Thought dissidence

After a rather long absence from Fiction Friday I am back with a new take on my Adam and Eve concept for NaNo in November. My apologies - it is long, because there were things that came up that had to go down.

This week's story comes with a warning. It does have adult content in it - so if you're likely to be offended by sex, it possibly not the piece you want to read!

It is 12:09pm on the information bar on the TV screen as I walk into my local. I take my earphones out long enough to order a short black and allow the barrista to scan the back of my hand. He smiles at me, out of well rehearsed and imprinted hospitality but I know for a nanosecond that he wonders when I will stop coming in for my short black.

Coffee is a luxury. The price rises each day as the store of beans slowly but surely depletes. Coffee is not considered an essential food item and is therefore not on the Government’s Agriculture charter. There is no land allocation for coffee though I imagine that there are high officials who have the power and access to bribes to have a few acres assigned to coffee for their own personal use. But we down here on the ground will never see it again. There is no international trade so one day, someone will pay an exorbitant price for the last public cup of Joe and that moment in history will be streamed straight into everyone’s mundane existence; another bastion of civilised society gone.

I have few other things to spend my meagre Government allowance or the savings that I have accumulated since I arrived here, so coffee it is today, tomorrow and with any luck the day after that. There was once a saying, “You can’t take it with you when you go.” Where I am ultimately headed, any amount in a digital ledger will be pointless.

The café continues to thrive even with coffee beyond the reach of most. They still serve food and as a Government affiliated eatery there is rarely an empty table. I squeeze between two men at a counter overlooking the street and slip my earphones into my ears. The unit looks exactly like the latest iPod and I notice both men glance sideways in jealousy at it. Every purchase is obsolete or out of fashion with a few months. The drive to work, earn and purchase is obsessive and socially sanctioned, as is the need to exercise, refine and hone the body. After all, there is nothing else now. Despite global constraints on energy, resources and production we have become the ultimate market society - we exist only to consume.

Slipping the earphones into my ears I scroll through the options, a playlist like no other. Immediately there is a flood of static and it takes a moment to tune into a clear frequency. My coffee comes and I smile at the girl my age who works here from dawn to dust. I know, because I’m here for breakfast, coffee instead of lunch and I stop on the way home for the simple dinner that is Government fare.

She is a drone in every sense of the word. No unique thought has ever escaped for her cerebral cortex while I have been in here. Her mind sprouts Government propaganda, responds in the agreed upon format. She is a glowing example of the third wave of the Government micro chipping programme. It chills me to the core.

As I sip my coffee, I surf the frequencies hoping that I will find someone with a dissident thought. There has been a growing trend in the past month. I’ve been able to collect more names since the last new moon that I have the entire time that I have been here. Something is shifting, something is freeing the minds of the population. Cracks are emerging, thoughts are seeping in, biology is working to triumph over technology.

Towards the end of my coffee I come across a thought. A man’s longing for a woman, the brunette with the short bob who had just ordered a green tea and the standard heavy wheat bread sandwich with hummus, and is walking out the door to take a seat with a colleague out in the sun. It is the briefest of indiscretions, so brief he doesn’t pause for an extra moment to stare after her. He will not have even realised that he’s had it.

There are five more minutes left of my lunch break. I have to be back at my desk at exactly 12:46pm. No one is ever late; it’s been programmed out of us. It is in the hands of the Universe as to whether he will be chosen. He stands just as I do and I follow him out. With speed and a lightness of hand, I drop a lolly wrapper in his pocket as I stride past him, with expert agility in my high heels. I’ll find his identity and apartment number later, if the lolly wrapper makes it home. They often don’t. There is with the simple tracker woven into the plastic. And if it does, I will add him to the other names and addresses on the list I will give Adam.

Adam ….

It’s been almost two weeks since I saw Adam last. The thought of him and what we do together in the shadows of the Neo-Burlesque club makes my chest tighten. My breathe catches in the bottom of my throat and my yoni moistens. I ache for wanting his touch, however brief. But I catch myself and file those feelings away for later, alone in bed, in the dark where the cameras can’t catch me. We may have successfully stolen their prototype thought transistor but their face recognition cameras are sensitive enough to detect shifts of emotion through facial expression. The last thing I want to become is a person of interest.

I push open the imposing glass foyer door of the Djerassi Building, the sole manufacturer of the reproductive micro chip that started it all. I sit down at my desk as the TV screen in the PR department flicks over to 12:46pm.

At nine o’clock every night the lights go out across the city. It is as if some naughty cartoon characters pull out a massive plug and the city is plunged into darkness. There are no candles or torches. There is the dim flickering of the LED television screen from apartment windows, powered by the days solar energy, captured by the massive panels that clad the outside of each of the apartment buildings. But they too go out one by one, until the entire city is cloaked in an un-urban like obisidan, with the only illumination coming from the moon as it rises. It is only then that I dare to venture out.

