Eos, Chapter 3.2: The Past and the Present

A/N: Dameon is from a parallel dimension (similar to our world) and wound up the world the chapter takes place in (a post-apocalyptic world) several years ago. Several versions of himself and his brother from other parallel dimensions run what is essentially a dictatorship. Dameon doesn't like this at all, and so his coworker and friend Jade is bringing him to a secret meeting.

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They took the bus to whatever secret revolutionary meeting Jade had in mind. They didn’t have to worry about chits or any other electronic trail — bus travel within the city was open to all, unlimited. They traveled in a zigzag across Eos, through divisions he had hardly ever been in before, filled with people walking and biking, enjoying a late night out.

“How do you even know people from here?” Dameon asked as they got off the last bus on a quiet street near the highway north, an area that brushed against both the empty outskirts and the wall that separated the ruins of the east side of what was Toronto from the west, the rebuilt city of Eos.

She glanced at him, but didn’t answer at first. After a moment, she shrugged, turning away from him down the street. “I didn’t always live in the Lake District, you know. Some people kept in touch.”

She led him into the tiny streets between buildings, and in just a few minutes they had turned half a dozen times and Dameon was completely lost and starting to get concerned. Eos didn’t have slums. That was one thing Samuel made sure of. But if Eos had a poor sector, this place would be it. The roads were badly lit, with lights only every ten or twenty yards. Instead of restaurants, they passed dingy bars, and of the few bikes that were on the street, all of them were chained with two or three locks. Dameon’s hand drifted to cover his watch before he remembered he’d left it in the park. Well, at least he didn’t have anything of value on him if they got mugged.

“Are you sure — “ he began.

“Yes, I know what I’m doing,” Jade said. “This isn’t exactly my first time walking through here.” She was walking more briskly now, though, back straight and head held high.

An age later, Jade turned down a final street and halted. “Here we are.”

Twenty feet in front of her, the road ended in a concrete wall. Not any wall. The wall, the one that separatedEos from the ruins of Toronto.

Someone had bored a hole through it. Three feet wide and four feet tall, it just brushed the ground, forming a low tunnel that led outside of Eos.

“Who — how — “ Dameon stammered.

“I don’t know,” Jade admitted. “It’s been here for years. People gravitated to it, you know? Exploring the ruins — it’s fascinating. I did it whenever I could sneak away as a kid. When — we — started officially meeting, we needed somewhere where it wouldn’t go on any record, and it was only natural to come here.”

She took Dameon’s hand and pulled him forward. “Come on, we’re a little bit late. It’s not hard, just duck your head going through, and then watch out for rubble and loose stones on the other side. Way easier than New York.”

Easy for her to say, Dameon thought ruefully as he followed her in. He was a good six inches taller than her — she had to duck, but Dameon practically had to bend over double. The old, rough concrete scraped at his scalp, and then he was through.

Silence. In the calm night, not a whisper of wind, in an abandoned, crumbling city, there was silence. Five feet away, behind the wall, there had been all the bustle and noise of a city, down to a slight humming about the atmosphere. Here, the air was crisp and clear, moonlight giving pristine clarity to the night shadows, like a sculpture perfectly carved and endlessly preserved. Awash in gray, the dilapidated buildings loomed over Dameon, guards in a mausoleum.

“It’s — humbling, isn’t it?” Jade whispered, looking around. “It’s pretty dark, so be careful where you step. The meeting’s just around the corner.”

Around that corner, the ruined city was alive again. The chatter of a crowd cut through the silence, and light broke through the windows and the gaps under the doors. The building had probably once been some kind of store.

Jade put her hand on the door handle and glanced back at Dameon. He nodded. Jade opened the door, and she and Dameon slipped inside.

The room was lit with flickering candles. They threw shadows onto the wall, the light dancing over the faces of dozens of people milling around, talking and laughing in small groups as if this were some strange party. Someone had set up tables with cups of water at one end.

An old Mexican man in plain laborer’s clothes was watching the door from a few paces away, with the careful air of a guard who didn’t want to appear as if he were guarding anything. His eyes narrowed suspiciously when he saw Dameon, and he pushed his way forward.

“Jade,” Dameon muttered, nodding in the old man’s direction.

Jade looked at the man, then at Dameon’s face, then back again. “Ah. Right. Of course you’d draw attention.” She took Dameon’s elbow and pulled him aside as the man reached them.

“So, who’s this kid?” the man said gruffly to Jade, folding his arms. “He’s a Dameon, that’s for sure. One of them. Better get him out of here before he hears anything he doesn’t like.”

“He’s a skeptic, Henry. Like us.”

“Doesn’t change the fact he could go waltzing straight to Samuel tomorrow and turn us all in.”

“Any of us could,” Jade countered.

