Chapter 3: After-Work Discussion
The Randalls lived in a split-level ranch house in one of the numerous suburbs that surrounded the human city. The first ten years of the mortgage had been paid strictly on time, with the financial investment company that currently held the deed expecting another thirty years of steady payments to come.
The Randalls were a family of three: father Charles, mother Teri, and little daughter Sara. Both parents were employed and made enough money to put the family comfortably in the upper-middle class tax bracket. In a progressive move, the mother was the primary bread-winner. Her husband was on record as having “no complaints whatsoever about this arrangement”. What he truly meant by these words was up for debate.
On this particular evening, Charles Randall returned home from a “voluntary” “morale-boosting dinner get-together” with his fellow employees that had somehow failed in its stated goal—just like all of the previous ones. He found his wife in her usual position at this time of day: seated at the kitchen island, catching up on the newest Internet memes and celebrity gossip by way of her tablet computer.
Charles gave Teri a perfunctory kiss on the cheek before beginning the job of putting away the remains of the lunch he had made for himself that morning. Teri in turn idly mussed her unmanageable poof of a hairdo without looking up from her screen.
Charles failed to ask his wife about the events of her day, or about the amusing antics of cats and former reality-show contestants. And Teri failed to ask her husband about whatever it was that he did for a living.
Theirs was a relationship based on uncomfortable silences, and normally, that was the way they liked it.
“The drones have been conducting experiments downtown again,” Charles said without warning, completely destroying the silence.
Teri put down her tablet and stared at her husband for several seconds before responding. “What were they doing?” she asked finally.
“Experimenting,” Charles repeated in a matter-of-fact way. “Dropping hallucinogens. For use against our enemies.”
“Huh,” said Teri. She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a few moments as she processed this information. “And did you get caught up in this mass hallucination?”
Charles nodded his head proudly. “Yes, indeed! I hallucinated that I saw Princess Luna.”
“‘Princess Luna’?” Teri asked. “Um, which anime was she from again?”
“Not an anime,” Charles insisted, “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”
Teri nodded. “Oh yes, of course. You watch it often enough.”
“Just as an escape,” Charles said without thinking.
The ever-present sound of dragonfly wings suddenly got a lot louder.
“Not that I have any reason to want to escape from this wonderful country we are living in!” Charles quickly clarified.
The couple stood (and sat) in quiet nervousness until the humming sound finally drifted away to more inviting targets.
“So, what did the others see?” Teri asked. “Your fellow subjects in this experiment.”
“Oh, they all saw Princess Luna,” Charles replied.
“Really?” Teri asked with a raised eyebrow. “So you all just happened to be bronies, gathered around the exact same street corner at the exact same time. What are the odds?”
Charles shook his head. “Actually, that wasn’t the case. Two or three of the people I talked to didn’t even know who she was. But from their descriptions, it had to be Luna.”
Teri sighed. “Charlie, you can’t hallucinate something that has no significance to you. And a hallucinogenic drug will not make everyone affected see the same thing at the same time. I mean, if my company could get away with that, they’d be selling diapers right here instead of being forced to do their business in third-world countries.”
“But you still wouldn’t buy them yourself,” Charles said quietly.
“Are you nuts?!” Teri exclaimed. “Have you seen the post-mort…” She caught herself and took a deep breath before continuing, a hint of resentment in her voice. “I mean, those are products for the lower socio-economic rungs. We can afford better, so we do. It’s good for the economy. And Sara’s going to stop needing to wear those things any day now, just you wait. We’ll find the right therapist, or she’ll finally tell us what’s going on in her nightmares, and she’ll become normal again, just like we always wanted.”
Charles stared at her blankly for a moment before speaking. “Speaking of Sara, where is the little dumpling? I expected to hear something from her when I got home. Screaming, breaking glass…”
The doorbell rang.
“That would be her,” Teri said, getting up, “along with her police escort.”
“What did she do now?” Charles asked with desperation.
“She tried to burn down Children’s Park,” Teri said with a note of exasperation as she made her way to the front door.
“How did she even get across town anyway?” Charles asked, following his wife with an open milk carton in one hand.
“She refuses to say.” Teri opened the door, to see a police officer wearing a pair of data goggles firmly holding the hand of the girl with the torn blue jumper.
Teri knew that the goggles were tracking every microscopic motion of her facial muscles, always watching for the distinctive twitch that indicated that someone was contemplating attacking a police officer. That twitch alone was legal justification for the use of lethal force.
She tried to keep her face very, very still.
“So, what are you going to do, Mom? What are you going to do?” the girl asked with a sneer.
“To your room, young lady,” Teri ordered. “Right to sleep. No supper.”
Sara frowned in disappointment, yanked her hand out of the police officer’s, and marched upstairs as loudly as possible.
“And pleasant dreams!” Teri added, in a hopeful tone that was completely false.
The door upstairs slammed shut.
