Free The Cause by Roderick Vincent Page A

meaning?”
    “So it is not a letter? It is an action. Like to ‘see’? Spelled
S-E-E?”
    “Yes, a bit ironic considering our current environment, but sometimes darkness is the necessary light.”
    “Profound,” I mocked. “Or perhaps your name is a command?”
    “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, absorbing my tone. “It is my bushido one word containing two edges. The first edge being that my former name has been dropped.”
    “And why did you drop your given name?”
    “Because I am no longer an object owned by the state. I repent their means of identifying me, cataloging my life and eventual death, which is all they really care about.”
    “Data is a virus,” I said. “It’s always out there somewhere crawling over everything.”
    “Data is never static. This is true. But it can always be changed, no matter how many places it lives.”
    “And the second edge?”
    “The new name is a new life, a death of the old belief. But it is more of a plea than a command, as you suggest.”
    “A plea for what?”
    “A plea for you to look.”
    “Look at what?”
    “To see the world in its true form.”
    “What if I see it clearly right now?”
    “You don’t.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Take your father, for example. He was pushed down the hill into a desperate situation like so many others. Why? Tell me who is killing the standard of living in America?”
    “I don’t know. Wall Street? The government?”
    “You don’t believe it? I can hear it in your voice.”
    “Some of it, sure.”
    “You’ve really no idea what you’ve stepped into here.”
    “And what about this place? This cave? This jail? This darkness? Am I not being pushed down the hill?”
    “Pushed into the earth, yes. Hopefully you’ll come out with better eyes.”
    “Is that what this is? You have brought us here to bleed and be tortured and we are supposed to learn something from this?”
    “The reason you’re in this place is because you’re a man who’s looking forward, not back. You’ve seen the pain of the past. Start again from the womb and come out to see the light. For Christ’s sake, Isse, move into the future. Open your eyes and truly see.”
    My senses sharpened. I heard him get up to leave. My face was hot with anger. “So that’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say to me?”
    “And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Make You Free.”
    He was quoting
John 8:32
, the CIA motto, but in his tone there was bitter irony. I heard the faint shuffling of his footsteps fade away. I thought about the job I came here to do, and how I hadfailed so miserably with the first attempt.
    “Go shout it on the mountain!” I screamed. “But don’t pretend the mountain is yours!” Seconds passed without a response as my voice bounced off the walls. I yelled again to unhinge the ricocheting echoes that were dying with the feather-footed steps of my captor. “You’re a coward!” I laughed and kept laughing until I heaved over succumbing to a fit of coughing. I pushed my right arm through the bars and tried squeezing my body through them. I clawed. I reached. But I wasn’t a ghost, a mirage, or cloud, and the bars rejected me. In the end, I remembered wondering if he was ever really out there.

Chapter 6
    “A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study but war and its organization and discipline.”
    -Niccolo Machiavelli
    Voices came to settle accounts after my first encounter with Seee. I questioned whether my imprisonment was a result of the men betting on me. Perhaps this darkened cell was a consequence of their betrayal? But how did I betray? By accepting a challenge? The voice telling me to do right by my country, the one magnetized by Pelletier, seemed harder to heed.
    A more logical voice told me it would have been petty for Seee to imprison me as an act of revenge. This was not a man with revenge on his mind, visiting you in the darkness, acting civil,