Henry peered up at Dameon through beady eyes. “A skeptic, huh? More like a spy.Aren’t all you Dameons soldiers or spies?”

Their suspicion was good, Dameon reminded himself when he realized he was clenching his jaw. It would keep them under the radar. With an effort at civility, he said, “That’s what they told me when I got here. You know what I told them? I told them I’d go to prison before I spied for them. I work with Jade — that’s how she met me. I’m a rescue worker, not a spy.”

Henry’s expression cleared, just a little, as comprehension dawned. “So you’re D-7.”

“Dameon,” Dameon insisted, shifting from one foot to the other. He hated that everyone in Eos knew his face and most people knew about his odd choice of profession.

“Dameon,” Henry acknowledged. “I see.” He hesitated a moment, then finally nodded to Jade, who let out a relieved sigh.

“We just have one simple entry question here,” Henry continued. “A question, and a warning. First the warning: what we’re doing is dangerous. You’ll learn the history at the speech tonight, but suffice it to say the government has never taken kindly to what we do here. Right now, we’re keeping quiet, keeping it safe, but we used to do more. Then we nearly got wiped out. That could happen again, anytime. Got that? Now the question: What brought you here tonight? Besides the pretty lady?”

Jade rolled her eyes. Despite Henry’s flippancy, Dameon knew better than to take the question anything less than seriously. He met the man’s eyes. “This morning, Jade and I went to New York to rescue a fallen. I brought my pistol with me. Without it, I’d be a mauled corpse steaming in an acid pool somewhere, but Jade saw me with it, and we got to talking. Half of dear old Samuel’s regulations are stupid and the other half are engineered to keep him in power. You could say I’m open to change.”

Henry actually smiled at that, spreading his arms wide. “Welcome to the the First Democratic Party of Eos. Legislative powers pending.”

Jade laughed at that. “One day,” she said, and steered Dameon away from the man. She let out a sigh of relief, but in a moment she was on her toes again, straining to see over the crowd. “There’s somany people I want you to meet now that you’re in… and the speeches are going to start any minute — “

“Yeah,” Dameon said. He wasn’t looking forward to being an object of curiosity all evening. He let Jade draw him into the crowd, trying to keep his head down as she searched for someone. Thankfully, it didn’t seem that the group was small enough for everyone to know everybody else — and besides, the dim lighting obscured the details. A good idea, to maintain anonymity.

“There she is,” Jade said, pushing between two people and tapping a young brunette on the shoulder. “Sarah!”

The girl turned away from her group. “There you are,” she said, pulling Jade into a hug. “I hoped you would come tonight.”

“Yeah, sorry I’m late. I was bringing someone new.”

Sarah looked up at Dameon and a flicker of surprised shot across her face. “One of them? Henry let him in?”

“He’s the one I’ve told you about, sis,” Jade said, giving Sarah a meaningful look. “Dameon, meet Sarah. My sister.”

Dameon nodded to her. Sarah nodded back, expression curious, but to Dameon’s relief, Jade didn’t give her a chance to ask questions, taking her hand and nudging her sympathetically. “How are you doing?”

Sarah shrugged, avoiding Jade’s eyes. “No worse than any of the other two thousand people who hated the scores they got today.”

So this was that sister. Dameon appraised her again. She looked… maybe seventeen? She had to be eighteen, to have taken the aptitude tests this year. She’d go to an accounting college in the spring. For accountants, training was what… two years? She’d be put to work at twenty. So young. The system was… what it was.

“Did you put it in the grievances pool?” Jade asked.

“Of course,” Sarah said. “They’ll read it out soon.”

At that moment, a hush fell across the room and everyone turned to face the front. Dameon, a inch or two taller than the average height of the crowd, watched over their heads as two women and a man stepped onto a portable dais at that end of the room. The man carried a large bowl. One of the women was masked.

“Your leaders?” Dameon asked under his breath.

“Yeah. Martin, Anita, and the masked one is Isa.”

“Not their real names, I assume? Why is Isa masked?”

“Not their real names. And Isa prefers to keep a low profile. More that that, she’ll never say.”

“She’s someone too easily recognized,” Dameon said in a low voice. “Politician, probably.” He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“Friends,” Anita said, stepping forward and spreading her arms. Her face was cast in shadow, but she was a curvy woman with long hair split into dozens of braids swept back and tied together in a high ponytail. “Welcome to the weekly meeting of the First Democratic Party. It is good to see this room so full of brothers and sisters.”

The crowd cheered. Anita quieted them with a wave of her hand and raised a portable microphone to her lips. “I see many new faces in the crowd tonight. We welcome you especially, and we’re certain you have questions about who we are and what our mission is.”

She fixed the crowd with her gaze, lingering over each person, one at a time. “So I’ll tell you: our mission is to bring freedom to Eos. No more. No less.