From my hotwired computer portal I link into the security system of my apartment building, over riding the night locks on my front door and the emergency stairwell. I exit the building through the second floor fire door, lift off the manhole cover at the back of the building and lower myself down into the sewer. The water is cold and slimey, I don’t want to think just what is in it. It’s a kilometre before I arrive at the manhole cover I want and climb the dangerously erroded ladder back to the road. The next twenty metres are the most dangerous. I need to walk down the street in full view of the cameras, hoping that Adam has disabled these few from his end. But I can never be sure.

I walk briskly until I come to the next manhole cover, but this one does not lead into the sewer. Lowering myself back into the subterranean belly of the city, I land softly on the paving. My bare feet are grateful for the cool smooth paving. The city is crisscrossed with convict made tunnels that the Eros Network has been utilising to smuggle the Liberated beyond the city limits, out into the country to a safe community.

The Eros Network originally linked people and kept safe houses for couples to meet. That was before my time though. It was a quiet revolution when the first draconian laws were passed forbidding intimate relationship of any type, when people still remembered and longed for sex, for connection, for love - before the yawning cavern inside was efficiently though inadequately filled with stuff. You can never buy what you are missing – you can’t even get sex or love on the blackmarket, even if you realised that was what you were really missing.

Now Eros liberates men and women from the biological suppression of the reproductive chip. I was one of the first to be liberated. I am the first link in the chain, identifying those who are open to being liberated - those who are having thoughts of a sexual nature. I have only met ever with Adam. The network is simple – you know who comes before and after you. In my case there is only Adam. That protects the network.

Now that we have the stolen Government technology, for the first time ever Eros is one step ahead of the Government. We are using their cutting edge technology against them, saving people who would other wise disappear.

Inside the tunnel I run my fingers over the wall until I hit pay dirt, the torch. It’s another of those commodities that are almost impossible to buy even on the black market. You have to have something of greater value to actually physically exchange for it - a mere torch. And few things command the same price. Who would have thought. A fragment of a memory surfaces of a little boy and a blue torch, an argument? Before I can get a mental hold on the memory it is gone, though I feel it, like the others, each memory is imprinting itself with growing intensity on my actual body. They warned me about this, about the memories, when I was liberated. I think I’m doing OK dealing with them as they surface.

The torch casts a thin shaft of light into the gloom. I marvel at the workmanship in the brickwork and construction of the tunnels, and at the lack of dust in them. I can’t help but run my hand over the bricks and know they are more than 200 years old. I hurry then. Adam will be waiting for me.

Beneath the cellar of the Neo Burlesque there is a trap door and someone has rigged up a simple rope ladder. There is an old plastic milk crate filled with misappropriated clothes – lavish costume pieces, simple sheaths of silk and satin. Tonight I choose a leopard print dress. It doesn’t fit perfectly – they never do. The lycra bunches or falls open in all the wrong places. It is also tailored for someone with a waist and hips. I have neither in the classic sense. There’s no time to change once I’ve pulled it over my head. The smell of sweat and stale sex tells me that I’m not the only one to wear it this week. I fold my office clothes lace up the knee high Doc Marten boots that I know fit me from past trips here.

There has never been time to ask Adam how it is possible that the Neo Burlesque continues to operate. It is the antithesis of everything that the Government stands for. It encourages the obscene, the sexy, celebrates the sensual and beauty of both the male and female form. And then there is what goes on in the shadows. Like coffee I guess, officials have their quirks and someone very high up must still have a penchant for this.

The club is one huge room, an old theatre. On the stage there is a band singing original, unsanctioned material. Two girls, one tiny and the other huge are dressed in bustiers and huge tattered tulle skirts that are short at the front exposing their fishnet stockings, and long at the back in an exaggerated bustle. A tall flamboyant feather is tucked into each of their upswept hair dos. The guitarist is in his usual knee length black trench coat and a top hat. From somewhere deep inside my head I hear a naturist’s voice commenting over the top of the brass section, speaking of the band as though they are exotic birds rather than a mish mash of left overs from Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras … where did that come from?

Before I have time to contemplate the new thought, there is a hand on my arm. It is Adam. We melt into the deep shadows at the perimeter of the theatre. There is a good reason that so much light is magnified to the middle, it creates these safe havens along the wall.

Adam’s mouth is hard on mine, his body pushing me into the cold, broken plaster wall. His hands are on my body, fevered and impatient, as mine are on him. He pulls the dress up to my waist, as I struggle with the button and zipper on his pants. My hands are shaking – again. There is no time for foreplay, for any tenderness or exploration. A chance for us to look each other in the eye, to traverse the histories we see there … for intimacy or love. There is only the physical act now and we are grateful for that.

