anything.

“And, Margaret?”

The woman who was going to do a piece on what the former Ruler was doing now that he was out of office looked up from her hands and offered a pained smile. “Yes?”

“Scrap your story. No one cares what the former Ruler is doing. It’s not news. Do a story on who’s paying for all the negative ads we keep seeing on television.”

The only confirmation the woman gave that she had heard what her boss had told her was drawing a straight black line through her notes, then quickly scribbling something else.

Amy looked around the room. Half of her staff were looking down at their notepads as if something interesting was there. The other half were gazing at random spots just over her shoulder so they at least got credit for sort of looking at her. When she stood up and pushed her chair back from the conference table, everyone else did the same.

“You know,” Jerry said, walking next to her as they made their way down the hallway, “This can’t end well.” As he said this, he ran a hand through the little bit of hair he still had on top of his head.

“I’m the news director. I’m just directing the news.”

And then she went into her office, closed her door, and went back to work.

Year: 2048

“What will you do?” Matheson said, as he and the Ruler stared out the windows of the Ruler’s office.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do.”

As they watched, a lone man in raggy clothes walked across the park to the front gate of the building the Ruler lived in. There, the man stopped and unfolded a piece of cardboard, which he held against the wrought iron fence.

“MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR,” the sign said. A throwback to simpler times and simpler complaints. Before the Tyranny had outlawed such things—it was a matter of time until men from the Security Services would rush out, tear the cardboard message away, and either drag the man to prison or kill him on the spot—there had been signs protesting checkpoints to get into and out of every city, posters complaining about AeroCams watching what everyone did, and banners listing all the different countries that had been turned into barren wastelands by the Tyranny’s bombs.

“Poor bastard,” the Ruler said, shaking his head.

Just as Matheson had expected, a group of four men in black armor jogged toward the protestor. The first one to get within arm’s reach of the man tore the sign down. Even with it gone, the man kept his hands in the air as if the message of protest were still there. The guard who had grabbed the sign ripped it into pieces. One of the other guards took out an extending baton from one of the many pouches in his vest and struck the protester across the face with it. With only one blow, the man was on the ground. It didn’t matter to the guards that the protester was completely motionless, his face flat on the concrete, they still took turns kicking him. When the man started convulsing on the ground, one of the men in black stopped beating him, but only so he could hold the rabble rouser still and give the other three guards an easier target to work with.

“Do you think he’s an Ed or a Joe?” the Ruler said.

No one else would know what he was referring to except Matheson, who, along with the Ruler, had developed the nicknames for the two types of dissidents back when they had written a college term paper together on the topic of public unrest. Eds were people who knew exactly what they were doing, knew the risks, and did it anyway, often sacrificing their freedom and sometimes even their lives to do so. Joes were people who stumbled into dissent, either because they said something dumb, didn’t know the effect their words or actions would have, or because they were caught up in what other people were saying and joined along. These people could be swayed into apologizing for the things they said and did and could even take the opposing viewpoint the next day, depending on which way the wind was blowing.

“Has to be an Ed,” Matheson said. “Kept his hands in the air, like the cardboard didn’t matter.”

The Ruler nodded. “Poor, stupid bastard.”

There had been a time when thousands of similar posters were held up, painted on walls, written on t-shirts, by people just like the man who was now probably dead. Those people were all gone now, because they had all seen what happened to people like the man with the wrinkled shirt and stained pants and knew it could easily happen to them if they dared stand up to the Tyranny.

Matheson and the Ruler watched the scene in silence. Once the unconscious man stopped convulsing and became motionless again, the four guards wiped the sweat from their faces and patted each other on the back for a job well done. A moment later, a van came by. The guards tossed the body into the back. The protest was over.

No one had run to the protester’s defense. No one else was even within a hundred feet of the guards. The few people who had to be out in public, going from one office building to another or running errands for their boss, kept their heads down and quickened their pace, doing their best to act as if they hadn’t seen anything.