Teri turned to the police officer. “I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, again with a tone she didn’t mean. From a checkbook, she pulled out a check with at least two more zeroes than was necessary, with a stamp in the corner loudly proclaiming that she voted for President Strait. “I believe this should cover the cost of the damages to the park…and to a certain minor’s criminal record?”
The police officer took the check and tucked it into his breast pocket, all without revealing a hint of emotion. He then turned sharply and returned to his patrol car.
The couple silently returned to the kitchen. After a moment, Charles noticed the milk carton in his hand, decided he didn’t want any after all, and put it away. “Now the weirdest part,” he said, continuing his story as if it had never been interrupted, “was what Princess Luna was doing: putting up posters. None of us looked at them—I mean, they might have been enemy propaganda, and you know the penalty for being caught reading enemy propaganda.”
Teri turned to look at him. “Putting up posters?” she asked. “That sounds familiar.” She tapped her fingers together for a few seconds before picking up her tablet and tapping in a couple of searches. “Ah, here we go—somebody posted a link to an outtake of a news video by mistake on the Bunny-Eared Cats Off-Topic Forum an hour ago instead of an AMV of Boss Fluffykins dancing to ‘Shake That Fat…’.” She stopped at the look her husband was giving her. “Hey, I don’t criticize your pony fixation! Anyway, after I got the link fixed, I decided to do some investigating—the original video wasn’t on the Channel 12 site for some reason, so the powers that be must have decided that it was too unimportant to post. I only watched enough to see that it was about posters and not cute cats before shutting it off, but it’s still in my cache, so here it is.” She shoved her tablet over so that Charles could see it. A video was playing, showing a trio of middle-aged attractive people sitting behind a desk.
“Hello, this is Mary Montell, along with Rick Taylor and Elena Martinez with the weather, and this is a News 12 Update.” For some mysterious reason, the POV of the broadcast was not the camera pointed at the news anchor, but rather the one pointed at the weather lady, who was sitting nervously in place and shuffling the papers before her.
The individual identified as Rick Taylor then began telling the story, again from off camera. “From the weirder side of the news, hundreds of mysterious posters have been spotted downtown between 5th and 11th Streets, and yet no one has admitted to seeing the individual responsible for putting them up.
“The posters claim to offer help in the realm of—get this—dream therapy, especially in resolving the nightmares of children and in fact claiming the ‘magical’ ability to enter dreams and fight imaginary monsters—for a price. The gypsy behind these posters uses an obvious night-based alias and the number of a public telephone booth, neither of which we will provide in the name of protecting the safety of the good citizens of this city.”
“Can you imagine?” the voice of Mary Montell butted in. “Even if this wasn’t an obvious fraud, if this particular psychic actually did possess the power to invade dreams, what an incredible violation of privacy that would be! Is this person getting the child’s permission? What happens if something goes wrong? Who’s going to foot the bill for the inevitable psychiatry sessions from having somebody poking their heads around in your most private space? I mean, can you imagine anyone being that irresponsible?”
Charles had gotten his coat on before Mary Montell had completed her opinion. “It should only take me a half hour to get down there at this time of night. Maybe I can get one of those posters before they’re all thrown away.”
“Good luck!” Teri cried out as the front door closed behind her husband. She stood there in the foyer for several moments, deep in thought.
· · ·
Back on the kitchen counter, the unwatched news video ran on, past the point where it was supposed to stop: “Elena Martinez,” the lone woman who had been on camera the entire time finally spoke, “here with the weather, but first, some interesting tidbits about Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, the supposed final destination for the worst of the worst terrorist enemies of this country.” Behind her, the expected weather map of the city was replaced by a grainy image of a desolate beach with some battered buildings in the distance.
The woman looked to be gathering her courage for a moment before she started speaking again, her words pouring out so rapidly that they were hard to distinguish: “Did you know that the Hispanic population of America is down nearly 8% from a year ago? And the number of people claiming their religion to be Muslim has gone down by nearly 30%. At the same time, nightly flights of dozens of military troop carriers and hundreds of black helicopters from around the country are converging on Guantanamo Bay.
“As these photographs prove, America’s most famous prison for terrorists no longer houses foreign enemies at all, but instead missing members of our own population, people taken without trial or explanation of any kind, besides the obvious supposition that the powers that be would be happier if they didn’t exist. Obviously, given the sheer numbers involved, these undeclared ‘enemies of the State’ are not stopping at Guantanamo, but where do they end up?
“Don’t you see what is going on? First the unwanted, the undesirables, and then those belonging to the wrong political party, and then, who knows? No one is safe!” As she was uttering these last words, Elena Martinez was rushed by dozens of black drones that had broken in through the windows and ceilings. These were equipped with robotic arms in addition to their camera lenses, and several of them had items clutched in their robotic hands. Before she knew it, Elena Martinez was chloroformed, stuffed in a body bag, and dragged off the scene.
A drone that had a pair of large turrets instead of arms slowly lowered itself into the scene, looking straight at the viewer and filling the entire frame. In the reflection in its lens, the recording light of the camera could be seen to be off—or at least appearing to be off. After several long seconds, the drone flew away, and the video ended.