Adam tears open a condom packet and rolls it over his cock in a single fluid action, then hoists me up onto his thighs. I wonder where he gets them – the condoms, but there’s no more time to think about it. There never seems to be any time to think about anything that matters. He presses me harder into the wall and fumbles for a moment with his erection, trying to get it inside me … and then for a delirious few minutes, we rut and pound our bodies into and against each other. Even with the anticipation and the two week wait, Adam cries out in the hollow of my neck and comes before I’m close to being there. That’s the way it is.

We untangle our bodies; Adam rolls the condom off, ties a knot in it and hides it in his pocket once he’s fastened his Government issue pants back around his waist. A used condom is the worst possible thing to have on your person, yet he doesn’t just drop it on the floor. I pull the dress back down and bend over to extract the list of names and apartment numbers from the inside of my boot. Our fingers linger, entwined for a moment as I pass the list to him.

There are screams as the outside doors of the theatre are beat in.
“Raid!”

Adam grabs my hand and we dash for the stage, racing up the stairs and pushing through the startled musicians, making our way for the backstage dressing rooms. Adam takes the first of the Government’s henchmen in the throat with his fist, crushing the man’s windpipe. I grab for the Tazer as he goes down. There is enough of a gap between the two black clad men for Adam to pull a knife from his belt and fell the second with an expertly thrown knife to the heart. We waste precious seconds stripping both men of their weapons, but there is no alternative. I’m unarmed and Adam only has his knife. I fasten the second man’s belt around my waist and try to make it fit. They’re not meant for women.

We hurry through to the dressing rooms, pulling open the trap door in the toilet in the largest of the dressing rooms, jumping down into the cellar. Adam sets me first down the rope ladder into the tunnels, following me as voices erupt above. And we’re running, hearts pounding in the darkness, my hands clutching at the belt which threatens to fall and trip me up. It’s dark and only Adam’s hand in mine keeps me moving forward. It is a bad time to realise that I have a mortal fear of the dark.

We come to an intersection. We stop and we’re both breathing hard and shallow. I can feel a breeze coming from a different direction. I have no idea how we got here, or where we are. I’ve only ever come the one same way to and from the Neo Burlesque. We are only just ahead of the beams of light behind us, there is not time to falter.
“You go this way Eve. We need to separate.”
I want to say something, but he is gone before I can and I’m all alone in the world - running for my life in the dark.

Fire: dance with me

This Week’s Theme: Start your entry with a fire. The night came fast. It was another element of life beyond the gates that was discordant with his experience of life to date. One moment it was light and the next moment twilight was sliding into night. In the distance he could see a flicker of light and he had a reference to find his way back through the bush to Brigit and the Range Rover. The acrid smoke, laced with sweet eucalyptus bought back a flood of memories. He was a small boy with his father at fire side. Behind was a small tent with sleeping bags, a back pack with a change of spare clothes … his fathers battered hiking boots unlaced at the flap of a door. He could feel the crusty outer of toasted marshmallows and the searing liquid centre in his mouth. Lost in his memories he approached the fire distracted. A drum beat jerked him out of his reverie. Stripped to the waist Brigit walked around the fire. The fire licked the cooling air with great crimson tongues, fuelled by the oil in the gum leaves. In its adolescent fury the fire leapt as high as Brigit’s hips and from his vantage point off in the bush, it looked as though she danced through the flames with her drum. Mesmerised by the dance of the flames, the fluid movement of her lithe body and the steady beat of the drum in her hands he walked a little closer, then sat quietly half behind a rock. The beat of the drum picked up as the fire died down, and the embers appeared, glowing with red intensity. After a time, marked only by the number of stars in the sky above, Brigit put down the drum and picked up a long stick. A moment later both ends ignited. With agility and grace Brigit began to twirl the fire stick. Firstly slowly in large rotations at the front of her body, with both hands holding and moving the stick. She then took the stick in her right hand and began to manipulate the stick between her fingers. The fiery ends blazed circles through the still night air. With awkwardness she moved the stick from her right hand and into her left hand, her upper arm still haphazardly bandaged from the previous night. Adam remained transfixed. The fire made a swooping and hissing sound, as it cut through the air, with increasing speed. Despite her injury Brigit manoeuvred the stick and the fire into ever more intricate patterns and configurations in the dark. She swapped it from one hand to the other, passing it both infront and behind her. Her feet danced small steps to accommodate the twirling and her body seemed elastic in the glow of the fire. She was one with the fire. The serpent tattoo that enclosed her spine appeared alive and slithering upwards towards the base of her skull. He had caught only a fleeting glimpse of it that morning at his house as she had quickly donned her singlet and shirt. Now it seemed as alive as the fire at her feet and in her hands. The fire swept closer and closer to her body, as she wove her body in and out of its grasp. Finally, after time eternal, one end spluttered and died, followed quickly by the other. Brigit dropped to one knee and he could hear her breathing coming hard and fast. “You can come out now Adam,” she panted, rising back up onto two feet. “Fire burns away the crap, the impurities. Fire is the beginning and the end,” she stated simply. He could see the steam rising from her naked chest as he got closer. “The Greeks believed that the element of fire belonged to the God Hades – it belonged in the under world.” “The Christian concept of the fires of hell?” queried Adam. Brigit shrugged her bare shoulders. “When I dance with the fire I no longer have to be cautious, or show restraint – I can be impulsive, temperamental, impulsive and wilful. I forget that this is a 21st version of Hades.” She bent down and pulled on an old V neck jumper. “There are beings called salamanders – elementals beings of fire. They say that the faces you see in the fire are them. Salamanders are Will itself. When I dance I find my will again.” She threw the stick to him. He caught it one handed, feeling her sweat and the heat of the fire still radiating from the metal. “Your turn now.”
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Adam and Eve: The Story so Far

