“I’m alive today because I ran from unwinding, and my selfishness cost these, and many others, their lives. My name is Risa Ward, AWOL Unwind, and now I must live knowing how many innocent people I’ve killed.”
—Sponsored by Citizens for AWOL Justice
38 - Hayden
Hayden stares at the computer screen, trying to believe Risa’s “public service announcement” is some kind of sick joke, but he knows it’s not. He wants to be furious at Tad, the busy little net-raker who brought it to his attention, but he knows it’s not the kid’s fault.
“What do we do now?” Tad asks.
Hayden looks around the ComBom. The eight kids on communications duty all look at him as if he can make the video go away.
“She’s a goddamn traitor!” Esme shouts.
“Shut up!” Hayden yells. “Just shut up, let me think.” He tries to come up with alternate explanations. Maybe it’s not real—just a digital image. Maybe it’s a trick designed to demoralize them . . . but the truth screams louder than any conjecture. Risa is publicly speaking in favor of unwinding. She’s gone to the other side.
“Connor can’t know about this,” Hayden says.
Tad shakes his head doubtfully. “But it’s been on TV, and trending over the net since this morning. It’s not just one, either. She made a whole bunch of public service announcements—and there’s an interview, too.”
Hayden paces the cramped space of the plane, trying to pull together a coherent thought. “Okay,” he says, forcing himself to calm down. “Okay . . . All the computers with web access are here in the ComBom and the library, right? And the Rec Jet TVs all get their feed directly from here.”
“Yeah . . .”
“So, can we route everything through facial recognition software before it goes out and scramble it every time she turns up? Do we have a program that can do that?”
No one answers for a few seconds; then Jeevan speaks up. “We have tons of old military security programs, there’s got to be facial recognition stuff in there. I’ll bet I can patch something together.”
“Do it, Jeeves.” Then he turns to Tad. “Cut the feeds to the Rec Jet and library until it’s done. No incoming broadcasts or web connections at all. We’ll tell everyone the satellite is out, or an armadillo mated with the dish, or whatever. Got it?” Agreement all around. “And if any one of you breathes a word of this to anyone, I will personally make sure you spend the next few years of your life shoveling crap out of the latrines. The Risa-bomb stays in the ComBom, comprende?”
Again total agreement—but Tad isn’t quite ready to let it go. “Hayden, there was something about it I don’t know if you noticed. Did you see how she—”
“No, I didn’t!” says Hayden, shutting him down. “I didn’t see a thing. And neither did you.”
39 - Connor
The man with Proactive Citizenry said that unwinding was at the core of the country’s way of life.
It sticks in Connor’s gut just as it did in Trace’s. Connor knows that things haven’t always been the way they are now—but when the world’s been one way for your entire life, it’s hard to imagine it being any different. Years ago, before he was even of unwinding age, Connor got bronchitis, and it just kept coming back. There was actually talk about getting him new lungs, but the problem cleared up. He remembers feeling so sick for so long, after a while he had forgotten what being well even felt like.
Could it be that way for an entire society?
Does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can’t remember being well? What if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?
Connor makes the time to go to the library jet to do some research, but the computers are off-line, so he goes straight to Hayden.
“You’re telling me everything’s down?” he asks Hayden.
Hayden hesitates before answering. “Why? What do you need?” He almost seems suspicious, which is not like him.
“I need to look something up,” Connor tells him.
“Can it wait?”
“It can, but I can’t.”
Hayden sighs. “Okay, I can get you online in the ComBom—on the condition that you let me do the surfing.”
“What, are you afraid I’ll break the web?”
“Just humor me, okay? We’ve had a lot of computer issues, and I’m very protective of the equipment.”
“Fine, let’s just do this before I get dragged off to deal with someone’s idea of an emergency.”
The kids in the ComBom are noticeably stressed as soon as they see Connor. He had no idea he inspires that level of fear. “Take it easy,” he says. “No one’s in trouble.” And then he adds, “Yet.”
“Take ten,” Hayden tells them, and the kids file out and down the stairs, happy to be freed, at least temporarily, from their stations.
Hayden sits down with Connor, who pulls out the slip of paper Trace gave him. “Do a search on this name.”
Hayden types in “Janson Rheinschild,” but the results are not promising.
“Hmm . . . There’s a Jordan Rheinschild, an accountant in Portland. Jared Rheinschild—looks like he’s a fourth grader who won some art contest in Oklahoma. . . .”
“No Janson?”