“What will you do?” Matheson asked again, not looking away from the spot in the distance where a dark puddle lay on the sidewalk, where the man’s face had been cracked open.

As Matheson watched, a man on his cell phone, too distracted to notice where he was walking, stepped in the puddle. As the man continued down the street, he left a trail of red footprints behind him. The crimson street art would remain there until the next time it rained.

The Ruler placed an index finger on either temple and pressed. The bags under his eyes continued to get bigger with each passing day. And his hair—pitch black when he had first become Ruler—was now entirely gray.

“What would you have me do?” he said.

“I don’t know. But we can’t keep on like this. Everyone is so afraid of our men showing up in the middle of the night and either dragging them away or putting a blaster hole through their head that they’re turning on everyone else they know. We’re getting hundreds of thousands of calls each day from people accusing all their friends of being Thinkers.”

“Are we arresting everyone who’s being accused?”

“Initially, we were. But how can we now? The entire country would be behind bars.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” The Ruler said, trying to chuckle, a little bit of life returning to his face.

“They would certainly be easier to control that way. But if the entire population is behind bars, who would keep the infrastructure running? Who would produce our food, teach our children, pick up our trash?”

“True,” the Ruler said. “What about the people making the accusations? Are you at least having them arrested?”

“I’d love to. But if we start arresting the people who are accusing their friends and family of being Thinkers, pretty soon no one will be reporting the radicals we actually want to catch, and then the Thinkers would be able to do whatever they want.”

“Very smart,” the Ruler said. “That’s why I need you here, to think of the things I’d never think of myself.” And then: “This is all the Thinkers’ fault. If they wouldn’t question everything we did, people would be happy to go along with it.”

“It’s almost like the Thinkers are thinking about everything except what’s good for the country,” Matheson said, smiling at his own joke. “We need to do something, though. We can’t have the public so afraid that they’ll turn on each other.”

“I like that the people are afraid. It means they respect us.”

“Maybe. But maybe they’re becoming too afraid. We want them to be just scared enough that they listen to what we have to say, but not so scared that they lose their minds. Pretty soon, no one will be safe. One of the leaders might turn on one of the other leaders. Maybe an entire group of leaders will claim that another group of leaders were Thinkers just to get rid of their rivals.” Matheson looked at the monuments in the distance before adding, “Maybe a leader with aspirations of becoming Ruler will accuse you of being a Thinker.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“I know that. But what are the Security Services supposed to do, listen to some accusations and ignore others? Where would it end? Would you be safe but your family be at risk? We need to make sure the people we care about remain insulated from everything that’s happening.”

“Very smart. Very smart indeed,” the Ruler said, patting his friend on the shoulder. “Sometimes, I think it should have been you who was elected instead of me.”

They walked away from the window and over to a pair of sofas arranged on either side of a glass table. Matheson sat on one sofa and the Ruler on the opposite one so the two men were facing each other. On the table in front of them, a stack of reports was piled detailing the state of the Tyranny.

The Ruler looked down at the documents, not bothering to flip through any of them. They were always filled with the same suggestions.

“What do you recommend?” he said to Matheson. “Maybe another war. Nothing unites the people like war.”

Matheson grimaced and ground his teeth together. “Normally, I would say yes. Wars have been very successful for us in the past. But I think the people grow tired of all the wars. I think they’re fed up with seeing their loved ones coming back in pieces and with all the money we put into killing people.”

“We could just drop some bombs then,” the Ruler said, eyes widening. “No one would get hurt. From our side, I mean. We’d level a couple cities, get our people cheering for the home team again, and everything would be better.”

“We may have played that card a few too many times. Trust me, I know it used to be effective, but there are too many people whispering that the last war was staged, and the one before that was unnecessary, and the one before that was just a distraction. We might want to hold off on any more bombs. At least for the next few weeks. After all, we’ve been on quite a roll recently.”

“What else can we do then? What other options do we have?”

“I don’t know,” Matheson said. “I wish it were as easy as blowing some city off the map, but I don’t think it is this time.”