Here is the story to date, including the promised ending....

The screech of the hinges opening on the small door snapped her back into reality. Her body became instantly and instinctively alert, as she waited for the rough grasp of the guards hands on her bruised shoulders. In the sensory deprivation of the visual and auditory abyss surrounding her, the visceral smell of fear and blood was her only navigation point. With the door open again, she smelt it with a terror that allowed her to centre herself in the moment and prepare for what lay ahead. A body was thrust into the tiny room and crumpled at her feet.

The door closed shut with a deafening finality and all was again silent. Her chest heaved in a relief that came on the wave of the adrenalin surge. Tears stung in her eyes but never fell. It was all over in less than fifteen seconds but it seemed like an eternity.

With a nervous hand she reached out to touch the body, warm but barely breathing, crumpled on the floor at her toes. It was a vivid and tangible reminder of what she was here for and she knew it was the first instalment of her torture.
“Is that you Eve?” a voice rasped.

Her stomach lurched at the sound of his voice, but she kept her composure.

“Shhhhh,” she soothed instinctively rather than consciously, running her hand down the cool clammy skin of the face she knew was looking up to her in the darkness.
“I –“
“Shhhh!” she hissed with insistence this time. “They will be listening.”

Stretching her legs that were cramping in the confined space, she adjusted herself to take his head in her lap. She didn’t know why, but it was comforting to have him close to her. From deep within, a saying rose up from the times before Mother.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

A tactile examination of his head and body found no external wounds or signs of torture which left her shuddering. It was known that those who tortured in the name of Mother never left a calling card but now the urban legend was reality. No one ever left the clutches of Mother alive to say whether it was true or not.

“Eve …”
“My name’s not Eve. That was my code name.”
“Someone in your ranks has a sense of humour,” he wheezed.
“I doubt it. You were a last minute substitute.”
“No I wasn’t.”

She withdrew her attention and focused on each vertebrae of her back pressed against the cold hard metal wall. She didn’t want to think what his words meant.

Outside of the unnatural darkness that contained them, she knew that a full and glorious moon burned in the sky above. Mother could subvert and control all that was natural within the human body, she could be the Mother of inhumanity with the power, the propaganda and the technology all at her finger tips – but she couldn’t undermine la luna high in the skies above them. As long as the moon rose in her celestial magnificence each evening all those below were reminded that there was once a natural rhythm of life that was beyond human manipulation.

But it was the moon that had been her undoing. With her rhythms in total harmony with the moon, as she snuck into the Closed City her own biological undercurrents were dragging her in a direction that she had been totally unaware of. The rendezvous had been the only thing in her mind as she had crept but her own natural cycles had a rendezvous of their own. She had forgotten the venomous arguments in the Caves, that the full moon was a dangerous time for any woman to be in the Closed City. It was only now that she understood so completely the implications of this.

She had worn an olfactory scrambler as she crept through the back lanes looking for the theatre and the small door in the rear of the building. The small device acted like a cloak of invisibility that allowed her to walk the street of the Closed City without drawing attention to herself. If no one could detect her own cocktail of pheromones then she was just like any other woman on the streets – hormonally chaste. It was the only protection she had bought with her into the vipers nest. The rest lay before her, hidden within the official precinct.

“Will you tell me your real name?” he asked, his breathing more measured and stable than it had been earlier.
“Does it really matter?”
“It does to me – though it doesn’t matter to them. When they strap the electrodes onto your skull - they’ll know everything then.”

She thought for a moment, remembering the passion and ecstasy that swamped her when he had first touched her in his house. She was already reeling from the extravagance of running water and electricity – and a television. Such luxury!

