***
When the sparkling city of Washington D.C. comes into view many hours later, several thoughts and memories assault me at once. The emotional impact is almost as strong as a physical one, not unlike taking a sledgehammer to the gut. For most of my life, this was is all I knew—this sparkling city that is a façade for all the corruption and greed that drives the people running our government.
To the untrained eye, the gleaming white buildings and towers surrounding millennia-old national monuments are beautiful, sparkling white tributes to America’s greatness. When I look at them, all I see are cracks, deep, dark, and oozing putrid sludge out into the streets. Our monuments are bathed in blood and that sludge surrounds the dazed citizens on the sidewalks without their knowledge. The mire pulls at their feet, sucking, draining the very souls from once good men. Yet they continue on blindly, believing in a man who elevated himself to the position of most powerful man in the world during our country’s most devastating event in history. What a joke.
The streets are well lit and heavy with traffic as the sun rises, more so than usual on a weekend. But this is no ordinary day, and the people out on the street aren’t just going about their daily lives. They are hungry for blood, Olivia’s blood, and they lust for the stench of death. The public execution is set for four hours from now, and already the twisted and convoluted streets are filled with people making their way to the lawn of the nation’s capital building, where Olivia and several others will be executed by firing squad. The event will be televised live, and all over the nation, people will cheer and celebrate her death.
As Jenica lands the craft on the outskirts of the city, I am reminded of my adolescence and my time spent living the same lie as so many of the people here. I was just as blind to the injustices, just as oblivious to the lies and propaganda being fed to a frightened nation. At least, I was until the nuclear bombs destroyed our country—and the perfectly laid out path of my life—forever.
Four years earlier…
Tamryn Bell is a sweet pixie of a girl, no taller than five feet, with a waif’s frame and a short haircut, boyishly cute and blonde. Blue eyes portray an air of innocence and a cherry-red mouth brims with unwitting seduction and promise. She is from a prestigious family, which makes my mother happy, and everyone assumes that we will get married someday. I am in no hurry to take that step, but I am not exactly intimidated at the thought either. At this time in my life, a future with Tamryn seems like a no-brainer. It is just one of many steps in my life plan, just after getting a degree in law and securing a job at a prominent firm. With my father’s influence, I am sure to land that dream job with enough money to place a golf ball-sized diamond on Tamryn’s finger. When I picture a life with her, it is filled with sweetness and comfort, possibly made all the better by the pitter-patter of little feet and a white picket fence.
Of course, all of this changes on the day of the attacks. I am fortunate enough to be thousands of feet in the air on a flight back from a trip with my parents to Hawaii—which is now no more than a series of charred lumps surrounded by an ocean long depleted of its wildlife and stripped of its sapphire hue, the results of another, unrelated and completely heinous attack that followed a few years later.
My sister and Agata are crush victims, their home in Seattle collapsing on top of them. My brother-in-law is killed, and Agata nearly goes with him. It is the Restoration Project that will give her a second chance when her injuries turn her into a vegetable. Her bionic cerebrum also makes her smarter than the average four-year-old child.
Tamryn is given a second chance as well. Although, I will always remember the day of the blasts as the day our relationship died. Coincidence—or fate if you believe in that sort of thing—has her square in the center of Los Angeles on that day. She is found beneath a pylon and, a few weeks later, declared a paraplegic by the doctors. There is no hope that she’ll ever walk again. But even then, I stand by her. I sit beside her hospital bed and hold her hand, praying especially hard in those first days that she will live and then, in the days that follow, that she will regain the use of her legs. I can’t imagine her confined to a wheelchair. Tamryn loves to dance. She loves to run, jump, and twirl girlishly down the sidewalk everywhere we go. Like some kind of fairy, she is constantly in motion, her hands and face full of animation and vivacity. Life without her legs will be worse than death for Tamryn.
She begs me to go, says she is no good to me with a broken body, but I won’t abandon her. Guilt over having avoided the tragic day mixes in my gut to do battle with my relief that I’ve been spared.
The road to recovery for her is full of hardships, and mirrors what is happening across the rest of the country as we struggle to move past what has happened. Even then, I believe it all, believe my parents when they tell me about the Restoration Project and the Healing Hands initiative and how it will change so many lives. Believe them when they tell me it is our government’s way of trying to piece our broken country back together.