“The whole thing makes my head hurt.”

Matheson watched as the Ruler pressed his fingers into his temples again. Each time, the Ruler also squeezed his eyelids shut, and each time he opened them the eyelids seemed to swell and become heavier than before, the eyeballs fading into the distance. The man yawned and closed his eyes for a moment. Matheson wondered if his friend might have gone to sleep right there on the sofa. It had happened before.

“Do you want to know the worst part?” the Ruler said, his eyes still closed. When Matheson didn’t say anything, he added, “There are reports that the Thinkers have learned how to travel back in time.”

Matheson didn’t say anything, only put his hand to his chin and rubbed at the stubble that was coming in. If anyone else were speaking about time travel, they would be thought to have lost their mind.

“Can you imagine that?” The Ruler said. “A bunch of radicals who hate all the good we’re trying to do, trying to go back in time and keeping us from starting the Tyranny?”

“Are you sure that’s what they intend to do?”

“What else would they do?” the Ruler yelled, his eyes bursting open, then closing again as he tried to calm himself. “We listen to every phone call, every conversation. We read every letter, every email. We track where every single person goes and who they meet with. And these people are still able to sneak around under our noses.”

“It doesn’t help that everyone is so afraid to fall under our suspicion that they keep reporting everyone they know to be a Thinker. We have so many false claims that we can’t track the serious ones.”

The Ruler nodded. “The entire thing is a mess.”

“If only we could record people’s thoughts,” Matheson said. “Then there would be no way they could hide from us.”

“That really would make things so much easier for us. Maybe in a utopia the Tyranny would be able do that, but not in the real world.”

The Ruler looked down at the stack of reports in front of him. One would be filled with all of the possible countries they could attack next. Another would detail all the new laws that could be passed to further control the population. Yet another would provide the statistics of all the people who had been rounded up under suspicion of being against the Tyranny, all the people who were in the Tyranny’s prisons, all the dead.

“There’s a book that predicted this very thing,” the Ruler whispered. “It said there would be people, like the Thinkers, who learn how to travel through time and want to use that capability to prevent the Tyranny from ever forming.”

Matheson laughed. When the Ruler didn’t share in the humor, Matheson leaned forward and said, “Are you serious? As a friend, I have to say you sound like you’re out of your mind. No offense.”

“I know. But it’s not crazy talk. And no, I haven’t lost my mind.” He smiled. “Not yet, anyway.”

“You actually believe the Thinkers can travel back in time?”

“I know they can, or at least I know they will be able to one day. I’ve seen the book.”

The only things Matheson could think to say were, “I don’t believe it,” and “Let me see this book,” and “You still sound crazy,” and so he said nothing, only leaned even further forward, on the very edge of the sofa.

The Ruler took no joy in knowing something that his friend didn’t. Rather, the knowledge made him act even more decrepit, another ten years older.

“I’m not withholding anything from you,” the Ruler told his friend. “I only saw it yesterday. Campbell showed it to me.”

“Campbell?”

The Ruler nodded.

“Campbell?” Matheson said again. “Why does the Fed chairman have it?”

“I’m not sure. From what I gather, it was originally given to Thomas Jefferson, who immediately went on to tell everyone—like the fool he was—about the so-called dangers of tyranny. Ha! He handed it down to someone he trusted, and so on, until someone received it who must have been more concerned with wealth and power than with preserving the foolish ideas the Thinkers try to persuade people of. Eventually, the book fell into the hands of the very bankers that the time traveler was trying to warn people about. There’s some cosmic justice for you. The rest,” the Ruler gave a shrug, “is history.”

Matheson started to open his mouth with a barrage of questions but the Ruler waved him off: “Trust me, the book was real. It was written on some sort of old paper, practically falling apart. But it was written in our modern English. There was no “’twas,” or “forsooth” or anything of the sort. It was antique, almost ancient, but written by somebody from our time. Damn thing even mentioned our secret prisons and our cameras everywhere.”