She remembered the speed and voracity with which they had fallen on each other and within the chaos of discarded clothes on the tattered lino fall, they had quickly consummated the controllable fervour within. The natural state of a woman made her both powerful and weak.

“My name is Brigit,” she answered quietly.
“Brigit,” he repeated. “As in the Celtic Goddess.”
“Who apparently rode into battle with both her lover and husband at her side. Yes, one and the same.”
“You have a husband?”
“No just a lover it seems,” she answered absentmindedly, stroking his damp hair. “All I ever wanted was a husband and a child. A simple but full life.”
“Your mother must have known you were destined for great things to have named you Brigit.”

“From a simple dream I was born a revolutionary, gifted with the name of a woman who refused to submit, for whom the cycles of life are more important than anything else in the world. My rage is at a system that has stolen my dream - destroyed what it means to be a woman and a man. A country that pretends it’s Utopian, that it’s rich and peaceful. No one at the mercy of the uncontrollable ravages of natural ebbs and flows of biology – women don’t bleed, women don’t bare children, men and women who no longer have sex. People just live to consume.”

“Humanity has been stripped of everything that makes it human. I thought my life long dream was a simple desire when I was a teenage – my friend would laugh that I would aspire to something so mundane.”

Her cynical laugh was interrupted by the sound of the security pad being activated and the locking mechanism being accessed from beyond the cell.

The sound bought back the moment, as she stood with Adam, as he punched the security code into a door to give her access to the explosives. The door swung open and there were Mother’s secret police waiting for her.

“You betrayed me,” she screamed as they had seized her by her arm and pressed a sedative into the side of her neck..

The door opened and the audio of protesting steel kicked in for ambience sake. There were no rusting hinges in Mother’s high tech detention centres.

A muscular arm reached in for her.
“You betrayed me Adam,” she spat, as the fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arm. “You betrayed all of us.”
“No I didn’t Brigit. This is just the beginning.”

The air lock of the cell hissed as the door shut. The guards shoved her quickly against the wall beside the door and clamped handcuffs onto her, pulling her arms upwards and outwards, forcing her to bend down. All the time she kept her eyes tightly shut, the fluorescent lighting of the corridor burning her eyes, after the indefinite time inside the darkness of the cell.

She took a gulping breathe of air and tried desperately to centre and ground herself, invoking an old relaxation exercise. In her minds eye she saw three gently glowing orbs, but before she could discipline her mind to draw the orbs together into a line and then down into the one golden glowing orb, she was roughly and awkwardly pulled away from the wall and pushed viciously down the hall.

Her legs, felt like jelly and she fell heavily on her face, as they failed to respond and carry her forwards with the momentum of the push. Blood gushed from a cut in the top of her lip or perhaps it was her nose. She was unsure, too disorientated with her own body to work out what hurt, what was numb and what felt OK enough to work for her..

“Get up!” commanded a voice from behind her.

Before she could attempt to get herself back onto her knees, she was dragged back onto her feet. A small scream escaped her lips as the shoulder joints and the scar tissue on the right, threatened to release as all her weight hung on the triangulation of her bound arms. Her feet touched the ground and the pressure released.

“WALK!”

Placing one tentative foot out she felt the feeling return to her legs. Squinting out her eyes, they began to slowly adjust, until she realised there was nothing to see. Just a long endless corridor of piercing white, punctuated by a door every few metres, that blended in so well it only became apparent as you came to the extact point of it in the wall.

At the end of the corridor she was told to stop, a code was punched into the security pad and she was thrust into a room and told to sit.

“Wait,” the taller of the two guards ordered her, “and don’t move. Whatever you do, do not move.”

She remained seated for what seemed time eternal until she realised that the feeling had gone in her hands. Left with only her thoughts, and a terror that rose in a jaggered chunk up her throat, she surrendered all of the fiery rebellion that had fuelled her for years. This time she had left everyone down.


When she left The Caves she understood the dangers that awaited her within the Gated City. Over the years she had devised a meditation technique in which she would predict, envisage and then overcome all the dangers and obstacles for each assignment before she left the safety of where she was staying. She had learnt the hard way, with her first scrap with danger what would happen if you were not prepared.

She was leaving Brisbane in the days before it had become the Gated City and was heading south for the Coast. Despite her urgency to leave, knowing it was a matter of time before someone from the Government knew she had been there and came searching for her on the open road, she had pulled over for a hitch hiker. She was a young girl, not much younger than herself, with untidy auburn hair and a sunburnt face. Ten kilometres down the road the hitchhiker had pulled a knife on her. In the ensuing struggled the four wheel drive had veered sharply off the road, through the guard rails and down into a culvert before ploughing into the embankment on the other side. Her first instinct at the sight of the knife had been to fight back. It had surprised her as everything until that point in time in her life, had been passive aggressive. But what had surprised her more was the lack of remorse she felt walking away from the body of the young girl in the long grass, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. A huge blood spattered hole in the windscreen on the passenger side gave away the fact that someone else had been in the car.

