Free Interzeit: A Space Opera by Samuel Eddy Page A

ouncil.”
    The latest carrot was his arm. It had been lost just below the shoulder, crushed flat by a flight of stairs and one hundre d tons of other material. They were going to give him a high grade prosthetic apparently, but first a nervous system port had to be “installed” in his nub. This process was less pleasant than it sounds, but better than the alternatives.
    The carrots were always different, but the stick was always the same. A threat, perhaps a soft one, others may ca ll him ungrateful, or selfish for even identifying it as such. Nonetheless it was indeed a threat, he had to pl ay along, or they might lose interest in his care.
    The whole event was a political PR nightmare for anyone with the word “defense” in their job description. That being the case , the establishment needed willing puppets to express the need for them to exist, to justify them. In exchange for helping them, they would be well taken care of. On the days of these events he was given drug cocktails to fight back the pain, and sharpen his thinking temporarily.
    The subconscious undercurrent of the whole process went something like this. The disaster happened not due to lack of readiness, skill, or dedication, but rather from lack of funding. The sheer logistics made it too difficult to achieve perfect security, the disarmament from the games had left them more vulnerable to attack, not less.
    Nol hated it as he hated everything after the death of Clara. She was his last familial link, their parents had abandoned them early on, took a cheap craft somewhere off planet, and never came back. S he was dead, and so with it everything was .
    He burned with fury during the agonizing days lying in the hospital. So long, he stewed in this mess alone as the hours crawled by. He hated himself for living, he wanted everyone around him to feel his pain. It was a pain that demanded complete submission to hatred, it flowed through him internally and externally.
    He hated the other survivors, watching them dance and sing on tune to the song being conducted for them.
    “Roll over and show them your belly now,” he would think, “Yeah , show them how much of a good boy you are.”
    He hated himself by the same token, as he could not contain his grief when speaking. In paranoia, he suspected it was in the cocktail, but maybe they were just weak, broken.
    Without a controlling guidance they would not be of much use to anyone, simply burdens . I nstead this way they were beneficial to their caretakers.
    The people ate this mix of tragedy porn and propaganda up like the cowed farm animals they were. Their prostrations were obscene, grotesque in their blind worship. One hundred years of peace, their peace, a sacred compact of mankind. This was a comforting institution, a safety blank et , or less childishly , a shield.
    With that shield shattered , everyone was paranoid, everyone was scared to die in the next big tumult. It could come at anytime, anywhere was vulnerable if Earth was vulnerable. The fear revealed the truth about them all, and it was a sermon that damned them.
    Clara had been so bold, so fearless, psychotically so. Something about their childhood had galvanized and shaped her into that person. But she was an outlier, impulsive, nonconformist , a freak really . The blanket was torn away, and it exposed a naked and crying child. They were soft and weak, domesticated by their one hundred years and their great destinies.
    Reality and nature shucked away this illusion, re-writing everything they thought they knew about themselves. It was the shocking and rapid death of an unjustified collective ego. Now they were begging and pleading, crying for it to go away.
    Worm like , they begged the cabinet and its endless subdivisions and cooperators. Anything, anything to just make it go away. Take it back, take us back to where we were before, undo the madness, seal it away, make it go away.
    No one would tell an adult that they could become a child once