We Have Silver Bullets with Your Names On Them!

SIMON'S FREEDOM
by Matt Mongrain

     A harsh rapping, metal on metal, awakened GX53-R suddenly. He woke up with a start, from an uneasy sort of sleep; he never really slept in this place, only rested his eyes to try to forget. Sleeping accomplished nothing, because the guards would always be impatient with the people who didn’t answer their calls rapidly, and the people the guards got impatient with were generally not heard from for a little while, or else they were beaten, right on the spot.

     GX53-R snapped open his eyelids, and saw one of the guards, faceless and dark, standing outside of the bars. “It’s time,” said the gray figure in a raspy voice, which then stood erect and walked to the next cell rapidly, spider-like in its movements. Their rooms were small, and all were in terrible condition; when GX53-R had arrived, they hadn’t even cleaned out the body of the boy who’d starved to death before him. He looked at his own hands, and he saw the bones protruding from the joints like skulls, staring at him with a rabid hatred. He saw the tattoo on his hand, as well: a bar code and the characters that formed his name under it. He stood up, stretched his small and wiry frame, and walked towards the door that the guard slid open moments before.

     He walked slowly, and weakly; the little foodstuff he had been given the night before had been scarcely enough to see him through to the morning, let alone serve him as sustenance. The other children were no better off, though, shuffling and shambling through the gray brick hallways like zombies. One of them, oddly, the one right in front of GX53-R, didn’t seem to have the same look of hunger about him, the same lack of energy; he walked with a determined step, jovial and content. Since GX53-R didn’t recognize this one, he assumed that the child was new; there was no time to pity him.

     After what seemed like an eternity walking, they reached the Video Room; here they would be taught about all of the important subjects, like Patriotism and the Government. The rows of cold, steel chairs seemed to reach out to the entering children, beckoning them to sit, asking them to. GX53-R obligingly took a seat, and the new child took a seat right next and promptly began to balance his short legs in the void.

     “Hello,” said the man-child. “My name is Simon. What’s yours?”

     “Shh,” urged GX53-R, placing a bony finger across his lips for added effect. “You mustn’t talk, or the guards will come again.”

     “Why will they? Have we misbehaved?”
     “Yes, we all have. Now be quiet, and listen to the film; we’re to learn something today about Terrorism that will be on the final exam, I’m sure of it.”

     Simon accepted this with great difficulty; he frowned queerly at GX53-R, and turned to face the video screen. It seemed to him to take up the entirety of the wall, and no matter how he positioned itself the distance was always uncomfortable. The projector reel clicked and whirred to life, surprising and delighting him; he had been unable to watch films as a child. The large word “TERRORISM” appeared on the screen, massive, and he read it slowly and with much difficulty.

     The pictures were rapid, and the children found it all very difficult to understand; a series of images of violence were presented, and the children were all disgusted with the anti-Patriotic actions of the onscreen terrorists, all except for Simon; he just wondered what all the fuss was about, and why the dark-skinned fellows were always being so destructive towards the white-skinned fellows. His own skin, and that of all the other children, was white: his less so than the others, who were pale and gaunt.

     “Why are we watching this film?” demanded Simon aloud whilst a particularly violent photograph was being displayed onscreen. “It’s making my stomach turn.”
     Pain.

     White fire coursed through Simon’s body, and he trembled with mouth gaping, unable to scream. He gripped the solid armrests of his chair tightly, until his fingers bled; his brain felt like it was melting, changing, burning… he couldn’t scream, couldn’t scream, but it burned so, seared his flesh… after a dozen seconds, the pain stopped as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun, and he slumped forward in his chair, panting, the tears dripping from his eyes to the concrete floor. GX53-R didn’t look his way; his pity might merit him the same fate, so he just stared at the screen, obedient.

     When the film was over, they were led by the No-Face guards to another room, this one with tables, and two pills set in front of every seat. All of the children sat down, and obediently swallowed the pills; Simon eyed them suspiciously first.

     “What are these pills?” he asked of GX53-R, who was sitting directly across the table. “I don’t like the look of them.”

     “One of them is nutrients for our proper growth, and the other is to keep us from resisting; it is a depressant,” chimed GX53-R, citing the response that had been programmed into him through months of repetition. Simon raised an eyebrow.

     “What is your name?”

     “GX53-R.”

     “That’s an odd name for a boy,” said Simon, nonchalantly tossing the pills into his mouth and chewing them. They had the taste of strong vitamin, and went down his throat with difficulty.