Brigit’s shoulder ached. Broken in the accident it had been set late by a healer with a little knowledge of bones and never healed properly. Years of yoga, of stretching and building up the muscle had never compensated for the break in judgement that day.The similarities between the hitchhiker and Adam struck her like a blow to the stomach. He was another break with her better judgement, after all these years of being so damn careful.

She had made peace with the fact that circumstances may call for her to detonate the explosives before she herself could leave the building. It had taken a month or more to come to a space within herself where she could unequivocally say she was ready to die. In all the exploration of the possible problems with this assignment had not she seen Adam, or anything like Adam. So firm was her belief in the Sisterhood and their city cousins in the Underground that she didn’t factor in betrayal. Not simply his betrayal of her, but her betrayal of those pinning their hopes on the success of this assignment, betrayal by the weakness of her own flesh.

Disregarding the orders given to her by the guards, she got up off the chair worked her body back through the loop made by her bound arms, until her arms were again in front of her, and her shoulders in a more comfortable position. Doing this engaged her mind and kept her from falling victim to the apathy and desire to just give in that was threatening to overwhelm her. Instead she tapped into the rawness of the anger that was building within her.

She placed her hands on the table and studied the handcuffs. She had never seen a pair of handcuffs, let alone worn a pair. She pushed them back down her arms towards her wrist until they hung like a sloppy masochist’s jewellery. Sliding her wrists out she held them in her hands and wondered what sort of guards cuffed someone’s forearms?

Before she could ponder further, the door slid open and Adam walked in alone.

“You bastard,” she swore, hurling herself towards him, her wrists still loosely cuffs.
“Sit down,” he commanded curtly, pushing her back into the seat she had just launched herself out of. “Have you moved since they put you in here?”
“What’s it to you – traitor!” she spat.
“I’m not a traitor – this was the only way to get us both inside here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s not time to explain now,” concluded Adam, taking the cuffs off Brigit quickly. “Get out the way.”

Brigit jumped to her feet as Adam pushed the table across the room, knocking over the chair that she’d just been sitting on. He climbed onto it and reached up to what looked to be a barely detectable manhole in the roof.
“What about the Genesis Network?” Brigit asked, looking up at Adam fumbling with what looked to be an old fashioned allen key.

Adam squatted down to look her directly in the eye.
“I am the Genesis Network,” he stated bluntly. “There are no others. Just me. Now tell me – how long before you moved when you were in here.”
“I don’t know – five minutes, ten minutes. I can’t really tell. Aren’t there Genesis people here?”
“No – just a couple of sympathisers, but they can only help out in minute ways, like with those cuffs. There will be more time later to explain everything, I promise Brigit.”

He stood again and began working on opening the manhole with key.
“And the bomb – the explosives. Where are they?”
The manhole unlocked and Adam slid it to one side.
“We’re going up.”

She watched him pull himself up into the manhole and then offer a hand to help her up too. Ignoring the hand and the pain in her shoulder, she deftly got up into the airconditioning ducts. Adam pulled from his pocket a tiny disc in a plastic protective cover.

“This is the bomb. Binary Override Mechanism.”
“And the second ‘b’?”
“This is the second version of it.”
“Of course!”
“We need to make it through to the central computing junction and insert this in the operating system.”
“It’s that easy?”
Adam raised his eyebrows at her.
“It’s that easy to topple Mother?”

“I wish it was Brigit – this will give us 24 hours grace. It will act like a virus in the system, to disrupt the functioning of the chips. We then have to gather up the 11 people that I have earmarked for the Genesis Network, and get out of the Gated City before we’re discovered.”
“What if they don’t want to go?”
“We’ll have to use the best of our persuasion to get them out of here. We’re wasting time, let’s go,” he urged and began crawling quickly down the duct.