She wants nothing to do with the project, nervous about being labeled as a freak. She is scared but I urge her on, telling her everything will be all right. ‘Don’t you want to walk again?’ I ask her, knowing the answer will be yes and that she’ll trust me just because I’m telling her it will all be okay. Tamryn, despite what she’s been through, is still as naïve and innocent as ever. It is one of the things I liked most about her.
The procedure is a success and, after a few weeks’ recovery, Tamryn walks out of the hospital with a bionic spinal cord and a new set of legs. Around the same time, my sister, Trista, makes the heart-wrenching decision to put Agata’s life in the Restoration doctors’ hands. Before her bionic cerebrum, she is well on her way to becoming a vegetable for life, a possibility that leaves us all paralyzed with grief. A few months after Tamryn, Agata is released as well, better than she had been when she was brought in.
It does not take long for the hate speech against Bionics to begin. On the airwaves, the media fills television screens with images of the Bios looting, rioting, stealing, and committing violent crimes. To be fair, there are just as many non-bionic perpetrators—our history has shown these crimes to be a natural side effect of disaster—but fair and balanced reporting has never been a strong suit of the American media. The Bionics are painted as villains with mutations—as if they’d been born that way, not created by doctors and scientists working for the government.
This is all it takes for the politicians to start weighing in. Soon, every campaign from mayor to senator to president becomes about the Bionics and their place in society. They are vilified and persecuted in the media. It is right around this time that I feel a deep rift develop between Tamryn and me. She will never say it out loud, but I know she resents me for pushing her to enroll in the Healing Hands project. She hates her bionic additions and fears the day when the Bionics will be rounded up and… well, at this point, we have no way of knowing what the government will do. But Tamryn just knows it would be awful.
It’s funny that I have always thought of her as the naïve one. But just now, our roles are reversed. I keep my faith in our government and the project. After all, it is doing so much good for our society. Each division is responsible for rebuilding and reshaping our world in different ways. Our citizens are getting their lives and their health back. Our cities are being rebuilt and are now bigger, brighter, and more beautiful than before. What evil is there to be found?
Even when the MPs start storming the city, rounding up all Bionics with an unsavory past, I believe that Tamryn is safe. After all, she comes from a good family, a well-known family. She can be protected by her father’s name, just as Agata is protected by mine, her grandfather’s. It isn’t until the day she goes missing that I realize how stupid I’ve been. Her mother shows up at my parents’ house, tears in her eyes, begging to see my father, wanting his help in getting her little girl back. I watch from a darkened hallway as she is turned away, the hard set of my father’s jaw revealing the
nature of his resolve. He can help her… but he won’t.
Nothing that I say will change his mind, not when he has invested so much into his image. He can’t be seen as siding with the enemy. ‘Not even your niece’, he says in that cold tone of his. In that moment, I realize just how sheltered I have been and how it has crippled me. I am completely incapable of understanding this new world, where the rich and entitled aren’t protected by their bank accounts or prominent names. I realize how spoiled I’ve been, how blind I am to the plight of the Bionics, as well as anyone less fortunate than I am.
I’m not a bad person, I know that deep down. But having the blinders ripped off, and the true nature of society shoved in my face, has left me angry and filled with purpose.
Within a few weeks, it becomes increasingly clear that my father will force my sister to turn Agata over to the authorities. Even though I’m the younger brother, I immediately take charge of the situation. I won’t lose her like I did Tamryn. My guilt over not doing more to save her is a deep and raw ache, but there is nothing I can do for her now. In Agata, I can find my redemption.
Rumors of a secret Resistance led by Professor Neville Hinkley himself seem too good to be true. Yet, I know firsthand how the government turned on him when he opposed the mutilation of those he’d fought to save. When the government declared that all Bionics would be stripped of their prostheses, the Professor objected strongly. It cost him his job, his life, and got him branded as a terrorist.
It took a lot of digging around, but I eventually found an underground railroad of sorts, a chain of people who would send you on the right path to the Resistance for little or nothing. Some would take food, some money, and others wanted nothing at all. It seemed enough for them to be able to stick it to the MPs, even if it could cost them their lives. In their faces, I see all the horror and hardship that I’ve been saved from by the coincidence of my last name.
By taking Agata and running away with her, I have made us both fugitives. But the alternative is simply unthinkable. I am now one of these people—an outcast, running from the enemy and fighting for a cause. I can never truly be one of them—my organs are all original parts of my body and I’d never known a day’s hardship before running away with my niece—but losing Tamryn taught me a very valuable lesson.
Injustice is as blind as justice, and no one is safe. And if injustice can pick and choose who it targets, then I am free to choose which side I stand on.