     “It’s the name they have given me. You have one, also; it would be best if you learnt it.”

     Simon stared at his hand, where a bar code and series of characters were set. “GX44-S,” he read aloud, beaming with pride. “My father taught me to read when I was young… he told me that if I learnt to read, I would surely become President one day!” He stared curiously at the numbers for a while more. “What do the numbers mean?”

     “You’re in training station G, and in block X… that’s the first two,” said GX53-R, pointing at the numbers, with a great eagerness to teach. “44 is the number of your cell, and the S means you’re going to be trained as a Marine.”

     “Trained? What do you mean?”

     “We’re in a facility for--”

     He was cut off by a booming voice on the speaker-phone. “All students will return to their cells for a one-minute bath break, and will then proceed to the gymnasium for weight and zero-gravity training. The cafeteria doors will open in three… two… one…”

     All of the doors slid open simultaneously, chiming eerily in the vast, echoing expanse of the room. The two-hundred and fifty children all simultaneously stood up, and walked towards the door to their hallway single-file. Simon was bewildered; he didn’t know what he was to do, so he followed GX53-R to a dimly lit gray hall.

     “What are we doing?” he queried inquisitively. “Why are we all going back so quickly?”

     “We’ve only a minute to clean up and do our business,” said GX53-R. “You shouldn’t ask that many questions, else the guards will find you, you know.”

     “Why do the guards want to hurt us so much?”

     “You talk too much. It’s because we are being trained to be soldiers.”

     “Soldiers?”

     GX53-R cleaned his face with the brown and foul water that poured from the taps in his cell, but Simon did nothing; only stood, waiting, afraid. After no time at all, the No-Faces returned and slid open the doors. In a mechanized frenzy, the children swarmed into the hall, going towards the gymnasium. All of them lined up against the walls, like criminals on a shooting range; Simon did like the others, and stood as straight as he could to impress the guards.

     A No-Face was walking from one end of the line to the other, making sure all of the trainees were present. He asked each to speak his name, and checked something on his pad of paper. GX53-R was nervous, like he always was during the Inspection; once, the guards had found that his face was dirty, and locked him in the isolation room for a week. I deserved it, reasoned GX53-R. I am a terrible child, but I will become a Gunner and serve my nation to my fullest.

     The guard approached Simon, looked him up and down through the black facemask. “Name,” he said, holding up the notepad.

     “Simon,” said the boy, grinning and eager to please.

     Pain. The white fire returned, immobilizing Simon, paralyzing him against the wall. When it subsided, the guard repeated: “Name.”

     “GX44-S,” replied Simon through teary eyes, barely able to read or remember his branded code-name.

     The No-Face turned to his companion and said, “All clear. Trainees, begin your work.” All of the children but GX44-S scampered to the weights and anti-gravity chambers that littered the gymnasium; he stood confused and bewildered, and very uncomfortable in the presence of the guards. A pink page was thrust into GX44-S’s hands. “Here is your training program,” said the No-Face, dispassionately. “You will be expected to follow it, to the letter. You will have a physical reevaluation in one month’s time, and if you fail to meet our standards, you will be severely punished. Go.”

     Simon ran, terrified, to the first machine on his list, and began to push and pull at it as was written on his page, honing his young muscles to perfection. GX53-R was nowhere near, and the child felt disoriented and alone without his friend to guide him through this strange new world.

     After many long, painful hours of physical labor, the children were summoned once again to the cafeteria, where the same two pills awaited at the prearranged seats. Simon swallowed his apprehensively, especially the one GX53-R had identified as the tranquilizer.

     “Why are we being trained as soldiers?” asked Simon of his nearby friend. “We are all children, and only men can fight in wars.”

     “The Government pays in cash for trainees, child,” hissed a No-Face behind him, jabbing Simon in the back with the butt of his rifle. “Your poor families accepted readily to give a child in exchange for survival. We usually don’t take them as old as you, boy… consider yourself lucky you even met your parents.”

     He looked at GX53-R with a raised eyebrow, who only nodded solemnly and didn’t look at Simon for the rest of the day. Simon knew he was poor and that the Government Bill Collectors were coming to his house more often to usual, and screaming at his mother and threatening her; but he also remembered the time he spent playing outside, and it saddened him that most of the other souls in this prison had never tasted such freedom.

“Doesn’t it make you angry that you’ll never meet your parents?” asked Simon while he and GX53-R were getting undressed for bed. This was the first time Simon would have to wear the Facility’s uniform, and he didn’t much care for it; its gray fabric stuck to him like fly-paper, and he was startled to find that his old clothes were lit on fire as soon as they touched the ground by a nearby guard.