“A few J. Rheinschilds,” offers Hayden. He checks them out. One’s a mother with a low-hit blog about her kids; another’s a plumber. Not a single one seems to be the kind of person who would have a bronze statue erected to them, then destroyed.
“So who is he?”
“When I find out, I’ll let you know.”
Hayden swivels his chair to face Connor. “Is that all you were looking for?”
Then Connor remembers something. Didn’t the Admiral talk about events leading to “our twisted way of life” too? What were those things he said Connor should educate himself about?
“I want you to look up ‘the terror generation.’ ”
Hayden types it in. “What’s that? A movie?”
But when the results begin popping up, it’s clear that it’s not. There are tons of references. The Admiral was right—all the information is right there for anyone to find, but buried among the billions of web pages on the net. They zero in on a news article.
“Look at the date,” says Hayden. “Isn’t that right around the time of the Heartland War?”
“I don’t know,” Connor says. “Do you know the actual dates of the war?”
Hayden has no answer. Strange, because Connor can remember key dates of other wars, but the Heartland War is fuzzy. He’s never been taught about it, has never seen TV shows about it. Sure, he knows it happened, and why, but beyond that there’s nothing.
The first article talks about a spontaneous youth gathering in Washington, DC. Hayden plays a news clip. “Whoa! Are those all people?”
“Kids,” Connor realizes. “They’re all kids.”
The clip shows what must be hundreds of thousands of teens packing the Washington Mall between the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial, so dense you can’t even see the grass.
“Is this part of the war?” Hayden asks.
“No, I think it’s something else. . . .”
The reporter calls it “The Teen Terror March,” already putting a negative spin on the rally. “This is by far the largest flash riot anyone has ever seen. Police have been authorized to use the new, controversial tranquilizer bullets to subdue the crowd. . . .”
The idea that tranq bullets could be controversial sets Connor reeling. They’re just an accepted part of life, aren’t they?
Hayden scrolls down. “The article says they’re protesting school closings.”
That also throws Connor for a loop. What kid in their right mind would protest their school closing? “There,” he says, pointing to a link that says “Fear for the Future.”
Hayden clicks on it, and it brings up an editorial clip by some political pundit. He talks about the struggling economy and the collapse of the public education system. “A nation of angry teenagers with no jobs, no schools, and too much time on their hands? You bet I’m scared—and you should be too.”
More reports—those same angry kids calling for change, and when they don’t get it, they hit the streets, forming random mobs, burning cars, breaking windows, letting loose a kind of communal fury. In the midst of the Heartland War, President Moss—just a few weeks before his assassination—calls an additional state of emergency, this time ordering a curfew on everyone under the age of eighteen. “Anyone caught breaking curfew will be subject to transport to juvenile detention camps.”
There are reports of kids who have either left or been thrown out of their homes. “Ferals,” the news calls them. Like stray dogs. Then comes a shaky video of three kids swinging their hands together. A sudden white flash, and the image becomes static. “Apparently,” says the news anchor, “these feral suicide bombers have altered their blood chemistry, so that bringing their hands together triggers detonation.”
“Holy crap!” says Hayden. “The first clappers!”
“All this was going on during the Heartland War,” Connor points out. “The nation was tearing itself apart over pro-life and pro-choice but completely ignored the problems of the kids who were already here. I mean, no schools, no work, no clue if they’d even have a future. They just went nuts!”
“Tear it all down and start over.”
“Do you blame them?”
Suddenly it was obvious to Connor why they don’t teach it. Once education was restructured and corporatized, they didn’t want kids knowing how close they came to toppling the government. They didn’t want kids to know how much power they really had.
The various links lead Connor and Hayden to an image that’s much more widespread and familiar: hands being shaken at the signing of the Unwind Accord. In the background is the Admiral as a much younger man. The report talks about peace being declared between the Life Army and the Choice Brigade, giving everyone hope for domestic normalization. Nowhere are the teen uprisings mentioned—yet within weeks of the Accord, the Juvenile Authority was established, feral detention centers became harvest camps, and unwinding became . . . a way of life.
That’s when the truth hits Connor so brutally he feels light-headed. “My God! The Unwind Accord wasn’t just about ending the war—it was also a way to take down the terror generation!”
Hayden leans away from the computer like it might start clapping and blow them all up. “The Admiral must have known that.”
Connor shakes his head “When his committee proposed the Unwind Accord, he never believed people would actually go for it, but they did . . . because they were more terrified of their teenagers than their consciences.”
Connor knows that Janson Rheinschild, whoever he was, must have played into this somewhere, but Proactive Citizenry was extremely thorough in wiping him off the face of the earth.