crueler. The charges of intellectual property theft and treason taught me that speaking up too soon can be a liability. I thought I was keeping you safe.”
“Safe from what?” Sascha demands. “Obviously not you or your mother.”
I accept his accusations. They are true, even though they are not the biggest concerns we have as we move forward. “It’s bigger than that. Even my initial results could have torn down not only my family’s business, but most re-education center empires in the world. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise. The everyday functioning of society depends on it, and it depends on keeping it the same.”
“If you found something better, why wouldn’t your mother have wanted to use it?” Sascha asks.
Sascha is bright, but he is young, like I was when I first started researching the topic. He still things can be fixed cooperatively. “My mother saw exactly one way to get results—her way. She knew exactly how to cause the most intense and terrible pain while still keeping a slave conscious. She knew exactly how many days one could starve before suffering physical ailments. And she made certain that every one of her trainers and guards knew as well and followed her protocols. Her re-education centers rose to prominence due to her bloodthirstiness and exacting standards; once she expanded, her methods caught on here and in dozens of other countries. Her system worked. Adopting a new one would mean admitting that she was wrong, admitting that she had steered entire nations in the wrong direction.”
Sascha’s eyes go wide. I can see him begin to understand the implications of all this.
“I didn’t just attack her system; I attacked the entire way of thinking,” I explain. “And I never took into account the big players—money, finance, legal influence. I was naïve enough to think I was doing a good thing.”
“Since the first people were Demoted a few hundred years ago, the re-education centers have always focused on control,” Sascha recalls, thinking aloud. “The Miller System made some improvements; it got rid of most of the physically disabling technologies, but made discipline and systematic terror even more important. You aren’t just going to destroy your mother’s system, you’re trying to turn everything upside down. All the laws, all the policies, all the recommendations—every part of our society that deals with the Demoted would have to be reconsidered. And in the mean time, everyone would realize they had failed for so long… someone would have to be held responsible.”
He’s starting to see it, now. The cold, hard truth that I discovered from the inside of a locked cell. “My results could have changed the state of the world, but I never considered how much I would be hated for revealing them. The second I let word slip at the company holiday party, I found myself arrested and locked away and accused of being a threat to national security, of all goddamn things.”
Sascha looks stunned.
“Didn’t you know?” I reply, a bitter smile on my face. “Trying to overthrow the Demoted system is a matter of national security. And my family has considerable sway with law enforcement. Donations, partnerships—law enforcement and re-education center developers are in bed together. A lot of medical research, too, but I didn’t find that out until later.”
“How did you get out of the charges?” he asks.
“My mother arranged for me to get out of jail once she felt I had learned my lesson,” I admit. Everything she gave, she could have so easily taken away again. “In exchange for my silence, I was set up with a bank account large enough to support me for a lifetime, and a lucrative position with Dean & Chanu. I disappeared, and I wasn’t supposed to come back. A cordial parting of ways, if you could call it that.”
Sascha gives me a hopeful look. “But you didn’t stay away?”
I shake my head. “I was planning to try again from the moment I was
“Safe from what?” Sascha demands. “Obviously not you or your mother.”
I accept his accusations. They are true, even though they are not the biggest concerns we have as we move forward. “It’s bigger than that. Even my initial results could have torn down not only my family’s business, but most re-education center empires in the world. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise. The everyday functioning of society depends on it, and it depends on keeping it the same.”
“If you found something better, why wouldn’t your mother have wanted to use it?” Sascha asks.
Sascha is bright, but he is young, like I was when I first started researching the topic. He still things can be fixed cooperatively. “My mother saw exactly one way to get results—her way. She knew exactly how to cause the most intense and terrible pain while still keeping a slave conscious. She knew exactly how many days one could starve before suffering physical ailments. And she made certain that every one of her trainers and guards knew as well and followed her protocols. Her re-education centers rose to prominence due to her bloodthirstiness and exacting standards; once she expanded, her methods caught on here and in dozens of other countries. Her system worked. Adopting a new one would mean admitting that she was wrong, admitting that she had steered entire nations in the wrong direction.”
Sascha’s eyes go wide. I can see him begin to understand the implications of all this.
“I didn’t just attack her system; I attacked the entire way of thinking,” I explain. “And I never took into account the big players—money, finance, legal influence. I was naïve enough to think I was doing a good thing.”
“Since the first people were Demoted a few hundred years ago, the re-education centers have always focused on control,” Sascha recalls, thinking aloud. “The Miller System made some improvements; it got rid of most of the physically disabling technologies, but made discipline and systematic terror even more important. You aren’t just going to destroy your mother’s system, you’re trying to turn everything upside down. All the laws, all the policies, all the recommendations—every part of our society that deals with the Demoted would have to be reconsidered. And in the mean time, everyone would realize they had failed for so long… someone would have to be held responsible.”
He’s starting to see it, now. The cold, hard truth that I discovered from the inside of a locked cell. “My results could have changed the state of the world, but I never considered how much I would be hated for revealing them. The second I let word slip at the company holiday party, I found myself arrested and locked away and accused of being a threat to national security, of all goddamn things.”
Sascha looks stunned.
“Didn’t you know?” I reply, a bitter smile on my face. “Trying to overthrow the Demoted system is a matter of national security. And my family has considerable sway with law enforcement. Donations, partnerships—law enforcement and re-education center developers are in bed together. A lot of medical research, too, but I didn’t find that out until later.”
“How did you get out of the charges?” he asks.
“My mother arranged for me to get out of jail once she felt I had learned my lesson,” I admit. Everything she gave, she could have so easily taken away again. “In exchange for my silence, I was set up with a bank account large enough to support me for a lifetime, and a lucrative position with Dean & Chanu. I disappeared, and I wasn’t supposed to come back. A cordial parting of ways, if you could call it that.”
Sascha gives me a hopeful look. “But you didn’t stay away?”
I shake my head. “I was planning to try again from the moment I was
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