Interstate Love Song

This Week’s Theme: Tell the story of a physical scar a characater has. For those of you wishing to know the story to date (including the long promised ending to the first two installments) see above post. Leavin on a southern train Only yesterday you lied, Promises of what I seemed to be Only watched the time go by, All of these things you said to me. ‘Interstate Love Song’ Stone Temple Pilots Adam sat uncomfortably in the passenger seat. He found stretching each leg slowly and then shifting his weight in the tattered seat alleviated the worst of his physical discomfort. He tried not to look directly out the mottled windscreen. The road now stretched out in an unnerving foreverness in front of them. This was the first time he had seen what was really beyond the Gated City. Looking out the window, what lay to either side of the damaged road was vast and inhospitable. He still felt confused and confronted by it all – not just the desolation but the destruction. The gentle tangerine blush on the horizon had turned the inky darkness dirty, and he’d seen it all for the first time a few hours earlier. Brigit had explained it all to him simply, as the dawn passed and heat of the early morning warmed up the cab of the four wheel drive. Mother had lured all those living in the country to the city with propaganda. The entire rural population had arrived in the metropolises over the space of a few years, willing to assist in the construction effort to secure borders of the newly formed Economic Federal of Australia. The efforts were in return for an implant – the chip that promised to stop the aging process. After the Cleansing there was no need for what was left out in the country. Less than ten percent of the entire population was left, yet Mother had called out the Airforce and they had bombed the countryside into nothingness. He had never been in a car until now, much less driven one, which left him stuck as passenger for the entire trip. Brigit kept the music going continuously on the stereo so there was nothing to do but look out the window. He glanced over at her, clenching the wheel between her long fingers. The blood on the makeshift bandage around her upper arm was drying and turning the same colour as the parched ground outside. The wound troubled him. Not just the fact that she had taken the hit for him, but the scar that he had found on the inside of her arm as he had bandaged it. When the sun was high in the sky Brigit finally slowed as they approached a tiny town. She turned off the main highway and into a side street, pulling up alongside a children’s part. “Breakfast stop,” she stated, pulling on the handbrake with her good arm. The dry Rice Bubbles did little to quell the aching in his stomach but he dared not ask if there was more. This was no land of milk and honey. He had left that far behind him. “How’s you’re arm?” he asked, looking down at the fading graffiti on the picnic table. “It’ll be fine. I’ve got some antibiotics in the back and some herbs as well. Just another scar really – it just hasn’t pretended to heal yet.” Adam picked at the flaking green paint, trying to decide if he should ask her about the scar. “What’s on your mind Adam?” Brigit asked, as she took the small billy off the butane cooker. “There can’t be anything kept between us now. It’s just the two of us out here. I need to know that I can trust you.” “Because I’m brooding you can assume I’m suspicious. Shit you’ve got a hide Brigit,” he stormed, the morning’s anxiety erupting into anger. “I was thinking about the scar on the inside of your arm.” “Would it have made any difference if you had have known before hand?” He stood and walked away, wondering if it really would have made a difference if he had known the myth of Eve was flawed. As he walked, further and further from where Brigit stood staring after him, the lyrics of a song from the car trip came back to him. Too much walkin', shoes worn thin too much trippin' and my soul's worn thin time to catch a ride it leaves today, her name is what it means to much walkin', shoe's worn thin Somewhere in this, the myth of Eve and the reality of Brigit collided. It was bigger than a name, bigger than legend. Only the here and now mattered. If Brigit had gone to the Gated City with the others from the country and if she had once had an implant, that was her personal story, it was none of his business. Brigit was not the Eve - no woman could be. He turned and walked back. “You saw the scar on my arm when you patched me up last night, didn’t you?” she said quietly, as he sat back down opposite her. “It’s your business.” “It’s yours too now.” “How did you get it?” he finally asked, when she failed to disclose anything else. “I rebelled like all teenagers did. Fed up with being holed up in the hills, I left and went to Brisbane – in the days before it became the Gated City. I couldn’t believe that it was all really that bad – even if my own mother had died because of it. I was rash and immature. So I showed up with a false ID that I had procured on the trip there, signed in for an implant and a Government job.” “It never really worked on me though. My cycles somehow continued and my dreams remained vividly prophetic. The only thing was the numbing of my thoughts and action during the day. I felt my uniqueness ebb away and I started to conform, stopped questioning, but I only knew it happening at a deeper intuitive level.” “I woke up one night at bathroom mirror with a bloodied razorblade in one hand and the chip implant in my other. I had cut it out in my sleep. For two weeks I kept up the charade of going to work as I hacked into areas of the information system I wasn’t meant to go. Then I left.” Overhead a cockatoo squawked shrilling and flew overhead. Brigit took a long drink of the cooled tea and stared at Adam who was again picking the paint off the table. “A myth creates itself, takes on a life of its own Adam. I make the best of what life has thrown up. Myths keep my heart from breaking in the middle of the night too."
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Fiction Friday: Adam and Eve II

