/To see a world in a grain of sand/

She told of the Outside and Arkady was entranced.

“I grew up in a small village; it wasn’t anything much.” She’s already projecting confidence with her first words, a willingness to bare her secrets, a willingness he wouldn’t have expected of that shy girl who flinched yesterday, when his manner was too brusque, blunt.

This is what the app has done.

“It wasn’t anything much, but it was the world to me. If you’ve read about climate change, in those stacks of books…” she gestures offhandedly to the side. “Uhh… the One stopped it when he came to power. So… outside… it’s pretty beautiful. Blue skies, trees, birds, all that stuff.”

Arkady nodded along. He’d read about this stuff. He’d wanted to see it all his life.

“I played outside a lot. I’d explore… there was a thick wood behind my house… that’s where I grew up.

“When I was eight or nine… eight. Yeah, eight. My parents received a message. It wasn’t on their phone, as was usual for most messages, it was in the mail. A little projector, holographic, you read about those?”

“Yeah. Somewhere…”

“Yeah we got one of those. I wasn’t in the room when it arrived, but my parents weren’t the same for the rest of the day. I’d come across my mom… and her eyes, they were wet, a little red, I didn’t get why but I knew she was sad.

“Turns out, we had to move to the city… uh… it’s called Columbia, I think. Renamed recently. For someone or something, I don’t really know… yeah, we moved. I was kinda dragged away kicking and screaming - that ended my childhood, I guess.” She gave a little, sad smile.

“Yeah, the city was no place to raise a kid, or so I thought there. My parents had had a pretty large house in the village we lived in… town is probably more accurate, but I thought of it as more… quaint than that. But when we moved to the city… we were stuck in a small apartment, one bedroom, so my dad would sleep on the cheap couch. I’d later find out that my parents had been demoted, rather significantly, by the One. They had gone from a pretty cushy job that paid a ton - something to do with chemistry? - to my dad literally working in a fast food restaurant. I think there was some sort of accident at his job, and he took the blame on himself… he was always that kind of guy.

“My mom never really was clear about her job… but I think she was a prostitute.”

She paused. The room was silent. She blushed a little.

“Uhh… yeah.

“When I was about twelve, my parents asked me to deliver something to someone, some sort of letter, I think. Obviously, I opened it and read it… I was shocked.

“So my parents were part of some sort of resistance or something, they gave it some sort of formal name that made it seem like they were more than a bunch of saboteurs, but that’s what they were. They would go and throw a wrench in the operations of… not the One, but the many corporations that dominated the city, that basically bribed the One to keep on giving them labor and leaving them alone.

“Something told me not to report them. In city school, we were taught that ‘terrorists’ surrounded us and if we saw anything against the One or against the hegemony of the corporations, we should report it immediately, and would be rewarded greatly… but I didn’t, I just confronted them…

“Blackmailed them, I guess.

“But they told me everything, and when they were done - we were up until like 0100 discussing this stuff - I was sold. I don’t know if you’ve read Marx…”

He did not know who Marx was. He said so.

“I was never allowed to read Marx, told obtaining a copy was too dangerous, but I was told the gist. Basically, he said that all of history was based on struggles between a dominant and subordinate class, and advocated that the exploited subordinate class rise up in a revolution against that dominant class. Which was what we were trying to do. Get enough people on board, weaken the corporations enough, that we’d be able to overthrow that hegemony and establish a ‘utopia’ - no one actually believed we’d be able to form a perfect society, but everyone in our movement believed that anything would be better than what we went through.

“When I was thirteen, our electricity was turned off - we couldn’t afford it. We used cheap candles we got off a guy who made them out of who-knows-what. That’s probably when I got fully on board with the revolution. I’d skip school and help the revolution out, and all of my free time would be spent learning, either from rare copies of old books that the One - probably the corporations, to be honest - had banned, or from word-of-mouth.

“When I was fourteen, my father was moved to work in a slaughterhouse. He’d come home every night with haunted eyes… he’d beat up my mother… he wouldn’t hit me but he’d starve me for days, and I had to scrounge for scraps out of dumpsters. Within three months, he was an alcoholic. Within six months, he’d offed himself.

“We couldn’t afford our apartment anymore. We moved into something with only one room. I could now see my mom crying instead of hearing her from the next room over through the thin uninsulated walls. I got more active with the resistance. Stopped going to school. Stopped really caring about everything else.

“A week ago, my mother was caught doing something sabotage-related along with five others. Two were killed on the spot. One had a show trial the day after, and was sentenced to execution. My mother and the other two were thrown in jail.

“I found out about this the next day. It wasn’t unusual for my mom not to come home in the night. Someone who was there had to tell me.

“Minutes later, some people came for me, cuffed me, tossed me in the back of a van, and moved me somewhere else. I was kept in a small room. I think they imprison children of revolutionaries... to prevent them from rebelling, I guess? And I think that’s why you’re here…

“Two days ago I was dragged out of the room, after dinner, and driven here. And you know the rest.”

Arkady sits there, stunned.

Electra squeezes his hand as they sit in silence. Neither wants to be the first to talk.

They sit there for a while, as Arkady processes all he has heard.

And then, he says, “We need to get out.”

And he sees the green 100 over her head.

milestone:

reach 100 relationship score with someone.

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reward: 20 monetary units

Arkady - N/A - overwhelmed - facets available!

Electra - 100 - tired, happy - facets available!

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