“I don’t know,” replied GX53-R. “I don’t think about it much. But they made the right decision. Now I will be able to serve my Government during their Great War, and I will be a hero. Everyone will remember the name of GX53-R.” It never occurred to him that his name was inscribed but once in the Government’s records, and that they had given him that name in the goal of anonymity in the first place; all the children destined to be heroes were bred in a different, harsher facility, and were assigned human-sounding names, not the matriculation numbers better suited to robots than young boys. But GX53-R genuinely believed he would grow to be a great hero, and it was the only thing that kept him from fasting like the boy before Simon had done. “That’s how they all went, starving,” he said aloud.

“What?”

“The boy before you starved himself to end it.”

     Simon was startled; why would a person do such a thing? “Why?”

     “The pain was too much for him.”

     Simon’s body tingled with remembered agony; his nerves snapped to attention. “How do they make us hurt when we disobey them?”

     “There are computer chips planted inside us, under our bar code.”

     Simon sat down on his hard cot, and slept uneasily; dreams of freedom haunted him persistently, and he was unable to shake their spectre come morning. When he wouldn’t wake up at the first rapping at his cell bars, the white fire woke him up quickly enough. That day was the same as the day before, except the film was on Patriotism; he found that the films ran in a cycle, and many of them were identical. A month later, he was always in his prison; he had almost forgotten what a free life felt like, and was beginning to grow complacent, like his fellow trainees already were. His name, too, faded from memory; he was no longer Simon, but GX44-S, future Marine and Trainee at Facility G.

     One day, though, that complacency began to fade.

     “I didn’t do it,” GX44-S said stubbornly. “I couldn’t have.” 

     He was in the office of the Chief, as the No-Faces referred to him; the man ran Facility G, but GX44-S saw a flicker of compassion in him.

     “We have video-tapes,” asserted the Chief. “You have seen them. It certainly looks like you.”

     “Let me see them again, I want to see them again. This can’t be right.”

     The Chief smiled a big, metallic smile, and leaned forward in his chair, crossing his arms upon his great, polished wood desk. “Your punishment will be much less severe if you just admit to it, my boy,” he said.

     “But it wasn’t me.”

     The Chief sighed. “You leave me no choice, then.” He only turned to the No-Faces in his room and, without a word, gave some hand signals. They dragged GX44-S outside, and into a small, cold, steel room; there, they beat him savagely. The beating was worse, even, than the white fire – with the white fire, there was at least a sort of disconnected and cold pain, like it was nothing personal; but through the blows, Simon could feel the inherent hatred that the No-Faces bore for him and the other children, and the scars lasted much longer than the bruises.

     The pieces of his broken spirit were reassembled, then, and a new and more pronounced longing for freedom filled him as he was thrown back into his small cell to recover. When he went to his assigned space in the cafeteria soon after, he found two blue depressant pills and no green nutrients. He looked at them, and sighed; he knew that through them was a path of no turning back, a path of calm obedience, and that if he didn’t resist now he’d never have the heart to resist again.

     He hadn’t been the one who’d committed the crime, if you could call it that; all he was accused of was staring at a No-Face. He deserved justice. I deserve justice.

     He cupped the two capsules in his hand, and made it appear to the cameras that he swallowed them; but he allowed them to fall into his shirtsleeve, and there they stayed. GX44-S forced a weak smile for the cameras, and they seemed to shirk from him, content with his response. Without the depressants to weaken him, he felt his strength return, the vigor of youth; despite the hunger that plagued him and his companions, he felt stronger than ever before, strong enough to take down all the No-Faces in his way, or at least wring one of their sidearms from them… take out two or three of the guards, make it to the exit. He saw the hills outside from his high cell-window; they weren’t green, but a toxic yellow, and yet they were still far more inviting than the dank, putrid prison.

     He would resist.

     But not yet. He would continue to ignore his blue pills, and would train harder than ever at his gymnasium sessions. His resolve grew, and he enjoyed watching the twin blue capsules swirl in his toilet when they were allowed to return to their cells.

     When came the time for his monthly revue, the guards found that GX44-S was making exceptional progress, and a small golden star was placed on his datasheet. The golden star meant that he was growing too rapidly, and that the ration of depressants should be doubled to quell any notion of rebellion.

     The seed had already been planted, and Simon continued to ignore the blue pills. It was time to put his plan into action.