This Week’s Theme: Describe your character's first brush with danger I was honestly in two minds as to whether or not I should continue on with last week's story, mainly because I'd made a promise to myself to write 52 unique short stories across the year - and this one seemed to be taking a life of its own beyond the boundaries of a short story (thank you all who breathed life into it as an extended piece with your encouragement!) Undecided I left it up to chance to see what the prompt for this week was ... so here we pick up directly from last week. The air lock of the cell hissed as the door shut. The guards shoved her quickly against the wall beside the door and clamped handcuffs onto her, pulling her arms upwards and outwards, forcing her to bend down. All the time she kept her eyes tightly shut, the fluorescent lighting of the corridor burning her eyes, after the indefinite time inside the darkness of the cell. She took a gulping breathe of air and tried desperately to centre and ground herself, invoking an old relaxation exercise. In her minds eye she saw three gently glowing orbs, but before she could discipline her mind to draw the orbs together into a line and then down into the one golden glowing orb, she was roughly and awkwardly pulled away from the wall and pushed viciously down the hall. Her legs, felt like jelly and she fell heavily on her face, as they failed to respond and carry her forwards with the momentum of the push. Blood gushed from a cut in the top of her lip or perhaps it was her nose. She was unsure, too disorientated with her own body to work out what hurt, what was numb and what felt OK enough to work for her.. “Get up!” commanded a voice from behind her. Before she could attempt to get herself back onto her knees, she was dragged back onto her feet. A small scream escaped her lips as the shoulder joints and the scar tissue on the right, threatened to release as all her weight hung on the triangulation of her bound arms. Her feet touched the ground and the pressure released. “WALK!” Placing one tentative foot out she felt the feeling return to her legs. Squinting out her eyes, they began to slowly adjust, until she realised there was nothing to see. Just a long endless corridor of piercing white, punctuated by a door every few metres, that blended in so well it only became apparent as you came to the extact point of it in the wall. At the end of the corridor she was told to stop, a code was punched into the security pad and she was thrust into a room and told to sit. “Wait,” the taller of the two guards ordered her, “and don’t move. Whatever you do, do not move.” She remained seated for what seemed time eternal until she realised that the feeling had gone in her hands. Left with only her thoughts, and a terror that rose in a jaggered chunk up her throat, she surrendered all of the fiery rebellion that had fuelled her for years. This time she had left everyone down. When she left The Caves she understood the dangers that awaited her within the Gated City. Over the years she had devised a meditation technique in which she would predict, envisage and then overcome all the dangers and obstacles for each assignment before she left the safety of where she was staying - that way she was never caught unaware. She had learnt the hard way, with her first scrap with danger what would happen if you were not prepared. She was leaving Brisbane in the days before it had become the Gated City and was heading south for the Coast. Despite her urgency to leave, knowing it was a matter of time before someone from the Government knew she had been there and came searching for her on the open road, she had pulled over for a hitch hiker. She was a young girl, not much younger than herself, with untidy auburn hair and a sunburnt face. Ten kilometres down the road the hitchhiker had pulled a knife on her. In the ensuing struggled the four wheel drive had veered sharply off the road, through the guard rails and down into a culvert before ploughing into the embankment on the other side. Her first instinct at the sight of the knife had been to fight back. It had surprised her as everything until that point in time in her life, had been passive aggressive, she had never had FIGHT. But what had surprised her more was the lack of remorse she felt walking away from the body of the young girl in the long grass, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. A huge blood spattered hole in the windscreen on the passenger side gave away the fact that someone else had been in the car. Brigit’s shoulder ached. Broken in the accident it had been set late by a healer with only a little knowledge of bones and never healed properly. Years of yoga, of stretching and building up the muscle had never compensated for the break in judgement and bones that day.The similarities between the hitchhiker and Adam struck her like a blow to the stomach. He was another break with her better judgement, after all these years of being so damn careful. After experiencing unbridled freedom from Mother for most of her adult life - here she was caged by enemy. Something she could never make peace with. She had made peace with the fact that circumstances may call for her to detonate the explosives before she herself could leave the building. It had taken a month or more to come to a space within herself where she could unequivocally say she was ready to die,if she was call to sacrifice her own life. In all the exploration of the possible problems with this assignment she had never seen Adam, or anything like Adam. So firm was her belief in the Sisterhood and their city cousins in the Underground that she didn’t factor in betrayal. Not simply his betrayal of her, but her betrayal of those pinning their hopes on the success of this assignment, betrayal by the weakness of her own flesh. Disregarding the orders given to her by the guards, she got up off the chair worked her body back through the loop made by her bound arms, until her arms were again in front of her, and her shoulders in a more comfortable position. Doing this engaged her mind and kept her from falling victim to the apathy and desire to just give in that was threatening to overwhelm her. Instead she tapped into the rawness of the anger that was building within her. She placed her hands on the table and studied the handcuffs. She had never seen a pair of handcuffs, let alone worn a pair. She pushed them back down her arms towards her wrist until they hung like a sloppy masochist’s jewellery. Sliding her wrists out she held them in her hands and wondered what sort of guards cuffed someone’s forearms? Before she could ponder further, the door slid open and Adam walked in alone.
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