The Death of the Wave Read Online Free Page A

Camps Patrol.
     
    No name for me, but a casual nod in my direction and a number, Breaker (Watchman) 256.
    Probationary.
     
    That is it. That’s how it happened.
    Nothing particularly dramatic, or noteworthy.
    I plodded to my fate like a cow to the slaughter
    with the endless song of unfair ringing in my ears.
     
    A choice that wasn’t a choice. What else could I have done?

SPARK
BLUE
----
    My poor fool.
     
    What perfectly crafted arrogance in the face of an artificial night!
     
    It is always dark in the Barracks save for the electric lights that line the corridors,
    but I had at reading that first sentence an urgent need of a candle
    to burn those words into dust and ashes—
     
    Images of an aristo.
     
    Third channel on our television sets constantly tuned to the smiling-faced advertisements
    or at times important announcements, the first memories of these superiors.
    Galileo, Human Services Coordinator, resplendent in gleaming white robes,
    his eyes wide and knowing.
    We knew nothing of them save that we were as animals to them.
    Smooth-skinned Artists in the advert industries, chosen for their pallor
    would tell us that our purpose was to become more like them,
    even though we knew that that would be impossible.
    There were contacts on sale in the Pharmacies for those Artists who could
    scrounge to afford them, damaging their eyes to get that deep mysterious look,
    and lead-based foundation to lighten skin after a life of toil.
    And it was in that moment as I read the mocking words that said that his true belief
    was that all effort on his part would fail, I hated him.
    I hate him far more than I had ever hated an aristo
    and that hatred only continues to intensify the further I read.
     
    All for the love of an Author.
    Descartes?
     
    I can sense his self-awareness and it drives my blood cold.
    Aristos are not meant to feel pity.
    They are not meant to sense their differences or their gradations of genius.
    They are not meant to know that anything that they were doing was wrong.
    That, in a sense, is their main redeeming quality,
    the one thing that removes them from true human horror.
    To save or to kill is meant to be equal to them.
    That was the myth that had been spread since the beginning,
    and that was supposed to be our sole source of hatred and of pity.
    True, the aristos have the intelligence that our society demands
    but all that brilliance comes at a significant price.
    We are at their mercy, but at least we feel something, however brief, in our existence.
    They were…are… not human.
    They can feel neither hatred nor love, and the games that they play with our lives are as meaningless and immature as a child picking the wings off a fly.
    They torture us not out of malice but out of alien curiosity.
    To see how long it takes us to die.
     
    And we were special in our ignorance, aristo-who-writes.
     
    I wonder if this is not just an elaborate sham, if he was just affecting emotion to get into my head or whatever unfortunate reader would stumble upon his words.
    I wonder if everything I saw had been a projection—
    that half-tilt looking out past the curious crowd might have been anything
    from complete boredom to sudden hunger.
    But no, sadness, I was sure of it.
     
    Say what you like, aristos are not like us.
     
    But they have families, mothers, fathers.
    How could they when they were bred in a lab, a swab of cheek cells?
    How many infants bobbing in amber vials slumbering in dreamless sleep?
    You hear things as a writer employed to formulate the messages of the Palaces,
    but nothing like this.
    Families? A new era of aristos? Were they outmoding themselves?
     
    Descartes. I almost chuckled at the presumption of it.
    Past twenty years ago I would have leapt at the chance to take another shot at a story.
    It was almost as if he knew the journalist heart in me that pulsed involuntarily
    at the most sordid tale, the weapon that could exact the most damage.
    I thanked my lucky test scores I made it