     He watched as the No-Face in the cafeteria walked behind them. Simon’s arms were gaining in girth rapidly, as were those of his Marine companions, but he didn’t tell anyone about them. The Videos explained very clearly that the punishment for rebellion was worse than Hell itself, that God hated mutineers and banished them with all His forgiving heart.

     He spun from his seat, and leapt at the legs of one of the guards, toppling him to the ground, gave the No-Face a solid two kicks to the ribs, and felt great satisfaction in doing so. The children leapt to their feet in a melancholy chorus of footsteps and cries, and the guards fumbled for their remote-controls to administer the white fire, stop the rebellion and make it a non-issue to the malleable children.

     Simon tore the sidearm from its holster, and the knife from its sheath; with the pistol, he shot himself through the right hand. It hurt, it stung very much; the nature of the wound, though, caused the blood loss to be minimal, and his extensive endurance training caused the pain to be diminished. He lost none of his resolve.

     The guards stabbed frantically at their remote-controls, and their movements became more and more shocked as they realized they held no sway over the rampant child. Simon grasped the fallen guard by the neck, just like in the Terrorism video, and pressed the blade of the knife sharply to the No-Face’s throat. His brothers-in-arms raised their pistols at him simultaneously, and aimed them at his head.

     “Stop!” cried Simon at the top of his lungs. “I will kill him, and all of you, if you don’t lower your guns.” To his surprise, the guards did comply; it was not because of his actions, though, but because the Chief had just walked in and wore the biggest, most resplendent smile ever. He moved his girth with effort, and his short legs seemed unable to sustain the excess above them for long; he predictably sat down at one of the tables.

     “Come on now, my boy,” he said with a smirk. “You mustn’t resort to violence, oh no. We can work something out.”

     “If I let him go, you’ll just have me beaten again!” he spat through clenched teeth. “You will give me freedom, or I will kill you and your companions.”

     The Chief’s fat body quivered, and a look of controlled terror crossed his face and stayed there at the prospect of being killed. “Th-that won’t be, be… necessary. You can leave this facility if you wish.”

     Simon frowned; that was too easy. That couldn’t have been sincere. In order to make his menace more threatening, he pulled at the head of the No-Face, to make the creature squirm.

     To his surprise, the face slid right off; it was a mask. Under it was the head of a man; clean-cut, young, and attractive, with long brown hair flowing down to his neck. The face radiated an innocence, a purity; it was so white. They were men, all of them.

     “P-please don’t kill me,” stammered the young man, at the mercy of Simon’s knife. “I have a w-wife, and children… three boys, don’t kill me, please, for the love of God…” His voice trailed off into sobbing tears, and a great wave of sympathy washed over Simon’s body. He lowered his knife, and allowed the man to fall to the ground; with him Simon fell to his knees, and leaned over, ashamed.

     The Chief stood. “Now!” he yelled, pointing at Simon with an angry fist.

     Simon’s head shot up like a rocket, and he managed to get a few shots in; a dozen of the army of No-Faces that poured into the cafeteria fell limp to the floor at the searing blaze of his pistol. But there were too many – so many – too many to overcome alone. Their shots rang, echoing, through the cafeteria, and their marksmanship was superb; within efficient seconds, Simon fell.

     His body was carted out, and thrown from a cliff into the roaring ocean, only too happy to claim him. It sunk happily into the folds of the water, free at last. Simon had obtained his freedom, though not in the way that he had desired; his soul, at last, was free, but his body was not.

     GX53-R was soon elevated to the status of near-god within Facility G, being one of the few people to have known Simon more closely than GX44-S. GX53-R had suspected something for a while – Simon had regained his power, and his blue pills were never chewed as was his custom, but only swallowed. He saw what one child was able to do without taking the blue pills… and he encouraged all of the other children to do the same.

     Despite the stringent security measures in place to prevent this very sort of thing from happening, word spread quickly inside the prison – whispers in dark corners, code-names being flung across the gymnasium. After Simon’s attack, they had doubled the depressant dose for every child in the facility, and every single one of the pills went into the sewer.

     Eventually, once the guards and the Chief had calmed down, GX53-R led a massive protest within the prison; though many of the children were lost, more still survived, and took over the facility. Word of this mutiny spread to all of the other facilities, one by one, and soon all were beginning plans of upheaval. A revolution had begun; under the banner of Simon’s Men, GX53-R would finally become the hero he should have been.

[ this page and all media therein is copyright © 2002 by matt mongrain. all rights reserved. reproduction prohibited without express, written permission of the author. ]