“Twenty years ago when our President was first gathering people to this city, he was a beacon of light in a world clouded by ash. We don’t dispute that. He argued that he alone could bind us together and rebuild. Maybe he was right. But that was twenty years ago. We’ve rebuilt. We’re a stable country of millions, one of two great powers left in the world.

“Now look around. You’re fed. You’re clothed. But with what clothes, what food? The same few dozen designs, the same food collectively farmed by a few dozen farmers in the west.

“Our President would have us believe that we are free. Free from the ruins of the old world, free from scrounging scraps of what they left behind. He sits on his throne and tells us we are the ones empowered. But a human right more fundamental than any other is the right to choose. And where are our choices? Taken from us as if we were untrustworthy children. Instead, we are told where to live. Assigned a job, given our monthly budget, told what to study and even whether to bike or walk or take the trains. And still, we slip through the cracks.”

An angry rumbling rose from the crowd in agreement, a murmur of discontent that set Dameon’s teeth on edge.

“Never mind that people die because the waiting list for a surgery is too long, or hang themselves because they hate their job, or go to jail for complaining about the police, or a hundred other things. Never mind that we’re stagnant, that our technology hasn’t substantially changed in a decade. Never mind that we’re abandoning the rest of the world, holed up in our neat little country. Never mind all that, our President says.”

The crowd cheered with every sentence. Dameon shifted uncomfortably, disturbed both at her treasonous words and to realize that those words actually bothered him. He scolded himself. He was a citizen of Eos in name, not in heart — he never had been loyal and never would be. Then again, words like this were an excellent way to get everyone listening imprisoned or killed. As wrong as that was.

“Well, you know what we say to that?” Anita cried. “We do mind. We do care. And we name you a tyrant. Not a president, but a king in all but name. And your days are numbered, because we the people will rise again.”

A smile spread across Dameon’s face, just for a moment. Yes, a tyrant. Name him. That’s the first step to change.

“We must take action.” Anita clenched a fist. “Strike out. Show him that we know our rights. That we will not tolerate these abuses.”

The crowd roared, but Dameon shook his head, euphoria fading as quickly as it had come This would never work. What was this little group of malcontents supposed to do? The Senate, although it was elected by the population at large, was practically a joke — it had no power to change any but the most superficial of Eos’ laws. Hell, it was mostly the government’s Public Affairs, meant to keep the people distracted and happy.

Unarmed and with no real political power, this ragtag group had nothing. Samuel was smart — Dameon knew that all too well — and he would never allow something like this to grow strong enough to present any real threat. An outright revolution would fail. Even if their numbers were twenty times what he saw this this room, and every one of them was armed, it would only be enough to cause a bloodbath. And incremental legal change was impossible under the system. The whole thing was foolhardy. So why was he nodding along to her speech?

“These are our demands: Open boarders,” Anita continued. “An open market. Innovation. And most importantly, the freedom to chose everything from your job to where you live. Democracy. These are our goals. We want to give you voices. We want your choices to be heard. Thank you.”

The crowd cheered raucously. Her speech sounded pretty. But words like these always did.

As the clamor died down, the guy with the bowl — Martin — stepped forward and took the microphone from Anita. “These are this week’s grievances,” Martin said. “Listen and know that they are heard.”

The bowl was filled with small slips of paper, Dameon saw. The crowd fell into an almost reverent silence, attention fixed on the ritual. Martin pulled out the first slip of paper and read it.

“I wanted to buy a cake for my daughter’s birthday, but I had used all of this week’s food chits. Meanwhile, my clothing chits expire tomorrow and I still have no use for them.”

“My mother disappeared last week on a manic episode and it still won’t prove she’s ill enough to get the medication she needs.”

“I submitted a complaint to my division’s HR and it took them six weeks to get back to me.”

On and on they went. Some were petty, or simple inefficiencies of bureaucracy, but many — far too many — were appalling. If they were true. Somewhere in the middle, Martin read out Jade’s sister’s situation.

Beside him, Jade was looking at the floor, shoulders hunched. “What is it?” Dameon asked.

“All these,” she said miserably. “It’s awful. But it’s good to know.”

“I guess.”

“It is. We have to remember, Dameon. We have to fix this.”

Dameon’s eyes flicked to Martin and then across the crowd. “Is it even possible?” he said softly.

“Of course,” Jade said instantly. “It has to be. There has to be a way. It’s just so hard to find it.”

Dameon put his arm around Jade’s shoulder and drew her close to him. “I hope you’re right. Either way… thanks for bringing me tonight.”

She gave half a smile. “Of course. What do you think?”

“When’s the next meeting?” Dameon asked.

She interpreted it playfully, and her smile spread into a grin. “I hoped you’d say that. Three days. Same time and place.”

Dameon wasn’t sure what he thought yet. But he wasn’t about to miss that next meeting.